Page 81 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

“Oh God,” I moan, pushing back to meet him as he reaches around to rub my clit in tight circles. I shatter again, my second orgasm ripping through me even harder than the first, my legs trembling so badly they barely hold me up as the aftershocks roll on.

Marcus stays buried deep, his thick cock still pulsing inside me. One large hand slides up my back, fingers tangling roughly in my hair, yanking my head back, arching my spine as he leans over me. His mouth finds the side of my neck, sucking and biting while his other hand grips my hip hard enough to leave marks. Each thrust slows and deepens, every stroke deliberate, grinding, letting me feel every inch of him stretching me open.

His tongue traces the shell of my ear, then dips to lick along my throat. “You feel so fucking good,” he murmurs against my skin, his breath sending shivers down my spine. His hands are so big I feel small in them, claimed, one palm easily spanning my hip while his fingers dig in and drag me back onto him.

I whimper at the overwhelming fullness, my body still fluttering around him. He keeps me there a long while, fucking me with slow, powerful strokes while his mouth devours my neck and shoulder. Then, with a low sound of need, he pulls out only long enough to flip me around again.

He lifts me and turns me to face him once more. I wrap my legs high around his waist as he pins me to the counter with his body. The shift is seamless, effortless with his strength. He drives into me with renewed ferocity, the raw power in him letting him go on without mercy.

Sweat slicks our skin. His hands bruise my hips, his mouth latching on to my neck, sucking marks I know I’ll feel tomorrow. Every thrust drives deep, claiming, his cock filling me completely, stretching me wide.

“It’s too much, Marcus, I can’t,” I cry out near the end, overwhelmed, tears slipping down my cheeks as the pleasure tips toward unbearable. My whole body shakes, every nerve raw after two shattering orgasms.

“Sure you can,” he snarls, his voice rough, his grip tightening almost painfully on my hips as he thrusts harder, pounding into me with deep, punishing strokes. “Take it, Jessa. Come on my cock one more time. You can do it.”

That last roughness shoves me over the edge, and I come on a sharp, broken sob, my walls spasming around him hard enough to drag his release loose with them. With a guttural groan, he buries himself to the hilt, spilling deep inside me, pulsing hot and endless as his body shudders against mine.

We stay locked together, both of us panting, trembling, his forehead resting against my shoulder, his arms banding tightly around me. The kitchen lamp throws long shadows over our joined bodies. Nothing breaks the quiet but our ragged breathing and the faint tick of the house going still around us.

Marcus finally eases out of me, and I ache at the loss. He leans down and kisses my forehead with surprising sweetness. I try to pull away, my legs shaky under me, reality starting to creep back in.

“And where do you think you’re going?” he asks, the words low, possessive.

I stammer something incoherent, my mind still hazy, and before I can form a real answer, he hauls me up into his arms. He carries me off against his chest with no effort at all, leaning close, his teeth grazing my ear on a soft bite. “I’m still hungry.”

A fresh pulse of heat runs through my pussy at his words. Wrung out as I am, I still want him, and I know I’m in for a long night.

Chapter Seventeen

Marcus

The wolf drags me out of sleep before dawn, and it wants to claim the woman by my side. My mouth is already at the back of Jessa’s neck when I surface, my teeth aching with how badly the animal wants to sink into her skin. A single bite would brand her mine before every wolf who ever caught her scent. I haul myself back so hard the mattress dips.

She doesn’t wake. Exhaustion has her too deep for that, sprawled on her stomach with her face turned from me, the sheet slack at her waist. Faint marks track down her spine where my lips wandered in the dark, and seeing them should quiet the beast pacing behind my ribs. It doesn’t. The wolf noses toward that untouched place at the curve of her throat, hungry for the one mark I didn’t give.

Sitting up slowly, the covers pooling at my hips, I make myself look at her rather than reach for her. None of this is right. My animal has never latched on to a person before, not with this ferocity, least of all a grown woman I met weeks ago. Every hour she breathes under my roof, it claws at me to close the distance. There’s only one creature a wolf strains toward this hard, and that’s a fated mate. I’ve been waiting for the bond since the night her car died on my road, waiting for the cord to draw tight inside me. Nothing pulls. No tether, no low hum, none of what Daniel described the year he found Hannah. Still the instinct roars at me to take her, to tilt her throat and make it permanent.

Getting up without waking her takes real care. In the bathroom, I wet a cloth under the hot tap, then wipe her down where the night left her spent. She murmurs into the pillow and burrows deeper. I kept her up past any decent hour, some dam between us broken clean through, until she was pleading for rest and I finally gave her mercy. Guilt tugs low in my gut as I draw the sheet over her shoulder.

A quick shower, and I dress in the dark. The wolf wants out. It wants four legs, the cold air, a straight line back to that bed, so I leave it leashed and go out on two feet instead.

The path along the edge of my land is wet from the night. I walk it out of habit, my thoughts sliding to the email I read off her phone. The job’s in Brenton, three states away, a firm with a fatter title and a company apartment waiting. I could kill that offer with two calls. Their name stuck with me, and I know men who know the men who run it. One quiet word from me, and the door closes.

But if Jessa ever traced it back to me, whatever we’ve built here will be damaged for good, and I’d deserve it. I have to talk her into staying, and that won’t be easy. Even now she watches every exit. One foot’s already out the door, and she’s not hiding that.

The path bends toward the old house. Ten years, and my feet still know the way. Daniel’s place sits back in the trees past the second creek, dark under a decade of ivy. I’ve run past it a hundred times and never once gone in. This morning I climb the rotted steps and put my hand to the door.

It gives with a groan. Inside, the dust lies thick, gone gray on the furniture Hannah chose. Nothing’s been moved. Their coats still hang by the door. A child’s rattle sits on the side table, right where it was set down. My chest goes tight as I move through the front rooms, past the kitchen, past the stairs, every room exactly as it stood the night they died.

The study stops me cold.

Where the rest of the house sits frozen in place, Daniel’s study has been torn apart. Drawers hang open, their contents dumped across the boards. Books lie splayed off the shelves. Someone dragged the desk from the wall, papers fanned everywhere, a decade of dust over the wreck. The damage is old, layered under years of grime.

Memory of the night I found them surfaces. Coming through the front, I caught the smell of blood and went straight to the bedroom where they lay. I passed this room on the way. The door stood open, and the study was whole. I’m sure of it. Someone came back afterward, into this one room, hunting for something Daniel kept.

The signet ring rises in my mind, the one Adrian pried from a dead girl’s fist three territories away. My father gave it to Daniel, and Daniel never took it off. It shouldn’t exist anywhere but on his hand or in his grave. I pull out my phone and call Adrian.

He picks up on the second ring. “It’s early.”