Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
NELL
Magnus carried me to my bedroom as if I weighed nothing.
He set me on the bed with a care that was at odds with the way his eyes looked.
They were amber burning through the brown, that golden light that I'd seen when I'd met his wolf back in the gardens of his parents' home.
Did that mean the man and the beast were operating as one?
Was I about to fuck the man or the beast, or both?
Real talk? I didn't care. I could barely form a singular thought, much less the complex math of being with a man who could shift his shape.
My whole body was humming. Nerve endings lit and attentive. I was thinking more with my breasts than I was with my brains.
Magnus stood at the foot of my bed. He took off his shirt. I had seen him naked before; the shift in the garden. But there was a difference between seeing and having. Right now he was here, and the lamp was on, and I was going to look at him properly.
The scars on his shoulders. The darkness of the hair across his chest. The lines of muscle that were not the product of a gym but of decades of shifting, of running, of carrying the physical weight of being what he was.
He was marked in ways that told a story I only knew parts of. I wanted to know all of it.
He came onto the bed. He started at my collarbone. I understood that what had happened in the living room had been a warm-up.
He moved down my body with the focus of a man who had decided that every square inch of me was worth his full attention. Not rushing. Learning. Mapping.
When he reached the inside of my knee, he stayed there. I had not known the inside of my knee was an erogenous zone. Magnus had apparently known for some time.
His mouth brushed my skin. The contact was barely there. A whisper. A question. Heat unfurled beneath it, spreading through me in slow waves.
I felt his breath before I felt the next kiss. Warm. Deliberate. My skin flushed. Every place he touched awakened as if it was a separate entity, becoming aware of itself.
When he pulled back, cool air rushed in to replace him. The loss was immediate. Then his mouth returned somewhere else.
Heat again. A slow, maddening cycle of warmth and absence. Touch and anticipation. Enough to make me tremble.
His hand slid along my calf. The calluses on his palm contrasted with the softness of his touch. Gentle. Careful. The combination was unfair. Everything about him felt unfair.
The warmth of his mouth.
The rough brush of evening stubble against sensitive skin.
The steady rhythm of his breathing.
The way his eyes darkened whenever he looked down at me.
I reached up. My hands found his hair. He stopped. Complete withdrawal.
"Oh, you are not—"
"I'm the boss."
Those three words hit every one of my triggers.
I had spent my entire adult life working for bosses. Bosses who changed deadlines. Bosses who scheduled meetings that should have been emails. Bosses who took credit for work they hadn't done and delegated problems they couldn't solve.
My first instinct was annoyance. But then I realized my hands were empty. My calendar was cleared. Magnus hadn't asked me to do anything except lie back and enjoy.
I was the one lying on the bed.
I was the one being catered to.
I was the one receiving his undivided attention.
Meanwhile, Magnus was treating my pleasure like a personal project with deliverables, benchmarks, and an aggressive commitment to quality control. The man was currently putting in an astonishing amount of effort on my behalf. And he was very, very good at it.
"Breathe, Petronella."
I released the breath I had been holding. The tension in my thighs ebbed by a fraction.
He waited. Watching my chest rise and fall. Watching the flush at my collarbone recede slightly. Reading me with those amber eyes that saw everything, cataloguing my arousal with the precision of a man who could hear my heartbeat slow.
Then he started again.
He parted my thighs. Took a long, slow lick. We'd been here before. He'd received a glowing performance review. He would excel again. I tried to hold still for him to complete this task and — hopefully — move onto the next.
But fuck, he was good at this. He tongued my clitoris.
I twisted my fingers into the bedsheets.
He delved his tongue into my entrance, going deeper than any tongue should be able to.
I grabbed hold of the headboard. His nose nuzzled my clit — was that on purpose?
— and his tongue tasted my perineum, my anus.
I wasn't a backdoor virgin, but I'd only had dick in there, not tongue.
I was not going to survive this interview.
I reached the edge again. Felt it gathering; that deep, coiling tension that started in my lower back and radiated outward. He knew; he always seemed to know the moment before my orgasm was at the door. He pulled back again.
I said something that was not a word.
He made a low sound that might have been amusement if it hadn't been so warm.
"Please," I begged.
Magnus moved over me. He looked down at me with those amber eyes. I looked up at him. Something passed between us that was not heat and not strategy and not the negotiation we had been conducting since the cabin. I reached up and pulled him down.
He came. He kissed me. He entered me.
I froze. "Condom?"
"I'm a wolf. We don't carry diseases."
"Pregnancy."
He shook his head. "I can't get you pregnant."
I wanted to argue. His dick was inside me. That's how women got pregnant. Maybe boy wolves could only get girl wolves pregnant? I wasn't a wolf. I decided to trust him. He hadn't lied to me once.
The first time was slow but not restrained. He wasn't holding back. Magnus Blackwood was a big boy. But I didn't feel a single pinch. He slipped inside me as if we belonged together. I felt every inch of him, every shift and adjustment, my body accommodating him with ease.
I pulled him closer.
He went deeper.
I made a sound against his throat. His whole body responded to it; a shudder he didn't suppress, a tightening of his arms around me. His rhythm lost its perfect calibration for one unguarded moment before he found it again.
Good. I wanted him unguarded. I wanted to be the thing that made him lose himself.
I wrapped my legs around him and changed the angle. He let me and exhaled sharply into my hair. A surge of triumph burned through me alongside everything else that I'd taken an inch of control. I loved having him in charge, but I was bossy by nature.
We moved together. Finding it; the rhythm that two people find when instincts take over.
I was close again, which should not have been possible so soon. My body had apparently abandoned all previous schedules in favor of Magnus Blackwood's. I dug my fingers into his back and chased the orgasm. He met me, stroking deeper, hitting the exact spot where I needed him.
He was going to let me do it this time. He was going to let me come. That realization was a prerelease. So when the orgasm hit, it left me drowning.
I had never clenched so hard in my life. The shudders had never lasted this long. I had never once cried during sex. All of these things happened. Magnus kept his promise and held me through it.
Distantly, I felt his surrender a few moments after mine. Such a gentleman to wait for me. His growl was low and broken against my throat. His whole body shuddered through his climax.
We lay still. His weight on me. My hands in his hair.
And then I felt it.
Something — changed. Inside me. A swelling, a fullness. A pressure built where there had been only the thickness of his cock nestled inside me. This was bigger than his manhood.
It wasn't painful. It was the opposite of painful. It was warm and deep and spreading outward through my whole lower body like the heat of the first sip of a stiff drink.
I shifted, trying to relieve the pressure and continue riding out the aftershocks of my orgasm.
The pressure held.
I shifted again, and realized with a dawning awareness that I could not move away from Magnus. Not because he was holding me. His arms were loose around me. His weight easy. Nothing restraining.
"Magnus?"
"Don't move." His voice was different. He sounded as if an animal had hold of his vocal cords. The amber in his eyes was very bright.
"What—" I tried to shift again. The pressure bloomed warm and insistent. It was not going to let me go.
"Nell, stop. Fuck. Don't move, baby. Just — fuck." He pressed his lips to my temple. His arms tightened around me. "Don't be afraid. I'll explain."
I was afraid. There was something growing inside of me. It felt good, but… not wrong. Just big. Magnus was already a big boy. This thing between us, this thing inside of me, was growing to the point I knew it would split me in two. But there was nothing I could do. There was no escape.