Chapter Forty-Two
D ays had passed since I had last seen Guinevere. I, and the rest of the castle, had known that she was deep in the throes of her heat.
I had not approached the chambers at all, afraid that there would be no place for me in such a naturalistic mating. After all, I was no alpha, nor was I a beta or even an omega.
How did I truly fit into their bond when it seemed fairly even keel with the four of them surrounding her like the four pillars that were the basis of all things in the world.
There were four directions, four elements, four seasons, and more. It seemed to be perfection as the gods had intended it and after not seeing her for days I had allowed doubt to grow in my heart and my soul.
But when Arthur had sent for me where I was brooding in my rectory, taking a page out of Lancelot’s book, my feet carried me to the bathing rooms without a second thought.
Now she stood in front of me, her soft hand in mine as she looked pleasantly rumpled in her linen robe. Her cheeks were still flushed with her heat and I knew if I pressed my weak nose to her neck she would smell of sex and desire.
Sex had never been something I had considered overly much before now.
None had ever given me the desire to experience it before—or at the very least they had not until I summoned this brown-eyed woman from the future.
Getting to know her had also seemed to trigger my desire to experience the urge to taste her flesh. Kissing her was no longer enough. I wanted to feel the length of her body against mine and see what sort of magic we could create in a way that was as benign and human as it could get.
Guinevere seemed shy as we stepped into the dim room and breathed in the thick, humid air.
“This is one of my favorite places,” she commented, likely to fill the awkward, empty space between the words we wanted to say and the discomfort of having to say them in the first place.
“It is mine as well,” I said, playing along with her game for a moment as I tried to organize my thoughts.
I needed to tell her exactly as I felt as our relationship now seemed entirely uneven—Guinevere displaying her hand so clearly to me weeks ago and me not returning the offer.
But how did I begin? I was never much one for words and professing one’s feelings did not necessarily come with a script.
I could have certainly perused the castle for the various works of poetry that were kept in scrolled form, or I could have asked others what they said when they told their significant others how they felt about them.
Those, however, were not my words nor my feelings. They all seemed… vastly inadequate.
Resolving just to blurt whatever came to mind, I turned to Guinevere. “Gwen, I feel I must say—”
My words were cut off abruptly by what I saw before me. Guinevere had dropped the robe she was wearing, baring her creamy, love-bitten skin to me in its entirety.
Her eyes were warm and her face was flushed as she offered me a small, knowing smile upon seeing my awestruck expression.
“You were saying?” she said as she began to descend the steps into the steaming pool.
But I had completely forgotten what I had meant to say, my mouth opening and closing uselessly as I watched her body disappear underneath the water.
“You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to,” Guinevere murmured, her eyes sparkling with a sudden mischief. “I can wash myself all by my lonesome if I need to.”
Then her hand disappeared underneath the water and a wanton noise left her mouth.
In a flash, I was yanking at my clothing, fighting with it to free myself so that I could experience something I had only dreamed about whilst telling myself it could never be.
My clothing fell to the floor in a messy heap as I nearly tripped in my haste to get into the water, hissing as the heat connected with my skin. “Does this not burn you?”
Guinevere shrugged, lifting a hand, causing the water to chase after her in an easy stream. It was amazing to me how far her magical prowess had come in such a short amount of time, it seemed effortless now when nary a fortnight ago she struggled to even find her core. “It honestly feels cool compared to the rest of me right now.”
Never before had I stopped to consider such things as an omega’s heat. I had always made sure not to pry when Eleanor and Juneau were experiencing such things as it was not for me to see, but now as Guinevere stared up at me with heavy lids, I wished I had at the very least asked them some questions.
“Do you need me to go and get one of the others? To, ah , soothe you?”
Guinevere shook her head and stepped closer to me until I could feel the tickle of her breath across my chest. “No, I just need you… if you’ll have me?”
I pulled her face to mine, feeling the desperate press of her lips as the water sloshed between us and I felt the slick slip of her body against mine.
Guinevere’s hands slid up my bare chest, her fingers curling just underneath my collarbone as her tongue darted into my mouth. She tasted of magic in its purest form and it seeped into me like rays of sunshine as a soft moan left her lips.
“I like you,” she murmured once she had pulled away. “I love you.”
Her words made something deep in my chest twist.
“I want you,” I told her, clearing my throat so that I could say the words I had wanted to say ever since I realized that I could choose my own fate. “I love you—you are like an extension of my own soul. When the gods ordered me to find you I had never felt such a desperation before and now I understand why. It was as if my magic knew that it would need you to feel complete.”
