Leora
He stared at me. He stared at me for the longest time. Then he growled, “Tell me where.”
Out loud.
Where? My heart was beating so fast, it took me a few blinks to comprehend what he was asking me. Even then, I had to stutter out a request for clarification. “Y-you want me to-to tell you wh-where it-it hurts?”
His dark penetrating gaze burned into my face, locking my eyes in place with its intensity. “If ye hurt. If ye want something—anything, then ye tell me about it. I will accept nothing less. Do ye ken?”
There was that question again. I nodded awkwardly, just to get away from his sizzling gaze.
But he dipped his head to chase my eyes. “A nod’s not good enough, mo ghràidh. Give me the words.”
“I understand.” I barely managed to choke out the words, even over the mate bond.
“Goooood.” He stretched out the word, giving it a note of dark satisfaction. “Now tell me where it hurts.”
I swallowed. And swallowed again. And still couldn’t manage to say the words out loud.
“Can’t manage the words, then?” he guessed inside my head. His mouth hitched up into a knowing smirk.
I nodded, hoping for some kind of reprieve.
“Then show me,” he said, quickly killing that small bit of hope. “Show me where it hurts.”
There was something about his filthy command, the low teasing tone he’d taken with me. Like a lion playing with a mouse.
My core was more than clenching now. It throbbed and ached. But show him? I … I … couldn’t do that. I froze in place, unable to move much less point to the spot on my body that needed attention. His attention.
“I can smell how much ye hurt.” He grazed his mouth down my neck, and my skin tingled under his hot breath. “I cannae abide it. If you dinnae tell me, you’re gonna make me guess.”
His words sounded like a threat. And a dark promise. I wondered but could not form the words to ask how he would do that.
He must have heard my unspoken question over our mate bond. He answered it as if I’d spoken out loud.
“Guessing will require me to undress you, mo ghràidh. Find out for myself where you hurt and make it stop.” He drew back to regard me, his intense gaze tracking over my face. “Do you ken?”
Oh, my goodness. My knees trembled. But somehow … somehow, I managed to nod.
“Is it here, then?” He reached out and plucked the bobby pins that held my braids in place out of my hair.
“Perhaps these plaits of yours are wound too tight,” he suggested, taking down the two thick braids and running his hands through my freed curls.
“No, it’s not my hair.”
I shook my head as practical thoughts invaded. I’d have to braid it back up before I went to sleep tonight. Wolfennites weren’t allowed to cut their hair, so my curls fell all the way down my back in thick waves. If I didn’t rebraid it before bed, I’d have a detangling nightmare on my hands tomor—
“How about here, then?”
All thoughts about detangling my hair were cut off by my gasp when he gathered my blouse in his hammy fists and tore it down the middle.
I’d rolled up my sleeves to make the spaghetti so it was easy for him to pull the shirt’s remnants down my arms. Then his thick but surprisingly deft fingers found the back clasp of my bra.
And, just like that, I was completely naked on top.
“Is this where it hurts?” His eyes raked down to my full breasts.
Before I could answer, he sucked one of them into his mouth, drawing on it ravenously as he palmed the other one in his large hand.
Then he switched, wetting my other breast while he dragged his rough thumb around the nipple of the first one.
The sensation of him using both his mouth and hands on my breasts was so unexpected.
So wrong. So unlike anything I’d ever felt before.
And for some reason I couldn’t comprehend, it enflamed my previously simmering desire.
I cried out, and my head fell back against the wall as shivers of pleasure shot down my torso and directly into my core. A heavy tugging sensation appeared in my lower stomach, and even though I was no longer in heat, I could feel a new slickness between my thighs.
I didn’t know and didn’t understand what was causing this, but it was frustrating and pleasurable at the same time. I liked the sensations, but …
“You’re making it hurt worse,” I whined over our mate bond. “I need more.”
“More? I’ll give you more.” There came the sound of more ripping fabric, then the feel of cool air on my bared legs. Then the much heavier sensation of his hand cupping my core over my panties. “Holy feck, you’re soaked. Is this where it hurts?”
