by Roxie Ray
“I intend for it to be.” I kissed Alora’s temple. “Is there anything that needs doing for the moment, Lord Haelian?”
“Not that I can think of,” said Haelian. “Brixta’s forces have all been killed or have fled. The city is ours—and you’ve already taken the liberty of determining Brixta’s replacement. I think, for once, all is truly well.”
“In that case, I will be retiring to the royal bedchambers for a few hours.” I smiled down at Alora. “I think I would like to rechristen them.”
“You’re terrible,” Alora said with a laugh.
I merely shrugged. “I have waited all my life for you, vringna. Now that all is well…Moons be damned if I will wait any longer.”
19
Alora
It had been four months since I had been able to kiss Ronan. Four months since I’d been able to enjoy the heat of his body and the safety of his arms—all four of them. Four long, aching months since we’d had any time alone together—or, really, any time at all.
It hurt, that we’d lost all of that time. There were so many little comforts that had been stolen from me when my husband—my late husband now—locked Ronan in the dungeons and me in the birthing suites. I’d missed out on being cuddled through the throes of my morning sickness, on having my feet rubbed when they swelled and having my breasts massaged when they ached.
We’d been robbed of that time. It was time that we’d never get back and I hated that.
But as Ronan swept me up into his arms and raced through the halls of the palace with me, I heard our laughter mix and echo, amplify. I smelled the scent of him, like warm rain on fresh earth, even beneath the blood of the warriors he’d had to kill to win this moment for us. I looked up at him and saw the deep blue of his eyes glittering back at me—
And just like that, it felt like no time had passed at all.
No. Better than that.
“You love me?” I asked him as he kicked down the door of the royal suite. “You really do?”
“I really do.” Ronan placed me down next to the desk where Brixta had occasionally signed drunken execution orders. He took my wrist in his hand and pulled it outward, then laid it down on the flat of the desk. “And I will prove it, too. Stay there.”
“Why?” I stared down at my wrist, still encircled by the heavy wedding bracelet that had marked me as the king’s bride.
I hated the look of it. I hated its heaviness, how cold the metal felt and how trapped I had felt here ever since Brixta had snapped it around my wrist.
“Because,” Ronan said, positioning one of his fists over the bracelet. “I want you to be free of him.”
“I think you did that when you killed him, Ronan.”
“Perhaps. But this last little symbol…” Ronan brought his fist down hard on top of the bracelet. I closed my eyes and let out a whimper. I was so sure it would hurt—but it didn’t. The bracelet cracked beneath Ronan’s fist and split apart. When it fell uselessly onto the desk beneath my wrist, Ronan picked it up, carried it to the window, and tossed it out. “There. Now you are truly free.”
I rubbed my wrist and smiled at him. He was right—I even felt free now. Knowing it was one thing, but feeling it—really, genuinely feeling it—It was the best thing I’d felt in four months.
At least, right up until Ronan took my wrist in his hand again and pulled me against him. When he kissed me, his lips like a conquering force on a torrid battlefield—that was the best thing.
And given the way his eyes were blue now, without even a single swirl of purple within them, I had a feeling there were even more best things to come.
“My queen,” he breathed against my lips. “Let me look at you.”
“I’m not much to look at these days, I’m afraid,” I said with a laugh. Nonetheless, I took a step back and gestured to myself. “Between my cankles and—”
“What are…can-kels?”
My laugh turned a shade more nervous. “Um…” I pulled my skirt up to my knee and stuck a foot out from beneath the folds of the fabric. My feet, once so dainty and small, looked pudgy in my slippers now. My ankles were swollen up like fat sausages. Not my sexiest look, if I was being honest. “These are cankles.”
Ronan chuckled softly, then dropped to his knees. He took my foot in his two lower hands and wound his upper ones around my hips so I wouldn’t lose balance.
“They are lovely.” Ronan’s lips dipped down to place a kiss on the place where, once upon a time, my ankle had clearly shifted into my calf. “You have beautiful cankles, my queen.”
