Chapter 17 #2
He stands to get the rest of his clothes off and I watch him do it. He isn’t self-conscious, which surprises me from a man who lives that far inside his own head. When he catches me looking he wraps a hand around himself and strokes once. Not performing. Taking the edge off so he can think.
That small practical thing undoes me more than any amount of Alpha display could.
“Come here.”
He settles over me, and when I reach between us to guide him in he stops my hand.
“Wait.”
“Eli, if you’re overthinking this—”
“I’m not.” He threads his fingers through mine and pins our hands beside my head. “I need to look at you first. I want to remember what your face looks like before it changes.”
The claiming. He means the claiming.
“You don’t have to,” I whisper. “Not tonight. Not for the paperwork or the deadline. I need you to know I’d have you either way.”
“I know.” He shifts forward and presses against my entrance without pushing in, and the tease of it drags a sound out of me. “That’s why I’m going to. Because you’d have me without the bite.”
He pushes in slowly, watching my face the whole way.
“This isn’t strategy.”
The stretch of him fills me completely. He isn’t the biggest of them, but the angle he takes is devastating, dragging against my front wall on every small movement. He starts with controlled, deep strokes and doesn’t look away from me once.
“Talk to me,” he says. “Tell me what works.”
“That. Right there.” He’s found the angle and I wrap my legs around his waist to keep him at it. “Just keep doing that.”
“Got it.”
He holds the same pace, the same depth, the same angle, and it builds in a way it hasn’t with anybody else. Not a sprint at the edge. A tide coming in.
“Eli, I’m close.”
“I know. I can feel it.”
He puts his forehead against mine and keeps that relentless rhythm, never faster, never losing the angle. When it crests it rolls through me in waves instead of breaking over me. I moan into his mouth and he takes the sound and keeps moving.
“Two,” he says against my lips.
“Shut up.”
He grins, then lifts one of my legs over his shoulder. The new angle makes me gasp. Deeper. He picks up the pace for the first time, his control starting to fray, and I can feel his knot beginning to swell at the base.
“I can feel you tightening every time I bottom out,” he says, rougher now. “You’re pulling me in.”
“Because I need you deeper.”
The sound that comes out of him is nothing like his usual register. He lowers my leg, pulls out and turns me onto my stomach. His hand runs down my spine before he takes my hip and pushes back in. From behind it’s overwhelming, and he drapes himself over my back with his mouth at my ear.
“Tell me when,” he breathes. “You decide when the bond happens. Not biology. Not my knot. You.”
Even now, even inside me with his knot starting to stretch me open, he’s handing it to me.
I turn my head to find his mouth. “Keep going. I’ll tell you.”
He moves faster, the control giving out at last. His knot swells with every thrust until the stretch sits right on the line, and his breathing goes ragged at my neck. I can feel him fighting the instinct to bite, feel the whole of him locked down where he’s pressed against my shoulder.
It builds from somewhere deep, slower than the others, coiling tighter with every stroke. When it breaks it’s the biggest thing I’ve felt tonight. I cry out into the sheets and his knot locks us together as he comes with a broken sound.
“Now,” I manage. “Eli, now.”
His teeth go into the curve of my neck, opposite Jackson’s mark, and the bond opens like a door thrown wide.
I feel him come through it. Not only where our bodies are joined. In my blood and behind my eyes and everywhere at once. He’s there alongside the others, and it’s exactly what I knew it would be.
Still water. Deep and calm and clear all the way down.
He groans against the bite, tongue soothing the broken skin, hips jerking through the last of it. We’re locked together and both of us are shaking, and he rolls us carefully onto our sides and keeps me against him.
“Okay?” His voice is wrecked.
“More than okay.” I reach up and touch the mark, the raised edges of it, the tenderness. “It’s perfect.”
His arms tighten, and his relief washes through the new bond so clearly I almost laugh. Under all that analysis and control, he’d been genuinely afraid I wouldn’t choose him.
“Four bonds,” I say.
He’s quiet a second. “One past the threshold. Tyler will be unbearable about it.”
“You’re allowed to be pleased.”
“I’m extremely pleased. I’m also aware the number isn’t why you did it.”
“No. It isn’t.”
He presses his lips to the bite and the bond hums between us.
“I should tell you something.” He pauses long enough that I know he’s arranging it before he gives it to me. “I don’t think I’m ever going to need this the way some people do. The frequency, I mean. That’s never been the part that matters most to me.”
“What does?”
“Being known accurately by somebody.” His fingers move over mine. “And knowing them the same way.”
“That’s not a problem to solve.”
“No?”
“No.” I bring his hand up and kiss his knuckles. “We work out what it looks like for us. We’ve got time.”
He pulls me closer and I tuck my head under his chin. The new bond settles alongside the others, and every one of them is its own thing. Jackson’s runs fierce and low behind my ribs. Beckett’s is warm and quick at the edges. Zane’s is bright, sunlight coming through glass.
And Eli’s. Still water, deep enough to go under in, and I’m not afraid of going under.
“Eli?”
“Hmm?”
“Thank you for waiting. For letting me come to you.”
He kisses my hair. “Thank you for seeing me.”
I close my eyes. Tomorrow there are complaints to file and people to fight. Right now there’s a storm on the windows and a man breathing against the back of my neck, and I don’t want to be anywhere else.