Chapter Ten #2
Her scent came through the door, heavy, cloying, and addictive.
Sweet and thick and shot through with want, it had been building for the past hour until it was all I could smell.
It permeated the corridor and arrowed straight down to my cock, which was painfully erect.
My own body had decided, somewhere around the forty-minute mark, that strategy was irrelevant.
My cock was hard in a way that had stopped being ignorable and started being a problem, pressure that had nowhere to go.
Every time I thought I’d gotten it under control, I’d hear something from inside that room—a breath, a shift of fabric, Thane’s voice low and steady—and it would get worse.
She gasped, a throaty, raspy sound, and my head dropped back against the stone.
I shouldn’t be standing here. I was a grown man and a military commander, and I had held myself together under conditions that would have broken most people. And yet I was currently undone by a closed door and a slip of an omega in a heat spike. That was the complete picture of my situation.
I shoved off the wall and put three paces between myself and the door.
It didn’t help. Her scent followed me. Of course it did.
It was in my clothes now, my hair, the back of my throat.
My body had cataloged it as thoroughly as anything in my life and had developed a very clear opinion about what should happen next.
But I couldn’t make myself leave the area.
I was drawn to her like a fucking moth to a flame, even though I knew the flame would burn me.
I adjusted my painfully-erect cock and breathed through my nose.
Bad idea. More of her scent. I breathed through my mouth instead and leaned one forearm against the opposite wall.
While I stared at the stone inches from my face, I tried to think about something, anything, that wasn’t the sound she’d made thirty seconds ago.
I heard Thane’s voice, too low to make out the words. Then her voice answered, unsteady, and a band tightened around my chest when she asked about me, where I was.
And Malric?
Did she want me in the room? Or did she want me far away? I wish I knew.
I pushed off the wall and walked back. Stopped.
Turned around. There was nowhere to go that wasn’t this corridor, that wasn’t adjacent to this room and everything happening inside it.
No matter where I went, her scent permeated the stone, as if the tower taunted me with what I couldn’t have.
That only confirmed my suspicions that the tower had some form of sentience.
Her scent spiked.
I hissed through my teeth and gripped myself harder, trying to relieve the throbbing, and this time I didn’t pretend I was doing anything other than what I was doing.
I told myself this was pragmatic, this was just managing a physical problem, this meant nothing.
I had jerked off plenty of times in tents and in woods surrounded by soldiers when need arose.
I could keep it simple, a physical release.
From inside the room, she made a sound that stripped the last of that argument bare.
I worked my hand against myself and breathed shallowly.
I kept my eyes on the wall and tried to make it enough.
It wasn’t enough. It was the pale outline of the thing I actually wanted, the shadow of it, and my body knew the infuriating difference.
She was feet away. She was in heat and she was making sounds that called to the alpha in me, and Thane was the one with his hands on her.
I was out here jerking off against a corridor wall like an untried youth and it was not enough.
A cry.
Her cry. High and broken and unmistakably real, pleasure cresting, and I heard it move through the room in waves.
And then, wrecked and breathless, my name.
“Malric.”
I hit the door with my shoulder before I’d made a decision.
It swung wide.
She was lying in the nest, flushed and sweat-damp, her hair spread loose across the furs.
Thane was beside her, propped on one arm, his breathing labored in a way I rarely heard from him.
He looked at me with an expression that was equal parts relief and something darker—something that said he’d been waiting for me to stop being an idiot.
Aveline looked at me.
Her eyes were glazed, unfocused, heat-drunk, and her full breasts, tipped with rosy, swollen peaks, were heaving with the effort of coming down from something that still wracked her body.
The scent in the room was overwhelming. It pressed against the inside of my skull and my body answered it with a full-body response that I had no interest in managing anymore.
Her hand stretched toward me, pleading for me to come closer.
I stood in the doorway with my hands fisted at my sides, every muscle locked, and looked at her outstretched hand and the open want on her face and made myself ask.
“Are you sure?”
I had to be sure. It would break me if she rejected me, but I would prefer that to her only asking for me because she was desperate, then regretted it later.
“Please.” Her voice was wrecked. “Malric, please.”
I dropped to my knees at the edge of the nest. Her hand found my jaw and I turned my face into it without thinking.
I covered her mouth with mine and she made a sound, a choking moan, against my lips.
She tasted of heat and honey and something uniquely her.
I pulled her closer with a hand at her waist and kissed her until she stopped trembling and started clawing at me instead.
I lifted my head. Her eyes were dark, fever-bright, fixed on me.
“Down,” I said, and guided her back into the furs.
Thane shifted behind her, moving to her side, his hand settling at her shoulder, and she turned her head to look at him before she looked back at me.
He pushed the hair off her neck and pressed his mouth to the junction between her neck and shoulder, where someday I would place my binding mark, if she let me.
His other hand cupped her breast, slow and deliberate, and I watched her exhale in a rush and arch into it.
He held her breast out to me, offering it to me, and I obliged, sucking a taut peak into my mouth and biting down gently.
Aveline screamed and fresh scent flooded the room.
I stroked a thick finger between her thighs, swirling in the slick that gathered there, soaking the furs beneath her and spreading across the tops of her thighs.
