Gideon's Promise (Sons of Judgment Book 2)

by Morgana Phoenix

  He stood bare foot and bare chested framed by the front window. A mug of what smelled like coffee rested between his large hands and sent tendrils of white smoke into the crisp morning chill. His hair was tousled around a face that needed shaving and glinted a pale gold in the shards of sunlight breaking through the trees. He was beautiful in a way most men could never pull off. There was elegance and strength in the broadness of his shoulders and in the way he carried himself that made every female head in the room turn. The fact that he belonged exclusively to her only heightened her unquenchable desires for him. It brought out her arrogance and a smug sort of satisfaction that made her feel almost feline.

  Her haughtiness must have made a sound, because Gideon looked up and the sun shimmered off the silvery pools of his eyes and tinted his thick lashes to gold. His mouth drew into a smile that coaxed a sigh from her.

  “I was just thinking about you,” he murmured. “Why are you awake?”

  Brow arched, Valkyrie went to him. “You weren’t in bed.”

  He set his mug down on a table and reached for her. His hands, still warm from his drink, closed around her waist and she was drawn into his chest.

  “What were you thinking about?” she wondered.

  His inhale cooled the hairs at her temple. “I’m not sure you’re ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, her back was forced against the glass. The sudden nip of cold seeping through her t-shirt elicited a squeak that made him chuckle. He moved in, filling her space with his warmth and Valkyrie latched on, hooking her arms around his shoulders and bowing her body into his. Strong, capable hands cradled the back of her skull, urging her even closer as his second arm hooked about her middle and effortlessly lifted her up. She was propped against the window ledge and braced only by his support. He kissed her. He tasted of coffee and toothpaste, which reminded her she hadn’t brushed her teeth yet. Her attempts to draw away were followed by his mouth moving to the slant of her neck to nibble on her pulse. His hands glided along her shoulders, down the lengths of her arms to her hands.

  “Come.”

  Curious, she let him guide her to her feet and up the stairs, back to their room. He shut the door and then scooped her up bridal style into his arms. She was set down gently on the bed. He perched by her feet.

  “You know I would never hurt you, right?”

  Bemused, Valkyrie nodded.

  “And you would tell me if I did, wouldn’t you?”

  Again, she nodded.

  Carefully, he rose off the bed and went towards the closet. She watched as he hesitated for just a moment before reaching in.

  Hangers screeched along the pole as clothes were shoved aside. That far in, she couldn’t see what he was doing, but waited until he had reemerged from its depths with something glinting in his hand. Valkyrie recognized the item immediately and every muscle in her body stiffened.

  “Gideon...”

  He put up a hand, the one not holding cold steel. “Trust me.”

  She did. He’d been her partner for over three hundred years. They had fought side by side. They had hunted and killed together. That sort of thing left no room not to trust. On top of that, he was her mate, the man she loved and the man she was having a family with. She would trust him with her life.

  Nevertheless, despite what her heart knew, her body remained rigid.

  He eased onto the bed next to her.

  “I want to show you something,” he said quietly. “But it doesn’t have to be today. We have eternity together and I can wait.”

  She didn’t know what was so important that it required handcuffs, but he looked so earnest she couldn’t say no.

  He made her recline against the pillows. The cuffs were settled on the nightstand as he moved over her. His mouth met hers, sweet and tender. It was like taking tiny sips of whiskey through a straw. The results had her lightheaded and languid beneath him.

  When he liberated her of her clothes, she was already ready for him. Her body hummed with the desire only he had ever invoked in her. The place between her thighs was slippery and swollen. She knew it wouldn’t take very much to send her over. Yet he hesitated.

  “What?” she breathed. “Don’t stop.”

  His lashes lowered as a chuckle left his mouth, but the sound was humorless. “I’m just enjoying you.”

  She watched his hands go to the waistband of his pants. The cord came undone easily and the material slipped around his hips. The thick head of his erection poked through first. Then he was kicking the hindrance away and kneeling between her knees. One arm anchored beneath her and she was dragged down to him to the center of the bed.

  “Okay?” he asked, which she found baffling and amusing.

  “Yes...” She chuckled.

  With a nod, he aligned himself with her opening and sunk inside with a slowness that made her swear and buck beneath him. Every rigid vein rising beneath the velvet shaft scraped against her walls until he was nestled as far as he could go. Her slick channel suckled at him like a hungry mouth.

  He pulled out once, all the way, before surging home, faster this time. The thrust propelled her up on the mattress, but he caught her and dragged her back to him, dragged her over him until he was so deep she couldn’t see straight. Her nails tore into his back, raking down to hook into the taut muscles of his backside.

  “Please...” she panted, uncaring how pathetic she sounded.

  Rather than give her what she needed, he draped his weight over her, lowering his arms and taking hold of hers. Both were raised over her head and pinned to the mattress.

  Valkyrie instinctively stiffened. The sweet bells that usually sounded when she was crumbling into mindless bliss were replaced with a louder noise that screamed red. Her heart jackhammered with a panic she tried and failed to swallow down.

  “Easy,” Gideon whispered into her ear. “You’re safe.”

