She parted her thighs wider, whimpering for more, but her hands stayed locked behind my neck. I let one finger drift down to the swollen pearl that lay just underneath the water, and traced the gentlest shapes over it. Again and again, until?—
Her scream echoed in the small room, water splashing over the sides of the tub as her climax held her in its grip. I held her in mine, too, making sure my fingers never stopped moving on that place, until she shuddered and relaxed.
Then I slowed my touch, gentling her down. “So perfect.” I kissed the side of her head, then her neck, and moved my hands back to her breasts, tracing a love letter on her body. “One,” I murmured, counting off the first of the twenty-eight orgasms I would provide in the night’s ritual.
Then I began the process again.
GORAN
The night she was taken out to sea and given back tied to my best friend was one of the longest of my life.
She’d called me Gorgeous again, without even realizing it. She’d let me carry her, hold her. Being around her was dangerous.
I’d never stopped loving her. I never would. But she was an obsession I had to conquer.
Lachlan came with me that night to the camp, making sure my men were safe from the storm. Then he joined me in polishing off three bottles of potato whiskey before we were able to sleep in the gale.
The storm brought unseasonal ice and snow, along with an oppressive malevolence that seeped through the tent flaps, and there was more than enough to do to make sure the horses and the men stayed alive. Since there wasn’t shit we could do about mythical ice beasts, I’d only told a few of my trusted trainers about the possibility of there being a magical element to it.
Lachlan slipped away the next day, heading toward the sea with his pelt tied around his waist. Five days later, he came back in the evening. “It’s gone.” His golden-tipped hair was wild,and dark circles ringed his eyes. “I followed it almost to the Svellvollr. It’s gone far north.”
I gave him food and drink and expected him to return to the house, but he headed back to the sea after the sun set. “Lachlan, where are you going?” He didn’t answer, but the slump in his shoulders made it clear that he was in no state to be alone.
My own heart heavy, I walked the path to the house, needing to call on Kellin to swim after his brother. Someone needed to.
I didn’t make it inside. Halfway down the garden, a small window was open, and the only scent that ever brought tears to my eyes stopped me and drew me toward the stone wall. On the other side was the bathing room.
And her.
I’d thought the hell I’d be consigned to after death would be fiery. But a deeper hell was here, the middle of Lachlan’s mint patch, with the scent of everything I’d lost in my life rising up all around me, and the only one who could return it to me as out of my reach as the moon.
Mint and rain. I sucked in breath after breath of it, my cock going stiff instantly and my knot throbbing in my trousers.
The irony of it almost made me laugh. Lachlan had planted extra mint in his garden when he’d noticed me carrying a sprig of it into my tent one night. I’d lied and told him it was for my tea. The truth was I’d hardly been able to reach a climax in a decade without those scents in my nose. Her Omega perfume.
The rain had stopped during the day, but started again as I lurked there. The night wind whipped my wet braids against my cheeks like it was administering a punishment, and I wondered if I deserved it.
After all, I was a warrior, full of honor and pride. I’d been so full of honor, I’d let the woman I loved more than life itself leave me because I had promised to let her go. I’d been so full of pride, I hadn’t followed her, even when my heart told me to run to her.No, I’d waited for an excuse, for Levi to call upon me to fulfill a debt, as if breaking one vow was mitigated by fulfilling the other.
“Nineteen! Kellin, how do you do this?” she gasped out inside, the barely-opened window allowing her voice to seep through. Her voice and her scent, honeyed mint and musk, mingled with the icy rain that died down every time she spoke, though that could have been my imagination. “Five nights now?” She laughed. No, she giggled.
Damnit to all the hells, that wasmygiggle.
“I’m making a map of your body,” the selkie—who had once been my friend, but who I was now planning a thousand ways to murder—replied, his voice more confident than I’d ever heard. “I have to explore every inch of you to do so, of course. Huh. I think I discovered a new valley… here.”
More giggles.
This was Kellin? If it had been Lachlan, I would’ve believed it. Lachlan was boisterous, almost cocksure. But his quiet older brother apparently gave new meaning to the word. Cocksure? If he’d fucked her nineteen times… No, the selkie mating ritual called for twenty-eight orgasms, for twenty-eight nights.
He’d been giving them to her for five nights now.
My mind clicked through the numbers as a murderous haze threatened to fall over it. I breathed deeply, remembering whose fault it was that I stood out here, while he lay in there with her. Pleasuring her. Driving into…
I had almost no time to pull my cock free of my trousers before I came, leaning against the cold stone wall, without even touching myself. Just smelling and hearing her.
Her voice pierced the buzzing in my mind. “Remember, no fucking. No matter what I say later. I can’t… I made a…”
“I promised I wouldn’t fuck you, my queen. These nights are not about me or my pleasure.” The wind whistled again, slappingthe bone bead of one of my braids against my ear. I rubbed away the sting and slumped on the wall.
