“I’m just glad you’re enjoying it.”
He shook his head, crossing the room to wrap his arms around my waist. “More than that. It’s like… I mean, I never thought I’d get to come here. I’ve always looked at the photographs and wondered what it would be like to stand in front of these places in real life. The Louvre. The Arc de Triomphe. They’re just… magic.”
“Uh-huh?”
I hummed, and kissed my favorite spot on the top of his head. When I leaned back, there was a look of self-assured desire in Fin’s eyes that surprised me.
“You’re magic,” he said.
Now which one of us was spellbound?
Sensing a shift in the wind, I let him guide me back towards the plush four-poster bed. If I knew him as well as I thought, he’d be really unsure right now — but he was hiding it pretty well, with only a slight tremor in his hand as he ran his fingertips down the center of my chest.
“Take this off,” he said.
It wasn’t a question.
Even if it had been, I didn’t need to be asked twice. I pulled it right over my head, discarding it on the floor beside me. His eyes danced over my body, approving in a way that most people trying to play this domineering character wouldn’t be. Well, you couldn’t have everything. Fin was too sweet and earnest to act like I didn’t make his heart stop.
It’s cool, I wanted to say to him. You make mine stop too.
Fin teased one finger into the empty belt loop of my shorts, and tugged gently. “Now these.”
He stepped back to give me enough space, and I did as I was told. Right there in front of me, he started peeling off his own clothes. Gone was the self-conscious shyness of our first time together. Now that he knew the power his body had over me, he wore it with certainty — albeit blush-tinged, but that all added to his character.
“Don’t I get to see you without these, too?” He lightly snapped the waistband of my boxers, nibbling his lip to try and suppress the smile that blossomed there.
“Yes, sir.” I kicked them away, standing proud and already hardening under this new treat of his control and confidence. “Of course.”
“So handsome,” he said, with an insuppressible shudder in his voice. I felt his feather-light touch on my hips, and over the front of my thighs — then his fingertip circling the slick head of my cock, and teasing the tip as I groaned. “I can’t believe how lucky I am.”
“Trust me,” I said. “Me neither.”
“L-lie down?”
I lifted myself back onto the mattress, not looking away from him for a second — the rigid curve of his cock, and the glassy shimmer of the day’s heat on his skin.
“I want you,” he said.
“Fuck. Me too.”
Watching him climb with awkward grace onto the bed felt like a spiritual experience. As he straddled me, eager hands lining me up with his eager hole, I found myself falling into those gray eyes even when they weren’t looking right at me — even as he diverted them down to the covers beneath us, or the plane of my chest in front of him.
When he sat down on me, taking all of me in at once, it snatched the breath from my lungs. I groaned, grabbing his hips in a deep, massaging grip.
“Fuck, Fin.”
“I love you.”
The contrast had me reeling. The shock of hearing him say it, even after spending weeks of being pretty sure how both of us felt, was like coming up for air after a storm. I swallowed, and caught myself from free fall.
I couldn’t just sit here and vanish into the power of his words.
“God, Fin. I love you, too. So fucking much.”
He rode me like only a lover could — slow and deliberate, giving us both the breathing space to feel every shift and all that delicious friction. I could feel the shape of him so intimately like this, with his whole weight pressing down on me. Knew exactly where to find the knot of nerves within him that sent his head tipping back and his eyes rolling briefly white.
“Fuck.”
I barely ever heard him swear, and the force of it jolted through me like a sonic boom. My hands felt tight enough to bruise him, but he gasped and tugged my hands back into place when I let him go, thighs clamping tight around me.
Fin kept me wild and wanton for ages — then, pulling away with a shuddering moan, took my cock in his hand instead, and bent to kiss me.
“Vaughn, I… if… I want…”
“Yeah, baby?”
He kissed me again, trails of thought leading him back to our moment of intimacy no matter how hard he tried to form words. Only after a couple of tries could he give me a sheepish grin and form his sentence.
“I want to come, like… when you — with your tongue…”
Although he may not have been able to say the exact words, I was thrilled to hear him asking plainly for what he wanted. Anyway, I knew exactly what he meant, and I fully intended to reward him. All the initiative he’d taken today turned me on as much as anything ever had before.
Even just a hint that he knew how beautiful he was to me, and how potent his sexuality was, set my whole chest alight.
“Of course,” I murmured, smoothing a hand over his chest. “You want to lie down?”
He groaned, slipping comfortably back into the role of following instead of leading. Face down in the pillows, I let him lie there for a moment — watched him rock his hips into the sheets as he waited for me, desperate and impatient.
When he felt my hands massaging the back of his legs, he sounded like he was about to come from the anticipation alone. I grinned, scattering kisses over the small of his back, and then down over the roundness of his ass.
“I love this,” he said, muffled by the pillows. “When you do this.”
“Oh, trust me. I know.”
I kissed down over his curves, encouraged by his moans, and lapped my tongue at his entrance. Just like every other time I’d done this for him, it melted his bones from the get-go; he sank down into the mattress, issuing the kind of moan usually reserved for erotic movies. There wasn’t an inch of this reaction he was faking, though. He wasn’t capable of faking anything right now, or doing anything deliberate. All he had was the sensation I was giving him, and the tidal rolls of pleasure that came with it.
