Chapter 24 Kendra
KENDRA
This kiss is nothing like the others, and the others were enough to keep me up at night replaying them.
The kisses before were careful, controlled, a man holding himself on a leash and letting out just enough slack to taste what he wanted without losing himself.
This kiss has no leash, his lips hard against mine, his tongue pushing past my teeth with a heat that makes my brain short-circuit, and his arm hooks under the small of my back and lifts me off the mattress, dragging me up the bed until my head hits the pillow at the headboard.
He settles his weight between my legs. Every inch of skin where he presses against me ignites, the heat rolling off him in waves that soak through my clothes and settle into my muscles, my hips lifting into him without my say-so, my fingers digging into his shoulders.
He breaks the kiss long enough to pull back and look at me, his eyes darker than I’ve seen them, the amber gone molten, his chest rising and falling in heavy pulls with his ridge fully erect along his back and not even trying to press it down.
His fingers grip the hem of my shirt and he drags it up my body, his knuckles trailing fire across my stomach and my ribs, and I lift my arms so he can pull it over my head and drop it off the side of the bed.
His fingers move to my bra and he stops, staring at the clasp, his brow creasing, his hands hovering over the hooks. He turns me slightly, studying the mechanism, and his thick fingers fumble the first attempt and I have to press my lips together to keep from grinning.
“It’s a clasp,” I tell him softly. “You pinch and pull.”
He exhales through his nose, and manages the hooks on his second try. The fabric loosens and he slides the straps down, and when the bra is gone and I’m bare from the waist up he goes still.
His eyes travel over me and the look on his face is not hunger. It’s reverence, his lips parting, his fingers hovering above my skin.
I reach for his hand and place it on my chest, his palm covering me entirely, and I feel his fingers tremble on my skin.
“Kendra.” My name comes out of him slow and wrecked, like he’s been holding it for a very long time, and I pull his hand tighter into me.
“I’m right here.”
He lowers his mouth to my neck, and his hands move down my body to hook into the waist of my pants. He pulls them down with my underwear, working them over my hips and down my legs, and his hands are shaking the entire time.
The tremor in them tells me something that his face and his voice have been trying to hide. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the realization hits me in the middle of kicking my pants off my ankle.
Kojo has never been intimate with a woman before.
I can see it in every careful movement — placing my bra on the bed instead of throwing it, pulling my pants down slowly instead of tearing them, the hesitation in his fingers every time they met new skin.
He is navigating me like a territory he has imagined a million times but never set foot in.
I look at him, kneeling between my legs, naked, and my eyes travel down.
His dick is thick enough to make my mouth go dry and long enough that my brain starts doing math I did not sign up for, and I press my thighs together instinctively — my body’s first response a very honest recalculation of what I thought I was prepared for.
“I want to mate with you, Kendra.” His voice is low, steady, completely serious, and the formality of the word mate instead of anything else lands different than anything he could have said.
He’s not trying to hook up. He’s not looking to fuck.
He is asking for the thing his entire species was built around, the act that completes a bond written before either of us existed.
But he sees my face and reads the hesitation before I can mask it, and his body shifts backward immediately, his hands lifting from my legs, his weight redistributing toward the edge of the bed.
I sit up before he can pull any further away, my hand catching his arm.
I push forward, using his surprise to shift the balance, swinging my leg over his lap and pressing my palms flat on his chest and pushing him backward until he’s lying beneath me with his head near the foot of the bed and his eyes wide open, looking up at me like everything he thought was about to happen just changed.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I tell him, and his hands hover at my hips, not gripping, just resting there, waiting, his chest heaving beneath my palms.
I lean down and kiss him slow this time, controlling the pace, and his mouth opens under mine with a groan that starts deep in his chest and vibrates against my lips.
When I pull back and look at his face, what I see there makes me want to ruin him.
A thousand years of waiting, written in every tight line of his expression, his fingers pressing into my hips like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he loosens his grip.