I couldn’t help it. I snorted.
“What?” Ronan glanced up at me with narrowed eyes that glimmered gorgeously. “Something is funny?”
“I just don’t think anyone has ever said those words in that order and actually meant them before, sweetheart.”
“No? But I do mean it. Your legs are as lovely as ever to me.”
“You might be the only one who feels that way on either of our planets,” I told him.
“You do not like the way your body looks?” Ronan lowered my foot back onto the floor. “What about it displeases you?”
“Well…” I ran my hands over my belly, which was rippled with shiny, pale pink streaks from the way the cub growing inside me had stretched out my skin. “On top of the cankles, there are the stretch marks…”
“These?” Ronan traced one of the marks with a fingertip. “You do not like them?”
“I’m used to them by now,” I admitted. “But, ah…you’re not.”
“And you think that the way your body has changed since you became pregnant with my cub means I am somehow no longer attracted to you?” Ronan blew a puff of air out of his nose. “Vringna.”
“I think that this is the first you’re seeing of my new body in four months,” I told him, tugging at him so he would rise to his feet again. Not that it did much good. “I’ve changed a lot in that time. Obviously. So…no, I don’t think that you don’t want me anymore.”
“Good. A ridiculous thing to think.”
“But I do think that maybe you’ll find me less—”
“Vringna,” Ronan scoffed. “No. You are not less. Never less.”
When he finally rose to his feet, he stopped to kiss each of my stretch marks first.
“You are so much more now, Alora,” he whispered, bowing down to rest his forehead against mine. His eyes sparkled still, no less blue than they’d been when he first carried me in here. “Everything I have seen, I love. Now, stop this nonsense and help me get your clothes off. I would like to see more.”
I giggled as I tried to unlace the ties of my top, only for Ronan to swat my hands away.
“I thought you wanted me to help!”
“As it turns out, I do not need it.” Ronan’s hands pulled the laces of my top and skirt free at the same time. “The benefits, I suppose, of having a husband with four arms.”
“Husband, huh?”
Ronan smirked as my top and skirt slipped to the floor.
“Soon enough, my queen. Soon enough.”
As I stepped out of my skirt, he wound his arms around me and pulled my body against his.
Any closer than this, and he’d be inside me.
A reality that was looking more and more possible as Ronan twirled me around and moved me to the bed.
He lowered me onto the mattress gently. My days of being thrown around like a sophisticated sex toy were apparently over—but somehow, I didn’t mind.
“I’ve been avoiding being fucked in this bed for so long now.” I ran my fingers across the silk comforter and smiled at Ronan as he lay down beside me. “It almost seems a shame to ruin my success streak.”
“Is that so?” Ronan’s fingers tiptoed across the comforter to brush against mine. “I suppose I could just continue looking at you, if you are no longer interested in making love.”
“You like looking at me that much, do you?” Our fingertips kissed, quickly and chastely like secret, virginal lovers.
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Like Ronan and I had been once, before all of this started.
It made me smile to think of how far we’d come.
“I do like looking at you, my queen. Very much. I could do it for hours. For days. For a lifetime.” A wicked twinkle caught in Ronan’s eyes. “But I would like making love to you much more.”
“Is that so?” I purred back at him. Just hearing him say those words was making me soaked. I could feel my honey dripping from my slit. When I shifted my thighs back and forth slightly, they were slick with my juices.
“I think that much should be obvious.” Ronan moved to stand before me. He gestured to his lap—though his didn’t need to. His cock bulged against the fabric of his pants. They looked tight and strained, like they were ready to split any moment. “But perhaps you need more proof.”
“Such as?” I bit my lip as I looked him up and down.
“Perhaps my queen would like to look upon me as well.”
Ronan removed his belt first, then his shirt. I held my breath as he unwound the laces at his collar, then pulled the shirt up over his head.
