by Selena Scott
Quick as a flash, he grabbed her by the wrist and buried his nose in her hand. His eyes burned into hers. “You touched yourself,” he growled.
She nodded, a flush creeping up her cheeks.
“How did it feel?” he asked, dragged her fingers along his lips.
“New,” she whispered. “Good.”
“What did you think about?”
Her eyes, tense, filled with emotion, shot up to his. “You,” she whispered.
Her words hit him at the same second the taste on her fingers hit his tongue. Any control he may have had snapped like a thread. He was done trying to ease her into this. She was his. He was hers. It was time to claim each other once and for all. It was time to quench the thirst he’d had for four years.
Solar reared back and ripped the sheet off of her body. She sat before him, gasping, in a pair of black underwear and a simple black bra.
“Naked,” he growled and unhooked her bra, tossing it to the side. Next came her panties, which he ripped off of her legs. And then she was completely bare in front of him.
Her perfect little pussy. Pink and wet just for him.
He grabbed her by the knees and spread her. She squeaked in surprise as he dove in. His tongue lapped at her crease and he groaned at her flavor. She was everything he’d ever wanted. Made for him. Made to tempt him. He could drown in her taste.
Dimly, he was aware of her sweet little moans coming from above him. But his focus was absolutely lasered onto her pussy. Her clit. Which he sucked into his mouth, teasing and circling it with his tongue. He could just eat her right up. So he did.
He felt her hand suddenly ripping at his hair, gripping him so tightly. He welcomed the pain and pushed his tongue more firmly inside her tight channel.
“Solar,” she moaned as her hips started to move against him. “Something’s happening. What- oh god- inside me- something is-” her words cut off on a high scream as her entire body tensed and her pussy clamped down on his tongue. Her hand gripped his hair as she screamed and screamed her release.
Her body fell back onto the cot, limp as a misty rainfall.
CHAPTER NINE
What the fuck had just happened to her? Never in her life had Zara felt something like that. Somehow, every bit of happiness and pleasure, every itchy, tense moment of her life had just exploded into resolution. Solar had just done something to her. Something he could never undo. No matter what happened. She would always have that moment.
Her body quaked with aftershocks as she brushed the hair out of her face. He still kneeled on the floor below her and she lay spread out on her cot. She tried to get her breath back.
She thought that maybe she should be embarrassed to be so laid out for him. To be panting and confused, and … all wet. But the second she looked up at him, the look in his eyes told her that she had nothing to be embarrassed about. He was looking at her like she was the only thing he could see. Like she was a glass of water in the desert.
“What just happened to me?” she asked.
“You came,” he said, his voice husky with need for her. “You had an orgasm.”
She sat up. She’d heard of that before, of course. But she’d never known it would be like that. She reached a hand out to his neck. Ran it over his shoulder. He was so gorgeous. All dips and valleys and muscles. She wasn’t sure how to ask her question, but she figured they were pretty far beyond modesty at this point. “Can I- I mean- is it possible for me to do that for you? Make you feel that way?”
A surprised noise made its way out of his throat. “Yes,” he said. “Just. Yes.”
She looked up at him through her eyelashes. “I don’t know how.”
“Touch me. Just touch me.”
He held himself still as she started out by tracing her hands over his chest, reaching over to trace across his back. But he was vibrating with restraint. His eyes had gone dark. She stroked over his shoulders and down over his arms. She linked her fingers with his and gently yanked him forward. He was just an inch away from her now.
And she did the only thing she could do. What her body was insisting she do. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his. So gently. But his flavor exploded in her mouth and Zara had the weird thought that it was the only thing she’d been missing. As if her mouth only had half of a complete flavor. And his had the other half.
She felt him start to open his mouth so she did as he did. But the second their open mouths connected her tongue took over. She traced his lower lip and gasped at the feeling of their tongues connecting. It shook something loose inside of her. She’d never imagined that she could feel so safe and also like she was falling off a cliff at the same time.
It wasn’t close enough. She grabbed the back of Solar’s head and held him in place, moaning into his mouth. She leaned over him, where he remained kneeling in front of her. It made her feel strangely powerful. Something she’d never felt before in her life. And here was Solar. Solid, always in charge. Competent. A warrior. And anywhere her hands went, he quivered. She scooted to the edge of the cot and tilted his head back as she deepened the kiss even further.
On a whim, completely unsure of what told her to do it, Zara nipped at his bottom lip with her teeth. Solar froze. Zara’s eyes fluttered open to find Solar’s eyes open and focusing on her. She released his lip. And then he was a blur of action.
It was like her teeth on him snapped something. Some control he’d had a tight leash on. She was suddenly on her back, slammed down onto the cot. The flimsy metal frame snapped beneath their combined weight and collapsed to the floor. But neither of them barely noticed.
He was kissing her now. Kissing the absolute breath out of her as his hands roamed her. He was touching her everywhere. Roughly, out of control. It exhilarated Zara, filled her up and excited her. This was Solar. She was so tired of being treated like she was breakable. Like she wasn’t a normal woman just because of her past. Here he was, giving her everything he had and she took it.
