I come so hard my elbows quit, my whole body wringing tightly around him while he growls praise and fucks me through the pleasure.
He hasn’t finished, but he slows, still buried deep, his weight a warm roof over my back. His mouth comes down to my ear.
“Nine seconds.” He groans. “One breath of you, and I knew. Mine. My mate. I have been gentle about it for two weeks.”
A slow roll of his hips that steals whatever I might have said.
“A duke would beg you to burn for him. I don’t need to beg. I can smell you burning.” His tusk skates down my back. “Come for me again. I want the sound you owe me. The one you only make past thinking. I have rationed it long enough.”
Pleasure slams into me, and I feel as if I’m flying as a wave of ecstasy radiates throughout my entire body.
And he still doesn’t come.
When I can think again, I realize he’s stopped moving. He’s still hard inside of me, and his breathing is ragged. He’s waiting for something, and that something is my neck. We both know it.
So I somehow find words. “On your back. Now.”
He groans as he pulls out, and I almost come again. I’m shivering from pleasure as I climb over him and sink onto hiscock in one slow slide. Our combined moans would end the betting pool on the spot.
I think I’m at orgasm six, and I’m beyond being gentle. I slam down on his cock, and my toes curl as the pleasure builds in layers.
He sits up, and I wrap my arms around his shoulders and tip my head back. We’re grinding together, and his mouth hovers over my neck.
He breathes there, open-mouthed, shaking, and there’s the sharp graze of tusk. My entire focus is on that spot.
“Wren.” It’s barely words at all now, dragged up from the bottom of his register. “I need. It’s the bond, I can’t.”
I take his head in both hands, and I’m crying, apparently, and grinning, apparently, and there isn’t one single doubt in my mind.
A reasonable woman would have doubts, but I stopped being reasonable two weeks ago.
“Do it. Claim me. Keep me.”
He bites.
His teeth sink into the skin, and there’s zero pain. What there is instead is a door opening in my head. His warmth floodsthrough it and into my blood like light. The orgasm that hits me runs on both our circuits at once, my body clenching around him as he roars against my skin and explodes, unloading ropes of sticky cum deep into me while his cock pulses. The ecstasy is never-ending. Through the newly opened door I feel fourteen months of waiting, and then the afternoon a vent kicked on behind a woman’s chair and everything he thought he knew was obliterated. And beyond all of that, my name.
The rapture rolls past anything I have a name for, his pleasure and mine running together until I can’t tell one from the other, and I stop trying to.
We hang there together, his mouth at my neck, as aftershocks roll through us both. Distantly, I’m laughing and crying, and he’s shaking. The bond unfurls between us, line after line after line, permanent.
He releases my neck with aching care and licks the mark once, twice, tending it. It pulses but still doesn’t hurt. He cups my face and tilts it up to his. His eyes are all gold now.
“Thess’venna.”His voice is wrecked. “Now I’ll tell you. It meanswhat I saved.” His thumb moves across my cheekbone. “Every word, Wren. They were always going to be yours. I just didn’t know your name yet.”
He presses his forehead to mine, and the bond hums between us. I can feel his wonder and devotion.
The whole island got him wrong, and so did I. He was never silent. He was mid-sentence.
We miss dinner, which he considers an actual emergency, and so at 9 p.m., I’m sitting cross-legged on his too-small bed wearing his shirt as a ballgown, eating rewarmed stew while his cum dries on my thighs and his eyes track every spoonful with satisfaction. That’s how Diane finds us, because she knocks and barely waits three seconds.
To her eternal credit, she doesn’t blink. She’s probably seen every possible thing a matched pair can do. She just opens a folder, extracts a packet, and sets it on the table next to the tablet full of dukes.
“Match confirmation, bond registration, and the transport manifest for Thursday,” she says. “Sign where the flags are. Ms. Delgado, the IMA will also need you to report to medical for your translator implant before relocation. It’s speech only. The runes stay runes.”
“I’ll read to her,” Valdrek says from behind me, and I hold in a giggle.
Diane looks at him. Looks at me. Looks at the tablet, on whose screen the library app is still open to a cover featuring a shirtless man in a kilt. She opens her mouth and then closes it.
