Page 16 of His Prize
“And you came here today because you wanted someone to punish you for your failures,” my prince said, sounding like he’d just connected the dots.
My body jerked in surprise over how exactly he’d read my thoughts. “Yes,” I said, overly emotional, like it was atotal relief he’d finally got it. Maybe now he would give me the pain I deserved instead of all this punishing softness and understanding.
CHAPTER SIX
Keiran
Wow. Everything with Darby suddenly made sense. He’d brought a heck of a lot of baggage into this fantasy. Way more than any high school soccer player. Way more than I wondered if he’d realized.
Air traffic controller, huh? Frankly, I thought that was super cool. And he was a supervisor. He was right to say that it was almost unheard of for an omega to reach that height in his career. That must have been an enormous amount of pressure on top of an already high-stress job.
It was no wonder the alphas he’d been working with the day of his mistake had given him a hard time. And honestly, it was those alphas’ fault that Darby had cracked. Even the strongest omega could only take so much bullying. It wasn’t Darby who had nearly put hundreds of people in a dangerous situation, it was those shitty alphas.
High school or air traffic control, kids in their teens or grown people in their thirties and older, the same thinghappened everywhere. Bullies who thought they were entitled to something treated smart, enterprising people like shit when their false sense of superiority was threatened.
Fortunately, I knew how to deal with those situations. That was one area where, despite my age, I had a wealth of experience.
“I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear,” I told Darby, switching back to a little more authority than I’d just been using, because I thought he’d respond to it. “None of what happened is your fault.”
Darby made a disbelieving sound and tensed in my hold. Since my knot was going down anyhow, his body pushed me out. “It was definitely my fault,” he said, sounding depressed. “I made the wrong call.”
In fact, I could feel that depression radiating from him on a visceral level, which was interesting. It certainly wasn’t what I thought a bond felt like, even a new bond. But sometimes alphas and omegas had a sixth sense for each other when they were in the middle of a heat together.
I decided to take a huge leap of faith, one that was technically against the rules. But if Darby could be honest with me about his reality, then I could do the same.
“I’ve made tons of bad calls,” I said, continuing to rub his arm, even though we’d physically separated. “I’ve made calls that lost us the state championship.”
Darby, who had been looking down, lost in his thoughts, snapped his eyes up to meet mine.
“So youarestill in school?” he asked, a slightly horrified look lighting his eyes.
I laughed, half in relief, as the shock of thinking I was just a kid had momentarily snapped Darby out of his funk.
“No,” I said. “I’m a coach. I coach high school soccer, and I teach PE, too. I’m twenty-five.”
The way Darby breathed out in relief also had me shaking with the effort not to laugh out loud.
“You had me worried for a second there,” he said, wriggling and stretching, like he was trying to work the kinks out of his muscles, but also like he was gearing up for another heat wave. “I thought I was cradle-robbing.”
That did have me laughing out loud. “Do you really think the Dark Fantasies Club would have invited me to beta-test this program if I was underage?”
“Well, no,” Darby said, now looking sheepish.
He was so full of emotion and expression. I was momentarily captivated by that and just stared at him as we lay side by side in bed. It was a cliché to say that omegas were the most emotional of the genders, but I had a feeling Darby really was. Maybe he kept it zipped up when he was at work, which I assumed he did, given his profession, but he felt to me like someone who needed to have and express his emotions. That was what BDSM was all about, really. Venting things inside you that were too intense for vanilla life.
“I’m eleven years older than you,” Darby confessed, his face coloring, like he thought that would put me off or something.
I shrugged one shoulder. “I would bet I’m eleven inches taller than you. Does that make a difference?”
“No,” he said, blushing harder. “I like alphas who can physically overpower me.”
On a gamble, I took that invitation and rolled over him, grabbing his wrists and pinning them above his head. I used my thighs to pin his legs down and slightly open, and the weight of my torso to give him the feeling like he was trapped under me.
“Like this?” I said in a voice closer to my dark, Dom persona.
Darby gasped, and his breathing didn’t recover. He panted under me, his cock pressing up into my belly. A sudden increase in his delicious berry scent told me he’d gushed slick. His arousalhad my alpha going nuts with the need to get right back in the game and plow him into next Sunday.
As quickly as the air crackled between us, Darby deflated. He turned his face to the side and murmured, “I don’t deserve an alpha like you.”
