He kept moving through it, extending the pleasure until I was trembling beneath him. His pace increased, becoming more urgent, more primal. His face above me was transformed by pleasure and concentration, sweat beading on his brow as he chased his own release.
“I’m close,” he warned, his rhythm faltering. “I need to pull out—”
“No.” The word was out before I’d fully formed the thought. My body clenched around him reflexively, refusing to let him go. “Stay. I want it inside.”
He looked startled, then almost panicked as his control slipped. “Isabeau, I can’t—I’m going to—”
A fierce possessiveness overtook me. I locked my legs around his waist, keeping him deep. “Give it to me,” I demanded. “All of it. Make me yours.”
Something was happening that I didn’t fully understand. My body seemed to be gripping him tighter, making it physically difficult for him to withdraw. Alain noticed it too, his eyes widening.
“My beauty, your cunt is gripping me like a vise,” he groaned, the crude language sending another spike of pleasure through me. “I can’t—I can’t pull out.”
His hands found my breasts, kneading them with desperate passion as his hips jerked erratically. With a final, guttural cry, he came, his release hot and pulsing inside me. The hot gush seared along my inner skin, lathering me with my own slick. The sensation triggered another, smaller climax of my own, my body milking his for every drop.
When I inhaled sharply, I caught our scents merging. A manly aroma with my sweeter one. I wanted more, but I physically could not handle it.
When it was over, he collapsed beside me, careful not to crush me with his weight. We lay there panting, sweat cooling on our skin, the amber light casting everything in a golden glow. His arms came around me, pulling me against his chest in a gesture that felt oddly more intimate than what we’d just shared.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice soft with concern.
I nodded, still trying to process the intensity of what had just happened. My body had responded to him in ways I hadn’t expected, hadn’t known it could. As if it recognized something in him that my conscious mind was only beginning to understand.
“What happened at the end?” he asked. “I couldn’t... I couldn’t pull out. It was like your body was holding me in.”
I bit my lip, uncertain how to explain something I barely understood myself. “I think... I think it’s the magic. My body wanted your seed. It wanted you to merge with me.” The words sounded primitive spoken aloud, but they felt true.
He didn’t laugh or look disgusted. Instead, his expression turned thoughtful, his hand absently stroking my hair. “Like a claiming of your own.”
Yes. That was exactly it. Something primal in me had claimed him, just as my beasts had claimed me.
On impulse, I shifted in his arms, exposing my shoulder where the claiming mark from my beasts formed an overlapping circle of three. The center remained unmarked, as if waiting.
“Bite me,” I said, guiding his mouth to the empty space. “Here. In the center of the rings.”
He hesitated only a moment, searching my eyes for certainty. Finding it, he lowered his mouth to my shoulder and bit down, barely breaking the skin, leaving his mark on my flesh forever. A jolt of pleasuring pain shot through me, and for a brief moment, I felt all four of them connected. My three beasts with Alain, linked through me in ways I couldn’t fully comprehend.
When he pulled back, his eyes were filled with wonder and a possessiveness that matched my own. “What happens now?” he asked.
I shook my head, settling back against his chest. “I don’t know. But we’re stronger together. All of us.”
The forest waited outside our sanctuary, with all its dangers and mysteries. Gaspard hunted us. The witch plotted. My beastssuffered. But for now, in this moment of peace carved out of chaos, I allowed myself to believe that we might all find a way to survive together. That I could have all of my men in the end, even if it was in blissful bubbles like this tree house I’d created.
sixty
Laurent
The dreamscape connection tore away like mist in harsh sunlight, leaving me gasping on the jagged obsidian ledge. Isabeau’s sad eyes lingered in my mind, and the presence of that prince.Alain, his name was fed through our connection. Her royal protector with his earnest blue eyes and obvious devotion.
I wanted to hate him. A part of me did, that territorial beast that viewed any male near our mate as a threat. But I’d seen the way he looked at her, not with Gaspard’s possessive cruelty, butwith something that mirrored what I felt. What we all felt. And lost souls help me, I was grateful.
“She’s with him,” Bastien growled from beside me, always the first to voice what we all knew. “That prince. He’s touching what’s ours.”
Marcel’s massive body shifted on my other side, his honey-colored fur rippling with barely contained emotion. “She’s alone in a world trying to destroy her. Would you prefer she had no one?”
The mountain beneath us groaned, another fifty feet materializing above our heads. The peak that never ended, the climb that never ceased, our eternal punishment. I closed my eyes, focusing on the claiming mark that burned on my shoulder. Through it, I could still feel Isabeau. Not just her presence now, but her emotions.
Confusion. Desire. Trust. All directed at the prince who’d taken her, then risked everything to save her.