It was like seeing him for the first time all over again. His chest was even more chiseled than I remembered. His abs seemed to have no end. And when he unlaced his pants and let them fall to the floor…
I gasped, suddenly breathless.
It had been four long months since I’d seen any man naked, let alone this one.
My Ronan. My heart. My soul. Father of my cub.
My king.
His cock twitched as I stared at it. It was even bigger than I remembered. It throbbed gorgeously, lifting upward with his every breath, his every heartbeat. Precum glistened at its tip, just begging to be licked away.
“Oh, fuck,” I panted. My pussy was suddenly on fire. My body roared to life as an intense cocktail of hormones flooded my veins.
For the last four months, of course I’d felt pregnant and worried. Unfortunately, that was about all I’d felt. Locked up in King Brixta’s birthing suites, as my breasts ached and my belly swelled, pregnant hadn’t just been my condition. It had become my entire identity.
As Ronan’s hungry gaze washed over me, that sensation was finally set right.
He looked at me like I was pregnant, yes, but like a woman, too. His woman. His wife. His queen. Mother of his cub.
“Do you want me, vringna?” He took his cock in his fist and pumped it as he moved toward me.
“Yes,” I breathed. “I’ve never wanted anything more in my entire life.”
“Then I am yours.” Ronan folded his body over mine. “All yours.”
His strong hands cupped my ass and the small of my back as he shifted me deeper into the bed. His lips claimed mine, then trailed down the curve of my jaw and the length of my neck.
He kissed all the way down my body, pausing only to give special attention to my most sensitive parts. When he bit gently at my nipples, I arched and gasped. They’d been hurting for months, and now, I knew why.
They’d been aching for Ronan’s lips—for the mouth of my mate.
“No milk,” Ronan said after he’d popped his lips off of my nipples. He stared down at them like he was seeing them for the first time. I supposed in a way, he was. They were darker now than they’d been the last time we’d been together, stiffer.
“Not for a few more months,” I told him. “Are you disappointed?”
“Never,” he breathed as he kissed them again. “Only excited for all the things yet to come.”
“Speaking of things yet to come…” I shifted my hips beneath him. When I bucked them up, his cock slipped against my cunt, hot and throbbing. “Do you want me, my king?”
Ronan closed his eyes, then laughed. “I feel like a virgin again, it has been so long, vringna. Forgive me for taking my time with you. I have missed this closeness.” He lowered his nose to my neck and breathed me in. “Your scent.” He curled his fingers around mine and raised my hand to his lips. “Your touch.”
“You’re a very successful man, for a virgin,” I moved his hand to my belly between us. My cunt burned for his cock. I was desperate to have him inside me. But I didn’t want to lose the tenderness of this moment, either. It had been so long, and in a way, I knew what he meant. I was feeling a little virginal myself, my current condition notwithstanding. “Perhaps the most prolific virgin I’ve ever met.”
“We took each other’s virginities once, I suppose. And I enjoyed that greatly,” Ronan purred. He smoothed his fingers down the swell of my belly. “I don’t suppose I would mind doing it again.”
Ronan wrapped his hands around my hips and shoulders suddenly. The world twirled as he spun me around and placed me on all fours in front of him.
“I don’t recall this being how it happened last time,” I said with a laugh. My cunt burned even hotter as Ronan trailed his claws down my back, squeezed my breasts and grabbed his cock all at once. “Are you looking to shake things up this time around?”
“I do not wish to shake you, precious one. Or squash you, for that matter.” The hands on my breasts shifted to my belly. He cupped it and sighed like it was the most precious thing in his entire world. “If that means taking you from behind and rutting you like a beast…well, from this angle, I have little to complain about.”
“A beast, are you?” I tossed my hair over my shoulder to look at him. The dark blue of his eyes glimmered back at me. “And what does that make me?”
“My mate, vringna.” Ronan pressed the tip of his cock into my slick, hot folds. “My mate, and so much more.”