Guinevere’s brown eyes were locked onto mine and I felt her swallow heavily as she reached up and pulled me down for another kiss, her stiff nipples pressing into me as she pulled me through the water and to the ledge on the far end of the room.
It was partially dug into the wall, allowing for the users of the bath to sit comfortably whilst also still being submerged to the waist in the piping hot water.
“Do you know what to do?” Guinevere asked, seeming to guess correctly that my experience was quite limited.
“Of sorts,” I admitted as I dropped my gaze to her full breasts and briefly resisted the urge to take one of the stiff peaks into my mouth to taste.
“Just follow my lead,” Guinevere said as she hooked a leg around my back and slid a hand in between us to grip my stiff cock. Her fingers felt like soft steel as she gave my length a few firm pumps underneath the water, making my hips jerk wildly in response.
Then before I realized what was happening, Guinevere pressed the head of my cock into the swollen entrance at the apex of her thighs and used her leg to draw me inside of her.
Sucking in a ragged intake of breath, I braced my hands on the wall on either side of her head, allowing myself time to get used to all of the pleasurable sensations reverberating through my body.
Like kissing, I could feel the exchange of magic through her and it was overwhelmingly powerful, my reservoirs of magic filling at an alarming rate before spilling over.
“Look!” Guinevere gasped, making me jerk my head up to follow her gaze. The water in the pool around us had begun to glow a soft green color, illuminating our skin. It looked just the same as the underwater cave that was my favorite place to go in my mind.
“It must be our magic,” I said with a grunt as her legs tightened around my waist.
Guinevere’s water-slick hands slid up my chest before sliding up into my hair. “You can move whenever you want.”
“Move?” I asked incredulously. “I fear if I even so much as twitch I will explode.”
A slow smile of satisfaction spread over Guinevere’s face. “It’s okay even if you do.”
“No,” I said with a sniff. “It is not. I wish for our first time to be memorable.”
But Guinevere just shrugged as if it did not matter. “That’s just assuming I won’t be able to get you hard again.”
I was shocked by the sultry way she had said the words and the ease with which she had said them.
I shook my head in disbelief. “I fear my queen is a minx in sheep’s clothes.”
Guinevere grinned, her fingers tightening on my hair. “You should have known that about me already, Merlin.”
In a flash, Guinevere flipped us around with an astonishing amount of strength and I was now sitting perched on the ledge as Guinevere slid onto my lap and back down onto my aching cock.
Her brown eyes locked with mine as her hips rose and dropped, sending a ripple of pleasure through me that nearly did me in.
“Don’t worry about coming,” she whispered into my ear as she tightened around me. “We can go all night.”
With a grunt, I wrapped my arms around her torso and held her tightly to me as I felt our magic sizzle over the surface of our skin.
My insides shuddered and quaked and I felt her gasp against me as her nails dug their way down my back.
I came, my vision blurring as the sound of my voice echoed off of the low ceiling of the bathing room.
Much, much later as we lay together on the stone floor of the bathing room with just our clothes bunched underneath us, I stared up at the ceiling, tracing circles on her skin that seemed to tingle with our shared magic. The water still glowed slightly from our magic, illuminating the room in a soft green light.
“So, what did you think?” Guinevere asked as she pushed up on my chest so she could see my face.
“I think I finally understand what the alphas mean when they say their omegas sucked every single drop of life from their bodies,” I answered her dryly.
Guinevere pressed a kiss to my jaw before continuing down my chest, her brown eyes on mine.
“Cease that, I have nothing left for you, Gwen,” I groaned as she nibbled on my skin.
“Not even a little bit more?” she asked with a pout and a flutter of her lashes.
“No,” I told her firmly. “You will have to give me some rest and perhaps a meal first.”
Guinevere rested her chin on my chest, seemingly content with my words. “I’ll hold you to it.”
I knew she would.
After a while, she spoke again. “Do you think everyone will accept our arrangement? The pack I mean?”
I could tell she was thinking about her near-brush with death a few days ago.
“They will follow Arthur’s rule—they always have and always will.”
“What does it mean, your highness?” one of the knights—Sir Bors I believed—asked as we gathered around the round table for the first time in months. “Are we meant to serve these others the same way we serve you?”
“Hear, hear!” the rest of the knights chorused as they all continued to speak over one another.
Despite my earlier reassurances to Guinevere who was resting after her long heat had finally abated, the knights and the rest of the castle servants were full of discontent over the change from the norm.
They had, thankfully, not said a word of such disdain to Guinevere, but now as we called a council meeting to discuss the inevitability of a full-scale Saxon invasion, they had questions.
