Chapter 6
Nicky
His cock softens and slides from me, and in the aftermath of the most intense sexual experience I have ever had, more than I could have imagined before actually feeling it happen to me, I wonder what the hell I am doing.
Orgasm chemicals had me high. The whole being in heat for my mate had me absolutely addled. But in the cool light of day, I realize that this is not where I am supposed to be.
I just turned into someone I don’t even recognize. Someone who lets a man do what he wants to her. Someone who lets herself be dominated completely.
As fast as I submitted, I rebel.
I get up out of bed and start pulling my clothes on. My pussy aches as I move, and my ass burns as I pull fabric back over it.
Rex lies in bed, watching me with a faintly amused expression on his far too handsome face.
“What do you think you are doing?”
“I need to get back to my pack.”
He sits up, propping himself on one elbow, rippling sexily while his hair falls in a dark curtain over his shoulder. God, he’s hot.
“I told you what would happen once we mated. You’ve taken my knot and my seed. You’re full of life belonging to me. You know you can’t go back and have things be the way they used to be.”
I look at the door. His eyes follow mine. We are both doing the same calculation. How quickly can I get there, and can I do it before he is able to block it?
* * *
Rex
“Are you going to trap me here? Make your butler watch me? I heard about him. He won’t have as much time to clean your underwear if he is busy with me.”
She smirks, sassy, rude, and so fucking full of herself. I should be irritated by her nerve, but if anything I am pleased by the fact our mating has made her feel so confident with me as to dare challenge me so directly.
I consider what to do next. I feel rather languid and relaxed, not to mention supremely confident in our mate bond. She felt so perfect around me. She took me so beautifully. We joined at an animal level, and soon the beast inside her will emerge for me.
I should keep her around for that, but the fact she doesn’t seem inclined to shift at this precise moment makes me think she is not about to. Sometimes it takes several matings to trigger the first full shift.
I could sweep her up in my arms right now and carry her off to the reserve. Part of me thinks that is the only correct thing to do. She needs to be taught to behave. She needs to be shown what true submission means, not just when she is so aroused she can barely think.
I can see a glint in her eye, and I suspect that is what she wants me to do. She wants to be forced to obey, over and over again, never offering any obedience of her own accord.
I know one thing for certain. Her hunger has been woken, and she is going to want to be bred again and again.
She can play this little game if she likes.
She will be crawling back to me before she knows it, and the shame of having to beg for her next mating will teach her a lesson that forcing her to go to the reserve will not.
“I’ll call you a car,” I say.
The look of shock on her face tells me I just made exactly the right choice. She wants to be able to fight me and have me rip away all the fundamental parts of her so she can cast herself as my victim. But I like who she is, and I want to preserve as much of it as I can.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. You’re my mate. Not my prisoner.”
She almost looks disappointed. I reconsider. I could perhaps call her a car and have that car deliver her to the reserve. That would amuse her on some level, I think.
But I know if I were to kidnap her, I would have no end of trouble.
Constant escape attempts, the illusion that she does not need me as badly as I need her reinforced over and over again.
It would be messy, the pack would be party to it, and I want to bring her in with a certain level of decorum that does not seem to come naturally to her, and used to not come naturally to me.
“Is that not what you want?” I lower my voice and my chin, so I am looking at her with the eyes of a predator. “Do you want something else, my little mate? Do you want to be captured and owned? Do you want to be imprisoned against your will? I can give you that, if that’s what you want.”
“No,” she starts to stammer, even as the blush on her cheeks tells me that’s precisely what she was hoping to hear. This little monster wants an even bigger monster to hold her.
I get out of bed and walk toward her. Her eyes widen in that adorable way they do when she thinks she might be in trouble.
I don’t think my mate truly understands any of her internal impulses yet.
I think she follows them like the little animal she is, but she needs time to really understand who she is.
I grip her by the wrist and pull her close to me.
“Don’t you dare leave my side,” I growl in her ear, feeling the shiver that runs through her as she enjoys the intensity of my displeasure.
“You impudent little whelp. Don’t you understand your place with me?
