by Leta Blake
“Turn around. Bend over. Put your hands on the coffee table.”
Xan barely managed it without falling over, ankles twisted in his pants bunched at his feet. But he moved aside the tea set and positioned himself on quaking arms, ass up in the air. He nearly hyperventilated as Urho’s hot hands landed on the globes of his ass and opened him for the second time in a week.
And then what he’d wished for—what he’d dreamed of the first time Urho had done this—actually happened. Urho’s hot breath glided over his ass cheeks, and then his slippery, hot tongue slid down Xan’s crack and tickled against his still sore asshole.
Urho muttered something unintelligible. Xan gripped the edge of the coffee table and cried out as Urho ate out his ass like he’d been dreaming of it as long as Xan had. The tea service rattled as Xan twisted and jerked in response to the sweet invasion of Urho’s tongue.
Xan’s cock twitched and jumped, pleasure rocketing over his rattled nerve endings, sending him into a state of madness. He rocked his hips, groaning, fevered, needing more than just Urho’s tongue—and then Urho pulled away.
He pressed a soft kiss to Xan’s aching, needy, hungry pucker. “This is mine now. Do you understand? This hole belongs to me.”
Xan cried out and came again, his body arching, come shooting onto the coffee table, the carpet, and his own face as he hunched and bucked, shocked by the wild and erotic shattering of his former understanding of sex and gratification. This, this declaration of ownership from Urho, was everything he’d ever wanted. Everything he’d known he’d never truly have.
He collapsed to the table, the cold wood a shock on his hot belly. The soft carpet beneath his knees again. Urho stroked down his back, slipped his fingers over Xan’s saliva-wet hole, and tapped it with his thumb. “Say it. I want you to say the words.”
Xan whimpered, shame and want fighting inside him. “My hole is yours.”
“Who does it belong to?”’
“You.”
“For how long?”
Xan swallowed, trembling all over, uncertain of the answer. “Forever?”
“Mine. Forever.” Urho kissed his hip and then his hole.
He tugged Xan back from the table and into his arms. He held him, kissing the top of his head, and the side of his neck above his collar. They moved to the sofa, collapsing there together. Their clothes were still disheveled, the scents of sweat and come dominating the room.
In shock, Xan rested with his head on Urho’s shoulder. His pants weren’t even fully closed, but they were both covered now. He watched avidly as Urho’s muscled chest rose and fell as he drifted off to sleep.
Time passed and Xan slowly came to his senses. Light faded outside, showing golden through the windows, and the clock on the mantel ticked. Carefully, he disengaged himself from Urho’s arms and reworked his clothes into a semblance of respectability, but only just.
He attempted to clean what he could of the mess they’d made on the floor and coffee table, using napkins from the tea service. Urho slept through it all, handsome and careless in sleep, his mouth slack and the edges of his eyes relaxed.
Finished with his attempts to obliterate evidence of what they’d done, Xan stared down at the man. He had no idea what any of this meant. Or what the promise he’d made entailed. But he knew he needed to go before Urho woke and they had to have some sort of awkward conversation that ruined everything that’d come before.
Slipping from the library, he let himself out the front door without alerting any beta servants and hustled down the street to his car. His body still sang with the pleasure he’d experienced, but his heart and mind were trepidatious.
He didn’t know what had come over Urho, how long he’d planned to make his offer, or even why he’d done it. But there was no way the promise he’d elicited at the end meant anything real. A promise extracted during a sexual high was no promise at all, and why he’d want to lay claim to Xan’s asshole was a mystery too.
But Xan couldn’t stop remembering the way Urho had demanded he repeat the words. He’d sounded sincere and resolute, as though Xan’s ass was something he’d been coveting for far too long and was determined to keep for himself.
Shaking the thoughts away, Xan focused instead on just getting home.
It wasn’t hard at all to drive past Monhundy’s house for once, and when he reached his house, he handed the car off to Lenser with a sigh of relief.
He climbed the stairs to his room. He needed to shower before seeing Caleb and reassuring him that he had the solution to the heat problem well in hand, and also some rather big news to impart. He hoped Caleb would take it well, because they had no choice but to leave in just a few days for a new life in Virona.
