I was tall for a female, but he was more than a head taller than me. It didn’t matter when the hands squeezing my hip and delving into my hair fell away to grip my thighs and lift me from the ground. Instinctively, I curled my legs around his waist.

“May I have you?” he whispered to my cheek, the gentle words a violent contrast to his unyielding grip. He held me as if unwilling to let me go, his hardness meeting my core through my skirts.

I didn’t think. I didn’t let doubts creep in. Not when he pulled back to look at me. Not when that one desperate look, the hunger in his eye, made it impossible to want, let alone think of anything else. “Please do.”

“Thank the fucking stars,” he rushed out, the words squashed against my lips when his stole mine.

He walked uphill without falter, seeming to know exactly where he was going.

The wheels of a wagon squeaked by, and other city dwellers likely passed us, too, but when I tried to pull away, I was denied. He captured the back of my head, trapping me. I laughed, surprised to find I liked being told no.

We floated up a set of spiraling metal stairs, and when he finally removed his lips from mine, it was to kick open the door to a dark apartment. A woodsy scent and that of old books enveloped me. As I tucked my nose into his neck while he locked the door, I discovered it was him.

A faint trace of mint—no, pine. Pine and something smoky, something unnameable.

It was a drug. A potion that went straight to my head, made worse when he dropped me onto a ginormous bed riddled with the scent. Before I could so much as glimpse the entirety of the bookshelves encircling the room, the wolf was above me, staring down at me intently as he dragged a hand up my leg.

My skirts were taken with it. As was my breath, hitching when he reached the apex of my thighs. Something sharp grazed my skin.

My eyes widened when I realized what it was. A claw. When I realized that I was truly going to bed with a stranger.

I was going to bed with a wolf.

It was then, with him so close, with nothing else within my thoughts and sight but him, that I wholly absorbed this creature. All that he was and how I felt small for quite possibly the first time in my life. His sheer size, muscle packed on muscle, was to blame.

The power behind such strength radiated from him like a slow to grow fire, emanating an unearthly energy that was impossible to ignore.

A touch cruel and knowing, he smirked and placed his other hand by my head, expelling a breath through his nostrils. “I’ve no patience for undergarments.”

Indeed, they then tore right over my center.