19. Brakkus
Brakkus
Iset her on the bed and reached for the shift out of habit. Human form was easier on a woman her size. Smaller hands, less of me, a body that wouldn’t make her brace.
“Give me a second,” I said. “I’ll change.”
“Change into what?”
“My human form. It’s easier on a?—”
“Don’t you dare.” She came up on her knees and took my face in both hands, her thumbs against my tusks. “You do not get to tell a girl she’s your mate and then put on a costume. I’m looking at you. Stay.”
I stayed.
I’d worn the human face to the Vossic table the first time Nadia brought me.
Wore it to the wedding, so the pictures would be something Orsala could hang in a hallway.
Earlier today, Theron stood in my living room and called me a spectacle.
Now a five-foot-five human knelt in my bed and told me to keep the tusks on.
I put my hand flat between her shoulder blades and laid her back into the pillows.
“You held everybody today.” I got my mouth to her ear. “Lola. Otto. Me. You sat on that sofa and let them take you apart, and you smiled the whole way through it.”
“Brakkus—”
“So here’s how this goes.” I took both her wrists in one hand and set them above her head. Her body pulled tight against the hold, tested it, and let go. “You lie there. That’s the job. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes.”
“Good girl.”
I undressed her one piece at a time and put my mouth on each stretch of skin as it was uncovered.
She was small enough that I could span her ribs with one hand and feel her heart beating under my palm.
Her scent came up thicker the lower I went, sunshine and cotton candy and something underneath it that I’d spent weeks calling a con.
I got the last of her clothes off and pushed her thighs apart with both hands.
“I can smell how bad you want it,” I said. “Soaking wet, and I’ve barely touched you.”
I settled my shoulders between her legs and put my mouth on her. The first slow drag of my tongue arched her off the mattress. My tusks pressed into the soft of her inner thighs. She felt them there and made a low sound and pushed down against my face for more.
I held her open and worked her clit slow. She started to come apart, and I stayed at that pace and made her have it that way.
Then I pushed two fingers into her and curled them up. She broke around them hard, her nails going into my forearms, my name coming out of her in a low moan. I stalked up her body while she was still shaking.
“Look at me.”
She did. She looked at the tusks and at the green of my hands where they held her wrists, and she got one hand loose and set her palm flat against my jaw and left it there.
I pressed the head of my cock to her and held.
In the bath I’d been in human form, and even then I’d had to feed it to her by degrees. This was all of me. She opened around the first inch and gripped down on it.
“Easy.” I gave her another inch. “Breathe. I’ve got you.”
She took me slowly, her breath catching, until her hips sat flush to mine and there was nowhere left to go. She let out a long broken sigh and went loose under me. Full, stretched, done fighting it. I held still and let her feel exactly how much of me she’d taken.
The instinct came up black and certain. Mine. Mine.
I set my jaw against the mating instinct and started to move.
Slow. All the way out and all the way back, deep enough to pull a sound out of her she couldn’t have stopped.
Her wrists drifted up to the pillow on their own and stayed.
Her body rose to meet mine and took me, and the room filled with the wet grip of her and her breath coming apart against my throat.
“Come on my cock, baby girl. Let me feel it.”
She clamped down so hard it dragged the breath out of me. It pulled me over after her. I drove deep and spilled into her, and at the top of it my mouth found the side of her throat.
My teeth came down against her skin. Right over the pulse, over the place the mark goes. Her heartbeat slammed up under my mouth, fast and open.
Every instinct I had roared at me to close my jaw.
I held there and shook and did not bite down. I’d taken a hard knee to the head in Chicago and survived. This was harder.
I lifted my teeth off her throat and put my mouth against the unbroken skin instead.
Then I pulled out of her, slow. She made a small sound at the loss of it and reached for me before her eyes were open.
“I’m right here.”
I got out of the bed anyway. In the bathroom I ran a washcloth under the warm tap and wrung it out one-handed, and when I came back she had rolled toward my side of the mattress with one arm across the place where I’d been.
I cleaned her up. She lay there and let me do it.
“Turn your leg for me.”
“Why?”
“I want to see.”
She rolled her hip and let it fall open. Two marks sat high on the inside of her thigh where my tusks had pressed, red going purple at the edges. I put my thumb next to one of them.
“Does that hurt?”
“No.” She lifted her head off the pillow to look. “Do it again tomorrow.”
Fifteen years in the pits taught me what a body can take before something in it gives. I sat on the edge of my own bed with my thumb next to a bruise on a woman half my size, and she was asking for more.
I got the blanket over her, killed the lamp, and lay down. She came across my chest and put her cheek over my heart. I set my arm around her and held on.
My jaw ached from holding back.
It would have taken half a second. One bite, right where my mouth already was, and she’d be mine in the blood the way she was mine everywhere that didn’t leave a mark.
The instinct kept telling me the job was unfinished.
It would keep telling me that until I closed my teeth, and it did not care what she had or hadn’t agreed to.
Out past the window the hills were black. The crickets were going in the brush below the fence.
I lost Nadia in February. Half a year, and I’d have told anybody that was the end of it for me. Then a woman came up my driveway in a Subaru.
A bite is forever. Hannah had said yes to my bed. She had not said yes to forever, and I wasn’t going to take the difference off her in the dark while she was too turned on to say no.
She shifted against my chest.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked, yawning.
“That you need your rest after taking all that cock.”
She giggled sleepily and then drifted off.
Brielle got into this house by pretending to want the widower so she could turn around and use my son for profit.
Now I lay in the dark holding a woman who wanted nothing from me.
I moved her hair off her neck and rubbed my thumb over the place where my teeth had been moments before.
Holding back the claim was torturing me.