It wasn’t the fucking I’d been imagining upon our reunion. As the hormones had raged through my body over the last four months, I’d fantasized about this moment so many times it had started to almost feel real. In my fantasies, Ronan had ravished me like a sex-crazed maniac, and I’d thrown myself at him just as desperately. Like a hot-cunted slut. Like his whore.
But as Ronan pressed into me, he was slow and gentle. My cunt clenched greedily around his cock, doing everything in its power to pull him deeper, but he refused to give himself to me in that hard, reckless way I’d yearned for.
The heat of my cunt unfurled inside my womb and spread through my body like tendrils of flame as Ronan’s cock slid into me, inch by agonizing inch, but it didn’t satiate my appetite.
It was good, but I wanted more.
“Not very beastly of you, my king,” I said over my shoulder.
“No?” Ronan paused, then wrapped his arms around me and pulled me upright. I moaned deeply as he leveraged the weight of my body to force my pussy down the last few inches of his length. When I had all of him inside me, it was like he’d pressed a button within me that read PLEASURE. My whole brain lit up. Fireworks exploded behind my eyelids every time I closed my eyes. “And what about now?”
“Better,” I panted. “Much better.”
“I do not want to hurt you, vringna. Or the cub,” Ronan purred against my ear. “But if it is a beast you want, then it is a beast you shall have.”
Two of Ronan’s arms hooked beneath mine. With his other two hands, he grabbed my hips, lifting me up. He held me tight against him as he pumped my body up and down the length of his cock. Every time he buried himself inside my cunt completely—more explosions. It knocked the breath from my lungs and turned my world bright with intense, glimmering light.
This is what taking drugs must feel like, I found myself thinking. I’d never tried them myself—and now, I didn’t need to. As Ronan jerked himself off with my cunt, shifting me up and down his length faster and faster with every moan that left my lips, I knew that everything in the world I needed right now existed here within this bed. The rest faded away as I felt my consciousness sink deeper and deeper into my core with his every move.
The rest of the world meant nothing to me now that Ronan was inside me again. His teeth scraped against my neck ferociously. His breaths were labored and heavy. His hands squeezed my hips and my breasts like they were things he owned, until I he
ard the growls coming from his throat begin to crescendo to a roar.
“Yes,” I hissed, ecstatic. “Come for me, Ronan. Come inside me.”
“You first,” he snarled back at me, shifting his fingertips between my legs to stroke at my clit. “You first.”
Just a whisper of Ronan’s touch against the swollen, sensitive bud between the lips of my pussy would have been enough to set me off at that point. He could have breathed on me, and I would have exploded in passion and pleasure. But it was no whisper when his fingers delved between my folds, ruthless and firm.
It was a bang. I could almost hear it, a shot through the night drowned out by the cries of need and fulfillment spilling out over my lips.
My body shook as pleasure rippled through it. If Ronan hadn’t been holding me up, I had no doubt I would have collapsed like a rag doll, perfectly spent.
Only then did Ronan let himself go. I could feel the tension in his body shift to release in a ripple of his muscles and a clenching of his balls against my ass. He plunged his cock as deep inside me as he could, then thrust himself deeper still with every rope of cum he pumped into my cunt. The head of his cock, angled and thick, pressed up against my core like it was trying to create even more of me to fuck and use and own.
For a moment, I wondered if he was ever going to stop coming. I could feel his seed slipping back out of me just as quickly as he shot it inside. His cock filled me so completely, I couldn’t imagine how there was any room for his seed to fit. It slid down my thighs all the way down to my knees—and still, there was more to take its place. Burning hot, wet and thick.
“Fuck,” I swore when he finally stopped thrusting. We were both covered in sweat as he held me against him. Our chests rose and fell heavily together, our breaths perfectly synchronized.
“My apologies, precious one.” Ronan chuckled and nipped at my neck. “I thought I would last longer than that, but…it has been a long four months.”