Removing his jacket, he took out the book Urho had given him. He opened it and stared at the inscription in the front:
For Riki with my love—Urho
He quivered, jealousy and wonder challenging each other in his heart. He flipped through the pages and then placed the book on the table beside his bed. Stripping off the rest of his clothes, he strolled into his bathroom, checking the mirror for evidence of what had happened.
Streaks of dried come on his neck and cheek, his tousled hair, and the still-glimmering shock in his eyes greeted him. He closed his eyes, breathing in the scent, letting it into his lungs, imagining it passing from particle to particle, until his whole self was touched by the remnants of what had taken place.
Then he turned on the shower.
As the hot water poured down on him, washing away the intoxicating scent of him and Urho together, clarity descended and another realization hit. He sank to the floor of the shower, his heart twisting hard. “I’m wolf’s own evil,” he whispered.
Because of his wicked nature and inability to resist temptation, he’d let Caleb down yet again. He’d left Urho’s house without the needed pills for Caleb’s next heat. He truly was the worst alpha in the entire world. Caleb didn’t deserve being stuck with him.
And he’d lured good, upstanding Urho into temptation as well. He scrubbed himself ruthlessly. He didn’t deserve Urho’s scent.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Urho woke cold and alone in his library, the air still swirling with the scent of his and Xan’s come. He hadn’t meant to pass out like that, but three nights of no sleep and riled up emotions—followed by exquisite and filthy sex with the man he couldn’t shake from his head—had wiped him out.
Rolling onto his side and into a sitting position, he pulled his hands through his hair and peered around the room, hoping to find Xan in some corner, or standing by the window. But no. There was no evidence of him aside from the remaining dried semen on the carpet and table, and the vivid scent of sex on the air.
Urho exhaled a shaky breath, filled with uneasiness. Where had Xan gone and why? A sick sensation slipped into his veins. Had Xan felt coerced into the sex they’d engaged in? Had he really not wanted it despite his trembling lust and relentless orgasms? Had Urho taken advantage of the boy?
He wasn’t used to negotiating sexual encounters outside of acting as a surrogate during heats. And wolf-god knew Urho hadn’t planned to have sex with Xan today. Not like that, anyway. When he’d made his offer, he’d imagined it as a future thing. A situation where Xan, unable to withstand temptation, would come to him and drop to his knees, look up at him with those big blue eyes, and ask for…
Wolf-god, he was getting hard again.
Apparently, he truly was a pervert. There was no getting around it. He’d had sex with another alpha and now yearned to do it again. Obviously he’d also lost his mind somewhere in the last few days. There was that to consider as well.
He tilted his head to gaze at the portrait of Riki, endlessly smiling. No change there. And he’d committed this sin right under his beloved’s watchful eyes. Why didn’t he feel more ashamed? He wiped a hand over his face and set about cleaning up the remainder of the mess his collision with Xan had left behind. It looked as though Xan had already tried
his level best with the napkins.
As he scrubbed the carpet, his ears peeled for the footsteps of beta servants, all of whom seemed to have thankfully found something terribly important to occupy them after Xan’s arrival in the house, he tried to process the events of the day.
He’d been overwrought. He knew that much. But as for what had led him to order Xan to his knees? That had been lust and something more—a refusal to watch Xan walk away and into the arms of a man who didn’t value the beauty of his form, the vibrancy of his mind, or his passionate need to be handled with the same command and respect as an omega.
Urho gasped, sitting on his heels and gazing back up at the portrait of Riki.
How had he come to that conclusion? He’d sensed it from the beginning perhaps. So when Xan had turned on his heel to walk away from his offer, some part of him had simply known what to do: treat him like an omega, command him to his knees, and own him.
And he’d done it.
His balls filled and his cock rose. He closed his eyes and saw Xan’s arched back, his small hole presented to Urho complete with quivering haunches and flushed need. He’d licked it, kissed it, and demanded ownership of it, and Xan had given him all of that without hesitation. He’d given his seed, and his pleasure, and Urho wanted more. Needed more.
