Page 17 of Bullied Pretend Mate (Silverville Firefighter Wolves #3)

The best fuck of my life was after a beach party in Los Angeles, a beta going down on me under the light of the moon in a cove flooded with the scent of the sea. It was romantic. It was impossible, I thought at the time, for a girl like me.

And it doesn’t even come close to comparing to this.

When Felix slides inside me, the pressure feels like finally reaching an itch you’ve never been able to scratch, relief you didn’t know you needed. A full alignment of the self, a horrible, terrible realization that something has been missing this entire time.

His breath comes quick when he’s inside me, and his hands flex on my hips, like he thinks he needs to hold himself back. My breasts flatten against him as I rise up, wrapping my arms around his neck.

He thrusts slowly, his breath loud in my ear.

When I tip my head back, he grazes his lips over the spot of his mating mark on me, and it sends a shiver coursing the length of my spine.

I wind my legs around his waist, digging my heels into his back and pulling him closer to me, tilting my hips, anything so he’ll hit that spot inside me.

And when his knot starts to form, my eyes could roll back in my head. I arch up from the bed, the pleasure unlike anything I’ve ever known in my life. He takes one of my nipples in his mouth, murmuring around it, something like, “Good girl, that’s right, take it for me, baby.”

I thought I knew everything there was to know about Felix Rana. But I didn’t know about this . I didn’t know about the aching, desperate brush of his fingers. I didn’t know about the power of his hips, the soft praise from his lips, and the way he could make me fly apart at the seams.

When he’s not whispering against me, telling me how beautiful I am, how much he’s always wanted me, he’s just whispering my name, again and again, between each kiss and each thrust.

The second time I come, he breathes hard, pounding into me fast, and I think that he’s going to come, that I’ll start to feel the release of that knot inside me, but when I come down from the high, I realize it’s still there, growing inside me.

It sets me on the path to the top all over again.

He’s endlessly attentive to me, drawing his mouth and hands over parts of my skin I didn’t know could be erotic. My chin, my bicep, the flat part just between my breasts. Felix treats my body like it’s a new land and he’s the cartographer, tracing every line with the tip of his tongue.

“ Maeve ,” he whispers for the hundredth time, to the point I no longer recognize my name.

It’s become something of a wish on his lips, a chant, a prayer.

His dark eyes drink me in, so when he pulls back, adjusting his knees in the bed for a different angle, they lock on my breasts, which bounce with each movement.

When I orgasm for a third time, his knot grows to the point just before pain, and I whimper against it, sweat beading on my brow, my entire body a loose, slick ease of pleasure.

I feel like taffy pulled through one of those machines, like Felix took me and warmed me up, wrapping me around himself until I found my true form.

“You okay?” he asks roughly after what must be more than an hour. Have I ever had sex for this long? How has he not come yet?

“ Yes ,” I say, because the last thing I want him to do right now is stop.

He won’t be able to pull out of me—not with the knot—but he could stop the movement, and that would be a killing blow.

And when Felix draws his body close to mine again, he cups one hand behind my head, tipping up my chin for better access to my neck. At the precise moment his teeth sink into my skin, he releases, the hot, steady stream of him more pleasurable than I could have imagined.

I hold on to him tight, afraid I might float away without him as my anchor.

We’re wrapped in one another as he licks at the mating mark, keeping his hips still inside me as his knot pulses steadily, releasing himself inside me.

It’s like the soft ticking of a car when you’ve pulled into the garage and cut the engine.

A cooling-down that feels somehow just as good—or better—than the thing itself.

That long, languid feeling of stretching your arms over your head when you first wake up in the morning. An unfolding of the self.

Folding into him.

We start to drift off together, his cock still buried inside me. When he pulls me close and presses a gentle kiss to the spot just under my ear and above the mating mark, I realize with a horrible, sinking feeling that this was a terribly irresponsible choice.

***

Luckily, when I wake up the next morning, Felix’s cock is no longer inside me.

In fact, not only is he not inside me, but I don’t feel like a mess like I was the night before. My cheeks warm when I realize he must have gotten up and cleaned me up after I fell asleep.

