Page 139 of Ruled By The Alpha

He smiles so widely, his top lip splits over his fang. “In no way.”

“When you said you have virtue enough for us both—”

He nods into my caress. Nuzzling into my palm, he paints it with hot kisses.

“I feel a fool,” I admit, the words pulled from my throat. “I should have waited.”

“So we can both be fumbling innocents tonight?”

“You’re hardly fumbling,” I point out.

He chuckles and adds the flick of his tongue to his seduction of my palm.

“I have no regrets,” he murmurs, his constant growl dropping towards a deep, resonant purr. “Nor any expectations. I want to lie with you tonight, but if that’s not what you wish, I’ll offer you the comfort of my arms and no more.”

I rub my thumb-claw over his full upper-lip. “Truly? You have such control?”

He grins and sucks on my palm.

“I do not have such control,” I admit.

“Good. Remove those robes so I don’t tear them. Show me what the Mother’s gifted me.”

My free hand slides to the complicated knots fastening my silk gown from breast to hip before I still. “I am no soft Omega,” I say.

“Are you still the skinny, dirty girl I lay with for an afternoon under a sage bush?”

More heat rises to my overheated cheeks. “I wasn’t dirty,” I object, working the first knot.

A snort interrupts his purr. “You had twigs in your hair. A great smudge on your nose. Your hands and knees were brown. I took you for a wood sprite at first.”

“Crawling under bushes is dirty work,” I protest. “I don’t remember you being any cleaner.”

“I wasn’t,” he admits. He rises to his knees, wets a square of linen with water out of his cup, and wipes caked powder from my chin. He continues until my face is bare. “But I am now. I stopped at the bathhouse before coming here and washed so well you can scarce tell I’m an Alpha.”

I chuckle. “That’s not true.” The first knot comes free, the ribbons a bit more tattered from my claws than my lady-mother will like; I start on the second one. “I could smell you from the hallway.”

He tosses the handkerchief aside and traces his claws down my cheek, brushing the loosened neckline open to reveal my shoulders and chest. His fingertips dance over my collar. “You smell of memory and desire.”

The second knot comes free with a soft rip. “What do memory and desire smell of?”

“Sage baking under a hot summer sun. Custard sweetness from the tarts I’d stolen as I crept away from the great hall. Cedar off the wooden soldiers you’d carved for the Queen. The salt of your sweat.”

I fumble on the third knot as the scents of memory and desire fill my lungs. I remember the sugar on his breath. The fresh, male tang of his skin. And over it all, the warmth of sage.

His hand dances lower, sliding silk away from the curve of my breast. He circles a careful claw around my prickling nipple.

The ribbon tears. My robe falls open.

“Up on your knees,” he whispers into my palm. “Show me what I’ve dreamed of a thousand nights.”

Any lingering Alpha impulse to balk his command fades to nothing under the heat of his gaze, the inferno of his breath across my wrist, the drifting embers of his touch on my breast. I shrug the robe off and let it fall to a rose-hued puddle. Wearing nothing but the soaked silk of my Omega’s girdle, I rise to my knees.

“Loosen your hair.”

Without even a wince at the thought of ruining Rivvard’s work, I run my hand through my hair. Pins pop and skitter across the bower’s cushions. I shake out my hair and feel the mass sweep my shoulders. He echoes my motion, his hair falling free down his back as he pulls away its leather binding.

Over the gentle patter of rain, I hear my Alpha’s breathing, a deep, constant aaahhh. My own echoes it.

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