Chapter 9 Jared #3
“Oh, no, please, fuck,” I choked. “Fuck me, just fuck me. I don’t need that!”
“You would if you’d never taken a cock before,” he said, entirely too calmly. But no—not so calm. He had the hugest, most frustrated-looking erection in the world standing up almost straight in a gravity-defying feat of alpha lust. Stubborn fucking bastard. “Four fingers. Then I’ll fuck you.”
“F—four, fuck, f—oh, gods, you fucking asshole!” He corkscrewed two fingers into me, laughing, and I let go of the blankets to clutch at his arms, caught between annoyance and helpless arousal and joy that I got to hear that laugh, that he laughed at all when he’d spent seven years thinking he never would again. “Calder, don’t torture me!”
“I started with two fingers, not one. I’m not trying to torture you.”
But then he bent down, his mouth now free to roam over my body, and licked my cock, sucked my nipples, pressed open-mouthed kisses to my sweat-damp skin, ignoring my hands in his hair trying to push him where I wanted him.
“Fuck me, fuck me, please, or I’ll never blow you again,” I lied through my clenched teeth, groaning and tugging on his hair as he reamed me open with three fingers now, the pressure unbearable and not nearly enough. “Come on, four might as well be your whole hand! Three is plenty, fuck!”
“Don’t tempt me,” he growled against my stomach, and then bit me.
I startled and yelped and that pushed his fingers against all kinds of spots inside me, and gods, what if he had that whole fist in me…
and then I arched again as I came all over myself and his chest, clamping down on his fingers, stars flying behind my closed eyelids.
I subsided, shaking and sweat-slick, wrung out and wrecked.
“You know I always keep my word,” he said, and pulled out enough to add that fourth finger. The wet, squelching sound my hole made as he forced most of his hand into me had me shuddering all over again with shame and fresh longing for his knot.
By the time he pulled his hand out and thankfully, finally lined up between my trembling legs, I’d been reduced to nothing but a limp, whining thing for him to use however he wanted.
I cracked my eyelids open to see him looming over me, limned by firelight and big enough to break me, and with that eerie silver gaze fixed hungrily on my face.
My pink, sweaty face, with my overlong hair stuck to me in all directions…
but his expression would’ve worked for a lover of fine art seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time.
“You want to know when I fell in love with you?” he asked.
“Sometime before you were willing to die for me, I guess?” I tried to smile, but the intensity of his gaze had me almost afraid to. “Yeah, I want to know.”
His lips quirked at one corner, but I could feel his trepidation through the bond. Whatever it was he meant to say, he didn’t know how I’d react.
“When you looked into my eyes,” he said.
What? “When I—but I do that a hundred times a day.”
He sucked in a deep breath, his fingers tightening on my thigh. “The first time, Jared,” he said, very low. “The first time you looked into my eyes.”
“That was—that was—” My own eyes were widening with disbelief.
The first time? The first time had been the morning after our captors threw me into his cell for him to kill me.
I’d spent the night waiting for him to do it, huddled against the wall, filthy and dry-mouthed and sweating and desperately needing to piss, stinking of fear. “No one could’ve loved me like that.”
Calder laughed a little, shaking his head.
“I’d never wanted anyone the way I wanted you.
” He leaned down, the head of his cock pushing into my slick hole.
So thick, gods. Even after four fingers, it felt like almost too much.
“I knew I’d end up killing you.” An inch slid into me, then another, and I wriggled around him, adjusting to it the best I could.
“I didn’t think the gods could be any crueler.
But you saved me, Jared. The last shred of humanity I had left. ”
He sank into me all the way to the hilt, lowering his weight down, wrapping one massive arm under my body to press me to his. My arms slid around his back, nails digging in.
“I love you,” I murmured into his shoulder. It was that or cry. My chest hitched; it might not be one or the other, fuck.
He didn’t reply—not with words, anyway. Apparently he’d said everything he needed to. Calder clamped me tightly to him and thrust, inhumanly hard, pounding his gods knew how many fucking inches so deeply into my body that there’d be no room for anything else.
No room for doubt, or pain, or bad memories, or fear. Only my mate. And the way he’d loved me when I’d have sworn he didn’t have anything in him but hatred. When I’d hated myself even more.
When his knot swelled, filling me so far beyond my capacity I could barely spread my legs enough, I came a third time, and it almost didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Calder inside my body, our bond wrapped around my soul, made blindingly bright by our magic and our love.
Calder shifted us around so that we came to lie on our sides, with my back to the fire and the front of my body warmed by his.
Fucking perfect. Nothing could be more perfect. I could’ve died content in that moment, nuzzling into his chest, cradled in his arms, stretched to bursting by his alpha knot.
And that’s when I understood.
I’d been ready to die in his cell, when he mated me, because it’d been the only way out. I’d have died without ever having been happy, though. And now I’d be ready to die if necessary, because I couldn’t imagine anything that’d make me happier than this.
Ideally, a whole lifetime of this.
But now I knew what it meant to have everything I wanted.
Sometimes I was pretty sure Calder was smarter than me, and at moments like this, I became very sure.
“I’ve never regretted mating you,” I said. “Not for a second. Not then. Not now. Never. But you’re right. This is better.”
His low laugh shook me, and shoved his knot against some very delicate places, and I cursed and clenched around him and ended up pinned and kissed and fucked a little more deeply.
Finally we lay still again. “Do we have to wait for midnight for the champagne?” I tried not to sound too plaintive, but I failed.
Calder held me even closer. “You never need to wait for anything you want that I can give you,” he said simply. Just stating a fact.
I closed my eyes and tucked my head under his chin. “In a few minutes.”
He kissed the top of my head. “We’ve got time.”
And we did. As much as we needed.