Her nose twitches, reading the salt in the air, and her face crumples sweet. “Ohhh,” she breathes, half a laugh in it, “these are happy tears.”
I take her face in both my hands and bring my mouth down on hers. She opens under me with a small broken sound. Her tail goes loose, drops flat to the floor, all that lioness fight gone soft under my mouth, and her knees start to go the second I lick into her.
I catch her up against me and don’t stop. The kiss goes deep, slow until I can’t stand it anymore, and I drink down every sound she makes. She clutches the front of my shirt just to keep her feet, and when she finally tears her mouth off mine she’s gasping, wrecked.
“Aaron...” she manages, breathless, but I’m already dragging my mouth down to her claim mark, and she shudders so hard her words fall apart. I bend and scoop her up. She yelps and throws her arms around my neck. I lay her down on her back in the middle of the bed.
Before I climb up after her, I catch the new dress crushed under where we landed. I want it somewhere safe, and that’s all it takes now. The dress slides out from under her and lifts off the bed on nothing, drifts to the chair against the wall, and settles folded careful over the back.
Mara’s head whips around to follow it, her eyes huge. She hasn’t seen me reach for magic like this since the Glen. “How did you...” she starts. I look back down at her and grin, and the rest of what she’s wearing vanishes the same way, leaving her bare and stunned under me.
“I’m the happiest man alive right now, Mara,” I tell her.
My own clothes go with the next thought, gone the second I want them gone. I climb onto the bed and brace myself over her. For the first time in a month, there’s nothing in my head but her.
42
Mara
His mouth comes down on mine and takes whatever I mean to say with it. He kisses me like he can’t get to me fast enough, like he’s done being gone, and I get his name out against his lips, broken in half.
“Aaron.”
His hands are already everywhere, dragging down my sides, spreading over my hips, sweeping up to my breasts and back down like he can’t decide where to land, like he has to touch all of me at once or none of it counts. He doesn’t answer me. He doesn’t say a single word, and that, more than the weight of him, is what tells me how far gone he is.
My lion isn’t shocked. I am, my head spinning at how fast he’s gone from happy tears to this. But she’s awake and delighted, and she’s the one who answers him.
My tail curls up and strokes his cheek, slow and proud. It slides down the length of his back, learns the muscle there, then slips between our bodies, over the hard plane of his stomach, to wrap around his dick and stroke him in one long pull.
He breaks against my mouth and grunts into me, ragged, and the sound moves through my whole body.
His mouth leaves mine and trails down the side of my neck, over the claim mark, and lower. He closes his lips around one nipple and works it filthy, sucking deep and rolling the other between his fingers, pinching just to the edge of too much, and my back bows clean off the bed to feed him more of me.
I’m stroking him the whole time, my tail working him in a slow nasty rhythm, and he grinds himself down into my grip and groans against my breast like it’s the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to him. The wet drag of his mouth, the sting of his fingers, the heat of him pushing into the curl of my tail—I’m soaked already, rolling my hips up to find some friction he won’t give me yet.
His magic comes for me then, catching both my wrists at once, warm and absolute, pinning them above my head to the bed so I can’t move them. My tail goes slack in the same instant, uncurling from his dick and falling limp against the sheets like he reached in and switched it off, and inside me my lion stops.
She doesn’t pace or fight it. She curls down small and warm and rests her head on her paws. My lion has never once gone quiet in the middle of this, not ever, and the wrongness of it cuts through the haze.
“Aaron.” I narrow my eyes at him, my breath coming fast. “What are you doing?”
He lifts his head from my breast just enough to look at me, and his mouth is wet and his eyes are something I’ve never seen on him in bed.
“This is the happiest moment of my life,” he says, his voice scraping. “And you’re about to feel every bit of what I feel. What I feel, you feel.”
His eyes go black. Not dark. Black, edge to edge, the way they did last time, his magic rising up under his skin, and everything in me goes hot.
“Oh, shit.” I know what this is. I know exactly what this is.
This is the price of the spell he cast on himself, the one meant to keep me from getting pregnant. It was always going to come to this—him going feral for me, every line of him one raw want. He’s just been too buried in the Glen and Eric and a crown he won’t pick up to let it surface. Now he knows I’m carrying his cub, and it’s loose.
“Aaron. Aaron?—“
He drops his head and puts his mouth back on my breast. My eyes go wide, and I stop breathing.
The orgasm rips up through me from somewhere deep, nowhere near where his hands or his mouth are, folding me around it. It’s the hardest I have ever come in my life. He hasn’t touched me there.
His hand is on my hip, his mouth is on my breast, his magic is in me. He’s poured what he feels straight into my blood, and I come so hard my pinned arms strain against the hold, my voice breaking open on a sound I don’t recognize.