I was so glad for the mate bond. Otherwise, there was no way I would have been able to answer with the truth. “Yes! Yes!” I gasped into his head. “That’s where it hurts. Please …”
I couldn’t believe how whiny I sounded. How unbelievably wanton despite being done with my heat.
But Alban didn’t chastise me. Just roughly pushed my underwear down and flattened his hand against the front of my bared sex.
“Is this where it hurts?” he asked, instinctively finding and rubbing at a particularly sensitive spot near the top of my folds.
Sensation didn’t just spark through me this time. It zapped. Made me cry, “Yes! Yes! Right there!” out loud, like the harlot Joshua had warned me against becoming so many times in chur—
All thoughts of Joshua disappeared when one of Alban’s thick fingers found the secret hole underneath my folds.
“Does it hurt here, too?” he asked, pressing in, and stretching me around his large digit.
“Yes!” I realized at the same time I cried it out loud.
“Good, I found the spot.” He pumped his thick finger in and out while rubbing at the other sensitive place he’d found with the ball of his hand. Then he added a second finger and turned me into a whimpering mess.
He leaned into me, and I could feel the imprint of his staff against my hip as he murmured inside my head. “So tight and wet. Do you have any idea how hard you made it for me to keep my hands off you while we were making supper? I could smell you the whole time. Hurting … wanting this.”
He knew? He knew the entire time? I should have been ashamed of myself. This was not how a good mate was supposed to act. But all my lessons and morals abandoned me under the weight of Alban’s merciless hand.
“Don’t stop!” I begged instead of apologizing. “Please, don’t stop.”
“I won’t.” He pulled back to pin me underneath his intense gaze but kept his hand moving as he told me, “I won’t ever stop. I promise you that.”
I didn’t think we were talking about what he was doing below my waist anymore, but soon what I thought ceased to matter.
A climax bloomed inside of me, eradicating everything else.
My bare chest heaved, and I found my release on a long moan—one Alban swallowed with his kiss. He buried his tongue in my mouth as I writhed helplessly under his still-pumping hand.
But … But …
“It still hurts,” I whined, even with stars bursting in my vision.
Alban’s hand abruptly stopped pumping. And I braced for him to yell at me. To call me a greedy, ungrateful slut … which was what I began to feel like in the stone silence that followed my selfish complaint.
He withdrew his fingers from my sex, and shame washed over me. What had I done? I opened my mouth to apologize.
But then he dropped to his knees and opened his mouth. Over my mound. He kissed me there, the flat of his tongue parting my folds with a long, sensuous lick.
Shock made me immediately try to clamp my legs closed.
But Alban wouldn’t let me. He tore away my panties with another two-fisted yank.
So, I was bare and completely vulnerable when he lifted one of my brown thighs over his broad shoulder and pushed the other one back into the wall with his large hand splayed over the soft inner flesh.
He … he … oh my goodness, he held me open as he devoured my most intimate place, his tongue licking me everywhere and delving deep.
My shock melted away, and my hands found his hair as my body began to shake.
I could feel myself becoming even wetter.
Because of him or because of the want. I couldn’t tell.
But I didn’t try to close my legs again. No, I sagged into the wall, letting him do whatever he wanted to me.
“You are mine. MINE, mo ghràidh,” he reminded me inside my head. “I willnae let you hurt, and I willnae stop. Not until you are fully satisfied.”
He pushed those words into my head, then he sucked my secret bud into his mouth.
And the climax that had only been building before snapped without warning.
It broke past my dam of reason, and I choked and hiccupped as it flooded me with a roaring river of pleasure.
I was drowning, drowning … and it wasn’t enough.
Even as the sensations stole away all of my breath, I told Alban over our mate bond, “It still hurts.”
A dangerous pause. Then he … he … erupted.
That was the only way to describe it. One moment he was down on the floor, and the next, he was everywhere. His heavy body blanketed me, pinning me to the wall. And, I couldn’t say for certain how and when he removed his kilt, but with one heavy thrust, I was impaled on his thick shaft.
