Thane’s hands moved over her, learning her, and she was panting, caught between us, her fingers pressing into my hair before she seemed to remember she’d put them there.
“Hold on to whatever you need,” I said against her thigh.
Thane said something low near her ear. She shivered. He drew her onto his lap and drew her thighs apart, placing her legs outside of his knees, exposing her swollen and glistening pussy. I looked up the length of her to see her watching me, flushed and undone and still watching, and it was the watching that broke the last of my restraint.
I lowered my head.
Her taste hit me like a blow. Sweet and sharp and clean. Warm honey, sweet cream, spicy silver blossoms. Her hips surged immediately, instinctively, her body straining toward me, silently begging for a deeper touch. Thane wrapped his hands around her thighs and held her tighter. I inserted a second then a third finger, and pumped them while licking her clit. She came apart at the edges almost instantly—her slick flooding me, her muscles clenching my fingers, her breath dissolving into broken syllables that weren’t quite words.
Thane’s hands moved against her skin above me. I could hear him murmuring to her, steady and low. She sagged against him as the tension ebbed out of her and he petted her down, while I slowly stroked the last flutters out of her. We’d done this before—shared a female, moved around each other in the dark—but never an omega and it was never like this. She was the difference. She was our center, our grounding force.
I wasn’t done. I needed more, was desperate for more. Her heat spike wasn’t quite over and I needed more of her taste. It was more addictive than any of the drugs the soldiers used after injuries or to combat boredom. Her taste, her scent, could get me through anything.
I bent my head and dragged my tongue through the thick syrup coating her pussy, working my fingers slowly in and out of her easily. I’d learned that she responded to slow better than to fast, that her breath caught higher when I varied the pressure, that she made a sound when I used my tongue a particular way. And I was determined that I was going to spend considerable time learning everything that made her make that sound. Her fingers tightened in my hair. Her thighs tried to close around my head and Thane held them open, his hands bracketing her hips, and she made a noise at that—at the gentle restraint of it—that told me something useful about her.
“Malric.” His voice, not hers. Warning or request, I wasn’t sure.
I felt it too. The shift in her, the heat building differently, the way her whole body had gone taut instead of fluid. She was close. She’d been close when I walked through the door and we’d brought her back to the edge, and this time it wasn’t going to pull back.
Thane moved against her. I heard the low sound he pressed into her neck, felt the shudder that moved through her in response, and then her hips were rolling up against my mouth.She was saying something in fragments, “please” and “yes” and both our names woven together without apparent concern for order, and I stopped being strategic about any of it and gave her what she was asking for.
She broke on a cry that I felt in my chest.
Her whole body locked and then released in a wave, her back lifting from the furs, her hands pressing me into her without gentleness. I stayed with her through it, through every shuddering pulse of it, until she went soft and her hands loosened and the sounds she was making thinned into something quieter.
The heat in the room settled.
Not immediately, not completely, but it dropped from the frantic register it had been holding and became something bearable. Something warm rather than urgent. I pressed my mouth to the inside of her thigh once more, just to feel her twitch, and then I moved up the nest and lay down on her other side.
She was between us. Breathing in pieces. Her skin was damp, her eyes were closed, and her scent had shifted into something softer, sated, and I lay there and breathed it in and didn’t say anything.
Thane’s eyes met mine over her. He looked as wrecked as I’d been in the corridor. His jaw was tight with the effort of restraint, and I looked back at him and didn’t look away, and after a moment, his mask came down.
Her hand found mine without her opening her eyes.
Her fingers laced through mine and held on like someone who’d been reaching in the dark for a long time and had stopped being surprised when they didn’t find anything.
I let her hold my hand.
The tower was quiet around us. The cold stone outside the nest, the banked warmth inside it, her breathing graduallyfinding its rhythm between us. I stared at the curved ceiling and kept her hand in mine and waited for the part where I pulled back, where I found the tactical distance I’d maintained for three days and retreated behind it.
It didn’t come.
Thane’s breathing slowed beside her. Her grip on my hand eased as sleep pulled at her, but I didn’t let go.
I stayed where I was.
Chapter Eleven
AVELINE
Ididn’t want to move.
That was the first coherent thought I had—a flat refusal from my body to do anything other than lie exactly where I was, warm and wrung out, with Thane’s arm heavy across my waist and Malric’s hand still loosely holding mine. My brain had stopped producing any thoughts whatsoever. There was only the nest, the quiet, and the unfamiliar sensation of having been completely undone and not minding.
Then my stomach made a sound that was deeply undignified.
Thane’s chest moved against my back. Not quite a laugh.
