The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

Chapter 305: She Wanted Punishing. He Wanted Her.

"Kiss me," she said. "Stop being noble for five minutes and kiss me."

He did. Slow. Deep. The kind of kiss that had no agenda behind it, no conquest, no game. His hand cradled her jaw, and his mouth moved against hers with a patience that made her angry because she wanted to be consumed and he was savoring her, and the difference between those two things was everything Agnes had never been offered before.

She made a sound against his mouth. Needy. Desperate. She’d kill anyone who heard it.

"Garrett." His name came out broken. "Please."

He pulled back just enough to look at her, and the expression on his face undid her more than the heat ever could. Concern. Real, uncalculated, unstrategic concern.

Garrett Darkhowler looked at her the way people looked at things they were terrified of losing, and she was going to destroy him. She knew it with the certainty of a woman who had been destroying things her entire life.

The information she was keeping would detonate everything he believed about her, and when it did, that expression would die and it would be her fault.

She kissed him harder to stop thinking about it.

His hands moved down her body with careful intention, mapping her through the wet fabric, and every point of contact sent cold relief through her body. He found the hem and pulled it over her head, and the air hit her bare skin at the same moment his mouth found her neck, and she arched into him so hard her spine left the mattress.

"Tell me what you need." His breath was hot against her throat. His voice had dropped into something lower, rougher, his wolf pressing close to the surface.

"You." The word fell out of her without permission. Raw. Unedited. "I just need you."

Agnes Viremont did not say things like that. Agnes Viremont said things designed to control outcomes. ’I just need you’ controlled nothing. It surrendered everything.

He stripped and settled between her legs with a restraint that bordered on cruelty. She could feel him, hard and heavy against her thigh, and the matebond was flooding her with his want, his need, the disciplined control he was barely maintaining.

"Look at me," he said.

She did.

He pushed into her. Slow. All the way, until their hips were flush and she couldn’t tell where the heat ended and he began. Her walls clenched around him immediately, her body greedy and desperate and done pretending otherwise.

She expected him to set a punishing pace. That was what heat demanded. That was how it was supposed to go: hard, fast, and primal.

He moved slowly.

Long, deep strokes that dragged against every nerve ending she had. His forehead pressed against hers. His hand stayed on her hip, guiding her into a rhythm that had nothing to do with urgency and everything to do with intention.

"Garrett." She was panting. "Faster."

"No."

"I’m in heat. This is supposed to be—"

"I know what it’s supposed to be." He thrust deeper, and her words dissolved into a moan. "This is what I want it to be."

Her eyes burned again. She pressed her face into his shoulder to hide it, and he let her, adjusting his angle so that every stroke hit deeper, slower, building something inside her that felt less like an orgasm and more like a confession.

A tear slid down her temple into her hair. She prayed he didn’t feel it. Heat made her emotional. That was all. Chemistry. Biology. The inconvenient intersection of hormones and the first man who had ever been gentle with her on purpose.

He felt the tear through their matebond. She knew he did, because his rhythm faltered for one stroke before he recovered. He didn’t mention it. He kissed her temple where the tear had fallen and kept moving inside her, and that small act of mercy almost destroyed her entirely.

His pace increased. Gradually, his body finally answering the biological demand that his discipline had been holding at arm’s length. His thrusts deepened, each one dragging a sound from her that she had never made for anyone else. Her legs locked around his waist, pulling him closer, demanding more.

"You’re mine, Agnes." His voice was wrecked. Low and raw. "Do you understand that?"

"Yes." The word cracked open. "Yes. I’m yours."

His hand found hers and pinned it above her head, fingers laced, palm to palm. He drove into her harder, and the orgasm that had been building behind her ribs crested and broke in a wave that whited out her vision.

Her back bowed. Her walls clamped around him in rhythmic pulses that she couldn’t control.

He followed her. His groan was low and long, his hips stuttering as he spilled into her, and the heat in her blood finally, mercifully, dulled to something bearable.

They lay there. His weight on her. His face in her neck. Both of them breathing like they’d sprinted through a war zone.

The heat would return in waves until the cycle burned itself out. But for now, for this brief window, her body was quiet.

Her mind was louder.

Coward.

Agnes closed her eyes and pressed her lips to his shoulder. He tightened his arms around her and made a sound in his chest, a low, satisfied rumble that vibrated against her skin.

"Next time," he murmured, "come to me. Instead of trying to freeze yourself in a bathtub."

"The bathtub was working."

"Agnes."

"Mostly."

He laughed. Quiet, warm, the kind of laugh that lived in his chest and reached her through the matebond before it reached her through the air. She hoarded it. Filed it somewhere deep where the guilt couldn’t corrode it.

He pulled the blanket over them both, tucking it around her shoulders with the meticulous attention of a man who built fortifications for a living. His hand settled on her lower abdomen, palm flat, warm, and the cramps that had been screaming for hours went silent beneath his touch.

She should have told him then. Right then, with his hand on her stomach and his breath in her hair and the matebond humming quietly between them. It was the perfect moment, and she recognized it, and she let it pass, because Agnes Viremont had always been better at recognizing the right thing to do than actually doing it.

Every day you wait, the price gets higher.

She buried her face in his chest and breathed him in. Pine. Iron. Honor. Everything she’d been raised to exploit and everything she was terrified of losing.

"Thank you," she whispered.

He kissed her hair. "Go to sleep, Agnes."

She didn’t sleep. She lay there in the dark, warm and held and guilty, listening to his heartbeat slow into the steady rhythm of a man who trusted the woman in his arms completely.

She had earned nothing he was giving her. She knew that. The matebond had handed her a man built from loyalty and conviction, and she was repaying him in omissions that would eventually become lies that would eventually become wreckage.

But his arms were warm. His heartbeat was steady. And the heat was already building again in the pit of her stomach, slower this time, a low ember instead of a wildfire.

She’d tell him tomorrow.

She told herself that every night.