I Wed the Ruthless Alpha, and Now His Wolf Kneels to Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Terms

In the Captain's house with the lamp in the window, Marja sets her terms at the kitchen table, and he puts his mouth on her until she shakes; at dawn her brother's howl answers the wardens.

The Captain's house stood on the hill above the shaft.

He drove me there with the lit lamp riding on the seat between us.

Neither of us said anything.

Snow came down in the headlights, thick and sideways, the first real lake-effect snow of the year.

He had held the flame steady in one hand the whole way.

When he parked, he carried it up the porch steps without letting it gutter.

Inside, the house was cold and very clean.

There was a long kitchen with an iron stove, a plank table and two chairs.

Over the sink was a window with nothing in it.

He set the lamp on the sill.

The flame leaned and righted itself, and the whole window went gold.

"It stays lit," he said. "That's the rite. As long as the marriage stands."

"How long does a marriage stand?"

"Until somebody puts the flame out." He looked at the glass, not at me. "Nobody has, in this house, but my father."

He fed the stove and the fire caught.

I pulled out a chair and sat down at his table with my wet coat still on.

"I have terms," I said.

He turned around.

"Go on."

"Wardens on the Toivola road every night until spring. Not twelve tonight and two next week. Every night."

"Yes," he said.

"You don't share my bed unless I say so."

His face did not change.

"Yes."

"After a year and a day I can unhook my check from your Board and walk out of this house, and the wardens stay on the road anyway."

"The wardens stay either way," he said. "I'll write that in the Dry's book, in front of Solange."

I had expected a fight over that one.

I looked down at my hands, which were shaking, and put them under my thighs.

"You're not what the Dry says you are," I said, before I could stop myself. "Or you're worse, and I haven't seen it yet."

"Both," Petroc said. "Take your coat off."

"Why?"

"It's soaked. You're gray with cold."

He crossed the kitchen, went down on one knee in front of my chair and began to unlace my boots.

I watched the top of his dark head, with its gray at the temple, bend over my feet.

His hands were big and careful, and a long white scar ran down the left forearm to the wrist.

Nobody in the Dry would have believed it.

He pulled off one boot and then the other, and then my wet socks.

He wrapped both my feet in his hands.

They were so warm that I made a noise before I could swallow it.

His eyes came up.

They were a pale gray-green, and for the first time that night he looked straight at me.

"The door isn't locked," he said. "It never is. The truck is yours when you want it."

"I know."

"Do you?" he said.

"I'm here because I picked it, Cap'n."

"Petroc," he said.

"I'm not calling you that tonight."

Something near a smile pulled at one side of his mouth, and it was gone at once.

I leaned down and kissed him.

I meant it to be one kiss, a small one, to see.

His mouth was hot and slow, and he tasted of coffee and cold air.

He did not move at all until I opened my lips under his.

Then he made a low sound in his chest and put one hand flat at the back of my neck.

The kiss went on.

I slid off the chair onto my knees on the floor, and he took my coat off my shoulders without breaking it.

My sweater went next, and the damp shirt under it.

He lifted me onto the table in one move.

The wood was cold against my thighs, and the stove was hot against my back, and I did not care about either.

"Tell me when," he said into my throat.

"Now."

He undid my jeans and drew them down my legs with my underwear and set them aside.

I sat on his kitchen table bare from the waist, with the lamp burning gold in the window behind his head.

He put his palms on my knees and opened them.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked.

He held my eyes while he lowered his mouth between my thighs, and then I could not look at anything.

He started with a long slow lick that went up the whole length of me and ended on my clit.

I grabbed the edge of the table.

He did it again, and then again, with the flat of his tongue, patient and heavy and perfectly sure.

My thighs shook under his hands.

"There," I said. "Right there."

He stayed right there.

He closed his lips around my clit and sucked until I heard myself cry out.

He slid two fingers inside me and curled them.

He found the place that made the room tilt.

I put my hand in his hair and pulled.

He groaned against me, and the sound went through my whole body.

It was too fast.

I was ten strokes from coming apart, in a stranger's kitchen, with my wet jeans on the floor.

"Wait," I said.

He stopped.

His mouth lifted and his fingers went still inside me, and he stayed there, hands on my thighs, breathing hard against my skin.

He did not argue, and he did not pull away.

"I hear you," he said. "Tell me."

I took a breath that shook.

"Wait," I said, "and then don't stop."

His mouth came back so slowly that I whimpered.

He was gentle for a long time.

He licked me in small circles until I was begging.

I said his name, the one I had told him I would not use, and I felt him smile against me.

"Petroc," I said again, to see what it would do.

He swore into my thigh and went at me harder.

His fingers pumped, his tongue worked my clit, and I came with my head thrown back and my heels digging into his shoulders.

It went on and on.

He did not stop until I pushed him off, shaking.

Then he stayed where he was, with his forehead pressed to the inside of my knee.

When I could see again, I reached for his belt.

He caught my hand and kissed the palm.

"Not tonight," he said.

"I want you to."

"You've been awake two days, you smell of smoke, and you came in here to pay for a road." He lifted his head. "I won't take what I'm paid. Ask me when it's yours."

I stared at him.

I was sitting naked on a table, still pulsing, and he had turned me down.

"That's the most infuriating thing anyone has said to me," I said.

"Then say the word when you want something more infuriating."

He carried me up to a bed with clean sheets that smelled of cedar, and he wrapped me in a quilt.

He went downstairs, and I heard a chair scrape by the stove.

I lay in the dark with my body still humming, and I slept hard.

I woke before dawn to a long clear howl from the Toivola road.

Twelve voices answered it, strung out through the snow, the wardens taking up their posts.

Then, a long way off from the gray poor rock hills behind the Crown, one more voice came in under theirs.

It was cracked, and low, and furious.

I had heard it every night of my childhood across the hay field.

That was my brother.

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