Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 65151 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65151 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
And it was love Jules would have of Brenya Havel.
Not a romanticized fascination with a misunderstood terrorist who was going to fuck her brains out, but actual love with the very real monster he was.
Rebecca had been fond of him in her way. But ultimately, she’d wondered what life might be like in an Alpha-Omega “natural state,” doubted, and slipped. One flirtatious pass at Senator Kantor had led to her ruin. To the murder of their sons. And perhaps was the catalyst that ultimately brought down Thólos Dome. If Jules had never been thrown into the Undercroft, he would never have found Shepherd. If Shepherd had never found Jules…
Thólos Dome would still stand.
Shepherd may have been the figurehead Followers worshiped, but many of the deeper cruelties Thólos had suffered? Those had been painstakingly crafted in Jules’s imagination and enacted by his order.
When it came to calculation, very few matched his genius. Only Shepherd matched his ruthlessness.
And Jules had ruthlessly watched Jacques fuck Brenya for hours while he’d been trapped in a prison cell. Catalogued her responses to Jacques’s aggression with surgical interest. After taking Bernard Dome for himself, he’d gone through months’ worth of video surveillance recorded by an Alpha who compulsively filmed every interaction with his damaged mate.
The Alpha’s narcissism was a pure gift.
When Jacques had raped her, Jules noted the seconds it took Brenya to stop crying, the minutes for a modicum of recovery. The breath patterns when she dissociated. The exact pitch of her moan when her body climaxed without consent.
Data. A map of where to touch, how to speak, when to withdraw.
He would use that information—every twitch, every tear, every whispered plea she’d made to the wrong man. Nothing would be wasted in transforming pain into passion. Give her pleasure so exact, so overwhelming, her body would unlearn agony… until it craved what it once feared.
If she had only known that what he had been watching on his COMscreen when she stole her glances of him across the room….
“The moment I saw you—” He dared brush his lips over hers, sweeping his velvet tongue into her mouth as if to tempt her to play. “—you have a phrase for it in French. Le coup de foudre. A lightning strike.” His voice softened, purr calibrated for maximum effect. “And when I caught you pulling my ship apart, repairing it for simple fun… it was the only time in my life that I wished I’d been a different man.”
That first true kiss, Jules pressed it upon her mouth with a tenderness Jacques had never shown her. Gentle, lingering, his strength enveloping a female braced as if he might hurt her. One who went astonishingly liquid the moment he began to really tease her tongue with his.
Her hand, once clutching desperately, nails embedded in his skin, pulled from where little moon-shaped cuts decorated the back of his neck to slide down his chest, feeling his heartbeat.
Unknowingly resting right where their bond had forever carved itself into him.
“Mmm,” she groaned against his mouth, surprised by the satin pleasure softening the muscles twisting her spine. The relief was exquisite. Like breaking the surface after nearly drowning.
She could breathe again.
Tongue hesitantly meeting his, Brenya parted her lips further.
When he finally deepened the kiss, it wasn’t with force but with deliberate intention. Each stroke of his tongue against hers heightened her senses. Urged her to gasp into his mouth as his touch became real and the phantom cramping in her womb—Jacques’s rage manifested as physical torture—began dissolving.
The influence of the Alpha flickered like a dying candle flame, pushing him to the periphery, as Jules stole her breath.
Male fingers worked magic at her breast, kneading flesh, thumbing her nipple with precise pressure. Not too rough, not too gentle. Perfect circles that made her arch into his palm, whimpering when he pinched the sensitive peak between thumb and forefinger.
A pinch that sparked a heartbeat between her legs, not the grinding agony of endless, empty orgasm.
“More,” she whispered against his lips, surprised by her own boldness.
And he gave it.
The bond, their bond, thrummed between them. Not carving out her insides as Jacques had done, but a conduit for pleasure, filling her with emptiness in which she had room to be.
Moving her body against his with newfound hunger, Brenya’s body awakened to something unimaginable. She kissed him back with desperation, because she wanted to. Tasting him, with tentative little licks. Then growing bolder, intoxicated, meeting the wet heat of his tongue in a dance that made her dizzy.
She moaned into his mouth, the sound raw and unfiltered. Her pebbled nipple throbbing at his touch, her other breast swollen and neglected.
Ending the kiss on his terms, Jules dragged her lower lip between his teeth before easing back just enough to see her eyes when he said it. “I love seeing you dressed in my clothes.”