Page 49 of Bitter Heat
Kerry shuddered, and the movement squeezed Janus’s still half-hard cock. “Because I need it. And there’s something about you.”
“What about me?” Janus asked, needing to hear it, needing to know he wasn’t going insane alone.
Kerry shrugged, but he sounded vulnerable as he answered, “You’re safe. You’ll take care of me.”
Janus felt like he might burst into tears, or scream, or grab Kerry into a hug that would collapse them into each other’s bodies. Take care of him? Takecareof him? Wolf-god, what he felt was so much more than that. “Yes,” he said, breathless with confusion and fear. “I’ll take care of you.”
“I know. I knew it when you helped me. And I was scared.”
“You’re scared of me?” Janus asked.
Kerry shrugged, and Janus felt the movement around his cock, still buried deep in Kerry’s body. “I don’t think you’ll like the answer to that.”
Janus frowned, confused how Kerry could be so contradictory. He was safe but scary? He was perfect but not what Kerry wanted? He felt his cock jerk inside Kerry, sending another shot of possessive pleasure up into him, sharp and angry, not sweet at all. Kerry gasped and then pressed his forehead against Janus’s shoulder. He shuddered and shook, a small orgasm wracking him, too.
“Wolf-god,” Kerry murmured. “This feels so good. I didn’t know. I never…it was never…” He shuddered, and his cock jerked between them with another small orgasm, cum drifting around them in the water as he again came down from the heights.
Janus pressed a kiss to the slight bruise on Kerry’s shoulder and tried to order his mind. He found that he couldn’t. He was entirely out of his depths here in the shallows.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Finally, in thesilence that followed their surprise resurgence of pleasure, Kerry slowly lifted off Janus’s still-hard dick. The slow slide of Janus’s fingers on Kerry’s hips as he rose was his only protest of this movement, but the loss of Kerry’s clenching heat around his cock and the coolness of the lake made him whimper.
Kerry seemed to feel it, too, his head falling back as he knelt in the water, his fingers reaching between his thighs to explore where Janus’s cock had just been. Ridiculously, Janus suddenly hated the water as it washed away his cum and all evidence of their coupling.
Separated, Janus wanted nothing more than to find a way back inside Kerry, and the ache in his chest told him that he meant that in ways that had nothing to do with his dick. With a weird sense of unreality, Janus asked, “What just happened? Why did we do that?”
Kerry winced but then moved away, making that ache in Janus’s chest grow until he felt it in his whole body. When Kerry was a good three feet away, kneeling in the mud, his half-hard cock bobbing in the water and his nipples raised in the breeze, he pronounced it, “Pheromone delirium.”
“That’s betweenÉrosgápe,” Janus said, frowning, and that new itch began in his head again, something that wanted to be understood.
“Usually. But it’s fair to say we want each other because of this,” Kerry waved at his beautiful stomach. Janus wanted to hold it. He hadn’t done that while they were fucking, and now he wished he had. Kerry seemed to sense that, though, and shifted another half-foot back. “Biologically we find it hard to resist, I suppose. I’m a pregnant omega alone. It’s natural that a single alpha will grow protective and want to satisfy my urges.” He looked a bit shamefaced all of a sudden. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew or at least realized by now?”
“What?”
“That my pater accepted you as a boarder partly because he hoped this would happen?”
Janus shook his head. It couldn’t be. This was so much more thanthat. Whatever he felt, whatever this was—
“Pregnancy is difficult for omegas without this relief,” Kerry said, his voice shaking and his eyes darting around to anywhere but Janus. What did that mean? Why didn’t Janus know? He felt like he shouldknow. “Pater probably didn’t want me to go to a local alpha and cause trouble on the mountain. No one up here has the means to weather any fallout.”
Janus growled at the thought of Kerry with one of these mountain alphas that, on any other day, at any other time, he felt protective of and wanted to help.
Kerry’s lips twitched up like he enjoyed Janus’s reaction more than he thought he should, but then Kerry schooled his face again, a veil of imperviousness dropping. “But Pater wouldn’t want me yearning for what I need without satisfaction, either. So, when your request for a boarding room came, he realized that I might have two needs met at once. So, he arranged for you to stay here. Alone. Without other boarders around to complicate things.”
Janus blinked. Had he been so blind? Of course, part of the attraction he felt for Kerry was the natural draw of a pregnant omega, but there was something else happening here. Something strong and passionate and irritating in a way he wasn’t going to be able to ignore. But despite that, he hadn’t ever considered the role Zeke might have wanted Janus to play when he accepted his request to board here.
Janus fought the urge to squirm, feeling confused and worse, used. But the certainty that he was missing an important piece of the puzzle, the ongoing after-bliss of orgasm, and the distraction of sunlight sparkling on Kerry’s wet skin as he moved farther away in the water distanced him from those feelings.
“And you’re handsome,” Kerry said, with a flicker of embarrassment and a shy duck of his head. “There’s that. It doesn’t hurt.”
Janus looked down at his own body beneath the clear water as if he’d never seen it before. The muscle he’d lost was making a slow but sure return, and his dick still pointed up angrily, like he hadn’t just come twice with Kerry. It hardened still further, refusing to dismiss whatever intensity had happened between them as something related to pregnancy hormones and not…and not…
Janus couldn’t put words to what that other reason might be.
“But I didn’t want to follow Pater’s lead,” Kerry went on. Perhaps sex made him chatty, whereas it made Janus brainless because he couldn’t figure out what was happening. All he knew was that Kerry’s explanations were wolf-god’s own bullshit. Still, they came out of Kerry’s mouth anyway. “Being a beta, Pater doesn’t understand how complicated a situation like this can get. Betas aren’t like alphas and omegas.”
Janus blinked again. Almost said, “Tell me something I don’t know,” and then didn’t. Because that would hurt Kerry, and he never wanted to do that. Even when the man was being obtuse and lying to them both, because what they’d done? That wasn’t fucking. It was more than that.
