Page 31 of The Alpha's Betrayed Mate

Belmont laughed again, and she felt that same warm surprise at how easily the sound came. It should have been strange, seeing that aloof, repressed man smile so effortlessly. He should have seemed like a stranger. But instead, it felt like something had finally been moved out of the way, and she was seeing him clearly for the first time in years. Finally, when she looked at him, she was starting to see the boy she’d fallen in love with all those years ago… or more to the point, the man that boy had grown into.

A thought occurred to her, and she felt a jolt of shock at how long it had taken her to think of it. Belmont looked a little worried when he caught her expression, but then he saw her hand fly to her belly and his expression softened. “I asked Syrra, when we realized you were going to make a full recovery,” he said quickly. “She said the baby’s just fine—said its aura and yours were still tightly entwined.”

Venna’s breath shuddered out of her, relief hitting her as hard as a wave. But even as Belmont spoke, she realized she’d known already, on some level, that what he was saying was true. The little life that had been with her for a little while now, it hadn’t gone anywhere. “Tough kid we’re going to have on our hands,” she remarked, knowing her casual tone wasn’t doing a thing to hide how close she was to tears of relief.

“Already taking after their mother,” Belmont said, drawing her close. “I’m so glad you’re awake again. How are your injuries? Do you think you’re healed?” There was a glint in his silver eyes and a certain tension in the way he was holding her that clued her in quickly to the motive behind the question. Smirking, she pretended to hesitate, letting a false look of worry cross her face.

“I don’t know,” she murmured, eyes downcast. “I think maybe I’d better sleep for another week—”

He cut her off with a kiss, and she might have objected to the rudeness of the gesture if her body hadn’t reacted as though she’d been struck by lightning. His arms tightened around her and she leaned into the strength of his embrace, not even minding the way he lifted her off the ground and began to carry her towards his bedroom without so much as checking whether she wanted to go. Awfully presumptuous, this new Belmont, she thought faintly as the kiss deepened, sending heat burning across every inch of her recently-healed skin. She ought to give him a piece of her mind… right after she’d gotten his help removing some of these bandages, perhaps.

For a moment, as he carried her through the door to his room, she wondered if he was going to throw her down on the bed the way he had so many times before. She braced herself, ready to chasten him for manhandling her poor, wounded body… but instead, he lay her down with a gentleness that surprised her. His hands pressed her back against the bed and began to roam curiously across her body, and she was surprised to find herself content to lay back, enjoying this new dimension to their closeness. Every time they’d made love, they’d torn into each other with a desperation that bordered on savagery, as if they had only a few precious minutes to satisfy their hunger. Right now, he was touching her with an easy, gentle reverence that suggested he was willing to keep at it all day… and Venna was shocked by how quickly she found herself shivering under his touch, how well even his softest touches coaxed along the fire of desire in her belly.

He was, slowly but surely, removing her bandages, working from the top of her head toward her toes—but doing so agonizingly slowly. Her impatience with the rate of his progress was tempered by the gentle, lazy kisses he would press to each new part of her freshly-healed skin he revealed, the relief each time a bandage fell away to reveal that the wound it had been covering was gone. As annoyed as she’d been to realize how long she’d been asleep, she realized now as she shivered and gasped under Belmont’s hands how right they had been to keep her sleeping. The very thought of lying there, awake but too injured to drag Belmont into bed with her… she might have had the patience to spend eight years in the woods, but that kind of waiting would have been absolutely intolerable.

By the time he reached the bandages on her midsection, she had lost every trace of propriety, and was writhing beneath his touch like a serpent, her breath coming in short gasps as Belmont’s lips and tongue teased at first one nipple, then the other. The pace with which he was undressing her was intolerable, unacceptable, obscene… and what was worse, he’d managed to pin her legs beneath him, using his considerable strength to stop her from taking matters into her own hands. Once or twice, she gathered the determination to wrench herself free… but then he’d let his hand skate up the inside of her thigh as if by accident, brushing against the fabric of her panties and knocking the breath from her lungs at the tantalizing touch of friction where she needed it most.

He made her wait until he’d removed every last bandage from her body before he removed the rest of her clothing, too—and then he sat back on his haunches above her, a wicked smile on his handsome face, insulting her with the neatness of his hair. Venna gazed up at him, suddenly at a loss to find any of the frustration with him she’d been nursing, any of the intent to get her revenge at the earliest opportunity. Because in that moment, she realized she was looking up at the soulmate she’d spent her whole life waiting for. And her heart was far too crowded with love to have any room at all for frustration.

He must have read some of what she was feeling on her face, because the smirk on his lips was giving way to a soft smile, a gentleness in those silver eyes she remembered from a very long time ago. He lowered himself down to her, the heat of his body intoxicating as it pressed her gently down against the bed, and the kiss they shared was gentle and tender, despite the desperate, aching need in her body, despite the hardness of his manhood she could feel pressing against her thigh. With a gentleness that felt clumsy and unpractised, she ran her hands over his back in turn, caressing the muscles there, moving with lazy appreciation around his powerful arms and across the swell of his chest.

“How many of your shirts have I ruined?” she murmured against his lips, and he uttered a soft, throaty laugh in response that was somehow the sexiest thing she’d ever heard.

“I’ve lost count. How many of your knives have I misplaced?”

“Seven, including three of my favorites,” she retorted promptly. He laughed again, and she hummed in appreciation of the sound. Then, determined to prove a point, she unbuttoned his shirt as carefully as she could, determined to prove she was every bit as patient as he was. And she was rewarded, when she began to do the same to his fly, with a choked-off moan that told her she wasn’t the only one who was fighting back the growing demands of her body. She could feel his cock pressing against the fabric of his pants, and she amused herself by giving it long, lazy strokes through the fabric, delighted by how quickly she reduced him to a shaking mess with his face buried against her throat to stifle his moans, hips jerking against her in a wordless demand for more pressure.

