Chapter 6
Chapter Six
It took a moment for even my werewolf eyes to adjust after being covered for so long. I blinked. And blinked again, but this time it wasn’t to rid myself of the effects of the tight, scratchy blindfold.
At seventeen, Rob had been handsome: straight blond hair, sky-blue eyes that flashed alpha gold when he got worked up, even features, a bright smile just crooked enough to be charming and a little bit dangerous, especially when his fangs showed.
The man glaring up at me, bound to my bed and with his cock still buried deeply inside me, couldn’t be described as handsome, although he looked more dangerous than anyone I’d ever met.
I stared at him in shock, taking in the ruin of the right side of his face and neck.
Half an ear, the line between what remained and what had been removed jagged and red.
Criss-crossing marks over his cheek and temple, purple and white scar tissue that looked more like burns trailing down his neck, up into his hairline, and tugging at the corner of his eye.
That eye… sky-blue and clear, unmistakably his. But bleak, gods. Like a lake in winter.
“Rob, what—” I cut myself off, choked, and coughed.
Fuck me, to coin a phrase. No matter what he’d done, it’d be a new low for me to let my first words to him after decades be some tactless, horrified question about his scars.
If anyone knew how it felt to have a disfigured face be the first thing people noticed, it was me.
But I didn’t know how not to say something.
Shifters healed very quickly from any wound that wasn’t mortal.
Alphas healed even faster. To scar one like that…
gods, it must have hurt. It must have been more agonizing than anything I could imagine.
No, probably not okay to ask that question, either.
I cleared my throat. “Where the fuck have you been? And what are you doing here? What—fuck!”
I flung myself forward, landing with my hands on his shoulders, clutching him hard enough to bruise his alpha body.
He didn’t flinch, not even when my claws came out and I felt them dig into his back, tearing holes in his black T-shirt, blood welling up around my fingers.
He just met my brown eyes with his blue, the color intense even through the shimmer of his gold alpha glow.
He felt like granite between my legs, so tense he could shatter.
“I don’t even know where to start,” I went on, when his jaw tightened and he didn’t say a fucking word.
“I don’t know what to ask you. I don’t know anything.
And you’re still—you’re—you broke in. You—” You fucked me and left me again.
I couldn’t say it out loud. It was too surreal, too completely bizarre, something I wouldn’t believe unless I was living it.
Besides, if I said one more word I’d probably cry.
He swallowed hard, Adam’s apple bobbing, and for a moment he looked like his young self again: a little unsure underneath the cockiness he showed the rest of the world, a little more vulnerable when it was only me to see it. My Rob.
And then his gaze narrowed, and he went right back to being a hard, scarred, mysterious stranger tied to my bed.
“It’s a long story,” he said at last. “One I’m not going to fucking tell you. You’ve seen me. Now you know why I didn’t want—you happy now, Finian?” he demanded roughly. “This what you wanted?”
Outside, the wind had picked up, a mournful whistle around the corner of my cabin that brought the gentle tapping of new-falling snow against the windows.
When I’d moved to this isolated mountain cabin, this was exactly what I’d fantasized about, all the fucked-up details notwithstanding.
A lover in my bed with me, warm and safe away from the weather, and…
if I’d pictured Rob as that imaginary man far more often than I’d have liked, well.
No one had been there to read my mind. No one had been there at all, ever.
And now Rob was here in the flesh.
He might be an insane stalker with a past full of dark secrets, but I could live with that if he apologized for leaving in the first place.
Maybe that made me insane too. Maybe I didn’t care.
Maybe I still had his cock inside me, and I had him tied to my bed, and I wanted to start riding him and fuck his brains out this time and force him to stay for breakfast. And explain himself, of course, but I’d get hungry long before I managed to talk him around.
So he was wondering if this was what I wanted? On balance, actually—
“Yes,” I said.
He stared up at me, eyes widening and lips parted.
The fluttering in my stomach made it hard to breathe, but I didn’t need breath to kiss him, did I? Taking a page out of his freaky book, if he really wanted to stop me he could turn his head or say no, but otherwise, he could simply fucking take it.
I leaned in the last couple of inches and pressed my mouth to his.
Rob didn’t turn his head, and he didn’t say no, and the low, soft sound he made as I teased my tongue into his mouth and opened my own was something I knew I’d play on repeat in my mind for the rest of my life.
I kissed him until my head spun, until the world vanished into a buzzing haze, until I realized I’d started rocking my hips, fucking myself on his knot, his cock going from half-mast to fully hard again still buried in me.
The kiss turned hungry, Rob biting at my lips and devouring me, somehow taking what he wanted from me while I had him supposedly at my mercy.
I released his shoulders and slid my hands down.
Cotton, not skin. No, that wouldn’t do. I let my claws out to play and tore his shirt down the middle, tossing thready fragments to the sides, and then I had hot skin and rough chest hair, broad pecs and ridges of muscle, and those had to be more scars, gods, so many scars, and I petted them and kissed him and rode him, moaning with every wet squelch of his cock in my reamed-out hole, the heat and scent and alpha magic of him wrapping around me and binding me to him more securely than any leather straps I could craft.
His knot had barely shrunk at all before it grew again, his cock pumping me full of enough alpha come to keep me wet for…
gods, I never wanted there to be an end, and I came all over his stomach and fell down onto his chest. I pressed a kiss to the side of his neck and let my eyes slide shut, my torso rising and falling with his heaving breaths.
So soothing. I could sleep like this for a week, even with my legs splayed to their limit around his hips and my skin starting to stick to his in all kinds of inconvenient places.
Maybe I’d only have it for a few minutes, but I’d make it count. The memories could last me another twenty years if they had to.