The Alpha's Borrowed Wife

Chapter 9

“What’s what?” He didn’t answer me. He put his face back into the hollow under my jaw and breathed in again, slow, like a man checking whether he’d imagined a sound. I lay under him with my heart going and no notion at all of what was happening. Was he… sniffing me? That was new. Adrien had never once sniffed me. Flattered or worried, Wren, pick one.

“There’s nothing there,” I said. “Whatever you think you’ve got, you haven’t. There is nothing on me. There has never been anything on me.”

“I know what you are.”

“Then what are you smelling?”

He lifted his head and looked down at me, and that light behind the gray was still sitting there. Then he made a decision, and I watched him make it. It crossed him and was gone again, faster than I could follow. What was it about? I didn’t have the first idea.

“Nothing,” he said.

It was a lie. I knew it while he was saying it… and I let him have it. Why? Because his hand was spread on my stomach, and I didn’t want one single thing in the world except for him to keep going. Priorities. “Then don’t stop.”

He didn’t. He took the shorts off me without hurry, and not gently, either. One hand was at the button, and the other was braced on my hip, holding me down against the mattress. He drew them off my legs and dropped them on the floor. Then he looked at me for a while without saying anything at all.

I’d never been looked at like that. Adrien looked at me like a man looks at a thing he owns and is pleased to own. Kaz looked at me the way he must have looked at an engine before he took it apart, as if every part of it mattered. Oh no. My stomach. Don’t think about your stomach, Wren. Too late. I was thinking about my stomach.

“Don’t,” I said. My hands had gone to cover myself before I’d decided anything.

He took both of my wrists, one in each hand, and put them back down on the bed on either side of my head. Then he left them there. “No,” he said. That one word went down my spine and settled low in my belly, and stayed. Bossy. The man was so bossy. Why on earth was that working on me?

His mouth came down on my throat, then my collarbone, then lower. He was in no hurry whatsoever. He set his tongue to my n****e and heard the noise I made hit the ceiling. He did it again on the other side, slower. Then he closed his teeth on it, just short of hurting, and my back came off the bed.

“Oh God!”

“Keep talking,” he said against my skin. “I want to know what works.”

What works? Nobody had ever asked me that… nobody had ever needed to know. Was there a list? Should I have brought a list? He went down my stomach with his mouth, then my hip, then the crease of my thigh. He put a hand on the inside of my knee and pushed my legs open without asking. My whole body went hot from the throat down. I’d spent years being asked politely for less than this.

Then he stopped again, with his mouth an inch from where I needed him, and looked up the length of me. “Say it.”

“I’m not going to.”

“Then we’ll be here a while.”

“You’re enjoying this!”

“Yes.”

“Kaz, you absolute—”

“Say it, Wren.”

“Please.” It came out wrecked. “Please.”

His mouth closed over my c**t, and everything in my head went white and silent.

Oh. My. God. I had no idea. A grown woman. Married. And I lay in a hotel bed on the south side of the Wexford and found out I hadn’t known. All those years, and nobody told me? Somebody should have told me!

His tongue found a rhythm almost at once, and then he wouldn’t vary it, no matter what I did. When my hips came up off the bed, he put his forearm across them, held me flat and kept going. Two fingers worked up inside me and curled. He found a place in there nobody had ever gone looking for. I heard myself say his name in a voice that belonged to somebody else.

I came so hard my ears were ringing. He didn’t stop when I did. He worked me through it and out the other side and straight into another one. That one took my legs out from under me entirely. I was shaking from the knees down, making noise into the back of my hand. He dragged it away from my mouth without once looking up. “No,” he said again. “I want it.”

When he came back up over me, his mouth was wet. I could taste myself on him, and I didn’t care even slightly. He got out of his jeans. I looked. Of course I looked. I was way past the point of pretending I wasn’t going to.

Oh.

One syllable, and that was all my head had in it. He was big everywhere else, and he was not an exception anywhere. Thick and hard and already wet at the tip. Something low in me clenched at the sight of him, with an animal enthusiasm my brain had no vote in. Traitor.

“That isn’t going to fit,” I said.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. A smile? On him? Nearly. “It’ll fit.”