He arched up into me, and I supported him with hands on his thighs to prop him up. Once he’d lifted high enough, he tucked his knees underneath him, and I reached around to stroke him off in time with my tongue. There wasn’t a single part of me that wanted anything other than to serve him, and keep up the metronomic rhythm I was setting for him.
He loved me. He’d just said it, not minutes ago. I had said it back — and six or seven months ago, could anybody have predicted that this is where we’d be? I had truly believed I was a lost cause. That I’d never fall in love, and that nobody would ever fall in love with me.
Fin shuddered hard, and his breathing sharpened.
“Mm — close,” he moaned.
I already knew. I didn’t let up for a second, working him open with a finger now too. When he came hard against my tongue, rocking back into the heat of my mouth, I felt a secondary wave from his orgasm. A powerful feeling of satisfaction and adoration that I’d never experienced before.
I crawled up to lie with him, folding his heaving chest and rapid heartbeat into my arms. He gave one last grateful moan and buried himself into my chest, inhaling the scent of me he seemed to love so much.
“Wow,” I said, into the sex-thick silence of the room.
“Wow yourself,” he said. I grinned at the lack of sense it made, and squeezed him tighter.
“Felt good, huh?”
“Mm. I think I’m dead.”
“Not sure that’s a good thing, Blondie.”
He stretched, toes curling and uncurling as he came back into the full length of his body. He peered at me through one gray eye. “They do say that here, don’t they? La petit mort.”
“I don’t think there was much petit about that.”
; Fin laughed quietly against my skin, his breath tickling me as he turned to face me again. “No, you’re right. La grande mort, more like.”
“I see you’ve been reading Lukas’s dictionary.”
He tutted, finally finding the energy to prop himself up on his elbows and look at me. “Right. I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. Did everybody know except me?”
“Uh...” I wrinkled my nose, pretending to think. “I mean… Yeah. Pretty much. Definitely.”
“You’re something else, Vaughn Bennett.”
I grinned, ruffling his hair. “I’ll take that as a compliment. To be fair, though, I only told Veronica and James, like… a few hours before, when I walked them to the car.”
“Makes sense.” He dropped back down against me, a comfortable weight, and hummed. “I’m sorry. This is selfish of me. Two minutes and it’s your turn.”
I waved a hand. “Doesn’t work like that. We’re not keeping score.”
“I mean… I know we’re not literally keeping score, but…”
“I wanted to get you off, and I did.” I tangled my fingers into his, squeezing his hand. “Honestly. Don’t worry about me.”
We fell into companionable silence, just listening to the faint sounds of Paris evening traffic outside. As much as I would have enjoyed filling Fin up before he asked me to rim him, I wasn’t lying to him. I was perfectly content to be lying here with him like this. There was nowhere else in the world I’d choose to be, and nobody else whose company I’d prefer.
He kissed my shoulder, and I squeezed his hand again. “You good?”
“Just thinking about how great my life is going to be from now on.”
“Yeah?” I beamed. “Me too. Describe it for me…?”
Fin gave a happy sigh, closing his eyes to imagine. “Well, of course, there’s the next week or so. You and me, and this trip.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s… I mean. That’s making memories that will last for the rest of our lives. When we’re at work and everything is cold and gray and miserable, and somebody cuts the line at Starbucks, and the news looks like a game of Mad Libs played by sociopaths… Well. This is what we’ve got to travel to. And we get to take a little bit of that with us everywhere we go.”
I was an alpha, not a crier. The knot in my throat was probably, uh. Allergies.
“We have Madrid. London. Another bunch of movies that seem way too recent to be showing on an airplane.”
I snorted, rubbing his back. “Priorities. Good.”
“Then, back home. We get to see each other a whole lot more often. I like to think you drive by from Helena every weekend. I’ll get my own place, so…”
“Uh-huh,” I said. There was something odd about this image. After all this ‘I love you’ and talk about the rest of our lives… Wasn’t he even thinking about living together? About moving to Helena to be with me?
“I figure I’ll finish class on Fridays, and go home. I grade as much of my student work as I can, so it doesn’t intrude on our weekend. You get back — with Chinese?” he added hopefully. “Or we’ll order in, or we’ll cook together. Anyway, I have you for a whole weekend. Maybe sometime you come in and talk to my kids about what it’s like to be an architect, and-”
“Wait, sorry.” I said. “I’m hitting pause. Your kids?”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “You know. My class?” The silence stretched for a few seconds, and he tried again. “I’m a teacher, baby.”
“I know,” I said. “But — in Blackwater?”
“Sure,” he said, sounding confused. “That’s where my job is.”
I felt a ripple of irritation. I knew it was unwarranted, but some part of me was frustrated. The animalistic, alpha part that demanded to take control of every decision. “You don’t want to think about coming to Helena, with me?”
“Oh.”
He sounded surprised, and that only annoyed me more. Had he really not thought about this? All this time I had been concerned that I was the one who wouldn’t be able to take this seriously, and now it seemed like head-over-heels Fin didn’t even want to share a living space with his mate. Or live within an hour’s drive of him.
