Page 88 of Bonds of Pain
“Except acknowledge me in public.”
His exhale shivers across the back of my neck, making me shudder. “Things will be different once I become king.”
Two unexpected heats and an accidental bond don’t make a relationship. I need more than he can offer me. This is just the first time it’s occurred to me to admit it.
“Maybe that’s not good enough.”
He tenses behind me. His anger is a flash of heat through the bond before he suppresses it, letting out a rueful laugh. “You’ve gotten bold. That’s Maya’s influence, I assume.”
It both is and isn’t. The twin bonds are like opposing poles of a magnet, pushing and pulling me into a confusing morass. I’m caught between them—literally and figuratively—trapped in a web of desire and resistance.
I want Logan desperately, just like I always have.
But I also want to hold him accountable. I refuse to go back to the life of silent desperation that I led before Maya arrived.
I can love that she makes me want something more for myself.
And also hate that she had to blow my entire life to smithereens to do it.
I bite my tongue on the accusations I’ve lobbed at him a hundred times before. Keeping my designation and our bond a secret even from our pack brothers isn’t about keeping us safe.
Logan is ashamed of me, and I refuse to keep living as his dirty little secret.
And if the warmth of her presence through the bond, the core of strength that gives her a spine of steel under that veneer of Omega softness, then so be it.
“This isn’t about her,” I say finally.
“I disagree. You’re connected to her in a way I’ll never be.” His mouth returns to my claiming mark, pressing a kiss there that makes me bite my lip to stay silent. “Just like you’re connected to me in ways she’ll never understand.”
Unwilling desire burns deep in my belly. My hands fist at my sides as I fight the urge to reach for him.
He presses his teeth into the indent of my claiming bite, just hard enough to make my muscles clench without breaking the skin.
“Logan,” I breathe out, because I can’t manage the words to insist that he stop.
“You let her have you, blissed out from blush and all. I could smell your fucking cum from the hallway.” he murmurs. The note of jealousy in his voice is impossible to miss, and I thrill at it despite myself. His hand moves below my waist, and he grips me hard in his hand. “Do you think she’ll wake up angry or just desperate for more?”
A few strokes of his hand have my cock rock hard, rising to the occasion from muscle memory alone.
Logan grinds himself against my back, his voice a low growl as his lips press against ear. “Tell me you haven’t missed this, and I won’t believe you. You’re already slick for me, Omega.”
The truth of it is so shameful that I can’t acknowledge it until he says the words. My dick gets hard all the time. I’m still aman, after all. But producing slick is a purely Omega response. It hasn’t ever happened to me before outside of the throes of heat.
A trickle of wetness sliding down the cleft of my ass to pool between my thighs becomes impossible to ignore. Need pulses in my blood, surging faster and harder than ever before.
I swear, shaking with the effort it takes not to grind back against him. “What the fuck…”
“It’s because of her,” Logan soothes, licking my neck. “Don’t fight it. This is exactly what we need. She is exactly what we need.”
The bare skin of his thighs meets the back of mine as he presses against me. I could fight him off if I wanted to. Logan might be bigger and stronger than I am, but we’ve sparred enough times that I know the weakness in his technique.
When he pushes inside me, the teeth he still has clamped down at the bend of my neck to hold me in place are unnecessary. The pleasure is sudden and mind-bending. Almost immediately, I’m already close to releasing into the hand he is still using to slowly jack me off in a matching rhythm to his gentle thrusts.
I’d let myself forget the way this feels, if just to save my own sanity. Because I can’t miss something that I don’t allow myself to remember. But I do miss it. Desperately.
Logan stays gentle, spinning me up slowly as the pleasure builds. He whispers unintelligibly in my ear, sweet nothings and promises that I know he won’t be able to keep.
Even if I want to believe it.
