Page 44 of Fight or Fly

I unbuttoned the offending article of clothing in a pleasantly drugged haze, slipping out of it and pulling my white undershirt over my head as well.

“Better,” Jax said, and tangled his fingers in my hair, tugging until it drew a gasp from me.

Jax had apparently been paying attention before.Fuck.

I melted into the pressure, but instead of dragging me to his mouth, he presented me for Leo to kiss. She attacked my lips with a ferocity I’d never felt from her before. Her fingers came up to grip my jaw, holding me where she wanted me, and I was lost.

Leo rode Jax hard, his alpha strength meeting her thrust for thrust as they passed me back and forth between them. I stopped thinking and simplyfelt, letting everything else go. Committee guards could have stormed the cell, and I still wouldn’t have pulled away from the lips and teeth marking and sucking at my mouth, my jaw, my neck.

Jax nipped his way down the left side of my throat, his breath coming harsh. Leo’s rhythmic, breathy cries rose in pitch as she careened toward her release, dragging Jax with her. With a final rough gasp, her muscles went rigid, and she jerked through her climax.

Jax groaned and spasmed as well. His teeth clamped over the juncture of my neck and shoulder—right over my mating gland. I cried out in a shocked combination of pleasure and pain as the skin broke, my blood and his saliva mixing. My entire body shook, gooseflesh erupting all over. My heart felt like it might explode, it was racing so fast.

The three of us remained suspended in that tableau for what seemed like a lifetime but was probably only seconds. Then Leo collapsed against Jax’s chest, panting. I could feel the humid warmth of Jax’s breath against my neck. He pulled back slowly, with the air of someone who’d just come back to himself and realized what he’d done.

The skin over my mating gland throbbed as the cooler air hit it. Blood beaded on Jax’s lips.

“Oh fuck,” he said. “Fuck. Kam, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

Dazed and knot-drunk, Leo came back to herself enough to peer at me with growing shock. I opened my mouth to say... something. Nothing came out.

“I didn’t mean to...” Jax tried again. He trailed off and scrubbed at his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’msosorry. I saw the scar where they took your gland. I didn’t mean to bring back bad associations.”

“Kam’s left-glanded,” Leo whispered, still watching me with wide eyes.

Jax blinked. “You’re—”

I lifted a hand to the throbbing flesh. My fingers felt numb.

“Left-glanded,” I repeated slowly. “They didn’t get my mating gland because it’s on my left shoulder, not my right. That’s rare—they didn’t bother to check first.”

A look of blank shock washed over Jax’s features. His gaze dropped to my hand covering the bite mark.

I let out a little laugh. It sounded wrong—not like a laugh at all. “Don’t worry. It’s as broken as the rest of me. It doesn’t work anymore.” I swayed a bit. “I feel strange.”

“Odama.Come here,” Leo said. She sounded like she was on the verge of tears.

I half-fell into their arms.

“Kameron,” Jax said against my temple, holding me against him. “I would mate you both without a second thought. “But not like this—never like this, without asking you first.”

“Don’t feel too bad,” I managed in a faint tone. “The joke’s on you. I might be a purebred, but at this point, my dowry is an embarrassment.”

Leo’s arm tightened around me, pressing me closer between them. “Downright nonexistent,” she agreed. “So’s mine, by the way. You should have warned me I was supposed to have a dowry, Mr. Purebred. Is that seriously a thing?”

Jax had gone very still, as though he couldn’t believe we were joking about it.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I told her. “Probably a bit moot under the circumstances.” I shifted in their arms, a bit uncomfortably. “Though, if you could get your mouth back on that and stop the bleeding, it would be much appreciated, alpha.”

Jax hesitated, but after a moment he scooted me a bit farther up his body and lowered his lips to my shoulder, pressing an achingly soft kiss there before covering the bite wound and rasping his tongue across the ragged skin. I closed my eyes against the fresh flood of full-body tingles—mated in the eyes of a legal system that no longer existed... and in none of the ways that actually mattered.Oh, the irony.

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