Chapter Forty-Four
Aubert’s hands on her foot, washing away the mud, were doing funny things to Isobella’s insides.
And baring her heart to him, admitting she’d longed for a Langeais wolf as a mate before she’d come on this mission, had nerves skittering up her spine.
Was she digging herself into a deeper hole? One she’d never be able to get out of?
She peeked at him through the strands of her hair. He was wearing his usual frown, focused on what he was doing.
“I am grateful, beyond grateful, to you and Edmond for saving my life.” She had to touch him. Had to know what he was thinking. She laid a hand on his cheek, and he paused in his ministrations of her foot, but didn’t look at her. “But that is not why I agreed to be your mate.”
“It was Edmond who turned you.”
His voice was gruff, but his hands remained gentle. And those hands, they weren’t cleaning anymore, they were caressing. And they were no longer confined to her foot. He slid them over her ankle and up her calf. Her stomach swooped. She wanted them to go higher.
He looked at her then, and in his eyes was the memory of what he’d done to her, with her, in the training room.
When he’d been on his knees between her thighs.
When he’d… Her breath caught in her throat.
She was finding it increasingly difficult to swallow, and everything she’d planned to tell him disappeared, gone like wisps of smoke on a breeze.
She waited. Anticipated. His hands continued their slow exploration, inching higher.
He pushed her dress up and it bunched at her thighs, his thumbs rubbing delicious circles across the backs of her knees.
He kept his eyes focused on hers. She couldn’t look away.
“Why?”
Why? It took Isobella a few moments to comprehend what he was asking.
“Tell me why you agreed to be our mate.”
It wasn’t a command. It was a plea. From a man who’d once been broken. He’d stood in the rain, by her side, Cordelia’s grotesque mud creation bearing down on them, and told her he believed in her. She believed in him, too.
“Because you’re kind, you’re gentle. Loyal.
You protect Remi, your brother, everyone you care about.
Me.” She cupped his face with both hands.
“Because I see beyond your frowns and your silence, Aubert Montagne, to the caring, giving man inside. You and Edmond are the most honorable men I have ever met. Being with you makes me feel strong in a way I’ve never experienced before.
I want to be your mate. To both of you. Not because you turned me, or because you’re a Langeais wolf, but because of who you are and what you mean to me.
” She chewed on the inside of her cheek.
Was she ready to admit it? She took a deep breath, released it in a rush of words. “Because I’ve fallen in love with you.”
She had. In such a short time, yet it was true.
It wasn’t the infatuation, the desperate neediness Douglas had elicited in her.
No, this was something stronger, purer, lodged deep in her soul.
The forever kind of love she’d always longed for but hadn’t believed could exist until she’d had ringside seats to Gabriel and Annabelle’s reunion.
Aubert was silent for so long that Isobella’s throat constricted.
He dropped her foot to the floor and scraped his chair back.
He stood, stepping away from her, and for a heartbeat she thought she might have lost him.
But he didn’t leave. With slow deliberation, he removed his boots.
He unlaced his leg braces and set them on the table.
His arm braces followed, and his surcoat.
Isobella couldn’t move, couldn’t look away.
He shrugged out of his chain mail, and it slithered to the floor. His padded garment joined it. Then he pulled his tunic over his head and tossed it aside.
He was magnificent. Identical to his brother, and yet different.
This was Aubert. She stared at his broad chest, his amulet nestling in the dusting of hair that continued down over his taut stomach, trailing beneath breeches slung low on his hips.
She dropped her gaze further to the unmistakable evidence that he did want her. Very much.
Isobella snapped herself from her stasis and slowly got to her feet, approaching him one small step at a time, as if he were a wild animal that might bolt at any moment.
Her hands shook with her need to touch him, to explore his body in the way the heat in his eyes and the flare of his nostrils told her he wanted to explore hers.
She placed her hands on his chest and curled her fingers in his chest hair, the warmth of his skin setting them tingling.
She had an irresistible urge to rub herself all over him and cover herself in his scent.
Instead, she tilted her head back, parted her lips and he leaned in, brushing his lips against hers oh so briefly, before his mouth was gone and he was running his nose along her throat.
He breathed her in, and his chest rumbled, igniting a throbbing in her clit.
Her wolf pushed forward, her canines punched through her gums, but she didn’t care.
She was with Aubert. He would always keep her safe.
He fisted the hem of her dress and dragged it up and up.
Untangling her hands from around his neck, she let him pull it and her underdress over her head.
Bereft, needing to be close to him, to be touching him, she snaked her arms around his neck again.
Then he was lifting her as though she weighed no more than a child, and she wrapped her legs around his hips as he walked her to the bed.
With the care and the tenderness she’d come to expect from the twins, Aubert laid her down on the soft covers of the bed.
Bracketing his arms beside her head, his long hair curtained them in.
The two of them, in a world of their own.
He slanted his mouth over hers, his tongue sliding between her parted lips, and a need so strong it left her breathless burst over her.
She moaned into his mouth, chasing his tongue, and though he gave her what she asked for, his hips doing a slow circular grind between her thighs that drove her almost wild, he didn’t rush. He didn’t lose control.
There was no doubt in her mind Aubert was as eager as she was.
The evidence in his breeches was impossible to ignore.
But something was holding him back. This was not the Aubert she knew.
The man whose savage emotions always simmered right below the surface, bursting forth when he loosened his restraint.
Their first kiss in the training room had swept her away.
It’d been impulsive, and wild and full of emotion.
That was the Aubert she wanted. The one who gave her everything.
For too many years, Isobella had settled for missionary position and connect-the-dots sex.
