Page 68 of The Alpha's Gamble
His cock stood up even harder than mine; I didn’t care that much about how mine ached for a touch when my eyes landed on his, tall and thick and flushed, impossibly larger than the tight little hole that was currently resisting one of his fingertips.
He’d plow me open with it. And I’d love it, that feeling of being stretched into a sheath for him. A shiver went up my spine as he nudged the tip of his finger slightly deeper.
That was enough to have me begging.
And begging more, as he replaced his fingers with his mouth.
And begging incoherently, babbling out how much I loved him, as he claimed me all over again, washing away the feeling of Walter’s magic and the desert sand and my own pain and fear far more thoroughly than bathing could ever have done.
At last he stiffened, groaned, and filled me with wet heat, his knot swelling and locking us together so tightly I couldn’t shift a muscle below the waist. The burn of the stretched skin of my rim crested like an endorphin rush.
“You didn’t bite me,” I slurred in his ear, eyes drooping closed. At this rate, I’d fall asleep before his knot went down.
He kissed my throat, I trembled and clenched around his knot, and we both groaned, Declan’s breath hitching. “I’m not biting you again until I’m sure you want it,” he said, and cut off my gathering protest—I did want it, right now, dammit!—with a quick kiss. Declan lifted his head and looked down seriously into my eyes. “I want to make you happy for a while. Prove I can do it forever.”
Well, what could I say to that? I loved him so much it hurt, and I said that, and then he kissed me again, and more, and rolled us over so that I could drape myself across his chest and close my eyes and droop into a contented slump, like a big cat.
He’d proved it in the last five minutes. Fuck, he’d proved it when we got back to the suite and he’d had more than one kind of cheesecake waiting. That showed a pretty damn fundamental understanding of how to keep me, Blake Castelli, happy for life.
I must’ve mumbled something to that effect into his broad chest, because he petted my back and said, “I’ll tell the hotel pastry chef to work on a few more varieties. You can taste-test them. Maybe that’ll be part of your job around here.”
Job. As in work?
That had my eyes popping open again. I’d thought I wasn’t his whore anymore, but his…love.
Also…
“Job?”
Declan shook with laughter under me, jolting me up and down and tugging his knot uncomfortably, and I swatted weakly at his shoulder, too tired to put much force behind it. It still would’ve bruised a normal human, but he’d barely notice, damn him.
“No spreadsheets,” he said, running his fingers through my hair. My eyes started to close again. Damn him twice for knowing how to soothe me even in the face of a threat of gainful employment. I mean, I’d been bored as hell hanging around the Morrigan playing blackjack for pennies. But I wouldn’t be trapped in the casino anymore. I could go wherever I wanted…except that Declan would be in the Morrigan.
Which meant I wouldn’t want to go anywhere else.
And that took the wind out of my mental sails.
“No spreadsheets,” I repeated. And that was great. I appreciated the prospect of a totally spreadsheet-free future, unless maybe I had the chance to set one on fire. The marketing department was thoroughly, and probably to their great relief, entirely on their own. But the problem…my throat tightened. Declan loved me, right? He already knew how useless I was for anything but sex and loved me anyway. Surely he wouldn’t change his mind about me if I was honest. “But I don’t actually know—how to do anything. Anything else. I mean, I don’t know how to do spreadsheets, but the couple of days I spent in your office means I know more about them than probably anything else to do with running a business.”
“There’s no hurry, Blake,” Declan said, still stroking my hair, in a tone so mellow that I thought he might never be in a hurry again. About anything. “We’ll figure it out. You won’t be bored, I promise. I’ll make sure you’re happy. But you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
That didn’t sound so bad. I squeezed his knot and made him groan and clutch me tighter, and then smiled into his chest. Fuck, I wouldneverget tired of that.
“Brat.” His hand came down on my ass in a stinging slap, and I yelped and squirmed, finally subsiding back onto his chest again.
His steady heartbeat almost lulled me to sleep, but I’d hit that point of tiredness when my brain simply wouldn’t shut down all the way. I stared at the wall. Declan’s hand stroked up the length of my back, and then down again. My eyes still wouldn’t close, despite how heavy my lids had been a few minutes before. It might’ve had something to do with my evening of near-murder, running for my life in the desert, clawing someone’s shoulder down to the bone, being blasted with magic, etcetera, now that I thought about it.
My brain-to-mouth filterhadapparently shut down for the night, though, because when I started talking, what came out was, “Next time I tell you one of your employees is trying to kill me, you should believe me.” The spreadsheets flashed through my mind. “Next time it’s probably going to be the marketing department.”
“Jesus, Blake.” His hands stilled, one wrapping around my waist and the other at the nape of my neck, holding me tightly. Underneath me, his chest expanded and then dipped as he drew in a deep, shuddering breath and blew it all out in a gust. “Never again. Fuck.” He kissed the top of my head. “I’m sorry about the marketing spreadsheet. I wanted to keep you busy with something so complicated and boring you’d go away and stop hanging around my office distracting me. And then you—you actually tried.” Another kiss. “I couldn’t believe how hard you tried.”
Bask in the warmth and admiration in his tone, or bridle at the condescension of it?
No, too tired to bridle at anything. And besides, he kind of…well, condescension wasn’t all that unreasonable. He’d worked his way up from nothing, from a professional setback I’d dealt him, to own this place. Meanwhile, I’d barely recognized a spreadsheet when he put it in front of my face.
“I really was bored.”
He let out a low chuckle. “Obviously.”
