23. Louise
W hen I wake, Frank and the others are just shuffling in from the outside, their faces all rosy with the cold, a general feeling of malaise wafting about them along with the musty smell of different cigarette brands and cold sweat.
“The tub out there is still hot?” I purr, sitting up from my place, head-down on the farm table.
None of them move to answer as I arch my back and stretch my arms over my head—my naked body prickling with goosebumps in the chill cabin air, the fire having quieted to a few flickering coals in its neglected state.
“Well, if any of you start feeling up to it—” I stand from the wooden bench, letting the fleece blanket slip from my shoulders, showcasing my nude form to all four of The Saints; their eyes all dart toward me. “I could use some company out there.”
Before any of the other boys can respond—Frank peels away from the group and follows after me, one of his hands reaching out to give my ass a playful swat on our way out the door.
It’s hardly my first winter hot tub, so I don’t bat an eyelash as Frank and I stroll the few feet through the snow to the large wooden tub in the nude—slipping into the delicious hot water up to my neck, eager to have Frank’s hands on me, his knot inside me; even if I can tell that there is dissent in the ranks of The Saints.
In my heightened state of arousal from the heat—I can’t quite be convinced to make the obvious conflict my problem at the moment; my intellect and senses somewhat dulled by my sigma drive to breed or be bred.
So I don’t ask where the others are. Even though I’m greedy for all four of them at once again.
The animal instincts in me—the impulses of a predator tell me that my hunt is almost guaranteed to be successful if I just focus on Frank for this moment.
Everything else will follow in the rhythm of life, death, sex, magic, and the nature of all living things.
I glide across the small circular pool of water, pushing off from one side of the submerged bench ringed around the wooden tub to where Frank sits on the other side.
He allows me to slither next to him on the bench, one of his hands already below the surface of the steaming water, stroking his cock languidly—his eyes searching my face, as if he might see something suddenly illuminate.
I’m leaning in, eyes closed—my mouth moving towards his as my hand creeps up and over the ridge of his hip bone under the water when Frank surprises me with a simple but disarming question.
“Do you believe in fated mates, Louise?” His voice is low, and when I open my eyes to look at his face, Frank’s stormy blues are fixed far away on the golden sun setting over the glittering icy line of the horizon.
The question takes me aback.
“I don’t know if I do,” I sigh, more than a little thrown by such a fanciful romantic notion passing Frank’s lips after this morning. Hell—as I sit here right now, my hand just short of reaching for his throbbing cock.
“You ‘don’t know’? What makes you think it can be real?” His eyes cut to me, and I find myself unsettled by the sheen of tears that seem to have formed.
Doing my best not to be insensitive, when I’m struggling to use my thinking brain as my clit pounds and my muscles clutch so tightly they begin to make my stomach ache; I attempt to give us both some relief by straddling Frank on the bench—my pussy still slippery with slick, even underwater—gliding against Frank’s hardness, his pulsing knot as I grind against him; my hands creeping into his hair—combing the wild black tresses away from his brow.
“It’s hard to say something is impossible or possible simply because,” I attempt to give a non-answer, guiding him back to the knowing rhythm our bodies crave in the chemical wash of the heat—but Frank doesn’t take the bait—despite all of his alpha sensibilities.
Instead, Frank’s hands snake up my spine to the nape of my neck—one of his strong palms cupping the base of my skull, easing my head back as he lays a chain of whisper-light kisses down the column of my throat.
Each little press of his lips makes me shudder, his cock twitching against my slick petals as I tilt my pelvis forward—Frank’s cock head dragging along the seam of my pussy lips, ready for me to seat myself on his turgid erection with the slightest downward movement.
“What keeps you from saying it isn’t possible?” His voice rasps just beside my ear.
My sigma aura blossoms anew, the frenzy of the heat pushing me to let the lascivious poison drip from my lips. “You don’t want me to talk about taking some other alpha’s knot, especially not when I would rather have you inside me right now.”
To my surprise, Frank’s lips curl against the shell of my ear as his teeth gently nip at my earlobe, careful not to break the skin.
