Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Orvik
I wake up with my mate in my arms.
The warmth of her soft curves presses against my side as the weight of her arm drapes across my ribs. The smell of her hair against my shoulder reaches my nostrils, stirring feelings deep in my chest that I struggle to identify.
Lust, sure. I lust for her like I’ve never lusted for a woman before. But it’s much, much more than that. Pride lurks in there as well. Pride in her beauty and her intelligence, in her strength as well.
Tenderness, too. The alien feeling is so new that it takes me a while to understand what it is. I’ve never felt like this for anyone and as I embrace the newness of it all, she stirs against me.
I don't move.
I'm not certain I'm capable of it. My entire body is engaged in the very specific activity of cataloging everything I can about her.
The exact temperature where her skin meets mine, the soft sound of her breathing, the bioluminescent patterns moving slow and satisfied across my chest and forearms in the gray morning light.
Outside the windows, the ocean is pale and still.
The sun is just rising over the horizon, painting the sky in a pastel canvas of pink and blue.
Nothing is required of me apart from being present right here, right now.
I lie there and breathe and feel, for the first time in fifteen years, like a man in his own home.
She moves again.
It starts as a shift, a small adjustment. Her knee slides up. Her hips roll. The soft curve of her backside presses back against me, directly on the erection I have been doing my very best not to acknowledge, and every nerve ending I possess fires simultaneously.
"Jackie." My voice comes out in a low growl. "Don't."
She goes still for a moment.
Then she looks up at me over her shoulder with a slow, wicked smile, her eyes not entirely open, her hair in disarray.
She wiggles her hips again. Deliberately rubbing against my already erect cock, the crack of her ass slipping up my shaft in a mind-bending provocation.
The sound that comes out of me is not something I have made before.
I roll her onto her stomach and cover her with my body in a single motion, my forearms bracketing her head, my weight braced above her but my hips pinning hers flat against the mattress. She makes a sound that is half surprise and half exactly what I was afraid it would be: delight.
"You are playing a very dangerous game," I say against the back of her neck. My beard tentacles trail down her spine and she shivers. "Tempting a kraken inside his own nest."
"Mm." She turns her face to the side against the pillow, still smiling. "And?"
I reach between her thighs.
She's already wet. Warm and slick and ready, her body entirely honest where she pretends not to be, and when my fingers find her tiny bundle of nerves, she makes a sound that I feel in my chest. She presses back into my hand, chasing the contact.
The scent of her arousal hits me like a current, heady and potent, filling the bedroom, filling my lungs.
Filling my mind.
She wants this just as much as I do.
I let my fingers move against her once, twice, just enough to make her moan.
Then I stop.
"You're a brat," I tell her.
She looks at me over her shoulder with that expression. The particular expression that I am going to be utterly powerless against for the remainder of my natural life.
"What are you going to do about it?"
I spread her knees apart with mine.
She makes a soft, shuddering sound as I position myself and I feel her hands grip the pillow beneath her head. I enter her in one long, steady movement, pressing all the way home, and she cries out into the bedding, a muffled, helpless sound that makes my tentacle hair pull tight with satisfaction.
I hold there a moment. Let her feel it. Let us both feel it.
Then I begin to move.
Last night was its own thing. The urgency of it, the restraint breaking all at once. The all-consuming lust finally unleashed.
This is different. This morning I have time and I intend to use it.
Long, deep strokes, each one deliberate, each one pulling back far enough that she presses back toward me before I give her what she wants.
Her breathing becomes ragged against the pillow.
Her back arches. I watch her come apart at the edges slowly, incrementally, with the force of a tide. Unavoidable.
When I feel the first flutter of her walls around me, I increase the pace.
My thumb finds her clit and I press there in the same rhythm as my hips and she gasps my name into the pillow, then gasps it again, and then she comes apart with a cry that fills the boathouse and goes out over the water, and I feel her pleasure along the entire length of me.
My own release follows like the tide answers the moon—inevitable, total, drawn out of me by the way she still moves through the aftershocks.
Afterward, I roll to my side. She turns and tucks herself against my chest with the ease of a woman who has been doing this for years, not hours.
For a while, there is only the sound of our breathing.
Her fingers move on my chest, slow and thoughtful, tracing the bioluminescent patterns the way she traced them last night. I watch her face while she does it. She's in a world of her own, following the lines from my sternum outward, and she looks strangely settled. Unguarded and at peace.
I want to see this face every morning for the rest of my life.
"This necklace," she says, touching the cord around my neck. The pearl rests against my collarbone, exactly where it always is. "I’ve never seen a pearl like this."
I look down at it.
I have worn the pearl for fifteen years. I have pressed it flat against my chest in crowded rooms and let it sing its song for me in exile. I have never once considered giving it to anyone, because there was never anyone to give it to.
I sit up. Jackie pushes herself up beside me, curious, watching my face.
I lift the cord over my head.
"A black pearl from the Maw," I tell her, holding it between us in the morning light.
It's dark and luminous, impossibly deep, catching the pale-gray dawn and holding it. "Taken from the deepest point in the ocean world. It’s a sacred place to krakens, where the black oysters live for thousands of years, working on their pearls in a world that never sees the sun." I am quiet for a moment, feeling the weight of it in my palm for the last time. It’s a big decision to give it away. It’s the easiest decision I ever made. "This was my father's last gift to me."
Jackie is very still, looking at it.
"A kraken mating is sealed with the gift of a black pearl," I say, "I am honored to gift mine to you, if you will accept it." I meet her eyes. "Our patterns are already permanent. This is—this is the declaration. You become my mate in every sense recognized by my people. And I become yours."
She looks at the pearl for a long moment.
Then she closes her hand around it, looks up at me, and leans forward and kisses me. Soft and certain. The kiss of someone who has made their decision and is finished debating it.
When she pulls back, she's glowing, the marks on her skin blazing awake in the morning light, answering mine.
I lower the cord over her head.
The pearl comes to rest against her sternum, between her perfect, perky breasts, and whatever I thought I would feel when I found a mate, it’s not it. It’s better. Deeper.
A happiness I never believed I would find.
She looks down at it, touches it once with her fingertips, then looks up at me with a smile that rips my soul into pieces and make it hers entirely.
“I want to take you swimming,” I tell her.