And he needed to know Xan was safe.
Rising from his cleaning, he wiped a hand over his sweaty forehead and peered up at Riki again. “Forgive me, beloved.”
But he knew, somewhere deep inside, that Riki didn’t mind. He’d only ever wanted Urho’s joy, and if he found happiness again in this madness with Xan, then Riki—far away in wolf’s cozy den of death—would support it. Even if the world called it sin and he might be imprisoned? If his soul might burn for this and be separated from Riki and their child forever?
Urho shook his head.
He didn’t believe in a wolf-god who punished, though he knew many did. Perhaps because he was a military man and a doctor, and he’d witnessed so much suffering that he truly believed the only thing wolf-god might offer is peace to all but the worst of humanity. Life was otherwise too full of misery to believe in anything else.
He took the stairs up to his rooms, avoiding the servants and glad for the betas’ relative lack of scenting abilities. He locked the door to his bathroom, flicked the shower on, and then hesitated once he was fully nude. He stared at himself in the mirror, taking in his wiry chest hair and dark skin leading down to his thick, alpha cock.
His pubic hair was pitch black, unlike the salt-and-pepper of his head. He was still muscled and strong, and he imagined lifting Xan into his arms, holding the boy like a treasure, and impaling him thoroughly.
Shuddering, he shut his eyes, took his cock in hand, and simply held it. The heat of his palm and clench of his fist kept him at the peak of arousal. He slipped it up and down his shaft, watching his cock grow harder, amused and amazed.
He hadn’t been so easily aroused since the last heat he’d acted surrogate. Omega pheromones were a guarantee for excitement, though. Odd that just thinking of Xan had a similar effect.
Wolf-god, what had he done?
As he reluctantly showered off the mixture of his and Xan’s come, he replayed Xan’s arrival and the brief conversation that had led so suddenly to what the people of the Old World had called fellatio. He recalled Xan asking him for pills for sexual stamina. The boy hadn’t needed help in that regard today.
But if he was truly unmanned, obviously, he wouldn’t.
Urho released a long breath. The slur unnerved him, playing at the edges of his mind. He’d accepted it and now he took responsibility for it. If Xan were truly unmanned then Urho would keep him safe. And if Caleb needed help with heats, if Xan needed pills to make it through, then he’d provide those too.
Drying off and dressing, he made up his mind. After going into his bedroom pharmacy, pulling out a tub of pills, and dividing them out into a pillbox, he called to Mako to hold his dinner. Then he left the house with a hammering heart and a whisper of worry in his mind, along with a hint of warning throbbing in his pants.
He needed to see Xan.
Face-to-face and man-to-man. And if he was jittery inside and feeling high on emotions he hadn’t experienced in years that was all the more reason to go to him.
Now. Before he lost his nerve.
“Do you think he ever gets lonely?” Caleb asked, lolling on his bed in a loose pair of pants and a V-necked white shirt.
His blond hair was tousled, and his fingertips were stained red from new ink he’d been trying out in his print studio. In a small room in the back of the house, he created bits of art on sheets of thick paper. He was never quite satisfied with any of them, though, and showed the outcomes to no one, not even Xan.
But he never threw away his so-called failures either. He hoarded his ink and paper creations in stacks that Xan was convinced were a fire hazard, but he kept that opinion to himself.
“Who?” Xan’s mind had gone immediately to Urho, though he’d hoped they were done discussing the man. He’d told Caleb that he’d stopped by Urho’s house and that he’d agreed to prescribe the medications.
Assuming Urho simply hadn’t had the pills on hand, Caleb had hugged Xan hard. “Thank you,” he’d said. “You truly believe this medication will help?”
“I hope so.”
But hope didn’t seem to cut it for Caleb, because he’d pressed on, asking, “And if it doesn’t?”
“We’ll make a backup plan, but unfortunately any plan we settle on will have to be made in Virona,” he’d said, and then he’d explained all about his meeting with Ray.
