Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Knox
Her scent wobbles.
It’s been three days of this. Three days of waking up to her need, taking shifts, sating her need while she breaks apart and is put back together.
For a heartbeat there’s that threatening little spike of empty empty empty, a cavern opening under my ribs, and then I’ve got my hands on her before I even think about it. Big palms locked around her hips like I heard a starting gun go off.
I shift between her thighs, broad shoulders filling her vision because I can’t not, because every instinct I have is screaming that if there’s space there, someone else will take it, or she’ll fall through it.
“Slow,” comes the warning from my right.
It cuts through the fog. I drag my gaze over, meet Eli’s eyes, then Declan’s. They’re both coiled, watchful. Waiting to see if I’m going to blow it.
I actually pause.
“Yeah,” I grind out. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Got it.”
I’m strung so tight I’m almost shaking, needing her like I need air, but I still wait. I have to. If I scare her now, I won’t forgive myself.
“Mia.” A hand curls around her jaw, guiding her face to me. “Still with me?”
She blinks slowly. Sweat has darkened her hair at the temples, and her pupils look too big. She mumbles, “Trying,” and my grip on her hips almost slips because I want to apologize for making it harder.
Her gaze drags down her own body and lands on me. On my cock, thick and flushed, the head nudging the inside of her thigh but not her entrance. I can feel the slick heat of her on every exhale and I’m shaking with the effort of holding back.
She should be scared. She’s swollen, red, used in every way a body can be used, every inch of her screaming I’ve already taken more than my share.
Instead, her breath stutters. Her hips give this tiny, helpless rock in my direction like she’s chasing me.
“Want,” she whispers hoarsely, and her brow pulls tight, like she’s trying to listen to a radio station that keeps cutting out. “Want…you.”
The words hit low. This is the heat talking, yes, but also something bright that feels a lot like mine. Those words scrape over the part of me that’s been chained up for days.
Declan leans over her, eyes too sharp for how soft his voice comes out. “Knox goes, then if you’re still crawling out of your skin, I’ll soothe you, love.”
She licks salt from her lips and nods, her pulse thudding hard in her throat.
Declan exhales slowly. He presses a quick kiss to her damp forehead and moves aside, before he meets my eyes again. “Easy,” he warns. “Like you’re trying to rock her to sleep, not shake her apart.”
Something stubborn in me bristles. He’s talking like I don’t know that already. My jaw tightens, but I clamp down on it.
“I know,” I say. It comes out rough, but steady.
I slide in on a groan that feels like it’s been locked in my chest for months. Her heat scent punches up around me, hot sugar and strawberries, and I almost black out.
Mia makes a sharp, broken sound at the stretch. For a heartbeat pure, selfish relief floods me because finally, finally I’m where I’ve been wanting to be since this all started. And fuck, there’s so much slick.
Her fingers scrabble blindly. Eli catches her hand; Declan gets the other. Rhys shifts up by her head, his lips brushing her temple, her hairline, his voice a constant, quiet stream of praise.
“You wrap around him so tight, sweetheart. You’re taking every inch of him. You’re so fucking perfect.”
The worst part is that he’s not wrong.
She is perfect around me. Too perfect. I could lose my mind in this, easy.
I don’t. I hold the line. I move in short, careful strokes, more grind than thrust. I set my feet, angle my hips, and let the thick head of my cock drag along the same spot they’ve already marked out inside her, the one her body keeps reaching for like a homing beacon.
Every slow slide through that oversensitized slick makes her whole body shudder. I feel every tremor along my shaft, in the fine muscles of her thighs under my hands.
Her words start to fall apart.
“Too much—” she gasps, and ghosts rise up in my chest. I’ve been too much my whole damned life.
A hand clamps down on my hip. I freeze instantly, a beat away from snarling. “Mia?”
Her eyes fly open, wild, but not with fear. She shakes her head hard, hair sticking to her cheeks. “Too much, but not enough,” she pants. “Please, don’t stop.”
The sound I make isn’t fit for polite company. “Fuck,” I mutter under my breath. “She’s killing me.”
She proves it a second later by rolling her hips up to meet me, chasing the drag of my cock. The groan that rips through my chest is low and helpless.
I force myself back to that one angle. The one that makes her muscles soften instead of brace, that takes the sharp edges off her noises and melts them into something loose and open. I stay there, locked, refusing to chase a higher high when she’s already strung out.
