Mated To The Vikens (Interstellar Brides Book 8)(42)

When it was over, he gently removed the plug and wiped my body with cleaning clothes and scented oil before releasing me and draping the cloak back over my shoulders. With a sigh, I lifted my arms to his chest and raised my face for a kiss. For once, confident that he would not deny me.

Before this moment, Gunnar had been the great unknown for me. Rolf was witty and hid the pain of his past with humor and wit. Erik loved to brood, but he did not carry darkness the way Gunnar did. Erik would release it into the world, would rant or bellow, allowing me to soothe him. In just two days, I’d learned my men and grown fond of them.

But Gunnar had been walking darkness. Impossible to read, impossible to know. I knew his protective streak, but nothing more. But a woman can learn much from a lover’s touch, and now I knew Gunnar’s secret.

I believed that he loved me, whether he was ready to admit it or not. He cherished me. He would move heaven or hell to protect me. His darkness chipped away at his soul, the loneliness he carried like a shield to his heart tried to hide him from me. But it was too late. He touched me, and I knew.

But I would be patient. Rolf’s easy banter hid an aching heart. Erik’s gruff demands his fear of losing me, of watching me die the way he’d been forced to watch his family perish. Despite their dark pasts, of all my mates, Gunnar was the most afraid of what loving me might do to him. Erik and Rolf had both loved, been loved. But to Gunnar, loving me was the ultimate vulnerability, a weakness he’d never allowed himself before. A leap he’d never taken because his love would be all consuming, powerful and obsessive.

Erik and Rolf would love me, pamper me, push me to reveal my needs, my darkest secrets. But Gunnar’s love could break us both open and drown us. Deep down, in the most instinctive and passionate core of my soul, I understood this about him in a way that I couldn’t explain.

And so I reached for him now, when the fury of his hard cock thrusting into my body was done, because I sensed he needed to be reassured that he had not broken me, had not frightened me away. Not with being at the club, or with others watching. No, Gunnar feared my reaction to him, to his carnal nature. On the contrary…

“Gunnar.”

He looked down into my eyes and I did not ask permission, not for this. I reached up and buried my hands in his hair, pulling him down for a kiss.

The kiss was not wild or full of passion, but gentle, tender, a thank-you I could not speak aloud because I did not believe he would be ready to hear my words. But a kiss could not be denied. And so, I would thank him with the gentle press of my lips to his, the trusting embrace of my small frame.

He did not pull away, but lingered beneath my gentleness and I knew I’d been right. He needed this side of me as much as he needed my body riding his cock. He needed to be loved.

After long moments, I released him and stepped back. “That was…incredible, but we did not find what we sought.”

I saw his eyes change then, seeing as he, too, remembered our true mission. A good fucking had certainly cleared both our minds of everything else. For a few, fabulous minutes, I’d not been worried about anything but the hard length of Gunnar’s cock filling me, the sharp sting of his palm on my ass, the carnal press of him filling my body with his seed.

“No, we did not. Perhaps next time.” I could see and feel the tenseness returning to his body in the stiffness of his shoulders, the grim set of his jaw. We’d have to return, over and over, until we found the man we sought. The future of the entire planet rested on my shoulders. And as strange as that seemed, I was glad they’d accidentally abducted me during transport. Glad everything had worked out the way it had.

And if I had to return to this club every day for a year and allow Gunnar to fuck my brains out with an audience, well, that was a sacrifice I was willing to make. In fact, my body trembled with excitement and anticipation at the remembered feel of Gunnar’s dominant touch. The hunt for a killer made me so tense, my body so hyped up on adrenaline and nerves, that the orgasm had been like a fucking nuclear explosion in my system. I’d short-circuited, my brain shut down.

Gunnar was like my personal EMP.

“Take me home, Gunnar.” I needed to be home, surrounded by my mates. Safe. God, I just wanted to be able to relax and let them hold me. I was so tired. The rush of the hunt for the VSS henchman had long since faded. And Gunnar’s expert and skilled fucking wore me out, emotionally and physically. I just wanted to go home, and on this strange new planet, home was wherever my men were. All three of them.

“Gladly, mate.” His eyes had changed, the dark color softened, the mask gone, allowing me to see the gentleness he tried so hard to hide from the world. I was looking straight into his soul, and I fell in love with him, hard and fast, in that moment.