I lean forward and kiss the tears off his face, and then I roll my hips and the sound that comes out of him could wake the dead in Wintermoon, a groan so deep it’s almost subsonic, vibrating through both of us. I do it again, finding the angle that drags him against the spot inside me that makes my vision blur, and his grip tightens on my hips and I start to move.
I ride him like I’ve been starving for this — and I have. Starving since the night he pressed my hand to his chest in that motel room and I felt the bond humming between us like a live wire. Three nights tangled together in this bed, feeling him hard against me, wanting him so badly my body ached with it, and now he is inside me and he’s mine and I am greedy about it.
I set a rhythm and he follows, his hips rising to meet mine on every downstroke, a reflex he figured out before his brain did, and the friction builds until my pussy is so wet and swollenthat every grind sends sparks through my thighs and up into my belly. His furnace is running out of control, the heat pouring off him in waves that turn the air around us thick and damp, sweat forming where our skin meets, my thighs slick against his hips, my palms sliding on his chest.
The room is tropical, the bed an inferno, and I don’t care. Every time I sink down onto him the stretch and the heat and the fullness of him filling me sends a pulse through me that whites out everything except the feeling of his body beneath mine and the sounds he’s making that I want to record and listen to on repeat for the rest of my life.
He is unraveling beneath me, his head tipped back, the tendons in his neck straining, his mouth open with every breath carrying a sound that gets louder as I ride him harder. His palms roam from my hips to my waist to my chest, his thumbs stroking over my nipples with a clumsiness that makes them more sensitive, not less, and he touches me like he is trying to memorize the shape of something he’s dreamed about.
I brace my hands on his chest and lean forward and give him everything I have, my hips grinding into him in tight circles, his back arching off the bed, the cackle building in his throat again. I’m close and I can feel that he is closer, his rhythm stuttering, his grip on my waist bruising, his eyes wild and desperate.
“Kendra.” There is a warning in his voice, a desperation, his body trying to tell me something his mouth can’t finish. “I cannot, I am going to...”
“Let go,” I tell him, and I press down and tighten around him and roll my hips one more time.
He breaks, his entire body seizing beneath me, every muscle locking, and the sound he makes is not human, starting in his chest and ripping upward through his throat in a roar that shifts halfway into the Bouda’s cackle. In the same instant he surges upward, sitting up so fast that my hands fly to his shouldersto brace myself, and I feel his ridge spike the moment his back straightens, every blade calcifying.
“Kojo?” I murmur, nervous at the fire in his eyes.
“MINE!” He roars out, then his mouth finds my neck and his teeth sink into the soft skin where my shoulder meets my throat.
The pain is blinding. Sharp enough to make me scream, his teeth locking down with a force that tells me this is not a man biting me but a predator claiming what belongs to him. I feel the skin give and the heat of my own blood on his lips, and my vision strobes and my fingers claw at his shoulders trying to find something to hold onto.
But beneath the pain, rising up underneath it, the orgasm hits. It crashes through me with a violence that swallows the bite whole, starting where he’s buried inside me and detonating outward in a chain reaction that seizes every muscle I have, my thighs locking around his waist, my nails carving lines down his back on either side of his spiked ridge, a sound tearing out of me that is barely recognizable as my own voice.
The pain and the pleasure tangle together into something I have no name for, something so overwhelming that my nervous system simply cannot hold it all at once. The last thing I register is his arms catching me as my body goes limp against his chest.
I don’t know how long I’m out, and when I come back to myself the first thing I feel is his mouth on my neck, not biting but slipping his warm tongue against the wound, his lips tracing the edges of the mark with a gentleness that makes no sense next to the violence that put it there.
I’m on my back now. He’s repositioned me on the pillows with the blanket pulled up to my waist, and he’s curled around me on his side with one arm across my stomach and his face buried in the curve of my neck, his lips moving against the bite mark in a pattern that I realize after a few seconds is not random.
He is whispering something, the same phrase over and over, his voice so low and so wrecked that I have to strain to hear it. “Please wake up. Kendra, please wake up. Please wake up.”
I try to lift my hand and it takes two attempts — my body feels like it’s been unplugged and rebooted. My fingers find his face and the sound he makes when he feels me move is a ragged gasp that breaks into something between a sob and a groan.
He pulls back just enough to look at me and his face is destroyed, his amber eyes red-rimmed, tear tracks running down both cheeks, his lips swollen from pressing them against my neck for however long I was gone.
“I am sorry.” His voice is shattered. “I am sorry, Kendra. I did not mean to, I could not stop it, my Bouda, the bite, I...” He trails off, his mouth trembling too hard to form words, and his hand hovers over the mark on my neck without touching it, his fingers shaking.
I pull his face down to mine and kiss him. He resists for half a second, his body rigid with guilt, and then he melts into it, his mouth opening against mine, his tears wetting my cheeks. I kiss him long enough to feel the tension leave his shoulders, his arm around my stomach loosening from its death grip and settling into something that is holding rather than clutching.
“I chose you,” I whisper against his mouth. “All of you. The man and the Bouda and whatever comes next. You didn’t take anything from me. I gave it.”
Kojo exhales and wraps his arms around me, burying his face in my neck right next to the mark. His tears are warm and steady on my skin.
I hold him with what little strength my body has recovered, both of us breathing in the quiet of the cabin, and I press my cheek to the top of his head and close my eyes and let the mate bond settle until sleep takes me under again.
