But Hawke hadn’t had enough of the kiss. Tugging her back with a grip in her hair, he reclaimed her mouth. Darkly intense, a searing brand. His free hand stroked down to grip her thigh as he urged her to move on him. “That’s it, beautiful.” Husky words against her lips as her body began rubbing against his without her conscious control, a tight kind of need unfurling in her abdomen.
More kisses, strokes along her thigh. “Open your mouth.” She obeyed because she didn’t want him to pull away, to leave her bereft when she could almost taste— The seam of her jeans pressed onto her clitoris and everything fractured. Even the agonizing pain of the second level of dissonance wasn’t enough to blunt the impact.
HAWKE saw the flickers of dangerous red and lethal yellow out of the corner of his eye, plastered his body to hers. “Baby, you hurt?”
“Wh—what?” A dazed sounding question. “Hurt?”
“Did the fire touch you?” Reaching down, he stroked her hair off her face.
Huge obsidian eyes looked up at him, devoid of the stars that denoted a cardinal. “Only inside.”
“What?”
“The fire only touched me inside.”
Figuring out what she was talking about, he grinned, then took mental inventory of his own body. No burns. “Interesting,” he murmured.
Something in his voice—likely the smug arrogance—had her blinking, trying to come back. He didn’t want her thinking coherently yet. She was all loose and sated right now, and he wanted nothing more than to hold her, to pet her as he wished. Shifting before she could stop him, he sat down on her bed with her cuddled into him. “You sure got a quick trigger, Sienna,” he teased, in control for the simple reason that she was in his arms, under his protection again.
A solemn look. “Is that bad?”
He couldn’t help it. He kissed her, indulging himself in the vibrant life of her. She wasn’t dead in some Pure Psy camp, hadn’t come back bloody and broken. “No,” he answered. “I like making you come. I plan to do it often and well.”
Color swept up on a red tide over her face, and she pressed it down against his chest. So young, he thought, feeling the raking claw of conscience. But he was no hypocrite. He’d sent her into an enemy camp, sent her into a situation that could’ve resulted in death. If she was old enough to die for the pack, she was old enough to choose who she wanted as a lover. “Tell me,” he said, weaving his fingers through her damp hair, “about the operation.”
Instead of pointing out that Judd had already done so, she gave him a step-by-step debrief. “I know I shouldn’t tell you the next fact because it puts me in a lesser bargaining position,” she said, “but I was scared.”
He squeezed her thigh. “I’d be more worried if you hadn’t been—fear keeps us alive, keeps us alert.” Now if he’d just listen to himself instead of feeling a feral anger at the idea of her afraid and alone in the dark.
Sienna sat up, one hand braced on his chest. “That’s not true. Arrows feel no fear, and that makes them strong.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “But an Arrow won’t have a kiss waiting for him at the end of a hunt, no warm body next to him when a nightmare strikes.”
A steady look—no longer that of the girl who’d blushed, but of the woman who had taken him on more than once. “Hawke?”
“Yes?”
“What does this mean?”
He curled a strand of ruby red around his finger. “It means you have to learn to deal with me.” There was no going back. Not from this.
Furrows on her brow. “Perhaps you should learn to deal with me instead.”
His wolf bared its teeth in a feral grin. “Baby, I’ve been trying to master that trick since the day I met you.”
“Liar,” she said. “Your wolf thinks it can control me.” A shift of her lower body as she got more comfortable.
He hissed out a breath. “Easy.”
“You’re aroused.” Such a cool statement, but he could scent the earthy warmth of the damp heat between her legs, hear the rising pulse of her heartbeat.
Leaning forward, he nuzzled at her throat, licking up the salt and spice of her. “I can handle it.” His wolf had had a taste, was starving for more, but it understood that to claim her to the deepest level, man and wolf both would have to move carefully. Neither part of him ever wanted to see fear in her eyes when she looked at him, especially in bed.
SHIVERING against the impact of those slow, wolfish licks, Sienna clenched her hand in Hawke’s hair. “Your hair is beautiful. You know it, don’t you?”