Page 18 of Eager Beaver
“I need you to fuck me,” he panted, clinging to me with desperation. “Hard and fast.”
I tried to give him his wish, but the water was fighting against us, adding friction, reducing the speed and force. Sweat beaded on our foreheads and necks, but Fable’s face scrunched up in frustration. This wasn’t what he wanted.
“Up,” I huffed, patting his hip. “Let me try something else.”
Confused but curious, Fable obliged, and with one swift movement, I hoisted him half out of the water and bent him over the ledge. Then, I entered him from behind, and his cry echoed across the lake. “That’s right,mon chou, be as loud as you want. Nobody will hear you.”
Steam curled off our skin in the freezing air, but with our legs in the spring and my body pressed over his back, we were more than warm enough. In this position, my hands braced against the slushy ground, I could properly fuck my mate the way he wanted.
“Oh gods, alpha,” he groaned, looking for something to grip on to as my pace hit full speed.
Again and again, I slammed into his tight, slick ass, and my eyes remained fixed on that soft freckled shoulder, the perfect place to mark him. My gums ached as my teeth extended against my will. It was a good thing Fable was facing away, because it would be hard to explain these incisors. I clenched my eyes closed and gritted my teeth as my climax bore down on me.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Fable chanted, and I reminded myself that he was not giving permission to claim him forever. Just for tonight. As soon as I felt the telltale fluttering of his tight ring of muscle around my cock, my orgasm burst forward, emptying my load into his channel. My knot forced its way inside him, locking us together. Every instinct I had told me to claim my mate, so I bit down on my lip hard, tasting blood, to keep myself from marking him.
Fable was still shuddering beneath me, keening, so I continued to thrust my hips in sharp punches, fucking him with my knot, until his taut body went limp, his breath shuddering past his lips.
Our bodies locked for now, I was careful as I gathered him against me and slid us back into the water. Fable let his headdrop back against my shoulder, letting out a sated sigh. “I hope nobody minds the mess we made of their hot spring.”
I chuckled, running my hands over his stomach to wash him clean. “Oh, I have a feeling we’re not the first to christen the spring.”
His head lolled to the side to make a disgusted face at me. “I did not need to think about that. Thanks a lot,” he said, making me laugh.
Lazing in the pool as we waited for my knot to go down, I took the time to satisfy my beast by rubbing myself all over Fable, covering him in my scent so that, even without my bite, other shifters would be able to tell who he belonged to from a mile away.
It was in the aftershocks, when Fable was still fully relaxed, that he sighed in half-drunk bliss. “How would you feel about meeting my parents?”
I froze mid nuzzle. “Um… good?” Meeting his family sounded serious. Did that mean I was winning him over to the idea of a future together?
His stilted laugh jolted through me. “I know it’s weird to go to dinner and meet your fling’s family, but… you’ve already played my pretend husband once. Maybe you would be willing to play my boyfriend for one more night?”
Fling, he said. Disappointment curdled my insides, and my knot chose that exact moment to slide free. “Of course,” I said, schooling my features as he turned around to face me. “Anything you need, it’s yours.” My heart, my soul, the air in my lungs, the blood in my veins. Whether he chose me or not, everything I was belonged to him.
13
Fable
“Lightmeatordark,”my dad asked Guy, carving knife hovering over the massive turkey. It had almost been too large to fit in the oven, but it was still going to be a stretch to feed us all. This wasn’t my mom’s first rodeo, though, and she’d made plenty of side dishes too. Nobody would ever leave her house hungry. Not on her watch!
Guy glanced at me, trying to gauge what the right answer might be, but then shrugged. “I’m easy. Whatever nobody else likes.”
Dad chuckled, shaking his head. “Oh, you’re a smart man. The members of this family would throw down over a drumstick. You don’t want to get caught in the fray.”
My brother and sister both tried to deny it, but their wives were nodding sharply, wide-eyed in warning.
With Dad carving up the turkey, the rest of us started passing serving bowls around the table, divvying up the stuffing, green beans, candied yams topped with marshmallows, and little buns tied into knots so they were shaped like doves, with cloves for eyes.
Molly, my brother’s youngest kid, started kicking the bottom of the table, shouting, “Canbabies!!” making grabby hands for the bowl of cranberry sauce. As her uncle, I dutifully started scooping some onto her plastic plate, loving the absolute mess she promptly made, sticking both hands into the sauce and bringing it to her mouth and missing most of it.
“Oh, sweetie.” Andrew made a face, but he was laughing. “I see laundry in my future.”
This was just the kind of chaos you could expect from an Everly family dinner. There were eight adults, plus four kids—soon to be five, with my sister now six months pregnant, though I still wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t twins—and my parents’ golden retriever Padawan under the table looking for scraps like a four-legged Roomba.
When my plate was nearly full, my mother moved from her chair to hover over me, reaching over my shoulder to add a sprig of rosemary and a couple whole cranberries to the edge as a garnish. I opened my mouth to ask what she was doing, but she wasn’t done yet. She kept fussing, even going so far as to take a napkin and clean up the gravy around the edges. Soon everyone around the table grew quiet to watch her work.
Finally, when there was a long enough pause for me to think she might be done, she turned up the overhead light to full brightness. She stared at me expectantly. “Well?”
“Well, what?” I asked, my gaze darting around the table. Was I missing something?