You will do as you are told. You will obey me willingly.
And you will present yourself for mating when I desire you. ”
Her eyes widen, her face pales and then flushes almost immediately as fear turns to arousal.
It’s the animal in her; it needs this intensity.
The same way she wanted to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck, her life in my jaws, she wants to be held by me now in this more human form.
She is mating with my beast just as much as she is mating with me.
I smack her ass hard. I feel myself get harder at both her yelp and the way her ass feels underneath my hand, soft and pliable and punishable.
She is awakening the darkest parts of me.
Perhaps I am not merely playing along with her desire to be ruthlessly dominated.
Perhaps she is bringing out in me the very things that she needs from me, changing me as I change her.
I like the way it feels being the bad guy she wants.
I have spent years making myself conform to a more civilized standard. I have pushed rougher, darker, more controlling impulses down, replaced conquest of the flesh with conquering board rooms. I have become incomparably wealthy as a result. But I have not felt this alive.
I have one of her wrists in my grasp. She takes hold of my arm with the other. I do not know if she wants mercy, or if she wants to feel me.
Before I know what I am doing, I have hoisted her up in my arms, ripped her clothing off her curvy little body, and I have her wrapped around my cock again. Her weight is nothing to me.
One of my arms is wrapped under her thighs, her other leg is curled around my waist. She is at my mercy entirely, spread lewdly open.
I am making savage sounds as I pound her already ravaged pussy with my thick cock.
She is locked in on me, her eyes on mine, her mouth open in a near constant moan.
She is tender and she is probably sore, but she arches for me anyway because her breeding deprived body needs this.
Another knot. Another deposit of seed right where it needs to be, deep inside her clenching, writhing body. She grinds against me, rutting her clit against my pubic bone as my knot keeps her stretched around me.
These post-orgasmic moments are sacred. I can feel the connection being knit between us, the physical closeness of our bodies, the way the fluids of our intimacy are mingling all goes to create the foundation of the rest of our lives.
I wish we could stay like this rather than return to mundane sanity, but we cannot.
As my knot softens, I feel the real world returning.
I can sense her resistance flooding back.
I can see the rebellion and the panic and the what am I doing in her eyes.
I let her slide down my body, already knowing what is about to happen.
“Don’t you go anywhere,” I growl in her ear, patting her ass.
I go and take a shower. I can hear her rustling around next door. She is trying to be quiet, but I have the kind of hearing that can pick up a mouse under a plant a hundred or more feet away.
She’s getting herself together, ready to make an escape.
I listen to it all with a little half-smile on my face. The sexual intimacy we shared was one thing. This is another, maybe even deeper kind, knowing what she is going to do before she does it.
I hear the door close, a little harder than she wanted it to. I hear her curse to herself under her breath. My smile grows wider.
She runs off, as I knew she would, getting into the cab I called for her, which has circled the block several times waiting for her to come out and flag it down.
Silly little thing. She really needs me to be the villain in her story.
Fortunately for her, I would do anything for her.
And, I have to admit, I am quite talented when it comes to villainy.
* * *
Nicky
My heart is pounding throughout the car ride. I am sure I absolutely reek of sex, but if I do the driver has the sense not to say anything about it. It’s a woman, which is nice.
The way that ended was wild. At first I thought he was just going to let me go, then he flipped it, then he somehow let me go anyway. I’m still not sure what to think. I definitely do not know what to feel, besides how tender my ass is where it meets the seat of the car.
We pull up outside the Runaway warehouse and I have a brief moment of not being able to believe he actually let me do this. I’ve run, and he’s let me.
“Thank you,” I say as I realize it’s time to get out of the cab. “How much do I owe…”
My question trails off as the driver smiles at me in the rearview mirror, while zeroing out the meter with one well-manicured finger.
“It’s already been paid for by Mr. Regent,” she says.
“Of course it has,” I say, slinging my door open and practically tumbling out. He knew. He knew the whole fucking time.
