Chapter 25 Remi #2
He pulls back and looks at me. Gray eyes, which are darker than Steele's, the color of storm clouds rather than morning rain. He searches my face for the hesitation I don't have.
"You're sure," he says again.
"Knox." I hold his gaze. "Take me upstairs."
He takes my hand. "Can you climb them?"
"I'll be fine."
The stairs are narrow, stone, curving upward. He leads me and I follow. His hand around mine is warm and steady and his scent fills the stairwell.
I'm walking toward something I've been walking toward since the night I looked at a stranger's tattoo and thought it belonged to my brother's best friend.
The bedroom is at the top of the stairs. His bedroom. Not a club room, not a scene room, not a space designed for anonymous encounters. His.
The bed is wide with dark sheets. The window is open to the river below and the sound of water.
Books stacked on the nightstand.
A watch on the dresser, face down.
He closes the door and turns to me.
We stand there. A foot apart.
"I don't know how to be gentle about this." His voice is lower than I've heard before. "I've been gentle for months. The hospital, the café, the nesting gifts. I've held back, and I'm telling you now that if you come to this bed I will not hold back, and I need you to tell me that's what you want."
"It is."
"Remi—"
"I've been gentle my whole life." I step into his space.
Put my hand flat on his chest. His heart is fast, controlled, the rhythm of a man fighting every instinct he has.
"I've been careful and managed and protected and now I want the thing your body has been promising me since the first night. All of it. Don't hold back."
His control shatters.
His mouth finds mine at the same moment his hands find my waist and he lifts me. I wrap my legs around him and he carries me to the bed and lays me down with a care that contradicts the urgency in his hands.
He's above me. His weight braced on his forearms. My knee positioned carefully, because even with his control gone he calculates the angle. Which I note is the same way Steele did, and the parallel makes something ache in my chest that isn't pain.
He undresses me slowly. Each piece of clothing removed with the deliberate attention of a man unwrapping something he's been denied for months, his hands memorizing the skin underneath as it appears.
He unstraps the knee brace and sets it aside on the nightstand before he lowers to the floor and presses his mouth to the damaged knee and holds it there.
The gesture undoes me in a way nothing else has.
"I watched you walk on this knee," he says against my skin. "It must hurt so much you never complain. Not once."
His lips trail higher, touching me with slow, open-mouthed kisses along the inside of my thigh. He spreads me wider with careful hands, thumbs pressing into the soft flesh just below where thigh meets hip.
My breathing fractures.
Slick is already coating me, thick and warm, the scent of it flooding the room.
“I’m sorry, I'm so wet.”
"Don't you fucking apologize for that." His voice is gravel and command. "Look at me."
When I do, he drags two fingers through the slick between my legs, slow and deliberate, then lifts them to his mouth.
"This is mine now. Every drop. I've waited months for this.
You think I'm going to let you be embarrassed about the best thing I've ever smelled?
" He sucks his finger. “The best thing I’ve ever tasted.”
He doesn't give me time to answer. His shoulders push my thighs wider and then his mouth is on me.
He groans against me like a man who has been patient for months and has finally, finally run out of patience, and the sound of it goes through me like a struck chord.
He eats me like it's worship and punishment at once, and I am loud, embarrassingly loud, and he growls encouragement against me every time I cry out.
My orgasm hits like a shockwave.
My back bows, fingers scrabbling in his hair, but he doesn't stop, he keeps licking through the spasms, murmuring against me the whole time.
I can't hear the words that leave his mouth, but the register of them undoes me further.
When the aftershocks fade he rises over me, eyes blown dark, and kisses me deep so I taste myself on him. I moan into it, hands clawing at his shirt.
"I need you," I gasp. "Inside me, please—"
He strips fast. T-shirt gone, belt clinking, jeans shoved down. His feet pushing them off as he settles between my thighs, notches himself against my entrance, but doesn't push in.
He drags through the slick, coating himself, teasing me until I'm whimpering.
"Look at me," he orders.
I do. His face is wrecked, like he's hanging by threads.
"I'm going to fuck you hard," he says, voice low and dangerous. "Because I've needed this for so long my dick hurts. But I'm going to love you through every second of it. You say stop, we stop. You say slower, I slow. Understand?"
"Yes."
He surges forward in one long, relentless thrust.
My mouth opens. Eyes on his.
The stretch is brutal and perfect. He stills for a heartbeat, letting me adjust to his size. Then starts moving, and he's not gentle. He pounds into me with deep strokes that hit every sensitive place inside me and make my vision blur.
With one leg wrapped around him, I meet every thrust.
The slick makes it obscene, wet sounds filling the room, his groans mixing with mine.
He shifts the angle, and the pressure builds fast again.
"Knox. I'm gonna—"
"Do it," he snarls. "Come on my cock."
I shatter again, harder this time, clenching around him.
He swears viciously, thrusts turning erratic.
"Knot me," I beg.
He raises his head to look at me. His eyes shatter into something wild and open and terrified.
"If I knot you," he says, his voice ragged, "the bond begins. Not the full bond. Not the bite. Not yet. But the chemical imprint. Your body will carry my scent permanently. You'll crave it. The partial matches won't—"
"They're not partial." I hold his face. "Steele and Crew are not partial. They're mine. And so are you."
"Remi—"
"Alpha. Knot me."
He thrusts inside me, shaking above me when it locks.
“Knox,” I moan.
Our scent fills the room so thick the walls seem saturated with it. My body pulses around the knot with the deep rhythmic contractions of an omega locked to her fated alpha.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs.
His whole body trembles against mine and his forehead drops to my shoulder and a sound comes out of him that is not Knox. It’s not controlled, nor measured and not the sound of a man who runs an empire but the sound of a man who has just found the thing he spent years pretending didn't exist.
"I've got you," he repeats the same words he said, and that Steele said. Different voice, different man, the same promise.
"I know," I say.
We stay locked for forty minutes, and Knox holds me through every minute of it with his mouth at my hair and his arms around me and our scent everywhere.
When the knot releases, he doesn't pull back.
He stays inside me, softening. His hand traces the line of my collarbone and his gray eyes find mine in the dark.
"They're not partial," he says. Repeating my words back to me. "Steele and Crew."
"No."
"They're your pack."
"They're your pack," I say. "Our pack. You have to share me. They've accepted it. Now you have to."
"I'll learn." Knox Olivetti, the man who said I don't share, the man who built an empire on control, looks at me and nods.
"It's a start."