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He felt nothing but pleasure from her end of the bond, his thumb on her clit ensuring she was coming too hard to panic over the thick insertion when his body tied with hers, but the absolute agony in their bond now speaks a different story.
The second he can do so without harming her further, he pulls his cock from her clutching sheath, grimacing to hold back a groan of pleasure at the slick, velvet caress.
His retreat is followed by a flood of semen and pussy cream, but to his relief, there’s no tinge of pink to it. Her opening is flushed bright red, however, and he presses a hand to her swollen flesh in an instinctive need to soothe whatever damage he’s done.
His mate jerks at his touch and cries harder.
“Adelaide,” he rumbles, panic sinking deeper. He kneels up to cup her cheek, make her look at him, but she curls up on her side, knees drawing into her chest as she hides her face in her hands.
“Shit.C’mon, talk to me. Where does it hurt?”
One trembling hand leaves her face to press against her breast, and relief shudders through his chest when he finally understands. Whatever pain she’s feeling, it isn’t physical. The mind-rendering pleasure he found wasn’t carved from her agony.
But her tears still spill over the sheets, her sobs tearing at his heart, and no matter how grateful he feels that he hasn’t injured her, it’s still not at all what he was hoping for after sex so grotesquely reality-bending he’s pretty sure a part of his soul left his body.
“Adelaide,” he says again, one hand finding her shoulder. When she only curls in tighter on herself, he slips his arms under her knees and back and scoops her onto his lap, holding tight.
She melts into his embrace, clings to him as if he’s a life raft in a storm, buries her face against his neck—and keeps crying.
“Shh, mate,” he murmurs against her ear, rocking her trembling body on instinct. “I’m right here. Whatever it is, I’ll fix it.”
She only presses herself harder against him, and he huffs a sigh into her hair, resigning himself to the agony of his mate’s despair until she is capable of telling him who or what he needs to break into pieces.
It takes a long while before her sobs quiet to deep, shaky breaths.
Gently he presses a kiss to her jaw, and she shudders in response.
“I’m right here,” he repeats, low and tender. “Just tell me.”
She hiccups something between a laugh and another sob. “I’m so… stupid.”
Jacob arches an eyebrow. Whatever he expected the cause of her breakdown to be, it wasn’t doubt of her own intelligence. “Come again?”
“I thought—I thought you were all like that. I hurt you because I thought... if I didn’t, I couldn’t—” She breaks off on a gasped inhale.
“Shh. Stay with me.” He holds her out from his body to give her space to breathe, one hand finding her chest to calm her. “Breathe. Just breathe.”
She gulps in several shallow breaths, but his hand has the intended effect. Slowly her breathing calms, and she sags in front of him, hands coming up to hide her face once more.
This time, he doesn’t pressure. He simply keeps his hand still and waits for her to find the words.
When they finally come, it’s on a whisper.
“That colonel at the party today? General Smith’s son?”
“Your ex?” he asks, doing his best to ignore the hot stab of jealousy at thinking about her ever being with someone else.
She chokes what could have been a laugh, but it’s deprived of mirth. “He’s not myex.We went on one date, because his dad asked mine. General Smith was Dad’s superior at the time, so I wasn’t given a choice. Anyway, it went… about as well as could be expected. He was nineteen—the definition of a teenage alphahole. All hands and dumb jokes about women, blowjobs, and sandwiches.
“After the movie, I thought he was driving me home, but he took me to his parents’ house. Parked no more than thirty yards from their front door.” She breathes in deep, her hands clenching against his chest—and he knows, fuckingknowswhat’s coming, but it doesn’t prepare him for the acidic rush of fury when she, in a voice devoid of emotion, says, “And then he raped me.”
The son of a bitch is dead. That knowledge is the only thing that keeps his body still as their bond twists like barbed wire in his chest despite his mate’s attempt at detachment. Once they’re done here, once she’s asleep, he’s going to hunt the man down, and then he’s going to shred him apart.
“I bled,” she continues, the faintest tremor making its way through her voice. “It was my first time, but it was… a lot. Enough that he went and got his dad. For a moment there, I thought he might actually have some remorse, but he was just worried that accidentally killing me would land him in prison.
“His dad sent him to his room, said he’d take care of ‘it,’ and the way he was looking at me…” She swallows thickly. “Suffice to say, if he hadn’t been able to patch me up in the bathroom, I don’t think I’d have been found. So when he told me he’d make sure my dad was demoted and shipped to an active war zone if I ever so much as suggested it had been anything but consensual, I believed him.
“I never said anything to my parents, and they never asked, but… My dad saw me come in that night. I panicked, thinking he must be able to tell… I was limping and my face was red from crying. But he just told me to go to bed. The next morning, my mom gave me some painkillers and a Plan B, and brought me soup in bed.” She chuffs through her nose. “As if I had the flu. Then asked if I was going to see him again.
