Chapter 25 #2
There are little momentary breaks where they feed me and cajole me to drink water.
There are little snatches of sleep, of soft words, sweet kisses, careful caresses, but they don’t last long before I’m mewling, demanding, and insisting again, and the alphas respond, no time at all until we’re fucking some more, the air filled with grunts and groans, cries and sighs, moans and whimpers.
It’s the most delicious fever. One that stretches on forever. One that has my nest reeking of our scents and sweat and come, that has the bedsheets twisted and ripped and damp; that has our bodies marked and bruised and raw.
And then finally, eventually, after who knows how many days and nights, the fever breaks, the heat fades, and soon I find myself lying in a tangle of alphas, daylight streaming through the edges of the blinds.
In the dim, quiet light, I can make out the little mark I made on Clay’s shoulder, and I reach out and trace it now, thinking how right it looks in the crease of his shoulder.
I reach up and trail my fingers down my own neck, over my shoulders. There’s no mark, no wound, no bite. I roll up to sit and frown.
“You didn’t claim me.”
The three snoozing alphas stir around me. Tucker yawns loudly and stretches his arms above his head, Nash blinks open his eyes and Clay reaches automatically for me.
“What’s that?” he murmurs sleepily.
“You didn’t claim me. I asked you to claim me. You said you would claim me. But you didn’t!”
“We were waiting,” Nash explains.
I can feel tears bubbling in the corners of my eyes. The heat may have faded, but I’m still an emotional and hormonal wreck.
“You decided against it. You don’t really want me.”
“No,” Clay says sternly. “But we wanted to wait until you were in your right mind.”
“I was in my right mind. I told you I was in my right mind.”
“Sweetheart, you told us a whole heap of frankly deliciously unbelievable stuff during your heat. We wanted to be sure about this.”
“Well, the heat’s over now,” I say. “You can even take my damn temperature to prove it if you want.”
It’s funny how a couple of days (or actually maybe it was more like four or five days) of being spoiled senseless by three alphas can make you one truly bratty Omega.
“There’s no need to take your temperature,” Nash tells me. “It’s clear in your scent.”
“Exactly!”
“Is it really what you want?” Clay says, softly.
I peer down at the three alphas lazing about in my bed. “You know it is,” I tell them all.
Clay reaches for my hand and brings my knuckles to his lips; lips that are bruised and swollen from everything we’ve been doing these last few days.
He kisses each of my knuckles tenderly, turns my hand over in his, and presses another kiss to the center of my palm.
Then he’s pulling me back down to lie among the three of them.
“We’ve missed you,” he says. “Being apart is too difficult, too damn difficult.”
I nod. I agree. It’s far more difficult than I expected it to be. Far more difficult than it should be among four people who really barely know each other.
“So, if we claim you now, Hollie, then this starts for real. You’re ours. You come home with us.”
“Yes. Yes,” I say. “I’ll be yours, you’ll be mine, I’ll come home.”
Clay shakes his head like he can’t quite believe this is happening, and Tucker claps his hands together and chuckles. Nash simply smiles at me sweetly.
Clay still has a grip of my hand and he lifts it again to his mouth. He kisses my wrist where the purple veins crisscross under my delicate skin. He inhales my scent, and then he’s kissing my forearm, the crease in my elbow, my upper arm, the point of my shoulder.
I’m trembling with anticipation; everything in my body singing. It’s almost enough to send me tumbling straight into another heat.
He presses kisses along the delicate bone of my clavicle, and his hands come to rest on my waist, squeezing and gripping me there and pulling me tight and flush against his hard body.
His mouth meets the crook between my shoulder and my neck.
It’s where I’m most sensitive, where my scent is most intense.
He inhales deeply. I can hear my scent rushing up his nostrils, I can hear him gulp it down into his throat, and I can hear the sigh that elicits from his lips.
I feel his wet tongue sweep against the fragile skin there, feel his lips kiss me and then …
. And then I feel the sharp pinch of his teeth.
I call out as they cut through my skin and plunge deep into my flesh, and a wave of ecstasy sweeps through me, making me giddy and pliable and weak in his arms.
We’re both still. I can feel his heart beat against my chest. He growls.
His arms weave around me, and then he’s rolling on top of me, parting my thighs and thrusting his hard cock inside me.
I’m no longer in heat and I’m a little sore between my thighs, and yet the feel of him inside me – his teeth sunken into my neck – is something wondrous and indescribable.
His teeth cut even deeper into my throat as he fucks me languidly and I come in his arms, come with his name on my lips, and he’s mine now. I’ve claimed him and he’s claimed me. I am his omega and he is my alpha.
He comes too with a grunt, but he doesn’t knot me. Instead, he rolls away from me and Tucker’s there next.
“Okay, sweetheart,” he says, running his fingers over the fresh bite mark Clay’s made in my skin.
“Perfect,” I tell him.
“We’re going to take good care of you, Hollie,” he says. “We’re going to spend the rest of our days assuring you’re happy, making you laugh, and also making you come.”
And with that, he’s thrusting inside me too.
I know these men intimately now. I understand what turns them on, what drives them forward.
I’ve learned that each one is a little different in the way they feel, in the way they move, in the manner in which they make love to me.
Tucker does it with a whole load of swagger, characteristic of the big, joyful cowboy.
I can’t help but smile up at him when he’s fucking me.
And there’s always a corresponding smile on his own face.
I come quickly, messily, loudly. He doesn’t come though. Instead, he kisses me roughly with just as much swagger. And then he’s burying his face in the crook of my neck, licking his tongue round the flesh wound in my skin.
He finds a spot next to Clay’s.
I hold my breath. I close my eyes. And I cry out another time as his jaw snaps into my skin.
A second claiming bite. This man is mine too. I wrap my arms around him, hold him tight, and I return the gesture, biting him on his broad shoulder. We hold each other, tasting each other’s flesh, smelling each other’s scents, feeling each other’s warm skin. Then he’s pulling away from me.
And there’s just one more pack mate left. Nash.
I wait for the dirty words that are always forthcoming from this sensitive man, only this time they’re altogether sweeter.
“You mean the world to us, Hollie. You’re everything we could have wished for and more. And we love you.”
A million little fireworks explode inside my chest.
“I love you too,” I whisper back. “I love all of you.”
I didn’t know if I would find love. I didn’t know if I could be happy again after losing my mom, after all those dark days and all that sadness. But I have found it – love and happiness – and I have found it in abundance.
Nash gathers me up in his arms, holds me, and for a moment he simply looks at me, studying my face as if he wants to commit me to memory. And then his eyes stray down to the two new claiming bites I have on my neck. He considers them for a time too. And then he lowers his head and bites me.
I definitely never learned about this in all those biology classes I took, was never taught about how it would feel to have three men love me this much, to be claimed by them.
Maybe it’s all biological – hormones, nerves, reactions, molecules, atoms, forces.
Or maybe it’s something more magical than that.
Because, as the final packmate claims me too, I feel like finally I belong.