Alban #2
“What aren’t you telling me?” I’d asked over our mate bond as soon as we were alone that night and getting ready for bed.
She was taking down her hair. Sometime over the last few weeks, she’d figured out that if she tried to go to bed in braids, I’d just take it down again because I liked having it in the bed with us, to keep her still when she was enjoying what we did too much, to caress when I took her slow, and sometimes just to watch it curtain around us when I put her on top.
So, staying in her usually compliant character, she’d established a new routine of taking it down at night and putting it up in the morning after her shower.
But that night, instead of apologizing and answering my question, she paused, unbraiding her hair to ask, “Does being heat-mated mean I never get to have my own thoughts? Am I not allowed to keep things to myself?”
She asked these questions out loud, in that apologetic, innocent way of hers. Like she honestly wanted to ken and needed me to tell her if she’d run afoul of some rule she had no knowledge of due to growing up in a closed community where intimate relations were never discussed.
I’d thought about lying, of answering, “Aye, it is a she-wolf’s sacred duty to tell their mate every single thing that crosses her mind.”
But I was just religious enough to fear bursting into flames if I did. Because the truth was, I’d only been letting her have the thoughts I wanted her to have since we established our mate bond.
She’d said she was fine with my crazy. That she wanted it even.
But she didn’t truly ken how crazy I was when it came to her.
She’d cracked my mind and made herself my obsession.
I’d do anything—anything to make her happy.
Go to Ireland and scour the land for her sister fifty times and back if that’s what it took.
But afterward, one baby wouldn’t be enough.
I wanted to keep her belly swollen with my seed.
I wanted to kiss her everywhere, down to her soul.
I wanted to crawl inside her head through our mate bond and just have myself a lifelong sit there so that I might anticipate her every need.
My obsession kent no bounds or limits when it came to her.
But that wasn’t a conversation for Christmas night.
“Nae, yer thoughts are yer own, mo ghràidh,” I assured her with a diplomacy my wolf did not feel.
Then I fucked her late into the night. I made her come again and again as punishment for holding something back from me. Worshiped her body until she passed out.
So, imagine how hard it had been to control myself when I woke up to find her side of the mate bond fully open to me, with dream images of my red wolf between her legs rippling over our mental connection.
She was having that dream again—the one I could never tell her she had unless I wanted my too easily embarrassed mate to drop dead on the spot.
The one that told me she could feel my wolf wanting her. Even when she slept.
I breathed and mentally chanted, “I will not wake her. I will not wake her. Not until sunrise.”
I’d been forced to learn a special breathing technique back when I served in Wolf Force.
It was meant to keep our wolves from surfacing when we were in the fray of battle.
Back then, I’d thought it was bullshite.
I’d never needed help keeping my wolf at bay.
The beast inside of me was totally under my command.
I had gone through the motions of learning the technique but hadn’t used it even once while actually serving.
That was before Leora, though.
The morning of Boxing Day, I lay beside her with my eyes squeezed shut and my hands fisted around the bedsheets, counting my breaths in, and making sure the breaths out lasted twice as long.
My cock was an aching piece of stone, tenting the quilt we lay under, but I chanted to myself, “I will not wake her. I will not wake her. Not until sunrise.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d waged this pre-dawn battle inside of myself.
Most mornings found me struggling to keep my hands off my mate, to let her sleep long enough to recover from what I’d done to her the previous night.
But mornings like this were the absolute worst for me. I’d thought having Dorie, and my father back under my roof would diminish my need for her, but my wolf was never satisfied. And sometimes, he continued claiming her in her dreams.
Nae, Leora did not want to ken the extent of my crazy.
I kept my eyes squeezed shut against the sight of her because just looking at her made me want to put her underneath me and ride her to empty. And I chanted inside my head to drown out the images she was subconsciously rippling over our bond.
I breathed in and out until a slight shift to a lighter tone of black behind my eyelids let me know the sun was starting to peak over the horizon.
In an instant, I was all over her, my stone cock flattened against her backside, my human hand buried in her sweet cunt.
Holy feck, she was warm and wet between her legs. Because of the dream? Or because of how many times I’d emptied my addicted cock inside of her last night?
It didn’t matter. My wolf still wasn’t satisfied.