I slide down his body, his abs tightening under me as I go, his breathing catching hard enough that I hear it stick in his throat.
I wrap my fingers around him and every muscle he has locks up at once, rigid from his neck to his thighs, his head pressing back into the mattress with a sound that isn’t a word but something he’s been holding for centuries escaping all at once.
“This is mine,” I tell him, and I mean every syllable.
His dick is hot in my hand, the heat pulsing against my palm, and I lower my mouth onto him, just the tip, tasting the salt and the furnace warmth of his skin, and his hips jerk off the bed and a cackle rips out of his throat so loud the windows rattle.
I pull back, startled, and he slaps a hand over his face with his eyes wide.
“I apologize,” he chokes out from behind his fingers. “That was my Bouda.”
I grin and take him in again, deeper this time.
His Bouda can do whatever it wants while I am busy.
He’s hot on my tongue, bordering on uncomfortable and quickly crossing into addictive, his furnace pulsing through every inch of him, and I take him deeper until my mouth stretches around his thickness and the groan he releases is so raw it makes the hair on my arms stand up.
One hand finds the back of my head, sliding into my hair, not pushing, just resting there, trembling, and the restraint in that gesture while he writhes beneath me is the most attractive thing I have ever experienced in my entire life.
I work him until his hips are moving in a rhythm he can’t control, ragged sounds escaping behind his clenched teeth that I can feel resonating in my own chest, and when I pull back to catch my air the noise he makes is devastating, a broken sound that tells me he would have let me do that forever if I hadn’t stopped.
I climb back up and position myself over him, reaching down to guide him where I need him, and the first inch makes me gasp out loud.
Not from pain but from the stretch, the fullness, the heat of him inside me so intense that I clench around him and we both groan at the same time, his hands gripping my thighs hard enough to leave marks.
I sink down slowly, shaking, taking him in increments to adjust to what I’m accepting, and his eyes are locked on my face as he watches me take him like it’s the only thing that has ever mattered.
I bottom out and we both stop breathing.
“Kendra.” His voice shatters on my name.
The formality, the composure, the careful restrained guardian who speaks only when necessary, all of it has left him, and in its place is a man who is feeling something for the first time and doesn’t have the vocabulary for it.
His palms slide up to my hips and his fingers press into the soft skin there and I watch tears gather in his eyes and spill down his temples into the mattress.
I lean forward and kiss the tears off his face, and then I roll my hips and the sound that comes out of him could wake the dead in Wintermoon, a groan so deep it’s almost subsonic, vibrating through both of us.
I do it again, finding the angle that drags him against the spot inside me that makes my vision blur, and his grip tightens on my hips and I start to move.
I ride him like I’ve been starving for this — and I have.
Starving since the night he pressed my hand to his chest in that motel room and I felt the bond humming between us like a live wire.
Three nights tangled together in this bed, feeling him hard against me, wanting him so badly my body ached with it, and now he is inside me and he’s mine and I am greedy about it.
I set a rhythm and he follows, his hips rising to meet mine on every downstroke, a reflex he figured out before his brain did, and the friction builds until my pussy is so wet and swollen that every grind sends sparks through my thighs and up into my belly.
His furnace is running out of control, the heat pouring off him in waves that turn the air around us thick and damp, sweat forming where our skin meets, my thighs slick against his hips, my palms sliding on his chest.
The room is tropical, the bed an inferno, and I don’t care.
Every time I sink down onto him the stretch and the heat and the fullness of him filling me sends a pulse through me that whites out everything except the feeling of his body beneath mine and the sounds he’s making that I want to record and listen to on repeat for the rest of my life.
He is unraveling beneath me, his head tipped back, the tendons in his neck straining, his mouth open with every breath carrying a sound that gets louder as I ride him harder.
His palms roam from my hips to my waist to my chest, his thumbs stroking over my nipples with a clumsiness that makes them more sensitive, not less, and he touches me like he is trying to memorize the shape of something he’s dreamed about.