It was a relief to talk to Caleb about his father’s displeasure, his cousin Janus’s favor in his father’s eyes, Ray’s intervention, and their upcoming displacement, but it was strange to be so open about those issues, all the while keeping the true events during his visit to Urho’s house a secret.
Even as they’d discussed the motivations for the move and the necessary preparations for it, he’d remembered the hoarse cry of Urho’s pleasure and the hot splatter of his come against his skin.
Xan wished he hadn’t needed to wash so thoroughly. He still craved the scent of it. He wanted to taste it again. Most of all, he wanted to feel the way he had in Urho’s arms—at his command, quite nearly beloved.
He’d almost believed Urho cared.
But that was ridiculous and just the product of an overactive imagination. Xan was moving to a new city very soon, and Urho’s offer, generous as it was, and pleasurable as the sample had been, wouldn’t be of any help when he was three hours away by the seaside.
Also, maybe he was still in shock. He didn’t know what to think, what to believe, and a large part of him wanted to run away from Urho as quickly as possible before he let himself do something stupid like hope. Even if the move to Virona did feel like punishment for something he couldn’t entirely control, between Monhundy and now this, it couldn’t have come at a better time.
“I’m speaking of Ray, of course,” Caleb said, referring back to his question of loneliness. “He works so hard for your father, day and night. Does he even have a lover? Do you know?”
Xan shrugged. Their interactions had always been quite one-sided: older Ray trying to keep younger Xan out of bigger trouble. It’d never occurred to Xan to ask his brother about his feelings, romantic or otherwise.
“I think he must be lonely,” Caleb said, rolling onto his stomach and propping himself up on his elbows to smile at Xan.
Xan stared out the window, watching the beta servants below working on the layout of their spring gardens—the fruits of the servants’ labor now something he and Caleb would have to miss.
“Perhaps he is,” Xan conceded. “But that’s his problem. Ours is preparing to move. By the weekend. It’s not much time to get everything ready.”
Caleb nodded, rising gracefully from the bed, his long legs and arms moving like a dancer. “I’m glad. This is exactly what I’ve
prayed for.” His eyes shone. “I’ve asked wolf-god for this every night, lighting the incense, and kneeling by my bed like a good omega should.”
Xan blinked. “What do you mean?”
Caleb crossed to him, folding into Xan’s arms. “I love you dearly, my friend. To get you away from that monster, I’d go anywhere, do anything.”
Xan hugged him close and fought down the lump in his throat. “What if I find another monster in Virona?”
“You won’t,” Caleb said fiercely. “We’ll build a new life there without any monsters in it. You’ll see.”
Xan kissed Caleb’s temple and sighed. The monster was inside him. He didn’t think there was any true way to escape that fact.
“And what about your family?”
Caleb shrugged, moving out of Xan’s arms and across the room to the vanity, where he sat down and began to brush out his blond hair. “You know how I feel about them. Leaving them behind is a bonus.”
Xan nodded, remembering the long, thin people who’d birthed Caleb and then treated him as nothing more than a pawn to marry off to the highest bidder.
The fact that Xan had chosen him and Caleb had at last consented to be contracted had been met with great rejoicing in the Riggs-Holo household. But that had died out when Caleb insisted their contract contain language forbidding his parents from access to the Heelieses’ funds outside of an annual gift consisting of a sum that was nothing to sneeze at. But that annual gift wasn’t even a drop in the massive bucket of money the Heelies, and now Caleb, had access to.
“And what about my own family?” Xan asked quietly.
Caleb’s gaze caught his in the mirror. “Darling, you’re more likely to be allowed access to your pater again if you do as your father asks. Unfair as that sounds and no matter how it hurts. Surely Virona is far enough away to put a damper on your urges, but not so far that your pater couldn’t come visit if your father lifts this ridiculous ban?”
“Pater must agree with it,” Xan said, voicing the fear he hadn’t ever allowed past his lips. “We all know how it is with omegas, with Erosgapé, especially. If he didn’t agree with Father, he could make him concede. All he’d have to do is express his disappointment in Father and he’d go on his knees to make it right again.”