“I mean… um. Lukas is leaving next year, so he said maybe I should take over the class. And I already love Blackwater Elementary, and they all know me there. The staff. So it seemed like a great opportunity, and…”
“Did you already take the job?”
“Yeah.”
I hated the bluntness of my tone, and the cautiousness of his. I knew it was wrong to treat him like this, but my mood got the better of me. I hummed. “Seems like the kind of thing that mates would usually talk to each other about. You know. Communication.”
“I thought you knew,” he insisted. “I mean, I’m sorry, but… it’s such a perfect job. I’m settled there, and…”
“I’m settled in Helena.”
“But your pack is in Blackwater,” he insisted. “I thought you’d want to come home.”
“Helena is home now,” I pressed. “That’s where I work.”
The silence between us grew uncomfortable. Fin drew back, looking at me with uncertain eyes and his bottom lip between his teeth. I could see the hope that I was joking dying on his face, and the guilt only made me feel worse.
“I don’t know,” said Fin. “I thought… I guess, since you already work out of the office so much, and you always say that all you really need is a good computer, so-”
“So you figured I’d just… take an hour’s commute to move home to the town I deliberately left several years ago. Right. Makes sense.”
“Vaughn, please don’t get mad at me.”
“Don’t make important life decisions without me, and then expect me to be okay with it.”
We shifted apart. The room’s energy grew spiky and unpleasant, and I began to notice a number of different things that hadn’t mattered before. The prickly heat from being out in the sun all day. A thin chip of wood missing from the bedframe. So much for making golden memories to protect us from the monotony of our everyday lives.
Frankly, I’d take gridlock and a rainy day over these crushing feelings of rejection and guilt — one irrational, and the other all too well-deserved.
14
Finley
We hadn’t really addressed the argument yet — if you could call it that. Things had gone back to relative normality the morning after, and we had resumed exploring Paris with only a faint bad taste in our mouths. Even so, it was obvious that there was something left unresolved, and I was excited to fly on to the next stage of our vacation in Madrid.
Maybe here we’d be able to clear the air.
I found the city surprisingly modern. I had been expecting it to look like the entire city had been carved out of marble and stone, but in the end I was treated to a whole wash of modern architecture, too. It was a different kind of beauty than what I’d been picturing, and the surprise was wholly welcome.
If it gave me an opportunity to pay rapt attention to Vaughn as he spoke at length about various architectural features and movements, then… all the better for it. It thrilled me to see that there really was a geek somewhere beneath all that suavity and stubble, just like Owen had promised.
“It’s the lack of purpose,” he insisted as he came to the end of a particularly long and excitable rant, hand tight in mine as we drank in the sight of the rose gardens at El Retiro Park. “It’s completely impractical. Not that it’s causing any problems, but… it only exists to be beautiful. For the sake of it.”
“Uh-huh?”
He gave me a sheepish grin. It was as close to shyness as I’d ever seen him. “Not that you’re interested in any of that, I know.”
“Oh, I’m interested,” I assured him.
To say the least. Honestly, it’s kind of turning me on.
A particular highlight was the cooking class that Vaughn had booked for us. We walked in expecting the lesson to cover how to make a traditional paella, or somet
hing similarly basic. Instead, it turned out we had managed to infiltrate a class of far more advanced students. ‘Prepare paella’ was not the subject of the class so much as it was the first step in a set of instructions we were supposed to follow, with little to no further guidance.
Still, it was a riot trying to fend for ourselves. We didn’t produce anything that was technically edible, but the experience was what mattered.
“In my defense,” said Vaughn, leading me out of a class of deeply unamused culinary students with stains all over his t-shirt, “The website said nothing about bringing your own set of knives.”
“How is your Spanish, by the way?” I teased, trying to comb a little crumb of something out of my poor, abused hair.
“Es perfecto, gracias.”
“¿Sí?” I said. “¿Qué es 'cuchillo' en español?”
He cleared his throat. “For the record, the next city we’re going to? I’m completely fluent in the language there.”
“We’re going to London, baby.”
“Exactly. So I’m right.”
We followed sun-warmed streets without any real sense of direction, just enjoying the fast pace and mood of the city. After spending those couple of hours as a team of two incompetent tourists in a group of experts, we were back to feeling like a team again. We’d still need to have that conversation about our argument at some point, but right now I was content to hold his hand and embrace the moment.
At least, I was right up until we stumbled across a young family on a day trip.
Completely out of nowhere, a violent pang of loss and sadness gripped me from inside my chest, and brought me to a halt. Vaughn stopped beside me; after a few moments, he looked my way and frowned with concern.
“Hey,” he said. “Fin, are you okay? I thought you were window shopping?”
“I’m fine,” I said. I wasn’t trying to lie. I just didn’t know how to communicate the unanswerable need that I was feeling, especially since I knew how sad it would make Vaughn to share it. That was one of the things that tied us so strongly together, I felt — that communal grief of not being able to have any children of our own.
Claiming My Omega: Blackwater Pack: Book 2 Page 14
