CHAPTER 22 - FOCUS

KNOX’S POV

She smells wrong.

Not bad – Ivy couldn’t smell bad if she rolled in a dumpster and let it marinate – but wrong in the way that makes the wolf in my chest sit up and start snarling, because underneath the vanilla shampoo and the coffee from her shift and the warm, sweet thing that is uniquely HER is a thread of something that doesn’t belong to me. Woodsmoke and old paper and that precise, expensive cologne that Dominic has been wearing since I was old enough to associate it with absence.

She’s been in his office. I know because I can track her scent across campus the way a normal person tracks their phone, and her trail today went from the library to the humanities building to his floor to his door and then back again, and the cologne she picked up in whatever happened behind that door is clinging to her skin like it’s staking a claim that I haven’t authorized.

She’s at The Grind House pretending to work and her hands are clumsy on the espresso machine and she’s dropped two cups since I walked in, and every time she thinks I’m not looking her eyes go unfocused in a way that tells me she’s not here – she’s back in that office replaying whatever Dominic said or did that scrambled her this badly, and the fact that she’s thinking about him while I’m sitting ten feet away watching her is making my blood run hot enough that the coffee mug in my hand is heating up from my palms.

I wait until her shift ends.

She comes out the back door with her apron folded over her arm and I’m leaning against my bike in the parking lot and she sees me and something in her face does that thing it does – the quick battle between the part of her that knows she should run and the part of her that wants to climb me like a tree, and the tree part wins the way it always does.

“Get on,” I say, and she doesn’t argue because we’re past arguing, we were past arguing the first night she got on her knees without me having to ask twice.

I take her up the coast road to the lookout above the city, the one where the guardrail is rusted and the view drops straight down to a carpet of lights that goes all the way to the water. It’s cold up here and the wind is pulling at her hair and she’s standing at the edge looking down and she’s still not HERE, she’s still wherever Dominic took her in that office, and the wolf in my chest is done being patient about it.

I come up behind her and my hands are on her hips and I spin her around and lift her onto the seat of the bike facing me, and her legs wrap around my waist on instinct because her body knows what’s about to happen even when her brain is in another man’s office.

“Wherever you just were in your head,” I say, and my hands are already pushing her skirt up and her thighs are cold from the wind and I warm them with my palms in long strokes that push higher with each pass, “come back to me.”

Her eyes focus.

There she is. That’s my girl, with her lips parting and the pulse in her throat jumping fast enough that I can see it without touching her.

I pull her forward on the seat until she’s flush against me and I’m hard enough that she can feel me through my jeans and her breath catches the way it catches every time she realizes how much I want her, like the evidence of it surprises her even though the evidence has been constant and obvious since the engagement dinner when her scent hit me across that restaurant table and my wolf chose her before I’d finished my appetizer.

I slide her underwear to the side and slide two fingers through the wetness that’s already there – that’s ALWAYS there when I touch her, like her body starts preparing the moment I enter a room – and I push them inside her and she gasps against my neck and her hands grip the collar of my jacket and the city lights are spread out beneath us and the wind is cold on my skin but she’s warm, she’s so fucking warm around my fingers that the contrast makes my cock throb against the zipper of my jeans.

I fuck her with my fingers while she sits on my bike at the edge of a cliff.

I curl my fingers into that spot that makes her legs shake and I press my thumb against her clit and I say her name against her throat like I’m branding it into her skin, and every sound she makes is mine, every shudder is mine, every clench of her pussy around my fingers is MINE, and the cologne is still on her skin but it’s fading under the sweat and the arousal and the scent of me that’s replacing it with every stroke.

She cums on my hand with the city lights below us and her face buried in my neck and my name in her mouth instead of his, and the relief of hearing it – my name, not Dominic’s – is so visceral that my vision flickers gold for a second and I have to close my eyes and breathe through the shift that’s pressing against the inside of my skin.

I pull my fingers out and she whimpers at the loss and I undo my jeans and lift her hips and push inside her in one stroke that makes both of us groan loud enough that the sound carries out over the cliff and into the dark below.

She’s still clenching from the orgasm and the tightness of her around me while she’s mid-aftershock is enough to make my claws itch at my fingertips, and I fuck her on my motorcycle at the edge of a lookout with her back arched over the handlebars and her hair spilling toward the ground and the city sprawled out beneath us like we’re the only two people left alive.

I cum inside her with my teeth on her neck – not the bite, not yet, the wolf isn’t ready to mark her permanently yet even though it wants to so badly that my jaw aches with the restraint – and she clenches around me one more time and goes limp against my chest with her forehead against my collarbone and her breathing ragged and warm against my skin.

On the ride home she presses her face against my back the way she does and her arms are tight around my waist and I can feel her heartbeat through my jacket, and then her hands tighten and she says something I almost miss over the engine.

“You’re burning up.”

She’s right. My skin is running hotter than usual, hot enough that she can feel it through the leather, and the wolf is pacing in my chest in a way that’s different from the usual possessive circling – it’s restless and electric and building toward something that happens once a month and that I’ve been managing alone since I was sixteen.

“Full moon’s coming,” I say, and I don’t explain further because explaining would mean telling her what I am and I’m not ready for that conversation while I’m driving seventy miles an hour with her body pressed against mine and my cum still inside her.

But it’s coming. And when it does, I won’t be able to hide it.