Her voice was just background noise as he pulled me with him to the office building. I had to run to keep up with his long stride, but I wanted to. I felt like we were hurtling towards something inevitable.
“Finn!”
We stopped for a second, feeling the relentless crack of Kelly’s will in the words. It was hard to resist, but when he nodded, we moved together, walking up to the main office door.
“Finn, don’t do this...” It was mildly interesting, the change in Kelly’s tone, but I smiled when he opened the door for me, the courteous gesture made a lot more intriguing by his ragged appearance.
He shoved the first door inside the building open. Karen, the receptionist, jumped when he did so.
“Oh, hi, Finn. Oh!”
I growled when her eyes dropped down to his hard cock, putting my body between him and her gaze. It took her a bit to realise what was happening, the appearance of the claws at the end of my fingers helping her refocus, particularly when I brandished them in front of her face. She backed away from the photocopier, ignoring the print job she had been working on, and edged towards the door. I pinned her with my gaze, making damn sure she didn’t take another look at my mate.
My mate.
I shook my head, then glanced up at Finn and saw the goofy smile on his face, saw in that second, like Slade, he’d heard my thoughts.
“Yeah?” he said, the word holding all the hope and fear he couldn’t express.
I nodded. My eyes ached, my head ached, and I wondered which fucking version of me was behind the driving wheel right now. But in all versions of me, there was one truth. Finn would always fight for me and stop others from hurting me, even when I wanted them to. He herded me backwards, my back bumping against the photocopier when his hands went to my face.
“You and me forever,” I said, choking on the words. Because in this moment, I wanted nothing else. I knew I could do anything I needed with him at my side, that we would build something good and safe and worthwhile between us, that anyone else I chose to bring into the pack would have his strength to back them.
“Finn!” We heard a muffled cry from beyond the door, but he slammed the lock on.
His mouth came down on mine, my hands tangling in his hair as we fought to get even closer. When his hips thrust against me, wedging his hard length between my jean-clad thighs, I groaned. “Gotta get these clothes off.”
He helped me, tearing my shirt off and flicking the clasp of my bra as I tugged down on my pants. A feeling of complete rightness settled over me as his skin touched mine, that same thrumming sense of another connected to you that I’d gotten with Slade, but this was a whole other thing. Finn was hotter, harder than Slade, something he kept carefully hidden in his day to day life. It was almost like touching a live wire, but I craved the bite.
I was lifted up and deposited on the still warm platen of the photocopier, but that barely registered. Finn’s face was in mine, his fingers digging painfully into my arms, his torso between my legs. I moaned into his shoulder as I was forced to part my thighs for him, the stretch there a lovely precursor of what was to come.
“I can’t make this good. God, Jules, if I don’t get in you in the next few seconds...”
“No foreplay,” I agreed, nodding my head. “I need you. Now.”
I was pulled from the glass, spun around so I leaned on the buttons, sending the machine wild. I knew exactly how it felt. His fingers slid between my thighs, gliding over the slick skin with no resistance and finding the same when they speared inside me. I yelped, the sudden intrusion forcing me up on my tippy toes, but it didn’t take long for me to spread my legs wide and start pushing back against them. It wasn’t enough. My head twisted on my neck, the friction good, but not as good as I knew the real thing would be.
I muttered meaningless imprecations as his hand grasped my nipple and tugged. Fuck, it was like he was pulling a string between it and my groin, my clit throbbing with each twist. When I felt Finn rub the head of his cock against me, I nodded. Yes, this was it, the thing that would stop the ache inside me.
“My love.”
Finn’s voice came out more animal than human but I didn’t care. I clawed at the madly printing office equipment as I felt the first stretch. I was getting it exactly how I’d asked, but I wasn’t 100% sure I had it right. He was so big, pushing inexorably in with slow, rocking strokes. M
y back curved, his hands going to my hair and pulling. I was caught, pinned to the machine, able to do little but submit to his onslaught. Then he was inside me, the two of us joined together perfectly, like the last piece of a puzzle.
His hand stroked down my spine as he began to move, and I thrust back against him. It was slow at first, a gentle rolling motion that grew faster, for a time, keeping pace with the click-clacking of the machine, but he soon outstripped it. I felt the burn of my venom in my mouth as my claws scraped across the glass. I turned, forcing him to disengage for a second before locking my legs around his hips as I leaned against the office equipment, my hands going to his cheek.
“Mate?” I asked one last time.
The look on his face was the perfect answer. I saw the tremble as he pushed himself back inside me, leaning over me and sheltering me with the wall of his body, just as he had in the car park.
“It’s what we are, aren’t we?”
As I nodded, the room, the clicking photocopier, us, it all faded away until I regarded Finn, sitting across from me in wolf form. His glowing eyes were now the same as mine, two points of light in the comforting gloom around us. I bowed my head, acknowledging his beast’s form. He glowed bright, one of the few pure white Tirians I’d seen in Sanctuary. I moved toward him on four paws, feeling the weight of what I was about to do. Venom dripped from my mouth, leaving burning spots on the bare earth and sizzling when I pushed my nose into his ruff. He held himself so still, I could feel the low vibration within his wolf body, the only indication of his response.
He turned his muzzle away, doing the thing any predator would find agonising to do—bare his throat. I stopped, saw the complete vulnerability of the man I loved in that moment, Hawk’s words from before springing to mind. He was offering himself up, everything he was, is, and would be, and he waited for me to take it or reject it. I honoured the peculiar agony of that, dropping my muzzle as I shifted closer, so my paws bumped with his. My nose searched within his fur, soaking in that warm, earthy scent that encapsulated all that was Finn and just breathing him in for a second. Tiny fragments flickered through my mind, of his gestures, his words, his careful negotiation of all of the relationships between me and the guys, not overtly taking control like Brandon but more performing a million acts of service in the background to keep us all working together. My tongue ran across my teeth, the venom there making my gums burn. I felt him jolt as I took a chunk of his neck into my mouth, dimly aware somewhere, somehow, my human brain had a whole lot of thoughts about this. In this form, that was all the endless chatter my other self seemed to need to engage in. Monkey brains and wolf brains didn’t mesh well, but for a moment, they cooperated.
My jaws snapped down, my fangs piercing his flesh, and my venom flowed over his skin and mine, matting in his fur and filling the wound. It sounded agonising, but it was the opposite. I could feel him, this had been something missing from my mating with Slade due to being in human form. All that was Finn came rushing at me, swamping me, drowning me in him.