She looked at him in naked bewilderment. “I don’t understand how any of this happened,” she said, through trembling lips. “We haven’t even kissed yet. I mean, we have, but not really.”
A fine tremor ran through the big hand that cradled her head and his face flushed with raw, sensual hunger. He closed his eyes and growled, “Your last few days have been so hellish. I’m trying to be so goddamn careful and give you what you need—”
She touched his mouth in wonder. She thought, I dreamed that a wolf came to my bed and watched over me while I slept. There was an epic story in those silent eyes, of mountains that had been crossed and a world that had been fought, and countless years that had been spent in service and in solitude. And there was a promise in that wolf’s eyes, a promise from an old warrior soul that knew what it meant to dig down deep and hold true to what he claimed no matter what.
She heard herself ask, “Did you come into my bedroom earlier?”
I dreamed a dream of passion, devotion and loyalty, and a promise that meant everything—
The shaking in his hands increased. He whispered against her fingers, “Just to make sure you were okay. Whatever you want, whatever you need. Tell me and I’ll give it to you.”
Everything.
And for one shining moment, her world became simple and clean and good again.
“I need you,” she said.
She felt the breath leave his body. His eyes opened, and the expression in them blazed. How she could have ever thought those pale blue eyes were icy, she would never know. They burned with a pure, steady flame.
Her hands slipped away from his face as he brought his mouth down on hers, and the warm impact of his lips caused her eyes to flutter shut. She was cradled from behind and caressed from above, and all the while she knew that the heavy, hard weight of him hovered over her, balanced for the moment but ready to fall. Her hands landed on the heavy, wide arc of his collarbones and slipped down the expanse of his pectorals, while her mouth formed a soft ‘o’ of surprise for how good it was, how incredibly good—
—and he took that as his invitation to slip inside. He curled his tongue between her lips with a sensual gentleness that spoke of infinite care and deep emotion.
She learned something from his kiss and took it to heart. This man felt things he never spoke of verbally. Instead he said them with his body and his eyes, his mouth and his hands, and in that moment as she kissed him back, she made a silent promise to him to learn the language he spoke so that she heard everything he had to say to her.
Then his language changed and became harder, more demanding. He spoke of need too, as he drove his hardened tongue into her mouth and shoved a heavy thigh between her legs. His massive body became a silent shout of urgency. He rocked his hips against hers, massaging the hot length of his cock against the arc of her pelvis, and the shudder of his breath blasted against her cheek as he cupped one of her breasts and fingered her erect, aching nipple through the thin nightgown.
She caught fire. It ran shining like liquid mercury through her veins. She arched into his touch and groaned as she gripped the back of his head. Her hands slipped against the short corn silk of his pale hair.
“Tell me to stop, sweetheart,” he muttered against her cheek. “Just say the word if we’re going too fast.”
His body said something else though, as he ground harder against her.
It said, please, please.
She stroked the wide arc of his back as she whispered in his ear, “You are my mate. I could never say no to you.”
His head reared back. He stared at her in astonishment.
For one terrible moment, dread darkened her vision and her heart gave a sickened lurch. She thought, I cannot be so wrong. I cannot live with it if I am so deluded.
The joy that came over his face was so incandescent, it blinded her. “That’s what it means,” he said. “True north.”
She broke into a bout of reactive shivering. “What?”
He leaned on one elbow to caress her face. “When I looked at you for the first time, the world changed. It all but knocked me off my feet. I’ve been thinking it was like true north had shifted, the magnetic pull from the one direction you use in navigation, but it’s more like the primary force from your card spread. I’ve been trying to figure out what it meant. All I knew was that it was you—you had become my true north, my primary force. Just like that, from one moment to the next.”
She closed her eyes and swallowed hard as the world came back into focus. “Yes, that’s what happened to me too.”
He bent down to nuzzle her neck. “It reminds me of a quote from a French philosopher. ‘The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.’ Do you know it?”
She wound her arms around his neck, and she let her frightened heart find ease and grow full of him. “I do now.”
I dreamed a dream of incomparable rarity and loveliness.
Then I woke to find it true.
Chapter Six
Sacrifice