“Put your cock inside…” My command fell into a whimpered exhale when he ended my misery and mercifully filled me.

“Better?” he asked, and I was gifted another chuckle when I gave him a garbled response.

In quick and deep thrusts, he delivered me to a rapid ruin that was halted from arriving when he paused. About to protest, I was then hauled up as he leaned back onto his haunches and scooped my hair aside. “Want to hold you when you break,” he muttered to my shoulder, and indeed, his arm enveloped my stomach.

I gripped it as he rocked up into me and kissed the curve of my shoulder. His teeth sank into my skin, the sting soothed by his lips and tongue. “Sing for me, wildflower.”

I laughed at his choice of words, but it was stolen by a moan when he reached down to slide his forefinger over my clit, and I fractured. He held me to him, kissing my neck and shoulder while I trembled and saw stars behind my closed eyelids.

“This isn’t normal, is it?” I rasped, swallowing.

Scythe hummed, his hand sliding over my stomach to cup my breast. “You desire something normal?”

Unable to help it, I smiled as I admitted, “Actually, I do.”

He stilled, but only momentarily. Taking my chin, he turned my mouth to his and tucked my hair behind my ear, tracing the arch. His question was hesitant, quiet. “Would you settle for natural?”

I frowned as I studied his lupine eye, his rugged features. “Why?”

His smile revealed and broke something I hadn’t known I’d possessed. “We both know nothing has ever felt this right.” He kissed me, deep and branding, and I was grateful.

I wouldn’t have known what to say to that—wouldn’t have known how to refute it when it was irrefutable.

He moved me over him with an unhurried finesse that reawakened my body far too soon. I slumped back against him, his stubble tickling as he continued to hold and taste me, and waited for my heart to slow.

It never did.

It was as if time failed to exist in this new world I’d fled to. That, or perhaps we were both aware that even though we would live for hundreds and hundreds of years, it was still far too fleeting.

Hours after feeding and hydrating me, when we should have been sleeping, the wolf set the book he’d been reading to me upon the nightstand and looked down at me. “What does normal mean to you?”

Exhaustion had cloaked but hadn’t yet taken me, and so I said the first thing that entered my murky mind. “Chickens.”

“Chickens?”

I leaned back in the embrace of his arm to better see him. “Do you not like chickens, wolf?”

He made a face. “To eat, yeah.”