  “No...”

  He shushed her gently as her wrists were drawn together and shackled with just one of his hands. Any other time, she would have marveled at how big his hands were, how long his fingers were to be able to fold so effortlessly around both of hers. Now it only doused her in a pool of cold sweat.

  “Look at me, Valkyrie,” he ordered.

  She didn’t want to. Her mind had already started drifting to that place it went when she knew the pain would start, the place where it was dark and quiet and she could curl into a small ball and no one could hurt her.

  “Valkyrie!” His voice left no room for defiance. “Look at me.”

  Shuddering from head to toe, she lifted her gaze to his face, suspended mere inches over hers.

  “It’s me,” he murmured once he knew he had her focus. “It’s my hands.”

  As though to prove it, the free one drifted down to stroke her face, to skim over her dry lips.

  “My hands will never, ever cause you pain,” he told her. “I will never cause you pain. Do you understand?”

  Her tongue had become a useless slab of meat inside her mouth, but she forced a stiff nod.

  He drew one of her hands down, kept a firm bracelet around the second one as the first was brought to his mouth. He kissed her scars. His bristles tickled the raw and sensitive skin. His gray eyes never once wavered from hers.

  “I will do many things to you. I will love you. I will fuck you. I will make you come hard often. But I will never do anything you don’t want.” He kissed her. His hips shifted against hers in slow, even rocks that she was not immune to despite her tension. “Don’t shut your eyes,” he warned when the fine threads of passion began winding around her all over again. “I want you to see me when I’m inside you and know that it’s me, only me. It will always be only me. No one will ever do to you the things I will. No one will ever hold you down, but me. And when I do, it’s to pleasure you, not punish you...” He paused, narrowed his eyes. “Well, unless you’ve been a bad girl.” He grinned when she chuckled weakly, but just as quickly,
he was serious once more. His voice lowered to a husky timber that tickled her chin as he nipped his way to her ear in between words. “My hands were made only to ever love, cherish, and worship you. I was made to only love, cherish, and worship you.” His thrusts became faster. “I’m yours, Kyrie. Only yours.”

  She came and it was nothing like all the other times. This one filled her with a warmth that enveloped her entire soul like liquid silk. It lifted her up and even when she fell, she was still floating in a soft sea of incredible bliss. Every breath was a sigh of content. Every heartbeat pattered with his name. She never wanted it to stop.

  “I love you,” were the first words she heard when the sound of harps and flutes finally dimmed between her ears. She’d heard him say it before, but there was something profoundly soul-bearing in his voice this time.

  “I love you, too.”

  It was as though her words had the power to dissolve him. Every muscle unwound simultaneously until he was a lax blanket draped over her, braced on only one arm. The other still had her wrists suspended over her head. It was insane, but it didn’t bother her. Nevertheless, she wasn’t sure she would ever be ready for the cuffs.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to let you cuff me,” she murmured. “The cold steel ... I can’t.”

  Against her shoulder, he nodded. “Okay.” He raised his head and peered down into her face. “That doesn’t make me love you any less.”

  “It’s the cold steel,” she said again. “I can’t stand it on my skin, not since...”

  “What?” he murmured, bundling her up in the blankets and his arms.

  Everything in her willed her to tell him forget it, but her mouth was already moving.

  “I was nine the first time I was taken to the pit.” She paused to swallow down the bile that worked up her throat at the memory alone. “We were being taught to hunt in the forest behind the castle and I was the only one who caught something that day. It was a baby rabbit, barely bigger than my hand and so soft. It looked up at me with these big brown eyes and I didn’t have the heart to kill it. It wasn’t big enough to feed anyone anyway. I thought what was the harm in letting him go? So I cut the snare and watched him scurry away. My mentor was furious. I was taken to my father. It was the first time he’d ever spoken to me and it was to tell me a Harvester wasn’t weak. I was the first kid ever to be taken to the pit. I was soaked in cold water and then taken to this dark room. They had to put crates under my feet to get me to reach the shackles suspended from the grates overhead. The iron was red and I didn’t understand why until they closed around my wrists...” She broke off with a squeak that would have mortified her any other time.

  “Jesus!” Gideon’s arms tightened around her to the point of near pain, but she didn’t ask him to stop.

  “The crates were taken away and I was left hanging there, my skin burning. The smell of it was the worst. They whipped me twenty times and warned me that if I cried, they’d hit me harder, and I tried.” Tears spilled down her temples. “I tried so hard.”

  “I’m so sorry, baby,” he growled into the top of her head.

  Valkyrie barely heard him. She was lost in the nightmare and the more she talked, the more vivid the memories became.

  “They let me down. I wasn’t sure if it was hours, or days, but they sent me back to the nursery, bloody and barely able to walk. Because I was the king’s daughter, he had used me as an example for all the other children to not disobey. I wet the bed for a week after that. I couldn’t sleep. The pain was unimaginable. No one was allowed to heal them. I never told anyone. Serinda found out. I don’t know how. She never said anything, but she started taking me everywhere with her. She taught me to hunt and to fight and to be the proper warrior. I worked so hard not to ever get thrown down there again.” But she had. So many more times after that, each time worse than the time before.

