First Temptation
Aurora POV
I was floating.
Well, technically, I was being carried, but considering my bare, dirt-caked feet hadn’t touched the ground since the courtyard, it certainly felt like flying.
Kieran navigated the winding, torch-lit corridors of the Valdoran castle with effortless, predatory grace.
He wasn’t even breathing hard, despite the fact that he was carrying a fully grown she-wolf bundled in a heavy travel cloak up several flights of stairs.
Everything around me felt entirely surreal.
After eight years of damp caves and freezing mist, the castle was an assault of warmth and opulence.
We passed massive woven tapestries, polished marble columns, and glowing iron braziers that radiated a heat that slowly began to thaw my frozen bones.
Passing guards immediately snapped to attention, bowing their heads reverently as we moved by, but Kieran didn’t notice them. His focus was locked entirely on me.
I couldn’t help but stare up at him. Up close, without the distraction of a monster trying to crush us into paste, the Alpha King was even more devastatingly handsome.
The way his dark, messy hair fell carelessly over his forehead made my fingers twitch with the sudden, absurd urge to reach up and brush it back.
He smelled of cedar, storm-charged air, and pure, intoxicating power.
My inner wolf was practically purring in the back of my mind. ’Ours. Good catch.’
He pushed open a set of heavy, iron-wrought double doors with his shoulder, stepping into a massive, sleek bedroom.
It was a stark, almost painful contrast to the overgrown ruins of Argentis.
The room was immaculate, decorated in rich, dark tones of charcoal and silver, with massive arched windows overlooking the moonlit mountain valley.
A massive stone fireplace was already roaring, casting a warm, flickering glow across the room.
In the center sat a bed large enough to comfortably fit a small army, covered in dark, heavy furs and shimmering silk sheets.
Kieran walked over and set me down incredibly gently on the edge of the bed, the plush material sinking perfectly beneath my weight. It was so soft it almost didn’t feel real. He stepped back just enough to give me breathing room, though his golden eyes never left my face.
I clutched the heavy wool cloak tighter around my bare shoulders, the crushing reality of civilization suddenly feeling very heavy. “Was...” I hesitated, my voice still rusty and raspy. “Was it really okay to dismiss your mother like that?”
Kieran knelt in front of me, bringing his towering frame down so we were perfectly eye to eye. The fierce, terrifying Alpha warlord who had just stared down a royal court vanished entirely, replaced by a man looking at me like I was the exact center of his universe.
“She will survive,” he promised, reaching out to gently brush a dark smudge of soot from my pale cheek with his calloused thumb.
The brief, tender contact sent a violent jolt of electricity straight down my spine to my toes.
“My only priority right now is you. You’ve been surviving by hunting and sleeping in the dirt for eight long years, Aurora. Right now, you are going to take a long hot bath. I am going to have the kitchens bring up enough cooked meals to feed a Vanguard battalion. And then, you are going to rest.”
Rest?
I blinked at him, completely thrown off balance.
My muscles were exhausted, yes. My wild magic was pretty depleted from healing the wyvern’s shattered wing.
But as I looked at the broad expanse of his chest, the mesmerizing way his muscles shifted smoothly beneath his dark tunic, and the intense, possessive heat radiating off his skin...
resting was suddenly the absolute furthest thing from my mind.
The mating bond, painfully fresh and crackling between us like raw magic, was flooding my freezing veins with a completely different kind of energy.
‘I’ve been sleeping on jagged rocks, freezing in the mist, and fighting for my literal life for nearly a decade’, I thought, my gaze dropping involuntarily to the strong, defined curve of his lips, then trailing slowly down to the tantalizing V of his collarbone exposed by his open tunic.
’I really, really don’t want to sleep right now.’
My human mind and my wolf were in complete, scandalous agreement.
The man kneeling in front of me was my fated mate.
He was gorgeous, he smelled like absolute heaven, and he was currently looking at me with a breathless reverence that made my pulse hammer everywhere.
A heavy, liquid rush of heat pooled low in my belly, immediately accompanied by a few distinctly dirty, highly un-restful thoughts about exactly what else that massive, fur-covered bed could be used for.
Kieran froze.
The soft, tender, highly protective expression on his handsome face fractured instantly. Through the wide-open channel of our new psychic bond, I felt the exact, terrifying second my highly explicit emotions hit him like a physical blow to the jaw.
