That finished me off. I pumped him full, shuddering with the spasms, letting out a sound that would’ve been a howl if it’d come from my shifted throat.
Everything went away but Nate and that pulsing conduit of magic between us, filling all of my senses. It tasted like honey and salt and fireworks. I leaned down and took Nate in my arms, burying my face in his still-damp hair—now damp all over again with sweat. He nestled there, breath quick against my shoulder.
And then, like so many incredibly stupid post-coital men of all species who’d come before me, I murmured the first words that floated through my idiot head: “I fucking love breeding you.”
Chapter 4
Nate
Sometimes our mate bond faded into the background when Ian and I were apart or I’d been too busy to focus on anything but what I had in front of me. I could always feel him. But it didn’t always take up a lot of my attention.
And then sometimes the bond overwhelmed me, flooded with Ian’s almost painful adoration of me, more devotion than I’d ever imagined before I mated with him and realized what had been right in front of me all along. At times like that, I didn’t even try to keep my grip on reality outside of Ian’s arms, Ian’s love, Ian’s perfect understanding of me on a fundamental, almost quantum mechanical lev—
“I fucking love breeding you.”
My eyes popped open. Ian’s muscular, freckled shoulder. Beyond that, the cobwebbed ceiling, populated by thousands of spiders who, in their microscopic arachnid brains, still had more tact and common sense than my mate.
Breeding me?Breeding me?
“Excuse you?” I rasped, my voice still wrecked from how completely Ian had wrecked me.
While thinking about…breeding me, apparently.
Anger and dismay gathered in a lump in my stomach—in whatever space Ian had left for it, anyway, given the size of his cock and knot. And the amount of come he’d produced. I could feel that, too.
Definitely anger. Not anything else. Nothing else could possibly make me tighten up like that, clenching around that massive, thick…breeding implement he had me impaled on.
Even in a weird fantasy, the thought of being pregnant just made me feel sick—and I had the feeling it might have even if I’d had the right equipment for it.
But…
Fuck. There had to be a logical explanation for my descent into bizarro-world. Pheromones. Oxytocin. Proteins in semen? No, that had been an ad for some super fucked-up MLM skin care line.
“Hello?” I prodded him in the side, meeting the telltale resistance of tensed muscles. Obviously he knew how badly he’d fucked up. “I know you’re not asleep or in a sudden coma or dead, Ian. Yet,” I added darkly.
He pushed up on his elbows and met my eyes.
Gods, it was hard to be angry with him when he looked at me like that.
When he left his end of the bond completely open to me, it provided incontrovertible proof of how he felt about me.
But a lot of the time he didn’t even need it. The intensity in those pale blue eyes never failed to take my breath away, even when he’d been an unbelievable dick with no brain-to-mouth filter…and given the events of the last five minutes, I might be revisiting the empty skull theory.
No, definitely staying fucking pissed, even though it’d be a lot easier to give in to the hurt and insecurity that underlaid my anger. Especially because it would be.
And I’d definitely wait for him to speak first. I’d stare at him in stoic, simmering silence.
Two seconds later, I burst out with, “You know, you knew I was a guy when you mated me. And that I’m not exactly the fatherly type. You fucking knew! So where the hell do you get off—”
Ian’s eyes flared gold, the only warning I had before he swooped down and kissed me, hard enough to bruise my lipsand prevent any other words from coming out of them. Trying to wriggle away from that kiss proved as futile as trying to get out from under him would’ve been.
Not that I really wanted to. But I ought to have wanted to.
Angry! Not hopelessly, helplessly aroused again, his thick, slick cock still buried in me, his tongue teasing into my mouth the same way he’d used it to work my hole open a few minutes ago.
At last he lifted his head, meeting my now-hazy gaze from only a couple of inches away. “Those are two different things,” he said. “Totally not related to each other. Also, I get off—” He stopped abruptly and cleared his throat, looking shifty. Shiftier.
I had to mentally rewind, slowly, before I could make any sense out of that, starting with the last thing he’d said.