“Don’t tell me what I want, Sweetheart,” he growls, lifting his hips, his hard cock pushing inside me as his hands grip the butterfly curve of my hips, pushing me downward until his knot presses against my throbbing clit, my body not ready to admit his knot yet.
“Only once,” I manage to gasp out as Frank’s hot hardness nudges at my cervix . The two of us begin to move against each other—writhing in the steaming water, the ripples lapping rhythmically at the edge as I adjust my riding pace—slow and deep.
“Had a heat in the field,” I huff against the effort of our coupling, my breaths thinned by the frigid air and physical exertion. “Needed a knot,” I whine pointedly, dropping all my weight against Frank—the swollen knurl at the base of his shaft stretches me—seeking admission to my tightness.
“A Fed fucked you so good you thought you were fated to fuck him for the rest of your life?” Frank challenges, a hand roving over the curve of my ass, rocking me against him so that my clit rubs deliciously against his knot as he assists my ride.
The memory theater deep inside my brain spins up, the long dusty film projected onto my mind’s eye showing me that fateful night; Dennis McBride and I, on a dodge-y stakeout, trying to get eyes on a dangerous unsub for the hundredth time; the two of us crammed into a rusted sea green sedan with tinted windows on the edge of Danner Hollow State Park, deep in the white mountains.
Nearly 48 hours we had been in that car, hours away from even a rest station; Both Dennis and I had protested the assignment.
In part because we were no longer the lowest on the BSU food chain and felt that the most recent Quantico grads should have been assigned to pay their dues; but mostly because I was close to my heat—unable to take suppressants after being put on mandatory heat blocker cycling on the heels of an assignment that had required me to take heavy suppressants and false scent producers for nearly two months.
Susan Lowry herself had assured me we would be relieved from our post before the situation became dire. Plans and standards of best practice tend to fall by the wayside when the biology of our designation actually takes hold, though.
After almost thirty hours of intense conversation and huffing each other’s scents—my body simply could not stave off triggering a heat.
With a complete loss of inhibitions, I tumbled headlong into full on heat sickness.
Far away from a hospital or placement where I might find medication to help manage the heat chemically or professional heat helpers who were trained to guide me through the heat and back into homeostasis, and Dennis toeing the line of rut around my suddenly raging heat; we spent the next 72 hours in and out of the car, all over the glorious nature of the state park locked in the most intense coupling I’d ever experienced before.
The very last time Dennis knotted me before the heat broke had been the most exquisite of all those that had come before; him on his back on a blanket in the tall, soft grass.
As I rode him slow and deep, my pale skin and red hair glowing in the silvery blue light of night—the warm summer breeze making the field around us appear as the surface of the ocean long before dawn —the reflection of the moonlight off the blue-tinged grass as it rippled in the wind like whitecaps over the distant windswept waves.
With a sudden swell, Dennis had flipped me onto my back on the soft blanket—so that I was looking up at him, the stars and the moon; his knot filling me like the full silver cratered coin in the sky above us.
Was the night really that beautiful? Was our coupling so ecstatic, so divinely sensuous because of brain and body chemistry reaching a fever pitch? Or was the sensation of otherworldly harmony, a touching of souls, if even for a fraction of a second, real?
We lay there, joined together—our breathing normalizing as the grasses whispered around us until we both drifted off.
The next morning, not but a handful of hours later, we woke—covered in mosquito bites, dehydrated, and ravenous; the heat broken—the magical connection we’d shared the night before, a distant memory.
Of course, Lowry had known what happened.
Both McBride and I had reported to her before going dark during the heat.
While hardly thrilled at the situation, it wasn’t as if she herself hadn’t been reduced to similar scenarios back in her days as a field agent.
After she gave her blessing and sealed the records, Dennis and I agreed to never speak of it again.
Not long after that, we both moved onto steady office work and out of the field. It wasn’t hard to avoid Dennis and any potential deepening of our relationship beyond our professional involvement with one another.
It’s just as I’m about to surface from this deep pool of memory that I feel something—like a warm, open hand running itself through the rippling waters.
Frank?
It couldn’t be… a mating bond?
“Dennis?” The name slips his lips as a question—tinged with want, but also hurt.