Chapter 293: Losing war

Yuki’s voice did not falter by the slightest fraction. It stayed steady, laced with a reckless, feverish bravado. She could feel the scorching heat radiating from his bare chest against her skin, and the heavy, persistent pressure of his arousal locked against her body.

Kaden’s grip tightened around her waist until his fingers nearly bruised her flesh. His breathing hitched into heavy, ragged gasps. It felt as though he was fighting a brutal war inside himself. His entire body went rigid. He cursed under his breath, a sharp, gravelly sound of pure frustration, before a dark, low chuckle rumbled up from his chest and echoed strangely through the quiet night.

He leaned in closer. His voice dropped to a rough murmur, " Repeat those exact words again, Snow if you dare," he dared her, pressing his hips harder against her. But Yuki’s mind was long past the point of working with any semblance of clarity. Whatever restraint she had left had already slipped away.

Her head jerked up. A bold, challenging smirk pulled at the corners of her lips. "Are you scared, Kaden?" she taunted. Her voice dripped with invitation. "You’re all bark and no bite."

A deep, ferocious growl escaped Kaden’s lips at the open challenge. The sound was primitive enough to scare the life out of any ordinary creature. Yet instead of terrifying her, the rumble sent a violent jolt of electricity straight to her core, making her stomach flip and fueling whatever wild, unhinged madness had taken root in her mind.

Yuki let out a soft, mocking chuckle. Her tone turned deliberately provocative. "What happened to the big bad wolf?" she taunted.

As soon as those words slipped past her lips, the world spun. In a blur of motion, Kaden grabbed her hips and violently flipped her around, pressing her back against the smooth, damp stone of the river rock as he caged her in and met her gaze head-on.

Her heart began to race wildly against her ribs as she looked into his eyes. They were dark, swimming with a predatory hunger that told her she had officially crossed a line. Yet not a single shred of panic touched her.

With effortless raw strength, her legs were suddenly lifted off the cold sand as Kaden balanced her entire weight with just one arm locked around her waist. Instinctively, her legs parted and she wrapped them tightly around his muscular waist for balance.

It proved to be a catastrophic, intoxicating mistake. The sudden shift brought her dripping, hypersensitive folds directly against his thick, pulsing length.

She could not actually see his cock from this position but she could feel the difference of it with brutal clarity. While she vaguely recalled that Killian’s arousal had been long, and terrifyingly intimidating in its own right, Kaden’s build was entirely different. Slightly shorter, perhaps, but the sheer brutal girth of him was enough to make anyone’s breath hitch.

The thick, heavy veins of his erection pulsed directly beneath her aching sex, sending dizzying waves of heat flashing up her spine. Kaden carried her weight effortlessly, pressing her firmly against the cold rock by the riverbank.

His voice remained low, laced with a lethal edge as he commanded her. "Say it again."

This was the exact juncture where any rational, intelligent person would have drawn a hard line and backed away. But Yuki was entirely past saving.

She scoffed softly, looking down at him with defiant amusement.

"Why would I want to repeat something I’ve already said twice?" she murmured. Her voice was laced with venomous taunts. "You don’t have the guts to actually do anything about it. You’re too terrified of breaking your precious, beloved Eloise’s heart."

A sharp, almost cruel smile touched Kaden’s lips. As if answering her taunt, the blunt, heavy tip of his cock pressed directly against her slick, trembling entrance. His grip on her waist tightened to a vice.

Her folds immediately clenched around him, spasming in a violent, involuntary reaction to the friction.

Yuki bit down hard on her lower lip. A breathless whimper threatened to slip past her teeth at how agonizingly eager her body felt to take him. It was deeply humiliating. After all, this was Kaden, the man whose very existence she had sworn to despise to her core.

Yet in this exact feverish moment, she was burning alive with raw desire, fighting a losing battle against the desperate urge to rock her hips forward and slam herself down onto that waiting tip.

She had never taken a man before. The thought flashed through her once,. Would it hurt the way other she wolves always claimed? Would she even be able to take him?

Her fried brain completely failed to register the freezing night air whispering around them, the fact that they were standing exposed on a public riverbank, or how insane it was to contemplate crossing that line right here. She barely even registered the sharp ache in her waist where Kaden’s fingernails were clawing into her skin like a man desperately holding onto a crumbling cliffside.

She was marching toward an engagement tomorrow solely to escape her suffocating entanglement with the Ravencourt family. Yet here she was, dripping wet against him in the mud, her nipples aching so fiercely she could barely breathe.

’Don’t let her push you over the edge,’ Kaden’s wolf howled frantically inside his head, scratching violently at the walls of his consciousness. It was a fair warning, because his wolf knew all too well that they were losing a war they had already surrendered. She was not just a feisty, sharp-tongued wolf. She was the end of him. A breathtaking, unapologetic seductress.

For weeks, he had secretly believed there was something fundamentally broken within himself, blaming his total repulsion, his numbness, and his complete lack of romantic or sexual interest in Eloise on some deep-seated emotional detachment. He had not been daft enough not to notice his own dysfunction. But looking at her now, he realized with terrifying clarity that was not the case at all.

His cock still knew damn well how to function. It just refused to wake up for anyone except the one woman who was entirely off-limits.

Yuki was actively seducing him, dragging him down into the dirt. And he was the pathetic one desperately fighting a losing war just to keep himself from shoving his entire length deep inside her wet, welcoming heat.

Damn it all. The sweet, intoxicating scent of her arousal floating in the night air had never smelled more maddeningly addictive. Every single logical instinct in his brain screamed at him to pull away, to put her down, to walk into the woods and never look back.

But how the hell was he supposed to walk away when paradise felt like it was resting right on the tip of his cock?