Finally, benevolently, she took pity on him and unfastened his fly at last, pushing his trousers down and hearing him groan with relief as his trapped manhood finally sprang free. He pulled back to kiss her, and she grinned against his lips at the familiarity. This was much more what she remembered—this kiss was every bit as ferocious as their first passionate clash in this very room, what felt like a thousand years ago but was in truth far, far too recent. So much time they’d spent apart, when they could have been doing this. It was a terrible shame.

Well, she reminded herself. No sense in dwelling on the past. All they had was the present—and she couldn’t make the most of it while she was worrying about what could have been. She arched her back and moaned as she felt Belmont’s hand slide up her thigh, parting her folds and finding the exact place she needed his touch as though some kind of magnet had drawn him right there. She’d never tire of that supernatural knack of his. It had been one of his favorite games, reducing her to a quivering wreck with the touch of his hand, teasing her for how inarticulate her demands became—seeing if he could make her beg. Sometimes, he’d even succeeded.

But to her relief, he wasn’t playing that game, at least not right now. There was nothing teasing about the way he stroked pleasure from her body with his hands, pressing his lips against the skin of her throat, her collarbones, her breasts, worshiping her with every caress. It was Venna who stopped him, in the end, who reached down with shaking hands to stop him from pushing her over the edge. As much as her body protested, she didn’t want to reach that peak alone. Not right now. Not when she could feel his manhood still, hot and hard against her.

He knew what she wanted without her having to tell him, and she caught her breath with anticipation as she felt the head of his cock brush against the slick heat of her folds, tantalizing her with the slow, grinding pace with which he entered her. The tension in his jaw told her how hard he was working against the urge to slam his hips into her with all the tremendous force in his body. He filled her with an aching slowness that was as delicious as it was maddening—a far cry from the wild, frenetic pace they’d always favored. Was he being mindful of her injuries? For a moment, she almost felt offended to be treated so carefully, as though she were made of glass. But then she saw the glint in his eye, and realized with a rush of fresh arousal that this wasn’t about treating her like she was fragile. He was teasing her. Showing off—proving how impressive his self control was.

“I get it,” she growled into his ear, so exasperated with love for him that she could barely think straight. “I am so, so impressed. Now will you just—” She broke off, gritting her teeth as she rocked her hips as hard as she could against him, gasping a little at the jolt of pleasure that shot through her. He was laughing that unbelievable laugh against her throat again, and she realized dizzily that he might just have added a new weapon to his arsenal, one she was powerless to resist.

“Seeing as you asked so nicely,” he purred in her ear… and if that hadn’t been enough to make her give up on any semblance of control, the thrust of his hips certainly would have finished her off. Venna arched her back and cried out in ecstasy as he gave her exactly what she wanted, both of them gasping for breath as their bodies moved together at a frantic, feverish pace, engaged in what had now become a race to reach their peak. And who could have blamed her for how quickly she reached it? Venna felt her vision blur and white out completely as a powerful orgasm broke over, feeling the tell-tale shuddering of Belmont’s body that told her he was right there with her.

Slowly but surely, they regained their breath in the delicious glow of the aftermath, wrapped in one another’s limbs. Venna thought for a moment of all the times she’d slipped out an embrace just like this one and padded off to her own room to sleep alone. What a fool she’d been. How many afternoons and nights could she have spent lying just like this, drifting off to sleep in the embrace of the most gorgeous man in the world? What a waste. Well, at least she knew exactly where to start on making up for lost time.

Still breathing hard, still damp with sweat from their lovemaking, Venna slipped at last into the first truly peaceful sleep she could remember, safe in the knowledge that the love of her life would be right there when she woke—today, and for the rest of their lives together.

EPILOGUE

“So, what do you prefer? A paintbrush or a dagger?”

Belmont smiled as Rylan turned from the window frame he’d been carefully dabbing with white paint. The clothes the boy was wearing were, as he’d predicted, absolutely spattered with paint, and he was glad Venna had insisted that they cover the whole floor with drop cloths instead of just putting them around the edges.

“I can like both,” the boy said after a considered pause. “It’s not like I could paint the baby’s room with a knife.”

“Sure you could,” Belmont said. “It’d just take longer.”

Rylan groaned. The first couple of times Belmont had joked with him, he’d reacted with shock and delight. Pretty soon, though, that had turned to dismay at just how corny his father could get. Little did he know, every mortified groan only made his father more powerful, more determined to tell an even worse one next time. Hiding his grin behind his hand, Belmont moved into the room to take a look at his son’s handiwork. He had to admit, when Rylan had offered to paint the nursery for them, he’d been hesitant to accept. But Venna had overruled him, as she was so fond of doing. And as usual, he found himself admitting that she’d been right to trust him. The warm shade of yellow they’d picked out for the walls glowed like sunshine, and he could already picture the baby’s crib there beneath the window, where they could peer out into the bright blue skies above Kurivon.

“How long til he gets here again?”

“We don’t know if it’s a he or a she yet,” Belmont said firmly. “We’re only about a third of the way there.” Could that be right? A month since the demon had been defeated for good… a month since the lorekeepers had confirmed that demon activity in the area was at a record low. A month of reprieve for the island… of rest, of celebration still touched with mourning. And a month of new beginnings. The pack had finally moved out of the community center, agreeing between them that it was time they made use of the cottages that had been waiting for them since they’d arrived. That meant the community center had been freed up for its original purpose, which was to facilitate connection and intermingling between the packs. Belmont could already tell that his pack were making fast friendships with the other wolves of Kurivon… and he suspected that a few connections might run a little deeper than friendship, too.

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