Chapter One Hundred and Thirty

Havermouth, Present Time

Aislen headed to the master bedroom, despite all the furniture being pushed together in the center of the room, and the strong smell of the gloss paint that they were using on the skirtings and edges. Tyler, having slept in the single bed the night before, made it feel like an intrusion to go into the smaller bedroom.

Talen set his bags to the ground and scooped her off her feet, carrying her over to the bed and sitting on it with her on his lap. “They do not see the damages that they have wrought,” he said softly into her hair. “They only see that which they have wanted hovering at their fingertips, without understanding that in order to possess it, they need to repair that which they have broken.”

“They are impossible,” she said in frustration, turning grief into anger. “Heath will defend the pack beyond all logic, and Cameron thinks that sex cures everything and that we should all go back to the river house and play happy families right now. As for Rhett, well,” she heaved a sigh. “He will probably blame me for starting another fight. He has always expected more from me than he would anyone else.”

“Hmm,” he rocked her slightly and she felt her spine soften, the anger and hurt draining so that she sagged against him. She rested in his arms, letting him soothe her with the motion, with the solidness of his presence, with the masculinity and gentleness of him – two things that, before him, she had never experienced hand-in-hand.

She placed her hand on his chest, feeling the steady beat of his heart, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, before stroking up to run her fingers through his beard, the hair softer to the touch than she had ever imagined beard hair could be. She lifted her face into the curve of his neck and breathed in the scent of his skin, letting it fill her lungs and warm through her.

Humans had the supernatural world so wrong, she thought. They thought of werewolves as rabid, half-men-half-beast, bloodthirsty creatures, and vampires as corpses risen from the grave, at risk of decaying without life-giving blood. Talen was the most alive person that she had ever met. The most compassionate and caring person…

She lifted her face, and he leaned down to kiss her, the touch of his lips against hers aching in its tenderness. He leaned back when she would have continued the kiss into sex, resting his chin on the top of her head and resuming the slow rock.

“You do not need to hurry, Morgana,” he said gently. “You do not need to let those brash, impetuous boys decide when it’s the right time for you to accept them. Yes, they love you. Or, at least, they love the idea of you. But love does not always walk hand-in-hand with respect, and they do not respect you or they would not have taken you as they did, and they would not have marked you in such a way against your consent.

“It is best for them, and for you, to take your time, to learn each other, to respect each other, to bare your souls to each other, before you make anything permanent,” he told her. “And mating for supernaturals is permanent, in ways that humans could not even fathom. If they are the men that I think they are, if they love you the way that I think that they love you, they will wait, and whilst they wait, they will learn to respect, value, and admire you for who you are.

“Time is what is needed,” he lifted her chin and used the pad of his thumb to stroke away the tears that she had been hiding from him. “Time may not heal all wounds, but it does allow them to form scars. There is time to take this at your own pace.”

She reached up to touch his cheek. “I don’t deserve you,” she said. “But I don’t intend to let that stop me from having you. I need you.”

His smile was lopsided and lit his eyes. “Good,” he told her. “I am doing my job right if you want and need me.”

“I need you inside of me,” she could feel that he was hard, the throb of his cock against her arse. “I want you to make love to me.”

“Gladly.” He lifted her off his knee and set her on her feet. He cupped her jaw in the v of his thumb and forefinger as he stood and lifted her face up as he rose over her. “You are a strong, fierce, compassionate, and beautiful person, Morgana Ivy, my little demon,” he traced her bottom lip with the tip of his thumb. “But even the strongest person sometimes needs to lay their burdens down and rest.”

He began to unbutton her shirt, taking his time, watching as she was revealed to him with attention and appreciation, as if he had not watched her get dressed that morning and already knew what lay beneath the cloth. He laid the shirt onto the chair, and took her waist in his hands, flexing his fingers, testing the boning of the corset.

“It is funny,” he observed. “How fashions change and what was decency in one era becomes indecency in another.”

“I always try to steer towards indecency,” she leered. “But you let me know, daddy, if anything doesn’t work for you.”

“Everything about you, little demon, works just fine for me,” he purred his response as he sent the skirt she was wearing to the floor. He sank his fingers into the cups of the bodice, and she drew in a breath, raising her chin, her eyelids heavy as he pulled the two sides of the corset together to release the front clasps, parting it and putting it to the side.

“I do so love a man who knows how to get a girl out of a corset the quick way,” she said.

He smiled, but his eyes flashed red as he stepped into her. “I want to feel your skin on mine, little demon.”

“Then you’d better get undressed, daddy,” she edged her fingers under the top that he wore. He lifted it up and off, and she caught her bottom lip between her teeth with a sigh of satisfaction. “That, really, is never going to get old,” she told him. “I just want to run my tongue over that line between your stomach muscles…”

His hair had come loose of the band holding it into a man bun, and fell around his face in a golden curtain, tangling in the coarser strands of his beard. He released the buttons of his jeans and heeled out of his boots before sliding them down his legs, revealing the powerful muscles of his thighs and the darker golden hair that grew there, and his cock, standing hard and ready for her.

“Hello, my friend,” she purred as she reached for it, and then gasped and giggled as he scooped her up in his arms as if she weighed nothing, depositing her onto the bed and stripping her panties from her in one fluid motion. “Oh, fuck!” she exclaimed.

“It’s on the agenda,” he smiled as he lay himself out along her side, a gorgeous spread of golden man. She rolled onto her side to face him, laying her hands on the hot silk of his skin. She watched her hands explore him, a tactile and visual feast of beautiful male, and he lay still for her touch, making no move to hurry her into sex, content to let her take what she wanted from him.

When she looked up, he was watching her face, his expression achingly open. “Oh, daddy,” she whispered, reaching up to touch his cheek and lifting her mouth to meet his, sucking on the softness of his bottom lip before releasing it.

The slightest push of her palms against his chest was enough to encourage him to roll onto his back. She straddled him, his cock resting between her legs, and leaned over to stroke his hair back around his face, framing him in gold. “You are just so incredibly beautiful,” she told him, tracing the line of his brow to his nose. “It’s a supernatural thing, isn’t it? I’ve yet to meet an unattractive supe.”

“Have you met many?” He wondered.

“Oh, many, many,” she followed the line of hair over his cheeks, and then touched the soft, smoothness of his lips with a fingertip. “They don’t always know that I know, however. There are the werewolves here, of course, and I’ve encountered the witches in Rideten and Kabramatta, and…” She pressed her lips to his shoulder, following his collarbone to the center hollow and then down until she could run her tongue through the furrows of his stomach muscles.

He drew in a breath, his chin lifting, and his eyes closing. “Mmm,” his hum was all pleasure as he spread his knees wider, allowing her to slither between them. She explored the center line of his ball sack to his perineum before taking one into her mouth, sucking gently. His moan was throaty. She switched to the other ball, before dragging her tongue up his cock to the tip, bracing her palms on the flat plane of his stomach as she took him as deep into her mouth as she could.

His hands rested on hers, the palms hot and the skin calloused. She pushed her tongue against the sensitive frenulum as she sucked, and felt his grip tighten. “Little demon,” he rumbled. “You have an incredible mouth on you.”

She released him and crawled up his body, dragging her body over his cock to taunt and tease him. “I want your cock buried in me, daddy,” she whispered against his lips. “I want you to take me so hard and fast that my mind wipes of everything but your body on mine, so that it reaches that edge of painful pleasure… You know what I’m talking about.”

“I do.”

“I want you to take me there.”