Calder shifted us around so that we came to lie on our sides, with my back to the fire and the front of my body warmed by his.
Fucking perfect. Nothing could be more perfect. I could’ve died content in that moment, nuzzling into his chest, cradled in his arms, stretched to bursting by his alpha knot.
And that’s when I understood.
I’d been ready to die in his cell, when he mated me, because it’d been the only way out. I’d have died without ever having been happy, though. And now I’d be ready to die if necessary, because I couldn’t imagine anything that’d make me happier than this.
Ideally, a whole lifetime of this.
But now I knew what it meant to have everything I wanted.
Sometimes I was pretty sure Calder was smarter than me, and at moments like this, I became very sure.
“I’ve never regretted mating you,” I said. “Not for a second. Not then. Not now. Never. But you’re right. This is better.”
His low laugh shook me, and shoved his knot against some very delicate places, and I cursed and clenched around him and ended up pinned and kissed and fucked a little more deeply.
Finally we lay still again. “Do we have to wait for midnight for the champagne?” I tried not to sound too plaintive, but I failed.
Calder held me even closer. “You never need to wait for anything you want that I can give you,” he said simply. Just stating a fact.
I closed my eyes and tucked my head under his chin. “In a few minutes.”
He kissed the top of my head. “We’ve got time.”
And we did. As much as we needed.
Chapter 10
Nate
“You’re seriously not going to tell me why Jared wanted them?” Ian grumbled.
He’d been unreasonably annoyed since I’d taken Jared’s phone call a few minutes before, maybe because I’d laughed myself sick over what he had to say, and maybe because I’d refused to let Ian in on the joke, and maybe because Jared had called me at all.
Or maybe because Ian had spent New Year’s Eve hanging out on the couch watching bad sci-fi on my laptop while I snored the whole night away, dead to the world, and then had barely gotten me off with my dick down his throat before Jared had called.
Shit, probably that one.
I’d already gotten dressed, grabbed two blank white mugs out of my stash, and tucked a Sharpie into my pocket. Ian had gotten a pair of boxer-briefs on, somehow, but his erection gave me doubts about their continuing structural integrity.
My mouth watered.
Yeah, Jared’s admittedly awesome prank could wait a few minutes, and with the state Ian was in, it’d only be averyfew minutes.
Plus, I could strategically expedite matters.
I put the mugs down. “Sit on the couch,” I told Ian, “and we can do that thing where I pretend I’ve never seen an alpha cock before and you have to talk me through getting it in my mouth.”
He dropped onto the couch, shaking his head and spreading his legs enough to give me room to kneel. “Are youreally in that much of a hurry to do whatever Jared has planned with some coffee mugs? Seriously?”
I gaped at him.
Ian cracked up, subsiding into a crooked grin, and waved an inviting hand at his cock. “You’re not that hard to read, baby. Not that I’m complaining.”
“You won’t be,” I promised.
And he didn’t, although he cursed a lot, and tangled my hair into a bird’s nest with the big hand he wrapped around the back of my head, and thrust into my mouth in a way that would’ve made someone who’d actually never seen an alpha cock before cry.
