“I love you,” Joel said, looking down at her beautiful face, her body glowing with pleasure and exertion, her stunning grey-green eyes looking back up at him.
“I love you.” She smiled, and somehow it made her even more beautiful.
Joel sighed as he slid inside her. She was so slick, hot and tight, and the knowledge that it was Nina he was with, that Nina’s body was taking him in, was enough to drive him almost to the edge already.
He stopped when he was fully sheathed, and breathed deep to pull himself back a little. He wasn’t going to let this end before Nina was fully satisfied.
Nina’s head had tipped back as he pushed inside her, and her inner walls were shivering around him, tiny little twitches of pleasure that were going to drive him insane. Joel inhaled again, and breathed in only the scent of Nina’s sex, thick and intoxicating all around him.
He couldn’t help himself. He started to move.
Nina lifted her hips to meet him, and suddenly they were moving together, making love to each other in this hot, perfect moment. Sweat dampened both their bodies, and the slick slide of sex sounded loud in the empty house. Nina moaned with each thrust, and Joel buried his face in her neck, inhaling her scent and kissing her soft, soft skin.
It couldn’t last. Part of Joel wanted it to go on forever, but another part was caught up in the slow, inevitable build of it, the way it was coalescing into a peak of ecstatic pleasure. He had enough presence of mind to reach down between them, find Nina’s clit and rub hard over it in the way he now knew would bring her to the edge.
He kissed her as she came, driving hard into her, catching the spasms of pleasure and prolonging them. The tight clench of her orgasm was too much, though, and with one last hard thrust, he gave in and came too.
They shuddered together for long moments. It seemed to go on forever—just as Joel thought it must be over, Nina would clench weakly around him one more time, sending an exhausted, almost painful twitch of pleasure through him.
Finally, he pulled out and let himself fall down next to her.
“Wow,” she breathed.
“Wow,” he agreed.
“I think that was a new best,” she said, after another long pause, catching her breath.
“I think so.” He pressed a kiss to her cheek. “I’m looking forward to moving that bar up a lot.”
He could feel her cheek move outward in a smile. “Me, too.”
Joel kissed her mouth, and then got caught up in the sweetness of her skin and started kissing her all over.
“Mmm,” Nina said after a few minutes. “This feels so good. Like sex, but...softer.”
Joel smiled against her wrist and moved onto the palm of her hand. She shivered under his mouth, and he smiled some more.
After a long time, he made it back up to her lips, and then tugged her into his body and lay next to her, breathing her in.
“Joel,” she said after a minute.
“Hmm?”
“Are you really all right with this? Being mates? Because I don’t want you to feel like you’re being pressured into anything that you don’t want...”
Joel cursed himself for spending so long being an idiot, and wrapped her up tight in his arms. “I have never,” he said into her ear, “felt as happy as I do right now. I have never loved anyone as much as I love you. And I never imagined that finding a mate could be the thing that solved everyone’s problems, instead of causing them...but that’s what’s happening. So there’s no reason in the world for me to regret this, or feel pressured, all right? No reason in th
e world.”
Nina sighed at that. “Good. That’s good.” She relaxed into his arms, and her eyes drifted closed.
Joel waited until she was softly asleep, and then pulled gently away to go look for his phone. He texted Cal.
Nina was going to be officially a member of this pack by the end of the day, and then neither of them would have anything to worry about any longer.
When he’d gotten his reply, he slipped back into his bed and pulled Nina close. She wasn’t waking up alone again.
***