Page 120 of The Florist and Her Alphas

Her breath catches. Her hand comes up and grips my forearm, hard.

“Yes,” she whispers. “Please. Cover it. I don’t want his marks anymore.”

I sink my teeth into her, and she flinches.

I press carefully. The smallest possible pressure. The most controlled thing I have ever done in my life. Not a bite. A touch of my teeth, hardly more than a pinch, just enough to break the skin. I hold for half a second. I pull back.

I wait.

I do not move. I do not breathe. I listen for the burn — the acid heat of a failed mark, the rejection her body has known before. I listen with every cell in my body.

She blinks, breathing hard.

Suddenly, the bond settles.

It is gold. It is everything. It fills my chest and spreads outward through my ribs, down my arms to my fingertips, into my throat, behind my eyes.

I feel her in my body in a way I have never felt anyone. Her heartbeat in my own chest, as if it had always been there. Her breath. The soft rise and fall of her belly against mine. The way she loves me. A wave of warmth radiates from the center of my chest and fills every empty space I have ever carried.

I pull back fully and look at her face.

Her eyes are wide. Her lips are parted. Tears are spilling down her temples into her hair, and her hand has come up to press against her own chest, right over her heart, like she can feel it too.

She has felt the bond take.

I had not breathed for the last twenty seconds. I breathe now. A long, shaking exhale against her cheek, and my voice, when it comes, is not my own.

“Liana?”

“I’m okay,” she whispers with tears in her eyes. “It doesn’t burn.”

The old scar begins to disappear. The silvery, jagged ridge is softening under my mark, smoothing, the angry raised tissue melting away and leaving only the warm gold glow of my claim. Her freckled skin knits clean around it.

“Ezra,” she breathes. Her hand flies to the spot, her fingertips pressing against smooth, unbroken skin where the scar has been for six years. “It’s gone. Ezra, it’s…oh my god, it’s gone.”

She is crying and laughing at once, her fingers moving over her own collarbone in disbelief, and the sight of it undoes me more than the bond did.

“It’s gone,” I confirm, my voice rougher than I mean it to be. I press my lips to the fresh gold mark, to the smooth skin around it, kissing the place where his claim used to sit. “He doesn’t get to leave anything on you. Not one thing. I’ll take every scar off your body one at a time if that’s what it takes.”

“Thank you,” she sobs, turning her face into my throat. “Thank you, thank you.”

My brothers exhale all at once — a soft collective sound that is half prayer, half laugh. Julian’s hand finds Cole’s shoulder. August’s glasses are fogged. The mark has taken. After so many failed attempts on her body, after three years of scars, the first one has taken, and it is mine.

I kiss her temple. Her skin is damp with tears.

“You are my wife,” I say, and my voice cracks clean through the middle of the word. “You are my omega. Forevermore.”

She nods against my mouth. She cannot speak. She is shaking under me, her body trembling with the new bond, her pussy clenching rhythmically around my cock.

I feel her tighten around me and remember, distantly, that I am still buried inside her.

I begin to move.

Slowly at first. Deep, measured strokes, my eyes never leaving her face. The warmth of the new bond pulses steadily through my chest with each thrust, golden and alive, and I can feel her body responding to me in a way it had not before. She is more open. More receptive. Every roll of my hips makes her gasp louder than it had before, her back arching, her hands clutching at my shoulders.

The bond is amplifying everything.

I thrust faster. Harder.