And if the bond wasn’t enough of a giveaway, the sudden, violent shift in my scent definitely was. Beneath the smell of dirt and monster blood, the scent of a newly bonded, highly aroused female spiked sharply into the warm air of the bedroom, impossibly sweet and heavy.
Kieran inhaled sharply, his chest expanding.
His pupils blew wide instantly, swallowing the bright gold in his irises until his eyes were almost entirely, dangerously black.
The hand resting casually on my knee suddenly gripped me tighter, his fingers digging into the wool, and a low, dark, violently vibrating growl began to rumble deep in the cavern of his chest.
----
Kieran POV
The hit to my senses was absolute and devastating.
One second, I was looking at my exhausted, dirt-covered mate who desperately needed a hot meal and a soft bed to recover from a decade of trauma. The next second, the mating bond between us flared like a lit torch dropped directly into a barrel of black powder.
I didn’t just feel the sudden, scandalous turn of her thoughts, I felt the sharp, intoxicating spike of heat low in her belly, the frantic, erratic flutter of her pulse against her throat, and the vivid,
highly explicit mental image of exactly what she desperately wanted to do with me on those silk sheets.
Then, her scent changed.
The metallic smell of soot, dirt, and monster blood was suddenly undercut by something impossibly sweet, heavy, and primal. It smelled like wild honey and rain. It was the undeniable, biological scent of a newly bonded female, highly aroused and actively calling to her mate to finish the claim.
Oh, shit.
My inner wolf entirely lost its mind.
‘Mate’, the massive beast roared, thrashing and clawing at the inside of my skull with a primal, blinding ferocity I had never experienced in my entire life. ’Ours. Claim her. Mark her. Now.’
My pupils blew wide, swallowing the gold in my eyes until there was nothing but endless, hungry black.
The hand resting gently on her knee tightened completely involuntarily, my sharp claws threatening to elongate, pierce my skin, and tear right through the thick fabric of the cloak.
A low, vibrating growl started deep in my chest, dark, guttural, and fiercely possessive, completely bypassing my rational human restraint.
Every single biological instinct I possessed screamed at me to push her back against the soft mattress, rip away the heavy wool and ignore the dirt, sink my claiming teeth deep into the crook of her neck, and finish the mating bond right here, right now.
The primal urge was so violently overwhelming it actually made my peripheral vision blur with a haze.
My entire body was burning, wired with a biological imperative that was practically begging me to lose control.
But I was the King of Valdora. I had spent my entire adult life mastering my wolf, learning to cage my violence for the good of my people, and I absolutely wasn’t about to let my feral instincts traumatize my beautiful, exhausted mate on her very first night home.
I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting a brutal, agonizing internal war.
‘Back off’, I snarled viciously at my own wolf, throwing every single ounce of my royal willpower into slamming the iron cage shut around the beast. ’Look at her. She’s been sleeping on rocks for a decade. She is covered in monster blood and dirt. She is exhausted.’
‘She wants us’, my wolf argued stubbornly, thrashing violently against my mental hold, completely intoxicated by her spiking scent.
‘She gets a hot bath first’, I countered, my jaw locking so incredibly hard my teeth began to ache. ’She gets proper food. She gets to feel completely safe and secure in our territory. She is ours. She isn’t going anywhere. There will be plenty of time to do... absolutely everything else.’
My wolf huffed, reluctantly seeing the tactical logic of my argument, but it continued to pace aggressively, restlessly, just beneath the surface of my burning skin.
It took absolutely everything in my power to force my fingers to uncurl and loosen my bruising grip on her knee. I took a ragged, shaky breath, opening my eyes to look at her.
Aurora was staring up at me, her eyes incredibly wide, her pale lips slightly parted as she watched the violent internal struggle play out across my face.
To keep myself from doing something rushed, I forced myself to stand up, putting three crucial, agonizing feet of physical distance between us. I ran a shaking hand through my dark hair, letting out a rough, breathless laugh that sounded more like a bark.
“Moon Goddess, Aurora,” I groaned, my voice a full octave deeper than normal, vibrating and rough with heavily suppressed desire. “You have absolutely no idea what you do to me. But if you keep looking at me like that, and projecting those kinds of thoughts across the bond...”
I took another deliberate step back toward the adjoining master bathroom, gripping the doorframe tight enough to crack the masonry just to physically anchor myself.
“I am going to start the water for your bath,” I said, my golden eyes flashing through the black as I offered her a wicked, entirely unapologetic smirk. “Because if I stay within arm’s reach of you right now, neither of us is getting a single second of rest tonight.”