Page 17 of His Reward
I focused on the physical pleasure of my knot swelling and locking us together. I had to shut my eyes and tense against the overwhelming pull to bond. It was like holding back the tide with my body, but eventually the urgency of the moment passed, leaving the two of us sweaty and tangled together as Lucien’s heat subsided.
As soon as I had the strength, I rolled to my back, taking Lucien with me so he could lie splayed over me, our bodies still joined. The movement caused him to burst with aftershock orgasm, but it wasn’t as strong as the rest of his heat waves.
“Wh…wh….” Lucien seemed to be struggling to put his thoughts into words as he caught his breath and only just managed to squeeze out, “Why did you stop?”
I knew what he meant. “I didn’t think it would be right,” I said.
“But I wanted—” Lucien blinked and tensed. He shook his head slightly, as if sense had just crashed back into him. “Oh,” he said, then sagged against me.
He fell asleep for a few minutes, his head resting on my chest just below my shoulder. Even when my knot went down, I didn’t move. I let his worn body expel me naturally, and still I lay there, holding him as he slept and recovered.
I couldn’t help but smile, but at the same time, I wondered how any experience with any omega would ever be able to live up to the three days Lucien and I had just had. I’d always thought that being spoiled for sex or ruined for omegas was just something people said, but in that moment, with a limp and welted Lucien drooling on my shoulder, I felt it like a fist in my gut.
As soon as Lucien showed the first signs of waking up, I nudged him to move enough so that I could shift out of bed, taking him with me. I carried him into the en suite bathroom and sat him on the toilet for a moment while I ran a bath for both of us. The lodge and the DFC had provided the bathrooms with several kinds of soap and bubble bath, which was just another way they knew exactly what they were doing, and in no time, I sank into a flowery-smelling, deep, warm bath with Lucien in my arms.
“This is…nice,” Lucien said, like he couldn’t think of the word he really wanted to describe it and had landed on something entirely inadequate.
“Mmm,” I said, sluicing water over his back as I checked his welts. “It’s really nice.”
I heard Lucien laugh slightly, then wince as I touched a particularly deep welt.
“Don’t worry about anything,” I reassured him. “You’re a little messed up, but I’m trained in first aid, and I’ll make sure everything is okay before I let you go.”
He was silent after that for a while. I washed the worst of the sweat and slick and cum from his body and my own, and when that was done, we just sat there in the tub for a while.
“This isn’t right,” Lucien said after a long silence. He nearly scared the bejeebers out of me with those words, since I thought they were the end of all the nice things between us. But he went on to say, “I should be writhing with post-heat aversion to touch right about now.”
I held my breath for a second. That was a good point. Whenever omegas finished their heats, they had anywhere from a few hours to a few days where they were absolutely repulsed by the touch of any alpha, even the one they’d just mated with. Apparently, it had something to do with the ancient omega instinct to protect a growing fetus immediately after conception. Every omega I’d taken through heat, though there weren’t a lot, hadn’t wanted anything to do with me the second their heat ended.
“Maybe it has something to do with whatever it was we felt right at the end there?” I suggested.
Lucien glanced over his shoulder at me. “It was a bond,” he said. “My omega and your alpha wanted to bond.”
I nodded, but I couldn’t manage any words. He was right, but bonds were something huge and powerful. There were married couples out there who took years to fully bond. I barely knew Lucien.
“Why didn’t you bond with me?” he asked the same question that had been on his lips right after his last wave ended. “I wanted it. I was trying to reach for it, but you pushed me away. Did I do something wrong?”
He sounded so vulnerable and small. He must have thought so, too. He immediately shook himself and shoved a hand through his wet hair.
“Whoa,” he said in a different, more solid voice. “I’m not even sure where that came from.”
“And that’s why I didn’t reach for the bond,” I said, hesitated, then added, “Even though I wanted to.”
“You did?” Lucien asked in that vulnerable voice, turning more toward me. He jerked slightly, then said, “Damn, that’s spooky. It’s like there’s a whole other part of me that wants different things than the rest of me.”
“Yep,” I said, nodding in complete understanding. “Heat can be dangerous when you’re super compatible with the omega, or alpha, you’re with.”
“You can say that again,” Lucien said, laughing uncertainly. He paused, staring at the side of the bathtub in thought, then shook his head. “It’s never been like that for me before.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said with a wide smile.
My smile seemed to shake Lucien out of his confusion even more. “It is a compliment,” he said, scooting farther away from me so he could turn and face me better. “You were really good. Like, amazing.”
“So were you,” I complimented him in return. “Your dossier said you were a hard player, but you really blew me out of the water.”
“You made it easy,” Lucien said with the sweetest, cockiest smile.
He reached a hand out like he would squeeze my thigh just under the surface of the water, but before he made contact, he pulled his hand away with a gasp. Then he shifted so quickly to the far end of the tub that water splashed over the sides.