The orgasm that finally tears through her on my cock is messy and raw and there’s not an ounce of performance in it.
Her back arches, her voice goes high and wrecked on a sound that isn’t quite a name, more like something pulled straight out of her ribs.
For a heartbeat my stomach drops, and I’m sure we’ve pushed her over the line into too much.
Then her scent snaps.
It blooms so hard and fast my knees almost give, perfuming the air thick enough we could drown in it. Her body clamps around me like a vise and every possessive instinct I own goes incandescent.
I snarl, buried to the hilt, my knot swelling at the base, locking me inside her. There’s no stopping it; there’s barely even riding it. I just grip her hips and let it happen.
“Fuck,” I grit out, dropping my forehead to her shoulder. “Fuck, sunshine, you’re—”
I don’t even get to the end of that sentence before the orgasm rips me open.
It’s not sharp, it’s not clean; it’s a brutal, grinding drag through every nerve I’ve got.
I spill into her in thick, pulsing waves, so much that some distant, rational part of me notes we’re going to be laundering this nest twice, minimum.
By the time the peak finally crests and slides down, Mia crumples under me.
Every strap of muscle in her body goes slack, all the tension that’s been riding her just…
gone. I’m the only thing holding her up now, my knot seated deep where her body is still clenching down around me in tiny aftershocks.
Her eyes are glassy. Her lashes are clumped with sweat and tears.
My knot takes longer to go down than Rhys’s. I knew it would. I’ve been fighting instinct since we crossed the threshold of this room, and my body’s done taking “no” for an answer.
I can feel it working on her, the way her breathing starts to hitch less and lengthen more, the way her head gets heavier against the pillow.
Her eyes keep fluttering closed. Sometimes they stay that way for a few heartbeats before she drags them open again, like she’s not sure she’s allowed to sleep again.
When I finally soften and ease free, she winces. The fine muscles at the corners of her eyes tighten, but her scent barely flickers. Sore, yeah. Raw. But not empty. Not that jagged, echoing emptiness that makes her claw at us.
Her thighs twitch like they want to clamp together. Before they can spasm and cramp, Eli is there, helping guide them closed, tucking a folded blanket between her knees so she doesn’t strain anything.
“Water,” he says, reaching for the bottle. One hand braces the back of her neck as he tips it to her lips.
She swallows obediently, throat working, and some stubborn, protective part of me preens at the sight. She’s wrecked, loose-limbed and wrecked, and she still listens when we tell her to take care of herself.
By all rights, that should be it.
She’s spent. Her heat scent has dropped a full octave. We’ve taken the worst of it apart, piece by brutal piece.
“Okay,” Eli whispers. “We’re calling it. No one moves for the rest of the night. We let her ride the comedown and in the morning—”
“No.” The word is small and hoarse, barely more than a rasp of sound, but all four of us snap to it like we’ve been jerked on a leash.
Mia’s brows are drawn together again. There’s a faint tremor starting up in her legs, tiny little aftershocks that have nothing to do with orgasm and everything to do with the heat still stalking around the edges.
“Mia?” Eli asks, leaning back in.
Her eyes are too wide when they meet his. Not that wild, cornered look from earlier, but not quiet either. That sweet-heat note that had finally, blessedly thinned starts to coil again, like a snake lifting its head.
Her hand twitches, reaching for something, anything. It closes on air, and I hate it. I hate that after everything we’ve done, there’s still a part of her reaching for something she can’t quite grab.
Declan drags a hand down his face, then sighs. “All right,” he says, and I hear the same thing in his voice that’s been living in my bones since we walked in here. “Then we stick to the plan. Knox wasn’t the last. I am.”
I make a noise low in my throat that might be protest, might be relief. Hard to tell which.
He strips with those quick movements he always has, like this is just another problem to solve. His cock is painfully hard, dark and flushed from holding back while Rhys, Eli, and I lost it, but his hands stay steady.
He doesn’t reach for her first. He looks at me and Rhys instead, eyes saying ‘help me do this right’ clearer than words.
“Move her up,” he tells us quietly. “I want her on me.”
Some knot in my chest loosens at that. Of course Declan’s not going to take her folded under him, pinned the way I just had her. He’s going to build her a landing.