I stared at the wall, waiting. If she was clever, she would remember the dagger on the floor across the room and all that I had taught her about killing a man from behind.
If she was cleverer, she would come up with some way to regain my trust. I hoped for the latter but prepared myself for the former. Given how she had acted today, it would bring me some small amount of joy for a chance to throw her to the floor and pin her there with my body once more.
If she no longer trusted me, it was the closest our bodies would be for some time.
“Okay,” she said after a long, tense silence.
I turned, feeling hopeful. “Okay?”
“Get me pregnant.” Already, she was stripping her top off. Her breasts spilled out of it deliciously, her nipples deep pink and hard.
I raised an eyebrow. I did not know what I was expecting, but…
It certainly had not been that.
“You wish for me to make love to you again,” I said slowly. This was…irregular. But if that was what she wished…who was I to say no?
“No,” she said, shimmying out of her pants. “I want you to get me pregnant.”
“I…do not understand.” I considered myself to be a clever man but barring a large lapse in my knowledge of human revenge customs, this did not make sense in the least.
“That’s how this works, isn’t it? It’s what you told me. Pregnancy is sacred to your people. Whoever gets me pregnant has to protect me. Keep me safe. And if I’m pregnant, then the Rutharian king won’t be able to have me.”
“He could not be told,” I warned her. This was a dangerous thing she was suggesting. Dangerous…but not exactly unwelcome—though I hoped that I was thinking that with my brain, and not just with my quickly stiffening cock. “Neither he nor Lady Idria could know.”
“Don’t tell them then.”
“No one could know. You would not be safe from them, just because—”
“If you’re lying to me, and you’re really on their side, I won’t be safe from them anyway. But at least if I’m already pregnant with your child, he can’t get me pregnant with his.” She smirked. “And when he finds out why, he’ll kill you. No less than you deserve.”
“I would never let him get that far with you,” I swore to her. “I would not allow it. You will never share his bed. You will never be his.”
“Good. Then get me pregnant.” She turned over on the bed, then rose up on her hands and knees. As she arched her back, her cunt was presented to me in a way that was…most pleasing. Too pleasing.
Suddenly, I was the one looking for a catch.
“You wish for me to put my cub in your womb…so that you can trust me?” Again, I could not exactly argue with the notion, but what she was proposing was…
Irresistible.
Beguiling.
Insane—and too good to be true.
“I was going to tell you that I loved you, before they came in and ruined it all.” She rolled over again and spread her thighs. Her hips bucked up toward me slowly as she slid her fingers between the lips of her cunt. She touched herself the way I had seen females in pleasure houses do when they wished to seduce a male into their embrace. “If you’re not lying, and this is all part of your master plan, I suppose I still do.”
“Of course I am not lying. But…” I did not understand why I was still hesitating. She was nude before me. Wet—I could see her honey glistening between the lips of her sex. Her clit was engorged, begging to be licked and sucked. Her body was a work of art that, in my softer moments, I imagined had been created simply to please me. She was perfect in every way—except that, perhaps, she may have lost her mind. “A cub is permanent, Atlanta. A forever bond between the two of us.”
“And if you’re not lying, then I want that. I mean it.” She shrugged, then resumed stroking her clit. “And if you are lying to me—”
“I am not.”
“Then it’ll be your death sentence. I don’t really care either way anymore.”
My eyes narrowed. “I think you do.”
“Maybe so,” she allowed. “But if you’re lying to me, it doesn’t matter. I’ll get pregnant either way. Better your child than his.”
“Your birth control implant.” I moved carefully between her thighs and pressed my thumb over the place on her arm where she had shown me. I could feel it there, a tiny hardness beneath her skin. “Rutharian seed…it has some neutralizing effect on such things, after a time, as I understand it. But my own will not take for as long as it is in your arm.”
She blinked at me, then nodded to the dagger across the room.
“Cut it out then.”
“It will hurt.”
“I know.” She closed her eyes and drew in a breath. “But there’s no other way.”
“And you are certain that this is what you want?” A mate. A cub. Everything I had ever dreamed of. Everything I had always known I would never be able to have. And with it, her trust.
She demanded this of me, but I wondered, did she have any idea what unfathomable gifts she would be giving me in return?
“I’m sure.” She pointed to the dagger as her eyes met mine. “Get the knife.”
17
Atlanta
He got the knife.
“This will hurt,” he said again.
“Not as much as sharing a bed with that Rutharian bastard will.” I closed my eyes and looked away. There was no avoiding the sensation of the knife piercing my skin, but at least no one was going to force
