MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

AMARIS

I did not answer him with words.

I want that on the record, because words are my entire personality, and the one moment my life genuinely called for a speech, I set down the glass I had never sipped, stood up out of that chair, crossed the space between us, and put my mouth on his.

He went still.

One full second. The stillness of a man who had prepared for every version of no and had not finished preparing for yes. And then his hand came up into my hair and the stillness broke and Corvin Grave kissed me back the way a dam does not so much open as stop pretending it was ever holding.

Oh, my brain observed, uselessly. Oh no. He’s been holding this the whole time.

Six months of cold across a dining table. Six months of a bed with a border down its middle. All of it had been effort. I could feel the effort in the way his mouth moved against mine, unhurried and starving at the same time, one hand in my hair and the other flat against my spine, drawing me in between his knees like he had already mapped where I fit.

He pulled back an inch. His breath was not steady. Mine had left the building entirely.

"Say it," he murmured against my mouth. "I need the word."

"Yes." My voice came out lower than I had ever heard it. "Corvin. Yes."

He stood.

I have seen this man command a hall of two thousand wolves. I have seen him stand over a war table. None of it moved the way he moved now — taking my face in both hands, tilting it up, studying me in the firelight like a man reading a treaty he intended to honor for the rest of his life. Then his hands left my face and found the zip at my back and drew it down slowly, deliberately, giving me the length of the zip to change my mind.

I did not change my mind.

The dress pooled at my feet. The fire was warm on my bare shoulders and his eyes were warmer, moving over me without hurry, and I stood in front of my husband of six months being seen by him for the first time and I did not feel like a vessel.

I felt like an answer.

"You are not what I priced you as," he breathed. His thumb traced my collarbone, down, slow. "You never were. I owe you six months."

"Then start paying."

Something moved through his face that on a younger man I would have called a grin. He picked me up — one motion, no negotiation, an arm under my thighs — and carried me to the rug in front of the fire and laid me down on it with a care that made my chest hurt, and then he took his time.

That is the thing no one warns you about with a man his age. The younger ones race. Corvin unwrapped.

His mouth started at my throat and moved down and he learned me the way he did everything, thoroughly, patiently, cataloguing every sound I made and returning to the ones that made me arch. His hands were rough from thirty years of being an Alpha and gentle in a way that thirty years of being an Alpha should have burned out of him, and when his mouth closed over my breast I stopped narrating my own experience entirely, which for me is the closest thing to a religious event.

By the time his hand slid between my thighs I was shaking.

"Look at me," he murmured.

I dragged my eyes open. He was above me, firelight on the hard lines of him, watching my face while his fingers moved slow and certain, and the watching was somehow more intimate than the touching, and the touching was already rearranging my understanding of the last six months.

"I have wanted this," he confessed, quiet, his fingers never pausing, "longer than I have admitted to myself. That is the last secret in this house. Now you have all of them."

He kept his own wanting as a secret. Filed with the witches and the bloodlines. Of course he did.

I pulled him down and kissed him and worked at his shirt with hands that had lost all their fine motor skills, and he laughed — actually laughed, low, against my mouth, the first laugh I had ever felt instead of heard — and shrugged out of the rest himself.

And then there was nothing between us and the firelight.

He settled over me. Braced on his forearms. Every muscle in him was holding still, waiting, his forehead coming down to rest against mine, and even now, even here, he asked.

"Amaris."

"Yes," I whispered. "Properly. All of it."

He pushed into me slowly.

My whole body pulled tight around the stretch of him and my breath broke apart and his went ragged against my ear, and he stilled, deep, letting me settle, one hand cradling the back of my head like the most important thing he was holding was not his own control but me.

"Alright?" Rough. Barely a word.

"Move," I gasped. "Husband."

The word did something to him.

He moved.

Slow first, deep, deliberate, each stroke unhurried, and the fire cracked and my nails found his back and the room filled with the sound of us — his breath going rougher, my voice climbing past anywhere dignity could follow. He shifted his angle and I cried out and he did it again, and again, reading me, relentless, patient, a man who had waited six months and intended the wait to be worth something.

"Corvin—" It came out broken.

"I know." His hand slid down, found where I needed it, circled. "Let go. I have you."

I let go.

It hit me in a long rolling wave that arched my whole body up off the rug and into him, and he worked me through every second of it, murmuring something low against my throat, and when I was still shaking he finally let his own control slip — his rhythm breaking, his grip tightening, my name coming out of him in a voice no pack had ever heard — and he followed me over with a sound pressed into my hair that I intend to keep.

Then quiet.

Fire. Breath. His weight settled half beside me, one arm dragging me into his chest like the border down our bed had never existed.

I lay there listening to his heart slow.

First time married, I thought, and I just consummated it on a rug while being fated to both of his sons.

The thought arrived and sat there.

His hand moved slowly up and down my spine.

"Stay," he murmured into my hair.

And with everything this house still held over our heads, I stayed.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!