Unmarked: My Mate Refused, The Alpha King Didn't novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The First Night

She sends Jasper away through the door and walks to the King; they spend the night together, the fever goes quiet, the King will not bite, and at dawn his sister brings word that Jasper has petitioned the Moot.

Thane lifted his head and started to rise.

I held onto his coat.

"Let him knock."

"He's your husband."

"He's a man who knelt at the Moon Stone and said he'd rather not have me," I said. "He doesn't get to ask for me at a door."

The pounding came again.

"Elsie!" Jasper shouted. "Come out and stop this!"

I got up on my shaking legs and went to the door myself.

I didn't open it.

"I'm not yours to collect, Jasper," I said through the wood. "Go back to Lavinia."

Silence.

Then the guards' boots came up the stair, and Jasper's voice went down it, protesting, until the hall below swallowed him.

I turned around.

Thane hadn't moved from the chair.

He was watching me with his hands hanging between his knees.

"You said I walk where I like," I said.

"I did."

"Then I'm walking to you."

I crossed the room and stood between his knees.

The fever had come back up while I was shouting at the door, and I felt it roll through my whole body in one long wave.

My fingers wouldn't stay steady on the laces of my dress.

He stood and did them for me, slowly, from the top down, and his knuckles brushed my spine each time.

"Tell me when to stop," he said.

"Don't."

The dress dropped around my feet.

He looked at me for one long breath, and I watched his throat move.

"Elsie."

"I've been looked at like a debt for eight months," I said. "Look at me like that again."

He did.

He lifted me against him and I wrapped my legs around his waist, and the kiss that came was the one he had been holding back since the chair.

It went on and on.

His mouth moved to my jaw, my throat, the hollow below my collarbone.

He carried me to the bed and laid me down, and then I pulled his shirt off over his head and he stopped being careful.

His chest was scarred everywhere except the place where the bandage lay, and I put my hand flat over the linen.

He caught his breath.

"Does it hurt?"

"Not when you touch it."

I stored that away, because there was no room in me for more than one thought.

He kissed down my stomach and pushed my knees apart with both hands.

Looking up at me from between my thighs, he said, "Say what you want."

"Your mouth."

"Where?"

"On my clit," I said. "Now, Thane."

He put his mouth on me.

The first slow lick went through me, and I grabbed the sheet.

He licked me steadily, then harder, with one big hand holding my hip down and the other spread over my stomach, feeling every shudder.

The fever rose and rose with it, and I begged without any shame at all, because there was nobody to be ashamed in front of.

"More. Don't stop. Please."

He slid two fingers inside me, crooked them, and found the place that made me arch off the bed.

I came with a cry that echoed off the stone.

For one second the whole burning world went white and quiet.

He didn't wait for me to catch my breath.

He came up over me, kissed me with my own taste on his mouth, and I felt how hard he was against my thigh.

"I want you," I said. "All of you."

"You have me."

He reached down, lined himself up, and pushed into me in one slow, deep stroke that stretched me wide and filled me to the end.

I gasped his name.

He stayed there, buried to the root, shaking, with his forehead on mine.

"You're so tight," he said, low and rough. "Fuck, Elsie. You feel like fire."

"I am fire. Move."

He moved.

He fucked me slowly at first, long strokes that dragged against every sore, starved place in me.

Then I dug my heels into his back and said, "Harder," and he gave me that too.

The bed shook.

His cock hit the deepest part of me again and again, and my nails scored lines down his shoulders, and I heard myself saying filthy things I had never said to a living soul.

He answered every one.

"Take it. That's it. Come on my cock."

I came a second time, harder, with my back bowed off the sheets and his name ripped out of my throat.

He followed me with a groan that sounded like it hurt, his hips driving into mine, his whole body locked tight.

He turned his face away at the last second.

His mouth hovered over my shoulder, shaking, and then he pressed it into the pillow instead of my skin.

Afterwards, he lay with his arm over my waist, breathing hard.

The fever was quiet for the first time in eight months.

It felt as if somebody had lifted a weight I had carried so long I'd stopped feeling it.

I turned to say so, and saw his bandage.

It had gone dark and wet through.

"Thane."

"It's nothing," he said, and kissed my hair. "Sleep."

I did.

I woke to gray light and a hand shaking my shoulder, and for one blurred second I thought it was him.

It was Pippa Kinross, the King's sister, in a travelling cloak, with a sealed paper in her fist.

"Get dressed," she said. "Your husband has petitioned the Moot for his wife, and my brother has until noon to answer."

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