17. Shepherd
Shepherd
Her scent had changed.
That was the first thing I registered when I crossed the room to her.
She still smelled like cardamom and the warm-bright thing I had been trying not to name for three weeks, but it was overlaid now with woodsmoke and pine resin, with the particular metallic register an alpha gives off after he has claimed an omega.
Calder was inside her scent. Calder had been inside her, full stop, until a few minutes ago.
I noted the way my own breathing changed when I registered it, and I noted the way I noted it, because that had always been my problem. I observed what I should be feeling.
I knelt down beside the pile of blankets Calder had built her.
“Noa.” My voice came out steadier than I expected. “Look at me.”
She did. Her eyes were less unfocused than they had been before Calder. The first wave had broken the worst edge off her. She was lucid, or as lucid as she was going to get for a while, and she was watching me with an expression I had to take a second to read.
Trust. That was what it was. She was looking at me like she trusted me with what came next.
I had not been prepared to feel anything quite like what that did to me.
“Tell me what you want,” I said. The same words Calder had used, because they were the right words, and I wasn’t too proud to borrow them.
“I want you to make this stop being scary again,” she said. Soft. Direct. “Calder did. I want you to.”
“I am going to take that as broad permission and ask for specifics.”
She laughed. Actually laughed, just a short broken thing, but I felt it in my chest like a gift.
“You would,” she said.
“I would.”
She let out a slow breath. “Shepherd. I want you to touch me. I want you to use your mouth. I want you to make me come and then I want you inside me. Is that specific enough.”
“That is admirably specific,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You're welcome.”
“I’m going to start now, if that's all right.”
“Please.”
I leaned down and kissed her.
I had been thinking about kissing her for about two and a half weeks.
I had a number of theories about how it would feel.
None of them were correct. Her mouth was hotter than I had calibrated for.
Her response was more immediate. She made a small sound when our lips met, half a sigh and half something more, as her hand came up to fist in the front of my shirt the way she had grabbed Calder's earlier.
The shape of that gesture, the muscle memory of it, did something complicated to my chest.
She may as well have marked us already. We both had a place she reached for.
I kissed her until her breathing changed. Until her free hand worked its way up under my shirt and her nails grazed my ribs and I had to pull back to keep my composure for one more minute, just one more minute, long enough to do what I had said I would do.
“Are you ready for more?” I asked.
“Oh god.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Shepherd. Yes.”
“Tell me if anything is too much. Or not enough. I haven’t done this in some time and I would rather you correct me than be polite.”
She made a strangled sound. “I will not be polite. I promise.”
“Good.”
I slid down the blankets, careful of her ankle, careful of the place between her thighs that was already slick and swollen and almost addictive to look at in the firelight.
I had glimpsed it briefly when Calder had her, from the chair across the room, and even that glimpse had done unforgivable things to my self-control.
Up close was worse. Up close she was pink and wet and tender and the scent of her was a physical pressure against my face, sweet and sharp and almost too much.
She was watching me. Her hand was in my hair.
“Use your mouth on me, Shepherd. Like you mean it,” she whispered.
And fuck did I mean it.
I hadn’t expected to. I’d told myself I would be careful.
Methodical. Attentive. I had not expected the first taste of her to take me apart at the base of my skull.
She was salt and copper and something deeper underneath, something that triggered every alpha instinct I had spent fourteen years burying under careful intellectual distance.
I made a sound. I couldn't help it. It came out muffled against her, low and lost, and her hand tightened in my hair.
“Oh,” she breathed.
I worked her with my mouth. Slow at first, learning her.
Where she gasped. Where her hips lifted.
Where she made the little choked-off sound that meant there, do that again.
I had spent my entire adult life noticing what people did when they were trying not to be noticed.
I brought all of that to this. I noticed everything.
I noticed when her thighs trembled. I noticed when her hand in my hair went slack and then tight and then slack again.
I noticed when her breathing started to climb.
I noticed when she stopped breathing entirely, and I worked her through it.
She came on my tongue with a long broken cry, her thighs locked tight around my head, her hand fisted hard enough in my hair that my eyes watered.