Arthur remained silent as he let his knights speak, his expression calm.
“And what of heirs? Your majesty, are you not worried for your line?” Sir Lionel asked, slamming a fist onto the table as if the entire proposition of a pack was preposterous.
I stood behind Arthur’s chair, growing increasingly more annoyed by their downright disrespect, and while I had no bond to share with the other four members of what I now thought of as my pack, I could see the irritated set of their shoulders from where I was standing.
They had positioned themselves in their usual seats, Bedivere to Arthur’s left, Lancelot to his right, and as a younger member of the round table, Gawain was seated further down.
“How can the gods ask this of you, your majesty? What did you do to deserve this sort of divine punishment?” Sir Gaheris, one of Gawain’s older brothers asked, oblivious to the obvious insult he was lancing at his younger sibling.
This had gone on long enough and I opened my mouth to tell them as such, but I never got the chance.
Bedivere’s fist slammed into the table before he cut through the din of conversation in a voice louder than I had ever heard from the alpha. “That is enough ! What king do you serve?”
There was a quiet chorus of Arthur’s name from the knights who seemed just as shocked as I was that Bedivere had spoken at all.
Bedivere’s growl filled the chamber. “I shall repeat myself. What king have you all sworn to serve?”
“King Arthur! King of kings!” they roared, stamping their feet in the familiar call to order.
“You will bend the knee to no other king than him— regardless of his marital status,” Bedivere finished with a snap before leaning back in his seat and glancing over at Arthur, gesturing for him to speak as if his outburst had been done with Arthur in mind. “Your majesty.”
Arthur stood, pressing his fingers into the ornately carved table that Bedivere’s blacksmith father and his foster-father had painstakingly carved upon Arthur’s coronation all those years ago.
“I was like you at first—unsure of the gods’ plans for me with such an… unconventional path for my marriage to my queen. But you all know better than I my fear of losing an omega the same way my foster-father lost his.”
Many of the knights shifted guiltily in their seats for they felt the same way about their own wives. It was the primary reason why so many of them had chosen to remain unmarried whilst the Saxons invaded our lands: they could not protect an omega and our kingdom at the same time.
“But I have come to appreciate their candor and the sense of security I feel as a member of a pack. The day I left Camelot to face the Saxon scourge, I knew that my wife was in good hands. In safe hands. Because there is no better protection for her than men who love her and would die for her. If not for them we would have all been lost to Morgana’s spell.”
Arthur looked at each man at the table. These were men who had fought by his side for years and I knew he trusted them with his life.
“I am your one king. That has not changed, however you will respect the men of my pack just as you respect my queen. She may have been my fated omega as decreed by the gods, but she also has my heart,” Arthur said, putting his hand over his chest. “Now, may we return to our original discussion? Merlin, what of Morgana and Mordred?”
I stepped forward as Arthur settled back down into his seat. “Her magic has been eradicated from the castle completely. I purified it all myself.”
I did not mention that the day in the baths with Gwen had done most of the magical work for me—I was fairly sure the sexual component of our shared magic was not something that the knights of the round table would appreciate hearing of.
“But we have been… unfruitful in our search for them. As you know, King Lot’s body was found on the edge of his territory by King Leodegrance and his men,” I continued, watching as people shifted to look over at the two siblings who shared King Lot as a father sitting at the table.
Gaheris, who had spoken up earlier, cleared his throat. “Agravaine has returned to Lothian in hopes of reclaiming our territory as its new king, but we fear Morgana’s mental magics have dug deep into our people.”
There was a muttering around the table about how magic seemed to be the source of all of the bad things happening in Logres and more than one set of eyes were pinned suspiciously on me.
“Let him know Camelot stands behind him,” Arthur said, drawing their gazes again. “We need to send scouting parties ahead to keep track of Saxon movements, I fear that they will not take kindly to the imprisonment and death of their men. If I had to wager, I also feel that Morgana will make her way to them in an effort to barter for her son’s power.”
“Then are we just meant to wait until the Saxons come to raze our homes?” Sir Lionel asked, pressing Arthur for more. “Should we not bring the fight to them?”
“We are not waiting,” Arthur told the man firmly. “We are preparing. There are none here who do not know this valley inside and out. If we are to fight a battle for the soul of Logres, then we must do it here in the heartland.”
Arthur began to delegate tasks to his men. The people of Camelot would be busy in the upcoming weeks fortifying the castle and the surrounding village.
We were going to protect what was ours.
It was time to prepare for war.