I brace my hands on his chest and lean forward and give him everything I have, my hips grinding into him in tight circles, his back arching off the bed, the cackle building in his throat again.
I’m close and I can feel that he is closer, his rhythm stuttering, his grip on my waist bruising, his eyes wild and desperate.
“Kendra.” There is a warning in his voice, a desperation, his body trying to tell me something his mouth can’t finish. “I cannot, I am going to...”
“Let go,” I tell him, and I press down and tighten around him and roll my hips one more time.
He breaks, his entire body seizing beneath me, every muscle locking, and the sound he makes is not human, starting in his chest and ripping upward through his throat in a roar that shifts halfway into the Bouda’s cackle.
In the same instant he surges upward, sitting up so fast that my hands fly to his shoulders to brace myself, and I feel his ridge spike the moment his back straightens, every blade calcifying.
“Kojo?” I murmur, nervous at the fire in his eyes.
“MINE!” He roars out, then his mouth finds my neck and his teeth sink into the soft skin where my shoulder meets my throat.
The pain is blinding. Sharp enough to make me scream, his teeth locking down with a force that tells me this is not a man biting me but a predator claiming what belongs to him.
I feel the skin give and the heat of my own blood on his lips, and my vision strobes and my fingers claw at his shoulders trying to find something to hold onto.
But beneath the pain, rising up underneath it, the orgasm hits.
It crashes through me with a violence that swallows the bite whole, starting where he’s buried inside me and detonating outward in a chain reaction that seizes every muscle I have, my thighs locking around his waist, my nails carving lines down his back on either side of his spiked ridge, a sound tearing out of me that is barely recognizable as my own voice.
The pain and the pleasure tangle together into something I have no name for, something so overwhelming that my nervous system simply cannot hold it all at once. The last thing I register is his arms catching me as my body goes limp against his chest.
I don’t know how long I’m out, and when I come back to myself the first thing I feel is his mouth on my neck, not biting but slipping his warm tongue against the wound, his lips tracing the edges of the mark with a gentleness that makes no sense next to the violence that put it there.
I’m on my back now. He’s repositioned me on the pillows with the blanket pulled up to my waist, and he’s curled around me on his side with one arm across my stomach and his face buried in the curve of my neck, his lips moving against the bite mark in a pattern that I realize after a few seconds is not random.
He is whispering something, the same phrase over and over, his voice so low and so wrecked that I have to strain to hear it. “Please wake up. Kendra, please wake up. Please wake up.”
I try to lift my hand and it takes two attempts — my body feels like it’s been unplugged and rebooted. My fingers find his face and the sound he makes when he feels me move is a ragged gasp that breaks into something between a sob and a groan.
He pulls back just enough to look at me and his face is destroyed, his amber eyes red-rimmed, tear tracks running down both cheeks, his lips swollen from pressing them against my neck for however long I was gone.
“I am sorry.” His voice is shattered. “I am sorry, Kendra. I did not mean to, I could not stop it, my Bouda, the bite, I...” He trails off, his mouth trembling too hard to form words, and his hand hovers over the mark on my neck without touching it, his fingers shaking.
I pull his face down to mine and kiss him.
He resists for half a second, his body rigid with guilt, and then he melts into it, his mouth opening against mine, his tears wetting my cheeks.
I kiss him long enough to feel the tension leave his shoulders, his arm around my stomach loosening from its death grip and settling into something that is holding rather than clutching.
“I chose you,” I whisper against his mouth. “All of you. The man and the Bouda and whatever comes next. You didn’t take anything from me. I gave it.”
Kojo exhales and wraps his arms around me, burying his face in my neck right next to the mark. His tears are warm and steady on my skin.
I hold him with what little strength my body has recovered, both of us breathing in the quiet of the cabin, and I press my cheek to the top of his head and close my eyes and let the mate bond settle until sleep takes me under again.