She took it easily and demanded more. Arching against him, she instinctually wrapped one of her legs around his hip. It brought her hot, wet core into alignment with Solar’s throbbing cock.
“Fuck,” he groaned. His head lifted and he stared her in the eye. He rolled them over so that he was sitting up and she was straddled over his lap, completely open for him.
“I should probably make you come again,” he whispered as he roughly dragged his hands over her breasts, tugging at the nipples. “But I wasn’t prepared for this. The reality. You. Naked. Wet. Ready.”
He leaned into her neck and sucked her pulse point into his mouth, biting down, hard. Zara moaned and leaned forward, clamping her own teeth over his shoulder. He groaned and squeezed her even harder. The tip of his cock slid across her silky wetness. Some feeling rose up in Zara. She wanted him inside her more than she wanted her next breath. He belonged inside her. She knew it.
“So, sometime soon I’ll romance you, Zara. But right now,” he said as he tangled his hands in her hair and yanked her head back to look up at him. “Right now I just have to fuck you.”
And with one arm banded around her hips, he thrust himself up at the same moment that he pressed her down. His cock shoved into her in one swift, intense stroke. Zara cried out and threw her head back. The feel of him. The invasion. It was so new. So pleasurable. So painful. But the pain tightened her nipples, had her gasping. It had her going. Something about the mixture of pain and pleasure had Zara moaning and wet. Crying out his name so loud she was sure they could hear her back at the camp. She didn’t care.
A single word exploded across her mind like lightning. Mate. She looked down at Solar in amazement. His face, so familiar, was bent into the picture of tense lust. The scar over his cheek and eyebrow was silver in the light. He was there, so powerful. The only man that had ever threatened Dalyer. His life’s work was destroying Dalyer. And there he lay, under her, wanting her. Needing her.
She had spent her whole life in fear of what it would mean t
o have a mate. Fearing the emotional prison of being tied to someone that way. But suddenly she realized how different this was than being a wife to Dalyer. Being a mate meant this closeness. This feeling. The explosion he’d given her with his mouth. It meant that he rescued her from the palace and slept on a thin mat outside of her hut. A hut he’d built for her.
It meant that his body was hers to touch and lick and bite. And she suddenly wanted that. So badly. Zara lifted herself up just slightly and grabbed Solar’s arm from around her waist at the same moment. She lifted his arm to her mouth, first kissing across his fingers and palm and then down his wrist. Then the skin of his forearm was between her teeth and she was biting on him at the same second she slammed back down, taking him all the way inside.
Both of them groaned at the sensations and Solar gripped Zara around the waist with his free hand, flipping them over. Zara’s back slammed against the cot and her legs gripped him around his waist. Her teeth transferred to the skin of his shoulder and his clamped onto the cleft of her neck. The two of them viced together. Solar’s feet gripped for purchase on the wooden floor of the hut and the sweat of their bodies made them slick. They slipped against one another but held fast with their hands and mouths as they bit down and soothed the bites with their tongues.
Zara’s fingers dug into Solar’s back as he set a punishing rhythm. It was as fast as her heartbeat and Zara felt him everywhere. He was everything. His scent filled her head, she could only see his eyes, his familiar face. His quick breath accented with the groan of his pleasure was fast in her ear. In that moment, Zara felt that she’d never lived before this. Never felt before this. Her entire life was Solar and the feelings that his rough, demanding hands were pulling from her.
Again, Zara exploded around him and this time she felt her channel pulsing and pulling at him. Solar’s eyes slammed shut against the sensation and he groaned into her neck.
“That’s right, Zara. Come for me,” he panted. “Show me how I make you feel.”
His words and the swivel of his hips had her coming more and more, her body rising impossibly higher. Her world shrunk down to the head of a pin as she threw her head back. Her entire life froze and set on fire. She knew she was screaming but her body could only feel.
“Mine,” she screamed. “Mate. Mate.”
Solar grabbed a handful of her hair and tipped her head to face him dead on. “Yes,” he growled. “Mate.” And then he pushed into her a final time, so deep that even her heart felt him. His face pulled tight with pleasure and his body tensed, pouring into her.
He collapsed with his full weight on top of her, his face buried in her neck. “Mate,” he said again as one hand stroked her hair. “Mate.”
CHAPTER TEN
Solar scrubbed a hand over his face as he fought to drag breath in and out of his lungs. He was pretty sure he was dead now. Or he'd just been born. Or had a religious experience or some shit.
All he knew was that his life as he knew it was over. He pinched his eyes closed for a moment against the new, semi-uncomfortable feeling of all of his priorities tumbling, shifting, rearranging. Zara had always been pretty close to the top. But now the rest of his priorities couldn't even see her, they sat so far back.
"You're the mountaintop," he mumbled into her hair that had tumbled all across the bed, across his chest.
"What?" She lifted her head and looked at him dazedly. He could see confusion, shock, satisfaction, and sex all play in her eyes. She slid even higher on his priorities list.
He chuckled at the look on her face. "I think you're a little stunned, woman."
She blushed, flopped back down, hiding her face in the pillow. Well, he couldn't have that.