“That’s very confident.”

“Yes.”

“Has anybody ever told you that you’re unbearable?”

“Not twice.”

He put one hand under my knee and opened me, and I felt the head of his c**k press against my p***y. Then he stopped and held there, looking at my face instead of at what he was doing. “Last one,” he said. “Say no and I’ll put my clothes on.”

“If you say that to me one more time, I will hit you!”

He pushed in. I stopped breathing… not for effect. My body simply forgot the instruction. He went slowly, and he went deep. The stretch of him was so far past anything I had a word for that my mouth came open. Nothing at all came out of it.

Later. Soon. Once this closes. A whole marriage of it… and here I was under a man I’d barely met. All at once I understood, the whole length of it, that I’d never once been f****d in my life. I’d been made room for.

“Breathe,” he said.

I breathed. He put his forehead down against mine, and he stayed there, all the way in, not moving, until I stopped shaking around him.

Then he moved. He f****d me slowly at first, and God, it was so much worse than fast. Slow meant I felt every inch of it going and coming back. The bed took it. His fist closed in my hair and drew my head back, and his mouth found that spot on my throat again. I made a sound I’d have been ashamed of in any other room in the world.

“Harder!”

“No.”

“Kaz, I swear to—”

“You’ve spent years waiting on a man who was never going to get there.” His voice had gone rough all the way through. “You can wait on one who is.”

I hated him. I hated him for exactly as long as it took him to shift the angle. Then… I didn’t hate him at all, and then my own name was gone out of my head.

He built it, taking it up by degrees until the headboard was going into the wall. Until my legs were shaking around his back. Until every thrust landed where his fingers had been. I was saying please over and over, with no idea I was making a sound.

His hand came off my hip and braced on the headboard above my shoulder. I heard the wood give. Not break. Give, the way green wood gives, one long low complaint under his palm. Somewhere far off, a small flat voice said… wood does not do that. I didn’t have anything left to answer it with.

It came up through me from the soles of my feet. I got both arms around his neck and held on, and it went through me in waves that wouldn’t stop coming. “Oh, f**k… Kaz.” My p***y clenched around his c**k so hard he groaned against my ear and lost his rhythm entirely. Then he was slamming into me, once, twice, and I felt him go over with me.

He held himself there, buried and shaking, with one arm locked under my back. He was saying something into my hair in a language I didn’t know.

When it was over, we lay in that ruined bed, and neither of us said a word for a while. Well. It fit. I was not going to say that out loud. Not ever. Not under torture.

Then I rolled my head on the pillow and looked at the headboard. There was a dent in it, under the varnish, right where his hand had been. A dent. In wood. “I think you broke the hotel,” I said.

“It will live.” He didn’t even open his eyes.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It bubbled out of me, helpless and a little bit hysterical, in a wrecked bed with a stranger. And beside me, with his eyes still shut, the stranger’s mouth went at the corner.

Then the laugh ran out, and I stared at the ceiling and waited for the shame. It didn’t come. That was what frightened me. I lay there and went looking for it on purpose, pressing at it like a bruise. There was nothing to find. No guilt, no horror, nothing but my own heartbeat and a soreness low in me that I was already glad of.

This was supposed to be for Adrien, every part of it. That was the arrangement I’d made at the little table across this room, before the coffee had even gone cold. And he had not been in my head once… so what did that make me?

I turned my face away from Kaz before he could see whatever was on it. That put it in the pillow, which was a mistake.

The pillow smelled of him. Rain and clean cotton and cold iron, stronger now with the heat still coming off his skin. I lay there with my eyes shut and breathed it in slow, like a woman pocketing something in a shop. And what had he smelled, really? He’d lied to me about it. Fine, I could keep one of my own.

That was when the room lit up.

My phone was face-down on the nightstand, where I’d put it the night before and forgotten it. It went off against the wood, buzzing and turning itself a quarter circle. The ceiling above it went pale blue.

Kaz reached over me and picked it up, and he didn’t look at me while he did it. He looked at the screen, and his mouth went flat, and he held it out.

My husband’s face filled it.