Page 79 of Knot Their Safe Haven
"You said that already."
"It’s worthy of repeating."
"Why?"
"Because in about thirty seconds, I'm going to kiss you properly."
His pupils dilate so fast I can actually see it happen.
"That's not dangerous. That's inevitable."
"You sound very confident."
"Scent matches always end up together. Biology demands it."
"So this is just biology?"
"This is biology confirming what choice already decided." His nose brushes mine. "I chose you before I knew we matched. The scent just means the universe agrees with my excellent taste."
"Arrogant."
"Accurate."
"Alessandro?"
"Yes?"
"Shut up now."
I rise onto my toes, closing the distance between us with deliberation that has nothing to do with wine and everything to do with decision. Our lips meet, and this time neither of us pretends it's casual.
He tasted like chocolate and wine and layered underneath, something sharp and elusive I could only identify as wanting. The air around us seemed to collapse into a dense, humming bubble—the gravity of his body, his hands, his scent, all crowding out the rest of the universe until every sense I owned was tuned to him. Our lips met, parted, met again, and each time the contact deepened: my tongue traced the seam of his mouth and found the inviting heat of his own, and he answered with a low, involuntary sound that shuddered through my chest like bass from a forbidden song.
I could tell he wanted to devour me and restrain himself at the same time, an oscillation that manifested in the precise, reverent way he mapped my mouth and the trembling in his fingers where they curled around my hips. I bit his bottomlip, not hard but not gentle either, and the shock of it broke something in him. He lost whatever tenuous grip he’d had on self-control, and our kiss tumbled from artful to desperate in a single heartbeat.
I felt him pull me closer, one arm crushing my ribcage to his while the other slid down to anchor just above my ass, and I gasped into him at the rawness of it. My toes barely skimmed the floor; I felt unstable, weightless, like a girl in a fairytale right at the moment she realizes the wolf is both her predator and her only way out of the woods.
He kissed with all the intelligence and calculation that marked his every move, but also with a kind of reckless hunger that upended me completely. I was used to being worshipped, to being handled like something dangerous or precious or both; this was new, this sense of being wanted not for what I was or what I represented, but for the very specific, irreplaceable fact that I was me.
I cupped the back of his head, fingers threading through the endless black silk of his hair, and rode the wave of sensation as he tilted me even further back, bending my body to fit his geometry. His tongue licked into me, and I bit down again, just a hint, just a warning, and he made a noise so feral it vibrated between us like a tuning fork.
I broke the kiss, not because I wanted to but because I had to breathe or risk fainting. We hovered there for a single, trembling second, my forehead pressed to his, our exhales tangling in the inch of air between us. His eyes were blown wide, the green lost to so much black that it looked like a storm about to swallow the horizon. I realized that I liked seeing him undone. I wanted to see how far I could push before he snapped.
He seemed to sense the challenge. He nipped my chin, my jaw, then kissed the spot just below my ear, tongue flicking at the sensitive skin. His stubble set off fireworks against my neck.I arched into it, greedy for more, for all of it, and he laughed against my collarbone—a sound so rich and private it sent a pulse of electricity straight down my spine.
Was this what it felt like to lose? Or had I already won?
My brain, the part that wasn’t turning to liquid, was busy cataloguing the ways this was different from every kiss before: the lack of calculation, the absence of an endgame, the way I had absolutely no plan and wanted none. I didn’t care about what happened next, what it meant, if it would add up to anything. I just wanted to keep kissing him until the world faded or the sun came up or both.
He seemed to have the same idea. He moved us, spinning in a slow, clumsy circle until my back hit the nearest wall—glass, cold, slick with condensation, the outside world murky and irrelevant beyond it. He pressed me there, full body, his thigh sliding between mine, and the contact lit up every nerve ending in my body. I gasped, nails digging into his scalp, and the pain only urged him on.
He held me pinned, mouth hot on my throat, and I had a flash of all the times I’d ever been caught, cornered, hunted. This was nothing like that. This was the opposite of fear: I was so alive I thought I might combust. I wanted to claw him open and crawl inside. I wanted to mark him and be marked, to let the world see the evidence of what we’d done to each other.
He pulled back, barely, just enough to see my face. His lips were swollen, kiss-bitten, and he grinned at me with every tooth in his head.
"Still dangerous?" he asked, voice shredded and lovely.
"You have no idea," I whispered, and pulled him down for another kiss, harder this time, all pretense burned away.