  “It’s over,” he told her. “You are never going to see that place again, I swear it.”

  But she knew the nightmares would never leave her. That place was hardcoded into her very soul. She was branded with it.

  She woke to the tense rise of fire flicking a hungry tongue over the stiff little bundle between her legs. She knew even before she opened her eyes, before she sank a hand into all that silky blond hair that it would be Gideon’s beautiful eyes peering up her body, watching, waiting for her to wake up.

  Sure enough, he had her clit between his lips, sucking and tugging mercilessly as two fingers filled her pussy.

  “There you are,” he garbled around her mound. “I was beginning to think you were going to sleep the whole day away.”

  Valkyrie’s response was a deep, guttural moan of pleasure and a roll of her hips against his face as her body tensed and shuddered beneath his studious assault.

  “Awake?” he asked when she had finally returned to earth and lay in a satisfied puddle across the sheets.

  “Mm,” was all she gave him.

  “Good.”

  He moved over her and reached for something on the nightstand. For a moment, she thought maybe he was going to try and talk her into using the handcuffs, but the thing he brought forth wasn’t metal. It wasn’t even silver. It dangled from his fingertips before he twisted his hand and it draped across his palm.

  Valkyrie recognized it. She knew what it was and what it represented even before he reached for her right hand.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Have I ever told you the story of a selkie’s pelt?” he murmured, head bent in focus as he wound the strip of leather around her wrist, over the butchered skin, and gently latched the silver buckles in place just over her pulse.

  “Yes,” she whispered, throat unnaturally tight.

  “When we were small, our mom used to tell us that the thing a woman wanted more than anything was the knowledge that the man she loved, not only loved her back, but loved her enough to place his whole world in her hands. Magnus always thought that was crazy. Even back then, he was such a cynic. At the time, I thought it was just plain gross. Girls were the carriers of all sorts of nasty germs and I didn’t care if one never imprinted on me.”

  Despite the tightness in her chest, Valkyrie couldn’t help laugh.

  Grinning, Gideon raised his head and met her gaze. “It wasn’t until much later that I began to see some truth in the words. I watched every year as my friends all imprinted and settled down with their families. I hated all of them. Our village was small so I could never understand why my mate wasn’t there. The fact that none of my brothers had imprinted either made me feel a little better.” His smile slipped and a hollow darkness filled his eyes. “Then the war started. My race was eradicated until it was just us. Lilith knows how we survived when an entire race didn’t. But we did and with their death I had been so certain that my chances of finding my other half was gone.” He watched the lazy skim of his thumb along her knuckles and she watched him, her heart aching. “Then I saw her one night, putting her own life at risk to save a group of human women from a madman. She was beautiful. I think I fell in love with her on the spot.”

  “She sounds amazing,” Valkyrie murmured.

  Gideon chuckled. “She is. She’s also the only person I have ever wanted to be truly enslaved to, body, heart, and soul.” He raised his chin, but only barely so he peered up at her through wispy fringes and thick lashes. “What do you say? Can I be yours?”

  Her answer was to crawl into his lap, straddle his legs, and lock her arms around his neck.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  It took two months to confirm what she already knew and only after she found her head buried in the toilet more than not. However, the morning sickness was nothing compared to the cravings, the aches and pains, and the mood swings. By the fifth month, winter had melted into spring and summer was peeking at them from around the corner and the heat was already driving her crazy. Nothing fit and she could no longer wear her boots due to swollen ankles and crappy balance.

  Gideon was elated
about the whole thing. Every new symptom only heightened his excitement, and despite her foul temper, Valkyrie couldn’t help getting excited with him. There was something contagious about his happiness, about the way he cradled her expanding abdomen and peered into her eyes with the most ridiculous grin. With each new day, she became more addicted to his attention, to his love and adoration. The thought of having a baby still scared the shit out of her, especially when every time she looked at her hands, all she saw were killing machines.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” she confessed.

  “It’ll be fine,” Gideon promised, as he did every time she began to feel herself panicking. “Your hands are beautiful and oddly very soft.”

  She looked at her palms with their long, slender fingers. “Why oddly?”

  “No idea, but it made you stop thinking they’re going to magically grow minds of their own and strangle our baby, didn’t you?”

  She frowned at his logic. “That’s not funny.” She sighed and let her hands drop into her lap. “What if I drop her?”

  “I’ve seen you throw a blade with deadly accuracy from fifty paces ... I think you’ll be fine.”

  “Stop pacifying me!” she snapped. “I haven’t seen a child since I was one. I don’t like them. They’re all small and fragile and they cry!”

  Gideon, not taking her seriously at all, nodded slowly with a sort of contemplation that narrowed his eyes. “Well, between the two of us, I doubt she’ll be overly fragile, but if she does cry, we can always toss her into the well out back—”

  She smacked him on the arm, twice for good measure.

  “You’re horrible! And your mother is going to kill you once I tell her what you said.”

  “Tell me what?” Kyaerin marched into the room, a box of bottles rattled in her hands.