Page 17 of Gemini Queen
He’s straying perilously near to balking outright at my edict, and I know it’s not only the prospect of Zarina Gemini watching him submit that he’s resisting. A disciplinary bite gives a shifter a degree of control over his thrall that’s nearly unbreakable. It’s a power that’s all too easily abused.
In order to submit, he’ll truly need to trust me.
Keeping my steps slow and my wolf leashed, I circle the desk and approach him with care. “It’s unfortunate you’ve forced my hand, Ronin. But I won’t betray my duty to you as your teacher. I’ll never hurt you or humiliate you. It’s meant to keep you safe.” Despite my resolve, my voice softens. “I’ll always keep you safe.”
And even though I know I shouldn’t, I let my hand drift up to brush his cheek. Under my touch he’s banked fire, skin like rough velvet after his shave, ribbons of hair like damp silk sliding against my fingers.
His eyes close and he leans into my touch. His head turns until his lips find my palm. My wolf whines softly, craving him.
“I mean it, Lucius,” he says low, lips soft against my skin. “I’ll hate it.”
Somehow we’ve strayed onto dangerously prohibited terrain, and it’s my duty to set us both straight. I detach from his touch and step back. For no reason at all, my heart is racing. I clear my throat and summon the requisite firmness.
“That’s the entire point of discipline. And it’s Master Aries. Now put your back to the wall, Mr. Pendragon.” I make the point of adding, for everyone’s clarity, “It’s for your own good.”
The imp all but rolls his eyes, but he contents himself with a snort that’s eloquent with scorn. “Yeah, keep telling yourself that, mate.”
He prowls to the wood-paneled wall behind my desk, inflaming my wolf with every slow sway of his hips and every soft swish of his hair. For a heartbeat, I think the young demon’s going to brace his hands on the wall and bend for me, which is a dangerously sexual provocation to a shifter.
Instead, Ronin turns with a sigh and plants his back to the wall.
Keeping my wolf tightly chained, I step forward to confront my erring student. “Palms against the wall as well, please.”
Arms loose at his sides, Ronin presses his palms to the wood. But devilry lurks in his gaze. “I thought you did it from behind.”
“This isn’t a mating bite, Mr. Pendragon.” My wolf is in violent disagreement, but I ignore him. I brace my hands against the wall on either side of Ronin’s dark head to ensure there’s no hint of inappropriate contact between us. His scent of cedar and ambergris wraps around my shaft and squeezes.
God help me, my wolf wants me to fuck him raw.
“No touching.” I remind us all of the rules, my voice thick and growly as my wolf fights to surface.
Ronin huffs out a breath and counters, “No biting.”
My fangs punch through the roof of my mouth.
“I make the rules, Mr. Pendragon.” And there’s absolutely no force in the universe that’s strong enough to stop me from diving in to bury my fangs in his shoulder.
The salty heat of his blood explodes on my tongue and a deep groan rumbles from my chest. A cry tears from his throat and his hands clamp around my waist, fighting by instinct to thrust me away. I growl a warning against his skin and lock my jaws around him, my bite designed by nature to subdue and compel.
His fist clenches in my hair and rips it loose from the neat tail I tie it back in when I’m working. His other arm winds around me and drags our hips together. The rigid blade of his arousal, sheathed in skin-tight leather, drives into my groin and knifes through every single barrier I’ve imposed between us.
“Hands on the wall,” I mutter gruffly against his skin, mouth full of his blood, senses swimming with his scent, manhood ablaze with his need.
“No.” Ronin rocks into me with a shameless moan. “Gods, Lucius, touch me.”
My wolf is desperate for him, barely placated by the need to lap the bloody wound we just tore in his flesh to clean it and stop the bleeding. I drag my tongue over the puncture marks to administer the healing agent in my saliva, because we shifters have a gene that encodes for that.
Tending him like this is deeply satisfying, on an instinctive level, both for my wolf and for myself.
The fact that our hips are locked together and I’m rocking into Ronin like I’m making love to him instead of correcting him, while he arches into me and writhes under my bite, is all something I’m striving to manage. At this particular moment, he needs this—he needs the reassurance and the connection of contact—and the fact that I’m nuzzling his torn skin to comfort him between long slow licks is somethingIneed.
It’s all I can do to keep my own hands stapled to the wall and off the scorching heat of his naked torso.
Christ, I should have made him put more clothes on before I started all this.
But the unforgivable truth is, he’s been teasing me all night, and I’ve been so damn eager to get my mouth on his body that I didn’t want to wait. Right now, it isn’t even about discipline. Or at least, it may be about discipline, but it’s also about something more. It’s about the fact that he’s nineteen and I’m pushing thirty and if I can’t control this forbidden need smoldering like an electrical fire between us, I’m a shameful failure and a shocking disgrace as a teacher.
That admission is enough to pry my mouth off him, to turn me toward him, my lips dripping with his blood.