But I didn’t stop. I didn’t ever want to stop.
I kept her there, gentling now, easing her through it, until her body finally went lax under me and her hand loosened and she let out a long uneven breath.
I lifted my head. I did not move otherwise. I rested my cheek against her thigh and watched her face.
“Shepherd,” she whispered. Wrecked.
“Yes.”
“You are very good at that.”
“Thank you.”
“Can you do it again?”
“Yes.”
I did it again.
Slower this time, because she was sensitive, but with the same care.
The same attention. I learned the second climax was different than the first, that her body asked for things at a different angle, that she would lift her hips a fraction when she wanted my fingers and roll them when she wanted my tongue.
I followed her. I let her guide me. I let her come apart on my tongue a second time, and when she did, she said my name like a question and an answer at once.
The alpha in me growled in deep satisfaction because my omega, and she was mine, sighed in a heat drenched happiness.
When I finally lifted my head, her eyes were closed.
“Noa.”
She opened them.
“I want to make sure you’re still with me,” I said.
She huffed something that might have been a laugh. “Get up here.”
I came up the blankets and stretched out on my side next to her, one hand smoothing back her hair from her temple.
She was flushed everywhere. Her chest was heaving.
Her hair was destroyed. The flannel shirt of Calder's that she had been wearing was open and rucked up under her arms and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I’d spent years of my life surrounded by beautiful things.
She reached up, and her hand went straight to my face.
“Glasses,” she said.
“What about them.”
“Take them off.”
I hesitated for half a second. My glasses were a fortification I had not fully realized I depended on until that moment. I took them off anyway, folded them with one hand, set them on the floor.
She looked at me. For a long moment. Then her thumb came up to my cheekbone, just under my eye, and traced a slow circle there.
“There you are,” she said.
I had no idea what to do with that.
“Without them,” she went on softly, “you look like a different person.”
“In what way.”
“Less hidden.”
I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them, she was still watching me, and her hand had moved to the back of my neck. The next wave was beginning to rise in her. I could smell it. The cardamom sweetening, the heat coming back up underneath.
“Shepherd.”
“Yes.”
“I need you in me before it gets bad again. I want to be holding you when it crests.”
“That can be arranged.”
She moved before I could. With a strength I had not expected from her at that moment, she rolled toward me and pushed at my shoulder until I let myself fall onto my back. I could see what she was doing. I let her do it.
“I need you like this,” she said.
“All right.” It was impossible to deny her. Not in this. Not in anything.
She straddled me carefully, mindful of her ankle, which I caught with a hand at her hip to ease the angle.
She got my pants open. When she gripped my cock in her tiny hand, I had to fist the blanket hard to keep my composure, because her hand was hot and slow and unhurried, and I was already two breaths from coming on her stomach like an absolute disgrace.
“Shepherd,” she said. Watching my face. “Breathe. You don't have to be careful right now. I just spent the last twenty minutes coming on your mouth. You don't have to be careful.”
“You have no idea what you do to me, do you?”
She smiled. Crooked. Tired. Tender. She kept smiling at me as she rose up on her knees, as she positioned herself, as she sank down onto me one slow careful inch at a time.
I lost my words.
I had words my entire life. I had words for everything, more words than I needed, more words than I could ever use.
They left me. They drained out of me as her body took mine in, as the heat and slick give of her enveloped me, as her face changed above me in slow degrees from concentration to something almost holy.
She bottomed out and stayed there.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I managed.
“Don't move. Just for a second.”
I didn't move. I couldn't have. I lay there underneath her, looking up at her, feeling her around me, and I understood for the first time in my analytical, observed-from-a-distance life what people meant when they said they could not think.
But then she moved.
Slow at first. Rocking. Testing the angle, the depth, finding what worked. Her hands were braced on my chest. Her head was tipped back. The line of her throat was a thing I would have written a paper on, if I had been the kind of man who could still do that, which I was not. Not anymore.
“Shepherd,” she breathed.
“Noa.”
“Touch me.”