Page 63 of Hunter Moon

He nodded, didn’t ask me to explain that I was scared of Maxim’s voice sneaking into my heat-stricken mind.

“Do you want to take the lead? Take what you need from me?”

I glanced down at his lap. Somehow, he was still hard in his jeans through all this talking. Me? That was no surprise—I was in heat, my whole body crying out for my alpha to come fill me. But maybe he was just holding it together because one of us had to. So long as I needed him to be strong and thoughtful, that was what he was going to be.

I shook my head. My breath caught in my throat, honeyed warmth sweeping through my body. “Will you... take care of me? Like you used to.”

His laughter was a low, sweet rumble that dripped through my core like molasses. In one languid move, he was off the bed, towering over me, his hips slotted between my knees. With his hands on my face, he leaned in and kissed me softly. “Baby, that’s what I’m here for.”

39

Aspen

Having Brook back in my arms was perfection. He was different, and I was different, but together, somehow we were the same.

He’d always liked it that I was so much bigger than him. That I made him feel small and somehow, through that, safe.

It didn’t matter why—it only mattered that with me, hewassafe. I would destroy anyone or anything that ever tried to hurt him again.

So I pressed him into the bed, like some kind of werewolf weighted blanket, and peppered kisses over his face. Forehead, both cheeks, the tip of his nose—before he got fed up and wrapped a hand around the back of my neck and pulled me once again to his lips.

This time there was no timidity in it. He pushed his tongue into my mouth, claiming, demanding that I stop screwing around and get down to business. It had been his eternal refrain during our sexual awakening: You’re not going to break me, Aspen.

Maxim Reid had tried to break him, had done catastrophic damage to my mate. But he had been right when we were kids. He hadn’t been broken. Hurt, yes. Injured. But he was still Brook, and he still knew what he wanted. Still knew how to get me to give it to him.

The wolf surged in my chest, annoyed with me.Mate now. No Reid. No worry. Mate.

So I wrapped a hand around the base of his skull, pulling his lips even closer to mine, thrusting my own tongue into him, claiming and hard, and he melted into me, like that had been the key to opening him up.

Teenaged Brook had been right. I wasn’t going to break him. I would never, could never, do that.

I ran my free hand down his neck, over his chest and ribs, to the soft, hot skin of his hip. His perfect bubble of an ass was exactly like I remembered, like I’d spent ten years dreaming about. When I ran my hand over it, he whimpered, pressing back into my fingers, demanding I hold him tighter. Not that I had a problem with that.

Still, my brain was struggling with the lack of oxygen, since he hadn’t let go of my lips, so I pulled back, up and away, long enough to tackle my jeans. It took about fifteen seconds to shuck everything, dumping it in a pile on the floor, but you’d have thought Brook was going to die from the lack of kissing, the way he grabbed at me, whining high in the back of his throat.

He was further into it than I’d realized. Way past the point of talking. It was a minor miracle he’d managed to rouse himself out of it well enough to have a talk with me about what he consented to.

His fingers scrabbled at the loose band of his shorts, pushing at it, but struggling to get them down past his hips, till the whine became a growl of frustration, and fingernails grew sharp, threatening claws, and thus threatening his soft, oversensitive skin.

I grabbed his hands in mine and pressed them against the bed, meeting his eye as I let him go and slid the shorts down, leaving him bare before me. I tossed them over my shoulder to join my own clothes. He didn’t look away, eyes wild and intense, as he slapped his hands on top of mine, pushing my touch into his skin.

I hadn’t expected him to want anything rough, but the challenging way he kept meeting my eye implied something, I thought. Was he waiting for me to push him, or worried I would?

It didn’t matter. He’d asked for me, asked for us, so I would give him what I’d always given him.

I slid between his legs on my knees, spreading them slightly to lower my body, and then grabbing his ass with both hands and hauling him up toward me. I ran a finger from the center of his chest down, to the tip of his cock, softly over it and down, down, down, across the sensitive skin of his balls, his taint, and then pushed, slowly, into him.

“Aspen,” he breathed, staring into my eyes. I could almost feel him burning me into his mind. That it was me with him, and no one else.

He was slick for me, his heat having made him beyond ready to take me, so prep was almost perfunctory. One finger, two, and he was writhing against me, bucking his hips up, pushing himself toward my cock. I was hard enough to hammer fucking nails, just from the way he kept looking at me. Like he’d never look away again.

“Aspen if you don’t fuck me right now, I’m going to push you down and fuck you.” His voice was a near guttural growl, and while the old Aspen probably would have said something smug and cocky, and let Brook do just that, it wasn’t what either of us wanted. It was always good like that, but the best? The best was just like this.

I pulled my hand away, setting both on the bedspread, on either side of his hips, and pushed forward, meeting his intense gaze as I slid into him. It was more of a homecoming than driving into Grovetown for the first time in a decade.

This was home in a way nothing else ever had been, ever could be.

He shuddered as I filled him up, his whole body practically convulsing with it, but he didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t pull away, or ask me to wait. No, he wrapped his legs around my hips and pulled me in even tighter.

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