I wasn’t going anywhere. I couldn’t go anywhere. But he let out a guttural sound and locked my wrists above my head, and for a few glorious moments, he took me, his strokes wild and unhinged.
But then he stopped. Stopped and pulled all the way out.
“Nae! Nae!” he growled out loud. “I cannae let myself go like this. Gail said I was too rough. Too crazy. And I willnae make the same mistakes with you. I willnae scare you away.”
Jealousy was one of the foundational sins in the St. Ailbe Ordnung, and I tried to be a good person always. But a surge of anger unlike any I’d ever known suddenly came over me.
“Don’t say her name to me,” I growled back at Alban. “Don’t you ever say her name to me again. I’m not her. I’m your mate. And I want your crazy.”
I don’t know what made me confess all of this now when earlier, I couldn’t even tell him “where it hurt,” but I stood in my conviction, holding his gaze as intently as he’d held mine as I informed him, “I want your rough. I need it. It feels so good to be possessed after years of being ignored.”
He stared at me for a long, hot second, his eyes glittering with a madness that I now suspected mirrored mine. “You want my claim? You want my claim?”
“Yes!” I answered without any hesitation whatsoever. “That’s what I want. What I need. It’s the only thing that will make me stop hurting.”
And that was it. Conversation over.
He picked me up like I weighed nothing and drove into me with an upward buck of his hips, invading so deep my sex burned and stretched to accommodate him.
It hurt, but in the sweetest way.
“Mine … mine … mine,” he chanted into my head. I clung to him as he pounded me into the wall. Not wild and unhinged like before, but somehow even crazier. He took me in a steady, merciless staccato that reminded me of the way he’d kept punching Evan, even after I screamed at him to stop.
Alban wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop claiming me. Not until I was dead. And for some reason, that was the thought that healed me, that finally made it stop hurting.
“Oh … Oh!” I cried. My entire body tightened then loosened with a burst of stars, and suddenly, I was floating in a warm cloud where nothing bad could ever touch me.
The Wolfennite laws against sex outside of heating were wrong. Joshua was wrong. Every shameful thought I’d ever had about my desire for this male was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Because I was Alban’s … Alban’s–not Joshua’s. I belonged to Alban. And he belonged to me. And nothing in my life had ever felt as natural as being possessed by this beyond-worthy male.
I didn’t realize I’d reached my epiphany so loudly that Alban could hear it until his voice sounded inside of my head, bringing me back down to earth, where he was still pumping into me between my legs. “Aye, you’re mine. Mine forever. Nothing more natural than that.”
He gazed down at me, some unspeakable emotion glistening in his eyes, as he whispered out loud, “Thank you. Thank you, mo ghràidh.”
Then he gripped my waist and powered into me one last time, grunting into my loosened curls as he flooded my sex with warm, heavy spurts of his seed.
We stood there against the wall, breathing hard.
Less than twenty-four hours ago, I was a proper Wolfennite female. I said my daily prayers and had making a new dress on my list of important to-dos.
But here I was, a mess. Literally ripped out of my clothes and naked as the day I was born with the curly hair I never wore out of braids tumbling everywhere. I could only imagine how I looked.
“You look beautiful, that’s how ye look,” Alban insisted. “You’re the prettiest she-wolf I’ve ever met, and if it were up to me, I’d keep you without a stitch of clothing day in and day out.”
I wasn’t the prettiest. I really wasn’t. But I didn’t dare to think that thought too hard with our mate bond so wide open. Also, I had to admit I did feel pretty in Alban’s arms. Deserving.
He made it easy for me to stop fretting about how I looked and what I should say and how I should act, and what came next.
“What now?”
I’d asked that question so many times earlier in the day. But in those moments after our intense round of wall sex, no anxious questions lingered in my mind.
What now?
Alban and me. Alban and me forever. That was the answer to that unnecessary question.
Still, it occurred to me to ask, “Mo ghràidh? What does that mean?”
Alban just smiled and answered, “I’ll tell you on our wedding day.”