Page 136 of Alpha's Rejected Warrior
I press one last kiss against her inner thigh and climb back up her body, settling over her. Her eyes find mine. The amber fades back to golden-brown, her gaze still soft and feral at once. I reach between us, positioning myself at her entrance.
I push in slowly.
The sensation detonates my every nerve. Her tight, wet, scorching heat envelops me inch by deliberate inch. But it’s theothersensation that sends me over the edge. The stretch. The fullness. Her aching satisfaction from being caressed from within completely. It layers over my own pleasure from being inside her until I can’t distinguish where my body ends and hers begins.
We both go still.
Her eyes lock onto mine. Neither of us blinks. Neither of us breathes.
And there it is. . .the thing I first felt by the pond under the trees, the night I thought I’d imagined it. Our heartbeats. Searching. Syncing. Two separate rhythms finding and locking into a single pulse that I feel in my chest and my throat and the base of my skull. They’reidentical: one drum where there should be two, beating in a single entity that spans two bodies.
I start to move.
The feedback loop comes over me immediately — it’s sharper, faster, and more devastating than I’m prepared for. Every thrust sends pleasure cascading through me, and the bond captures it and routes it through her, and her response floods back into me, amplified. The recursive wave builds on itself until the boundary between giving and receiving dissolves entirely.
Her legs wrap around my waist, her heels pressing into the small of my back, drawing me in deeper. Her pleading for me isn’t in words. It’s in the tightening of her arms, the arch ofher spine, her body pulling me closer with a ferocity that says everything her voice hasn’t caught up to yet.
Then, she pulls back. Just enough to create a few inches between our bodies, allowing my thrusts to be stronger. Both her hands release my shoulders. Her legs unwrap from around my waist. And she turns over.
Everything in me goes quiet.
She settles onto her stomach, then rises slowly on her hands and knees, presenting herself to me: her spine, her backside, the exposed nape of her neck where her dark hair falls to one side. She looks back over her shoulder. Her eyes hold three things at once: passion, devotion, and vulnerability.
I understand what this means. Lycans never turn their back to anyone they don’t trust with their life. Rhiannon, who faces every threat head-on, who maintains tactical awareness like breathing, who has never once in my presence turned away from potential danger, is giving me something no enemy will ever see.
Her most vulnerable side, naked and unguarded. For her human. Her mate.
I press forward, aligning myself with her, and slide into her from behind in one slow, deep, unhurried stroke that empties the room of oxygen. Her back arches, her fingers curling into the sheets beneath her, and the gasp she makes settles somewhere behind my ribs where I know it will live for the rest of my life.
I lean over her, my chest pressing against the warm plane of her back, and cup both breasts in my hands. The weight of them fills my palms as I continue the slow, deep rhythm, rolling her nipples between my fingers, feeling them stiffen against my skin while my hips draw back and push forward in steady strokes that make her breath stutter.
The pace builds on its own. Gravity and need and the feedback loop pull us into a rhythm like a current neither of uscontrols. I straighten, grip her hips, and drive myself into her with everything I have.
Deeper. Faster. Harder.
“Oh, Ethan!”
Rhiannon’s hands slam against the headboard, bracing, and she pushes back to meet every thrust. The collision of our bodies fills the room with sounds: skin against skin, the creaking of wood, her breath and mine tangling into something rhythmic and primal. Her back rolls with each impact, muscles flexing beneath sun-kissed skin, and I take a mental photograph that will have the permanence of stone.
Dark hair spilling across her shoulders, the powerful line of her back, her waist, the flare of her hips under my hands, it’s magnificent, awe-inspiring, and mine. The combination rewires a part of me that will never go back.
“Rhiannon.” I press my mouth against the back of her neck. Her skin is hot and alive beneath my lips.
Her whole body seizes. I sense it a full heartbeat before my body registers the physical tremor. Pleasure explodes through her and then hits me like a shockwave. She orgasms around my cock, clenching tight, and the growl that tears from her chest crests into something seismic that rattles the window glass in its frame. The sensation rips through me so suddenly, my vision whites out. I have to grip her hips with both hands to hold on.
Then, she turns.
She rolls beneath me, settling onto her back, pulling me down between her thighs. Her eyes find mine. Amber and brown swirl together — open, unguarded. I enter her again.
We move together. The final climb. Her legs wrap around me, and our rhythm locks into a synced, pulsing rhythm building toward a peak I sense approaching like thunder rolling across a valley.
Her mouth finds my neck, the left side. It’s the specific place her lips have visited before, the place she nicked that still carries the faintest blemish.
Her lips part and her tongue slides against my skin. Her teeth barely graze it.
But there’s no biting. Just hovering.
And this time I understand.