I’ve defied Rex, and he’s made it very unsatisfying for me to have done so. I really thought he would have properly insisted on keeping me. I would have freaked the fuck out if he’d done that, of course. I would have called him a monster, and I would have meant it.
Even worse, I miss him.
I miss everything about him. His scent. His presence. The energy I feel when I am around him. Walking back into the office, everyone knows what happened to me. They can smell it. They can sense it.
I don’t say a word, but they all react anyway. There are rounds of cheers and laughs, whooping and general tomfoolery amongst themselves.
“Boss got laid!”
I don’t know who shouted that. One of the guys. I don’t want to know who did it, either. I’m not in the mood to kick some overgrown frat boy’s ass this morning.
“Do none of you have any work to do?” I smile as I ask the question. It’s nice to be back among my people. I can’t imagine what it would be like to inhabit Rex’s world. His apartment is nice, of course.
“So…” Laura grins when I get up to the office. “When’s the wedding?”
“Please don’t,” I groan.
“We’ve all missed you,” she says. “I mean, we woke up, wondered where you were, wondered why the place smelled like wolf… we were getting ready to come after you. Thought he might have taken you off. But he let you go.”
“Yeah. Well. I left. But, yeah. I guess he did.”
She stares at me, her jaw properly dropped. I’m tempted to reach out and close it for her, but then she says what’s on her mind.
“You left? You mated with him and then you left?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s not a big deal. I’m an adult. I can have sex. It’s fully legal and everything.”
“That’s amazing. Most shifter girls would never leave their mate once they’d experienced his love.”
I just got done having the most amazing sex of my life and I still want to gag at the phrase, experienced his love.
“That’s propaganda,” I tell her. “It’s not like that.”
She rolls her eyes. “Maybe you didn’t do it right,” she says. “Or maybe he didn’t do it right?”
“We did it right,” I confirm, which is the plainest way I can say that I feel like my entire interior has been rearranged.
“Did you shift?”
“No.”
She frowns at me. “But when a female shifter mates with her mate for the first time, she shifts. You should be a wolf right now. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless he’s not your fated mate. Unless your inner she-wolf didn’t rise for him…”
I walk away. More than anything right now, I need to do some work. It’s the only way I am going to regain some semblance of sanity. A shower, too. That would be nice. About time I used my corporate bathroom.
She follows me into my office, throwing theories out at me. “There’s still time,” she says. “If you mated recently, the transformation might not be on you yet. He shouldn’t really have let you go. It’s irresponsible.”
“He didn’t let me go. I left,” I say. “And I am fine. I’ll shift on my schedule, when I feel like it.”
“I don’t think that’s how that works,” she says.
“I’ll be fine. I promise. You don’t need to worry about me. None of you do. We’ve got a lot of work to do. I’d like to get some more videos made today. We don’t want to start skipping days on the schedule.”
Laura gives me a guarded look, but nods, because I’m refusing to talk anything but professional matters. I know that I’m supposed to be shifting, but I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel anywhere close. I feel… what do I feel? Kind of sore and tired and a bit hungover. I am tender.
I want to get my work done.
What I don’t want to do is transform into a feral animal who has to be held down and fucked for her own sanity. They say you only shift once you fuck your fated mate, but they don’t say it has to happen involuntarily. I get to choose what kind of animal I am. I chose to be human. And in control.
It takes a little while for the buzz to die down, but once they realize I am serious about getting things back on track, everyone gets back to work.
We all have schedules and deadlines. I know it seems as though I have no control over my pack, but the truth of the matter is they know what to expect from me when it comes to the work we do here.
We take it seriously. We go all out. So once I get back to work, everybody follows my lead.
That’s what real leadership is. Setting an example and having others fall in line because they want to, not because I’m a big, smelly wolf creature.
I want to bury myself in the familiar, and for an hour or so, it works. There are moments when I actually get to forget I ever met Rex Regent.
Then I move, or something aches or throbs, or just for no reason at all, flashes of the sex we had keep coming to mind while I’m trying to focus on some content for new brand deals.
It’s very distracting. I feel as though I’ve lost the full and independent use of my faculties, and I do not like that.