Page 99 of May: Bloom & Bane

My climax crashes through me.

My cock pulses deep inside her, thick, hot ropes of come flooding her already slick channel. My hips stutter and jerk with each wave, pressing as deep as I can while her body squeezes around me. Ashán’s presence flares brighter, his pleasure mingling with mine as we fill our mate together.

“Vresh,” I breathe against her throat. My wing curls tighter around her as the meadow continues to pulse with residual magic.

I stay buried as the last tremors fade, refusing to pull out. My length remains nestled in her warm, slick heat, our bodies joined as one. She throbs softly around me, drawing soft groans from both of us.

“Don’t move,” I whisper. My hips give the smallest rock, just enough to feel her around me. “Stay like this. Let me feel you.”

Ashán’s fingers trace lazy patterns across her breast. “Perfect,” he murmurs. “So full of us. So warm.”

I rock again, my length sliding through our combined release. Each tiny thrust pushes my seed deeper, and the fertility side of my nature purrs with satisfaction.

“Do you feel how perfectly we fit?” I whisper into her ear. “How your body holds onto every drop?”

Her walls pulse around me in response, and I answer with another slow rock of my hips.

“We could stay like this forever,” Ashán murmurs into her hair. “Buried deep. Keeping you full.”

I press soft kisses to her sweat-dampened skin. “Ním.”

Her lids flutter closed. “Neeth. Always neeth.”

And through it all, buried inside my mate while her body relaxes around us, the bond pulls taut between us.

Soft snores fall from her lips as she drifts off to sleep. I’m about to join her when Ashán asks a question that shakes me to my core: Why didn’t the bond seal?

CHAPTER 30

caramel apples

—EDEN

Ibasically float out the front door. My skin still feels warm in all the places Sage and Ashán touched me throughout the night. It’s the kind of heat not even the morning mist can chill.

I know he’ll be upset if he finds out I left the house by myself, but the sight of him curled in the dark, his wings trembling in agony, while his mind was lost in a migraine… isn’t something I can sit by and do nothing about.

The hushroot grows near the marsh, little lavender-veined blooms that Sage taught me about yesterday on our walk. I kneel at the first cluster and pick only what I need, whispering an apology to each stem. They pulse warmly in my palm, already reaching for something to heal.

I reach the edge of the meadow where the ground turns to sponge, and the air is thick with the scent of damp earth and… crisp, caramel apples? That’s new. I wonder if a new flower could be blooming from Sage’s pain. They all seem to react to his emotions.

My boots sink into the soft, mossy earth as I push through a curtain of low-hanging branches. I freeze when I see a man sitting on a gnarled root, hunched over like he’s trying to hide himself inside the shadows. I slip behind an oak tree and peek out at him. He’s huge and shirtless. Even in the dim light of the marsh, I can see silver threads gaping with every breath he takes.

He lets out a low, pained groan that makes my muscles tense.

“I told you, I’m not going back until the sun sets.” His voice is raspy. “You saw her face. She was disgusted, Jack.”

I look around the marsh, but I can’t find whoever he’s talking to.

“I want to hold her too,” he whispers, his voice trembling as he stares at his massive stitched hand. “But I will not let her see us.”

He’s silent for a moment.

“Lucifer, I know you’re trying to help… but you aren’t.”

A shudder wracks his body, and he lets out another painful groan.

“What would you have me do?” he rasps. “Scare her again? Just so we could be near her? How is she ever going to love me… now that I look like this?”