Psy & Changelings 11 - Tangle of Need

here,” she murmured once she could speak again. He smelled of soap and man and coffee, and she wanted only to rub her face against his chest, indulge the deep sensory need he both created and filled in her.
    Taking a seat on the bed, he put the coffee on the little side table with pretty curved legs. Her eyes locked on a droplet of water making its way down his chest, the dusky hue of his skin broken by a sprinkling of dark hair. “You missed a drop,” she said, catching it on her finger.
    No laughter, his expression reserved.
    Fingers curling into her palm, she allowed her hand to fall to the sheet. “This changes things, doesn’t it?” She’d known the night had been too beautiful not to, had been trying to ignore the inevitable truth, because this feeling inside of her, it was a fizzy joy she hadn’t felt for so long it wasn’t even a memory.
    “Yes.” A single rough word, but his hand, it closed over her own, warm and protective.
    She spread her fingers, interlocked them with his own. “Do you want to end it?” The fact it hurt her deep inside to ask that question was an unmistakable sign she’d already started to fall for this man who could never give her what she needed.
    “We should stop,” Riaz said, eyes of pale brown shot with amber in the morning sunlight, “before it costs us both.”
    “You’re right.”
    Yet neither one of them made the move to break their physical connection. Adria’s wolf stood in silence, uncertain … scared. It was hard to admit that, to accept that in spite of her every promise to herself, Riaz had come perilously close to breaching the core she’d vowed to protect. Part of her wanted to wrench her hand from his, turn away. It would be the safer choice, allowing her to walk out of this a little bruised but heart-whole. And still…
    Riaz cupped the side of her face with his free hand. “I’m a bad risk, Adria.” Raw, his soul stripped bare. “A really bad one.”
    Untangling their fingers, she pushed up into a kneeling position, the sheet held to her breasts. “I’m worse.” The scars she carried were invisible, and marked her to the bone. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to trust a man with all of me ever again.” His honesty deserved her own. “I’m broken deep inside.”
    Almost able to taste the intensity of her pain, Riaz curved his hand over her nape. “I swear to God, I will hunt Martin down and rip him limb from limb.”A dominant female’s pride, her self-belief was her armor, something no male worth his salt would ever attempt to strip from her.
    Startled laughter coloring the air, Adria tugged him down until their foreheads touched. “There’s no need. It took me longer than it should have, but I saw him for what he was—and I saw the mistakes I’d made, too.”
    But the damage done, he thought, was nothing that would easily fade, her scars as indelible as his own. As indelible as the feminine strength that had brought her out of the darkness. His wolf, its teeth still bared, took a single step toward her, halted. He felt as if he stood on the edge of a treacherous cliff. A single wrong move could send him tumbling down into a rocky gorge, shattering his bones, his mind, his soul itself.
    He’d never expected to be here, facing this moment, with any woman.
    A storm cloud deep within, the shadow of a past he was determined to lay to rest threatening to darken the morning, but as strong was the knowledge that he couldn’t live in limbo forever without going mad, and that the flickering flame between him and Adria was something important, something worth fighting for.
    Maybe, just maybe, two broken people could manage to create something whole. “Yes,” he said and waited, his wolf’s body quivering with a tension that kicked him in the guts with exactly how important Adria had become to him. And, his eyes on the mark he’d sucked on her neck, he knew he wasn’t going to behave and walk away if she said no.
    “Yes.”
    Her answer made his wolf lunge to the fore. He didn’t fight the shift, because this decision, it was as much the wolf’s as it was the man’s. A lovely woman with wide violet eyes and hair of tumbled silk was kneeling beside him when he completed the shift to pad around and take a seat on the sheets, his body pressing against her knees. An instant later, the air filled with iridescent sparks of color … to form into the shape of an elegant silver wolf with an unexpected white flash on her