“You’re so wet, Omega. Making a mess for your alphas. Do you like having two alphas taking care of you?”
She moaned, her head falling against Thane’s chest. “Yes.”
I skated a finger over her clit, circling it a few times, her hips arching into my touch. “You will not have any more alphas, Omega. Only us.”
I knew I was going against everything I had been fighting since coming into this tower, but at this moment, she was my omega and I wasn’t sharing. Aveline didn’t even hesitate. “Yes, please, Malric.”
“It’s alpha, Omega. When we’re in your nest, we’re your alphas.” I sucked a mark on the side of her breast, marking her as mine.
She sucked in a breath. “Yes, Alpha.”
“Good girl.” I pressed a finger inside her tight channel, feeling the muscle squeeze me too tightly. Damn, she would strangle my cock when I got it inside.
I pressed my mouth to her collarbone. Her sternum.
The soft skin below her ribs. I took my time on the way down.
She smelled extraordinary this close—the heat of her skin, the sweetness underneath, a scent so hers that it pressed against something behind my sternum I’d spent three days refusing to name.
My mouth traced her hip. The inside of her thigh, where her skin was softer, and she made a sharp sound and her hips lifted.
Thane’s hands moved over her, learning her, and she was panting, caught between us, her fingers pressing into my hair before she seemed to remember she’d put them there.
“Hold on to whatever you need,” I said against her thigh.
Thane said something low near her ear. She shivered.
He drew her onto his lap and drew her thighs apart, placing her legs outside of his knees, exposing her swollen and glistening pussy.
I looked up the length of her to see her watching me, flushed and undone and still watching, and it was the watching that broke the last of my restraint.
I lowered my head.
Her taste hit me like a blow. Sweet and sharp and clean.
Warm honey, sweet cream, spicy silver blossoms. Her hips surged immediately, instinctively, her body straining toward me, silently begging for a deeper touch.
Thane wrapped his hands around her thighs and held her tighter.
I inserted a second then a third finger, and pumped them while licking her clit.
She came apart at the edges almost instantly—her slick flooding me, her muscles clenching my fingers, her breath dissolving into broken syllables that weren’t quite words.
Thane’s hands moved against her skin above me.
I could hear him murmuring to her, steady and low.
She sagged against him as the tension ebbed out of her and he petted her down, while I slowly stroked the last flutters out of her.
We’d done this before—shared a female, moved around each other in the dark—but never an omega and it was never like this.
She was the difference. She was our center, our grounding force.
I wasn’t done. I needed more, was desperate for more. Her heat spike wasn’t quite over and I needed more of her taste. It was more addictive than any of the drugs the soldiers used after injuries or to combat boredom. Her taste, her scent, could get me through anything.
I bent my head and dragged my tongue through the thick syrup coating her pussy, working my fingers slowly in and out of her easily.
I’d learned that she responded to slow better than to fast, that her breath caught higher when I varied the pressure, that she made a sound when I used my tongue a particular way.
And I was determined that I was going to spend considerable time learning everything that made her make that sound.
Her fingers tightened in my hair. Her thighs tried to close around my head and Thane held them open, his hands bracketing her hips, and she made a noise at that—at the gentle restraint of it—that told me something useful about her.
“Malric.” His voice, not hers. Warning or request, I wasn’t sure.
I felt it too. The shift in her, the heat building differently, the way her whole body had gone taut instead of fluid. She was close. She’d been close when I walked through the door and we’d brought her back to the edge, and this time it wasn’t going to pull back.
Thane moved against her. I heard the low sound he pressed into her neck, felt the shudder that moved through her in response, and then her hips were rolling up against my mouth.
She was saying something in fragments, “please” and “yes” and both our names woven together without apparent concern for order, and I stopped being strategic about any of it and gave her what she was asking for.
She broke on a cry that I felt in my chest.
Her whole body locked and then released in a wave, her back lifting from the furs, her hands pressing me into her without gentleness.
I stayed with her through it, through every shuddering pulse of it, until she went soft and her hands loosened and the sounds she was making thinned into something quieter.
The heat in the room settled.
Not immediately, not completely, but it dropped from the frantic register it had been holding and became something bearable.
Something warm rather than urgent. I pressed my mouth to the inside of her thigh once more, just to feel her twitch, and then I moved up the nest and lay down on her other side.
She was between us. Breathing in pieces. Her skin was damp, her eyes were closed, and her scent had shifted into something softer, sated, and I lay there and breathed it in and didn’t say anything.
Thane’s eyes met mine over her. He looked as wrecked as I’d been in the corridor. His jaw was tight with the effort of restraint, and I looked back at him and didn’t look away, and after a moment, his mask came down.
Her hand found mine without her opening her eyes.
Her fingers laced through mine and held on like someone who’d been reaching in the dark for a long time and had stopped being surprised when they didn’t find anything.
I let her hold my hand.
The tower was quiet around us. The cold stone outside the nest, the banked warmth inside it, her breathing gradually finding its rhythm between us.
I stared at the curved ceiling and kept her hand in mine and waited for the part where I pulled back, where I found the tactical distance I’d maintained for three days and retreated behind it.
It didn’t come.
Thane’s breathing slowed beside her. Her grip on my hand eased as sleep pulled at her, but I didn’t let go.
I stayed where I was.