He reached down and tipped her face up to him. "It's okay if you're overwhelmed, Z."
She nodded and nestled her face into his hand a little bit. It warmed him, fiercely.
"It's just that absolutely everything in my life just changed."
"Not everything."
She shifted to her side and his eyes joyfully skated over her curvy figure. It felt so good to finally be able to look. "What HASN’T changed?"
He lifted her fingers to his lips and looked her right in the eye. She was looking right back, he noticed. Something she never used to do. It felt good. Gratifying. The way it was supposed to be.
"My feelings for you haven't changed."
She scoffed and tossed her hair over shoulder. "Solar, your feelings have completely changed! A total 180. Before this morning you could barely stand to be around me. And now we're..." She motioned back and forth between them to indicate all the things they'd just done and all the things they were gonna do again.
He looked her dead in the eye. It was suddenly extremely important to him that there was zero confusion on this point.
"Zara. The," he motioned his hand back and forth just the way she had, "is basically the only thing I've been able to think about for a year and a half."
Her mouth dropped open. "What?"
"I'm serious.” He scrubbed a hand over his face again. “Ever since we rescued you four years ago, you've always been uncomfortably important to me. Enough that it confused me and I kept my distance. But I never really understood it. Until about a year and a half ago when you suddenly woke up with this body and it finally dawned on me that you were about to become a woman."
Zara bit her bottom lip and reached out to fiddle with a piece of her hair. "You- you wanted to mate with me?"
"Woman," he said. "I wanted to destroy you."
Her mouth dropped open again. "I never knew."
"I know. I worked my ass off to keep it from you. I didn't want you or anyone to know."
She turned to him. Feelings warmed her eyes and she reached out to stroke a hand down his chin. "You suffered." It wasn't a question. She was telling him what she saw in his eyes.
He shrugged. "People suffer all the time. It's life. I handled it. I thought I could handle it."
"So why did you come to me?" She was asking because she was curious, he knew. But he could also tell that confusion was there. She needed reassurance. She was scrambling to understand what had just happened.
But in order to explain that he had to know what just happened.
"It's hard to explain, Z. It happened so fast. I was out by the river and I caught your fertility scent on the wind. And it was like," he flopped back onto the bed, searching for the words. She propped herself up to see his face. "Every feeling I'd ever suppressed for you. Every frustration. Every missed moment. It all came roaring back at once. And there was no stopping it. Everything else stopped existing. All there was, in my whole world, was you."
He watched her face as the sincerity of his words broke over her. There was confusion, joy, fear, surprise. She worried her bottom lip between her teeth and he found himself getting hard again. Even after she’d just completely dismantled him.
“And now?” she asked and he instantly narrowed his eyes in confusion.
“What are you asking me, woman?” He ran his hand down her side and observed her. Even in the harsh afternoon light, she was painfully beautiful. Her large gray eyes filling her face. Her small features looking so delicate. But he knew better. He knew she had a fierceness within her. He had bite marks all over his body to prove it.
“You- you called me your mate. Did you mean it?” Zara asked. She was looking him right in the eye and it gave him the same thrill it had given him before. After four years of her dropping her gaze from his, looking her right in the eye felt so intensely intimate.
Her words made him go still, though. She’d been so clear that she never wanted a mate. That she wanted to be alone. Peaceful. Independent. He’d completely understood her reasoning when she’d explained it to him. After all those years tethered to Dalyer, he supposed nobody would want to be linked to another again. But it had deeply thrilled him when she’d said it moments ago. Called him her mate. And more than thrilling, it had just felt right. It had felt like the truth.
> “I meant it.” He ran a finger over her collarbone. Her skin was like flower petals laid over glass. She was a work of art. “But that doesn’t mean anything unless you meant it.”
A color worked its way over her skin. She was blushing. He assumed because she was remembering the things she’d just done and said while she was fucking his brains out.
She turned and faced him. He felt like his world tipped with whatever she said next. “I never felt like I’d ever want that. A mate.” She drew her hands through her hair and let out a frustrated breath. She stared at the ceiling like she could find the answers there. “But. I guess I don’t know. It all felt clearer a moment ago.”
He tipped up on an elbow and studied her face. “You mean that it was clearer when I was inside you.”
She blushed further, flushing up to the roots of her hair. She bit her lip and nodded.
“Then I guess I’m gonna have to try and clear some things up for you.” Solar scooped her up and laid her across his stomach. His cock was sandwiched between them as he smoothed a hand over her ass. Finding her wet core from the back, Solar teased her with his fingers.
Zara gasped and stiffened, smashing her breasts into his chest as she buried her face in the crook of his neck. Her hips made tiny fucking motions and he grinned into the sweltering air of the hut. She was a goner. He circled her clit with his middle finger, teasing her into pleasure, while two other fingers plunged into her and circled her channel.
Fuck, she was tight. He deserved a medal for lasting as long as he had before. He could feel her tightening and rising and when she tensed and broke, screaming into his skin, he felt her release almost like it was his own. But he wasn’t done with her. He rolled her off of him so that she lay on her belly on the cot.
