Wolves of the Thousandth Winter novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Archive Table

Locked in the reading room, they give in; he takes her apart with his mouth and stops short of the bite.

"Your pack," I said.

"My Beta's scouts."

Gunnar's voice had dropped into something that raised the hair on my arms.

"They follow me when the book is out of its box."

"Will they come in?"

"Not if I tell them not to."

He went to the front of the museum, opened the door, and stood on the step in the rain.

He did not shout.

He made one low sound, deep in his chest, and the six shapes in the lot turned together and slid into the dark.

He came back in and locked the door behind him.

At that exact moment the lights died.

The whole building went black and the heater clicked off.

The only light left was the lamp on my reading table, running on its battery pack.

"The line is down," he said from the dark. "It goes every storm."

"Great."

"You should go home."

"I can't, my car's on the hill road and it's flooded," I said. "I walked."

"I'll carry you."

"You will not carry me."

He came back into the lamp's yellow circle.

Rain ran off his hair and down the side of his throat, into the open neck of his shirt.

He looked at me the way I looked at the ledger.

"You said no," he said. "Back there."

"I said not because a book says so."

"It's the same."

"It's not the same at all," I said, and crossed the floor.

I put both hands flat on his wet chest.

His heart was slamming under my palm.

"I don't want you because of the seer," I said.

"I wanted you when you took my wrist, and I hadn't read the line yet."

His breath went out of him.

"Thora."

"You don't get to decide what I want, Gunnar."

I took his beard in one hand and pulled his mouth down to mine.

He made a sound against my lips.

Then his hands were on my waist.

He lifted me off the floor and set me on the edge of the reading table.

The ledger was a yard away, under its cloth.

He kissed me hungrily, his hot, slow mouth opening mine.

His tongue stroked mine, and his beard scraped my chin.

I wrapped my legs around his hips and dragged him in.

I felt him hard through his jeans, thick and heavy against the inside of my thigh.

"God," I said.

"Say it again."

"God, Gunnar."

He bit my lower lip, gently, then my jaw, then the soft place under my ear.

I pushed my fingers into his hair and the cord came loose.

All that dark gold fell around my hands.

"I want to see you," he said, against my throat. "Every inch."

"Then look. Hurry."

He undid my cardigan one button at a time, slowly enough to make me crazy.

He pulled it off my shoulders.

The lamplight fell on my plain black cotton bra and the soft heavy curve of my breasts above it.

He stopped and looked.

"You are," he said, and his voice cracked, "the most beautiful thing I have seen in nine hundred years."

"You're laying it on."

"I'm being exact."

He cupped me in both his enormous hands and kissed the top of each breast.

Then he drew a nipple into his mouth through the cotton.

I arched off the table.

"Oh, fuck."

He did it again, harder, and I gripped his shoulders and felt the muscle shift under my nails.

He got the bra open with one hand.

His mouth on my bare skin was so hot I shook.

He kissed down my stomach, over the soft round of it, his beard dragging over every inch.

His hands pushed my skirt up my thighs.

He dropped to his knees on the museum floor.

"Lift," he said.

I lifted, and he drew my tights and my underwear down my legs and tossed them aside.

I sat bare from the waist down on a table that had held a hundred years of town records.

My knees were apart and a man was kneeling in front of me.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked.

His eyes were gold.

"Tell me what you want."

"I want your mouth on me," I said. "Right now. Please."

He pushed my thighs wider with both hands.

The first stroke of his tongue went up the middle of me, slow and flat.

My head fell back.

"You taste like rain," he said, and went back for more.

He licked me in long, deliberate passes.

Then he found my clit and circled it with the tip of his tongue until I was shaking.

I had one hand in his hair and the other flat on the table.

I heard myself begging in half words.

"There. Don't stop. Right there."

He didn't.

He sucked my clit gently into his mouth and slid two thick fingers inside me.

The stretch of them was so good that I cried out.

He curled them forward and found a place I did not know I had.

"Come for me," he said into my skin. "I want to hear it."

I broke apart.

It rolled through me in long hard waves.

My thighs locked around his head, and my voice went up and up in the dark museum.

He held me through it and kept his mouth on me through the last shudder.

Then I pushed at his shoulder, laughing and gasping.

He rose and pulled me against his chest.

I felt how hard he still was.

I reached for his belt.

His hand closed over mine.

"Not tonight," he said.

"What?"

"You haven't chosen. And I can't be inside you and not want the rest of it."

"The rest of it."

His eyes closed.

"The bite, Thora."

"A wolf takes his mate with a bite at the shoulder, when he's finished."

"One bite and it's done, for both of us, for good."

"And you won't."

"I won't," he said. "Not off a book."

I looked at his flushed face and the ache in it.

His hands were shaking where they held me.

"Then you'd better be very good at everything else," I said.

He laughed against my hair, a real laugh, rusty from disuse.

"I have nine hundred years of practice," he said.

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