I stare at him, getting lost in him all over again.
“I can’t risk him figuring out who you are. Even though we hid it from everyone very well,” he admits after a few long moments.
My fingers rub the pooling slick around my pussy, and he finally turns his attention to what I’m doing and watches. His expression mirrors everything I am experiencing.
“Who am I?” I press gently, wanting to hear him say out loud what I already know.
“Mine,” he growls.
A surge of his dominance swamps our bond with his possessiveness. It elicits a tremor of sensation over my skin, and the room fills with my sweet scent, made sweeter by my arousal and his desire.
He groans, the noise rumbling all through the room like thunder in a storm.
Using fingers that were inside my pussy, I beckon him closer. And then I beg, my voice floaty and soft, “Aleksei, please, your distance literally makes me see stars.”
He moves as fast as lightning as the space between us disappears. But he doesn’t reach out to touch me; his beautiful, mismatched eyes fall to the bite on my hand. We’re past hiding from each other, and I twist my hand, offering it so he can see the deep moon-shaped scar that will forever be on both sides of my hand.
His touch is as tentative as it is reverent. It’s consuming, and the whole moment is made more intense because of his voice. It dips low and is intimate. “Why did you hide this?”
I leave my hand in his but swing around to sit on his lap. “The same reason you tried to pretend I wasn’t yours.”
For the first time since I met him, he lets go of his ego and his designation. And it’s fucking intoxicating as his true self rains down over me from above. The intensity of him, coupled with the insight as to how much of himself he has hidden from the world, is as scary as it is brilliant.
One day soon, we will utilize his incredible acting skills, and mine, to fix our troubles, but not until after I’ve taken my fill of him. Like this, he’s everything.
“Aleksei,” I whisper, trying to get serious for a second, but he’s blown my mind, so I can’t stop my hands from exploring him while I brush my nose under his jawline. “I have to tell you something.”
He holds my hips up off him, but not because he doesn’t want me. God, I can read how much he does. He wants to hear what I have to tell him, because that’s Aleksei—a caregiver, dream catcher, and fierce protector rolled into one.
“Tell me,milaya,” he insists. Again, his words rumble over my skin as obvious as I hear them.
“Kade and Santiago…”
He stops me by lowering me onto his lap and pressing his lips to mine. Where we touch, sparks of pleasure tease my senses alive.
His lips are soft, his tongue pressing inside my mouth. I whimper, lost to the way he switches between claiming licks and nips to pouring all his emotion into a kiss. I lose my mind, falling into each swipe of his tongue. It’s so goddamn incredible kissing him, so much better than I ever dreamed.
Aleksei sucks my bottom lip into his mouth, dragging it through his teeth while he shuffles our position so he’s lying over me, pinning me down with his hips. “After. First, I’m tasting you, feeling the stretch of your beautiful pussy around my knot, then licking until you scent of only me. Once it’s undeniable who has claimed you, then we talk of them.”
I want that.
Goddamn, I want that.
But I’d be a shitty mate to him if the first thing I did was deceive him. It doesn’t mean I don’t savor the opportunity. Moving my hands to undo his shirt buttons, I undress him without looking or saying a word. He lets me push him up, so I can take it off. I freeze up and lose myself for all the wrong reasons when my fingers trace over the scar, because I fucking know how close I came to losing Aleksei. He wouldn’t remember—he was out of it—but I live it again whenever I wake in the night.
“Look at me,” he barks. It’s not aggressive, but I can’t fight against the command.
I find his eyes on my face, and he dips to kiss me slowly, chasing away dark memories. “I’m here, that’s all that matters.”
“Yes and no, Aleksei.” I hide under his chin. “I saw you nearly die.”
“And I’m about to show you how alive I am.”
His words are a balm on wounds I have been avoiding and ignoring. I drop my head and submit to the weight I’ve been carrying around for so long. Jesus, I want this with him, but Ialso know how dangerous it would be. And I won’t risk him. Or them.
“I want you to drug, then protect me until my heat has passed. I’ve got medication in my room.”
His breath rushes out as he locks up in a sudden rush of anxiety. I kiss his throat as my fingers trace his scar on his side. “I can’t do my heat here. I want to. Every cell in my body pines for you, but I can feel your anxiety, and it matches my own. It’s why you locked me in your suite, without my guards, because you know how dangerous it would be to simply sayfuck the worldand languish with me.”