The kind that never left her satisfied and had made her wonder if this was as good as it ever got.
Now she knew why, and Isobella didn’t ever want to question Aubert.
Whether his love was real. If he really wanted her.
She needed to know, to feel it. Needed to see him lose control.
Isobella wanted raw. She wanted visceral.
She wanted throw her over his shoulder and take her up against the penthouse windows kind of sex.
Sex that said mine and lay claim to her body, her heart and her soul.
Aubert could give her that. She knew he could.
But he wasn’t, and his restraint ignited a raging need in her to break through his facade and unleash the beast. It frightened her.
It exhilarated her. It made her brave. Something primal and wild erupted within her.
Her wolf. It wanted the real Aubert, too.
Her canines dropped. She sucked his lip into her mouth, scraping her fang over his tender flesh.
Juicy. Anticipation coiled within her. She struck.
Aubert reared back. She had bitten him. Drawn blood. He followed the slide of her tongue across her lip, and it was all he could do to not rip her chemise to shreds and bare her delectable body. Did the woman not realize he was trying to do right by her?
In Langeais, he had let his emotions get the best of him.
Not this time. Not when it came to Isobella.
It was too important he get this right. She was too important.
She squeezed him with her thighs, grinding her hot sex against his straining cock.
Merde. She was testing every ounce of his control.
That he was still wearing his breeches was the only reason he had not already slammed his cock into her welcoming heat.
“Isobella.” His voice was rough, as if he had swallowed a bunch of rocks.
The little temptress bared her neck at him, her smooth golden skin ripe for his bite.
Aubert tried, but he could not hold his canines back.
They slid down, his gums throbbing in time with the pulse in his groin.
She rolled her hips, and he growled. Her scent intensified.
By the Fates, she was testing him. And he loved it and hated it in equal measure, for he was close to abandoning all reason.
She arched her back, pressing her hard nipples into his bare chest. This was a side of their mate he had not known existed. Her gentleness, her empathy had drawn him to her. Her honesty had burned brighter than the summer sun. This demanding, impatient, hungry Isobella—it slayed him.
“Aubert, please.”
He groaned and dipped his head into the crook of her neck, striving for calm. She nuzzled his neck too, and his wolf stilled in his mind, waiting, hoping. His wolf was a bigger fool than he. She was not going to—
Isobella latched on to his shoulder, sinking her teeth in deep.
She claimed me. Marked me as hers.
Aubert threw back his head and howled, and as he voiced his joy, his triumph, as his wolf surged forward, his control snapped.
The moment she retracted her teeth, he ripped through her chemise with his claws, shredding it.
He flipped her over and dragged her pert bottom into the air.
He had a moment of sanity, where his human mind tried to reassert itself, where he questioned his actions, what he was about to do. How he was about to do it.
“Don’t you dare back out now. I want this. Please.” She waggled her pretty pussy at him. “Take me, Aubert. Make me yours.”
He tore through the laces on his breeches and freed his aching cock. Hands on her hips, keeping her in place, he lined himself up and thrust. Her hoarse cry went straight to his testicles.
He was inside her. His mate.
Her channel fluttered around his cock and Aubert closed his eyes, imagining his weapons, his swords, his daggers. Bringing them to mind, one by one, focusing on their blades, their hilts, counting them. He could not—he refused to—come before she did. The man and the animal inside him demanded it.
When he had his body under some semblance of control, when he was certain he would not come with the slightest twitch from her, he rolled his hips.
She whimpered. “Yes.”
He did it again, then slid out, unhurried, each painstaking inch bliss beyond comparison, before slamming back in.
And again. Slow at first, then faster, as she met him thrust for thrust. Her breathy moans and the slap of flesh filled the room, the air thick with the aroma of sex.
If there truly was a heaven, Aubert had found it.
His grip tightened on her hips as he took her, pushing them both closer to the edge.
Pleasure ripped up his spine. He held on, gritting his teeth.
He almost lost his mind. Then she was tightening around him, shouting, calling his name.
He let go, thrusting into her once, twice more and he threw his body over hers, opened his mouth and latched on to her shoulder as his own release ripped through him.
She screamed, and her channel clamped around him like a vise.
By the Fates. He had never… In his mind, his wolf howled, his canines buried in her shoulder, her sweet blood in his mouth.
She shook beneath him as her orgasm fluttered to life again, wringing more cries from her.
Everyone in the keep would know they were fucking, but Aubert did not care.
She was his. He was hers. That was all that mattered.
He retracted his teeth and licked the wound. She would heal. The mark would be gone by the morrow, but a part of him was in her now. They were connected.
Shaking, he collapsed on the bed and pulled her with him. Her dark nipples and heavy breasts heaved as she fought to catch her breath. His beautiful mate. He tucked her head against his chest, letting loose a satisfied rumble. More than satisfied. Content. In a way he had never thought possible.
Isobella’s eyes closed, and, exhausted, she drifted off to sleep.
Aubert pulled her in tight against him and dropped a kiss on the tip of her nose, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. “I have fallen in love with you, too, sweet Bella.”
* * * *
Edmond stood outside Isobella’s bedchamber. He had been prepared to lock them in there together for days, but there had been no need. Aubert loved her as much as he did. Now Isobella knew it, too.
He grinned, then entered the room, closing the door quietly behind him. Isobella slept, curled up in Aubert’s arms. He shared a look with his twin, an understanding, then stripped off his clothes and slipped beneath the covers to cuddle their mate between them.
The rightness of it, the three of them together, seeped into his bones, but there was only one problem. “I think we are going to need to build a bigger bed.”