He grabbed her arms and tore them from her chest. With a strangled squeak leaving her lips, he buried his face between her breasts and pressed them together. Reid urged her back onto the pod’s edge once more as he suckled and teased, spending the time he should have before worshiping her lush curves. It was almost too easy how quickly she stopped protesting. Too easy when she leaned back onto her hands and allowed him to feast at his leisure. Too easy to bring the strong heady scent of her arousal back. He lavished and nipped her peaks until they were raw, until the color of them matched the color of the marks on her neck.
And when her legs spread for him again, he slipped inside, taking back every delicate inch of her tender flesh.
The rest of that afternoon he made sure he did his job, and that he did it well. And plied Clara with enough of his seed that she’d never be without it again.
Chapter Eleven
***
He left her in hisbed, soft and well-loved, the marks of his claiming all over her body.
Reid sat next to her, uncomfortable in the after-throes and with the cuddling, unable to find a position to relax because a niggling sensation of guilt tapped at his gut. He used her. She used him. He gritted his teeth thinking that they were equal in that matter but they weren’t. He ran his palm down his face.
Clara had fallen right to sleep as soon as he laid her on his bed—he remained wide awake. The metal in his body longed to release and reform, shift and resettle, to make him back into the canine he was so he could find peace and sleep with his—
With Clara.
His mutt had a better sense of smell, a sense of hearing that was intensified. His beast had a simpler state of mind, an alert one in which he was not bogged down by everything that made him a man... and a machine.
Everything is easier when I’m not human.
Reid shifted his teeth in and out, his claws as well, finding the process moderately relaxing. He kept his back to her, afraid he’d wake her and take her again.
Even now, after everything, after the consumption of her body, submitting to his dominance, and even after he started on the long and tedious trek to claim everything of Clara’s—starting with her body and her desires—he was restless, his beast growling to prowl.
Reid gritted his teeth and stopped himself, having already risen from the bed and circled the edges of the room twice.
Restless.
His eyes shot to Clara turning over on his bed, burrowing deeper into his covers. He moved to loom over her vulnerable, sprawled frame and sniffed the hair that lay across his pillows; calculating each of his movements so he wouldn’t accidentally touch her.
She won’t hear me, smell me, know in any form that I’m here.
Reid read her movements, willed his internal tech to scan and access every part of her at every moment. If Clara awoke, he’d know. If a heavier breath escaped her lips, he’d know. If her foot twitched.... he’d know.
He knew a lot already, almost everything when it came to her physically, but now that she was his and part of his pack—the idea he didn’t want to acknowledge because it felt so fleeting—he wanted to know her mind.