It’s sweet. Another example of the man, it seems, Felix has become. Gentle and caring. Considerate.

Last night was, without a doubt, the best sex of my entire life. It’s laughable to make that statement because nothing else even comes close. At this point, I’m not sure those other encounters I experienced even count as having sex.

“Hey.”

I startle when Felix comes out of the bathroom. For some reason, I find myself wishing I had more time to get myself ready, despite the fact that he saw all of me last night. No makeup, no pretty dress.

“Hey,” I manage, clearing my throat and meeting his eyes. To my surprise, instead of deep, foreboding dread, something else bubbles up out of me.

Laughter.

“Okay,” Felix says, cracking a grin of his own. “Not exactly the response a guy wants after a night like that…”

“No,” I say, waving my hand in front of my face. “It’s not that, it’s just…” I take a second to calm down, then, using my pajama top to wipe the tears from my eyes, I say, “How are you always getting me into these situations?”

His smile fades a tiny bit. “Were you—I mean, I thought you were okay with everything that happened—”

“No, no, I mean— yes . I was enthusiastically consensual, Felix. But I just—don’t you think this is going to complicate things?”

He stares at me for a moment, then shrugs and takes a seat on the bed, dipping the mattress down and making me slide a bit toward him.

“Here’s what I think,” he says, clearing his throat. “I think you’re obviously a beautiful woman.”

The obviously hits me, because for most of my life, that has not been obvious. Not to others, not to Felix, and definitely not to myself. I swallow those feelings down, trying to focus on the here and now.

Felix goes on, “And the mating marks—they’re so—I mean, you felt it, too? That first day? It’s a sexual thing. That’s our bodies. Reacting to one another. And I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. Maybe it will make it more convincing.”

“Do you think other people will know?” I ask, the thought of that bringing a blush to my cheeks.

Felix fixes me with a teasing look before reaching out and twisting a lock of my frizzy hair around his finger.

“I hope they will,” he says, his voice thick. “Makes me look pretty good.”

He’s playing the part , the logical voice says in my head. Method acting .

“Okay, so what are you proposing?” It’s hard for me to talk when he’s touching my hair like that. It’s something I can’t feel, or something more like a phantom touch. The knowledge that he’s feeling me, but I’m not feeling him. The sheer proximity of his hand to my skin.

“I think we stop trying to fight the physical element,” Felix says simply.

The word comes out before I have time to think about it. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” I say, my mind already working overtime to reassure me. We can have some fun. Why not relieve some tension with Felix? He obviously knows what he’s doing. And he’s right—the mating mark is sexual. It’s going to be torture to go through it without a little release.

It’s not like I’m planning to take a mate. It’s not like Felix is thinking of this as anything more than a chance to score. Knowing him, he’s probably just thinking of this as a little bonus for the work of convincing the lawyer about our mating.

I could never be romantically involved with him. No matter how much I dreamed about that as a girl, how much I dreamed that he would walk into the cafeteria and claim me.

He never did. He did the opposite, humiliating me. Causing the whispers and pointing in my direction. What sort of desperate loser was I? How could I think I had a chance with him?

For a second, I close my eyes, focusing on bringing back that hurt, centering it inside me. Using it to block off the warm, melting feelings that rise up any time I look at Felix now.

“Okay,” Felix whispers, and I open my eyes, watching him as he climbs across the bed toward me, his arms bracing on either side of me. “So, how about a little more before we have to check out?”

I should say no.

But his scent is around me. His body is warm, and my core is already tightening with need for him. I throb with want for the pressure only he can provide.

“Okay,” I breathe, reaching behind me and grabbing a pillow, hugging it to my chest as I roll over.

Maybe if I don’t look at his face, it won’t be so bad.

Maybe these warm, pervasive thoughts about him will go away if I don’t see him watching me like I’m something he could eat alive. “But we’ll have to be fast.”

“Oh,” he growls, leaning down and kissing my back, which sends a shiver through my entire body. His large, warm hands squeeze my backside. “Absolutely no promises, Maeve.”