Fifty-Five
FIFTY-FIVE
Emiel
SOMEHOW, I’D MADE it to the battered sofa with its piles of soft cushions. Mia was beneath me, moaning and wriggling. Cranberry silk gaped open, missing several buttons and torn below the collar on one side.
Had I done that? Had she?
It must’ve been me. She was pawing at my shirt and the fly of my trousers, but her movements were clumsy and uncoordinated. I needed our skin touching. I needed to wallow in that sweet elder-sumac perfume. I needed to bathe in it until anyone within a two-mile radius would know that this omega had wanted me, had claimed me with her scent.
I growled in frustration as the layers of clothing separating us confounded me. It was intolerable that I had to sit up and take my hands off her so I could tear everything off. Part of me wanted to lift her upper body so I could drag the remains of the shirt that smelled like another alpha off her. But I knew that scent, and as much as it made me want to howl with frustration, I knew she’d chosen that alpha, too.
But that other alpha wasn’t here right now .
She was mine. All mine.
“ Emiel ...” she groaned. “God... touch me... I need you...”
She needed touch. I needed taste. I growled, untangling the last bits of clothing from my body and throwing them aside violently. Then my mouth was on her, repaying that sneaky bite that I could still feel throbbing on the side of my neck.
Her golden skin was unmarked, because apparently the other alphas in this house were stupid. I would fix that. I’d fix it right the fuck now.
She cried out as I started biting my way down her body, beginning with the hinge of her delicate jaw and trailing downward from there. Her mating gland smelled delicious. I paused, nosing against it, making her shudder.
Sharp fingernails dug into my shoulders, every little pinprick of pain skittering along the length of my spine, burning with icy heat. Her breasts were so soft . I was obsessed with the way the tender flesh gave way beneath my mouth... the way the hard peaks pebbled when I sucked on them, blood rising to the surface.
Mia sobbed with need and bucked her hips up, trying to rub her soaked folds against whatever part of me she could reach. I slid down the couch, abandoning those tempting tits in favor of the banquet waiting below. Her body was like a wellspring, gushing forth a never-ending feast of the finest manna.
No matter how much of it I licked up, there was more. I gave in to instinct, rubbing my face through the slick mess, reveling in the way it coated my cheeks and chin.
In what felt like no time at all, she arched beneath me, choking as a noise too big to escape caught in her throat. Her pussy clenched and twitched, the muscles of her passage fluttering around my tongue as I tried to lick deeper.
The choking noise became keening—a low, desperate sound that went on and on, worming its way straight to my painfully hard dick. Mia wriggled and shoved, and for a terrible moment, I thought she was trying to get away from me.
A black hole opened up in my chest at the very thought...but before it could swallow me whole, she slithered down to kneel on the floor, her pussy practically in my face.
“Please, please, please,” she begged weakly, lowering her upper body until her ass was in the air. “Please... I can’t... I need...”
I didn’t actually remember ramming my throbbing dick inside her. I didn’t remember lining myself up, or grabbing her hips hard enough to bruise, or making the decision to shove it inside her.
But somehow, between one moment and the next, we were joined together. Hot, silky muscle rippled around my cock, as though Mia’s body would try to keep me from ever, ever leaving. I didn’t want to leave... but I did want to recreate that first indescribable moment, again and again for the rest of forever.
I pulled back, and she groaned, bereft, then whimpered when I thrust back in, snapping my hips. How could anything feel this good?
“More,” Mia demanded. “Need it so bad...”
I gave her more. I gave her everything , reveling in the little birdlike cries she made, the pitch rising with each thrust until she was singing for me, sweeter than the wildest songbird.
The scent of fennel and aniseed wafted into the room, sharp with surprise and something darker. I tensed, growling.
“Oh, fuck, you have got to be kidding me,” said a familiar and unwelcome voice. “ Seriously , Mr. ‘I Don’t Do That’?”
The instinct to keep thrusting into Mia’s welcoming warmth warred with the instinct to pull out so I could lunge across the room and scare this rival male away from the omega beneath me. My growl deepened in warning.
But at the sound of the second voice, Mia’s entire body went rigid, her muscles trembling and twitching. She let out a strangled, high-pitched cry, her passage clamping around my dick like a hot vise. I howled, taken by surprise, my release spurting out of me in rhythmic jets so intense that my vision tunneled in. When it cleared, my knot was already swelling, tying us together.
A moment of panic gripped me at the idea that we were vulnerable, but fennel-and-aniseed only grunted in disgust. “Unbelievable. Emiel, I swear to god that if you scare her at all, I’ll hold you down while Zalen rips you a new asshole. I’ll send him in here as soon as Luca unknots him and you can explain this to him, because frankly I don’t even want to know.”
I recognized the shape of the words, but he might as well have been speaking Swahili for all the sense they made. I rumbled another warning and hid as much of Mia’s body from view with my own as I could manage. The other alpha muttered something else unintelligible and left, his scent fading slowly after him.
My shoulders unknotted, all my attention returning to the omega beneath me. She was making small, happy noises, still wriggling on my oversensitive dick. I wanted us to be in a den—someplace enclosed and secret. There was a blanket folded over the arm of the couch. I stretched out and grabbed it, throwing it over our bodies and the seat of the couch like a makeshift tent.
Mia sighed in utter contentment, going boneless. I eased us onto our sides and wrapped my body around hers as she continued to fuck herself on my knot with tiny, shallow movements. After a few minutes of this, a purr vibrated free of my chest. I couldn’t help it. Mia shivered all over, her passage rippling again with a second, gentler climax.
As she hummed in contentment and went boneless in my arms, my purr grew louder. Had I ever made that noise before? I didn’t think so. It just seemed like the only possible response to the feelings flooding through me. That, and...
Her mating gland was inches away from my lips. The dark and quiet space beneath the blanket-tent was thick with her pheromones, combined with a hint of the scent that I hid from the world—cinnamon and sour orange peel. The combination smelled like heaven. I wanted to tie those two scents together for the rest of our lives.
I licked at the little gland on her right shoulder. It was red and swollen, but she hummed contentedly at the contact and rolled her head to the side to give me easier access. My teeth grazed the skin and she shivered, but her breathing was already deepening into sleep.
I was salivating. It would be so easy. It would be so right. This was meant to be, wasn’t it? She would want this as much as I did. She would want me to...
I froze.
She was asleep. She couldn’t want anything right now, because she wasn’t aware of what was happening. The faintest glimmer of wider awareness peeked through the haze of lust and instinct that had descended on me like a storm cloud. I was balls-deep in my roommate Mia, who’d helped me rescue Princess, and taken me out to lunch, and never, ever acted like she was afraid of me.
Mia, who hadn’t agreed to having me drag her away from Luca’s nest and stick my dick in her. Not until she was already heat-drunk.
Don’t try to pretend, boy. I can tell you want it .
The phantom voice whispered in my ear, deep and dark and amused. Panic fluttered in my stomach, spreading outward in cold waves. My hands began to tremble, clammy sweat breaking out on my skin as the sick, nauseating wrongness of what had just happened spread through me like burrowing worms.
I was trapped... she was trapped. We both were, until her muscles unclamped from my knot. Mia made a small noise of discontent in my arms, and it pierced through me like a prison-house shiv.
Oh, my god.
What had I just done?