“What about Sophie?” Eddie asked. “What if she’s really with them?”
The look that came over Josh’s face at the mention of Sophie’s name was frightening.
“Yes,” he agreed. “We’re going to have to do something about her too.”
Chapter One
SOPHIE
The autumn sun shone brightly on Sophie’s shoulders and chest as she allowed her head to fall backward onto Burton’s shoulder.
Her alpha thrust into her rhythmically, his hands gripping her breasts firmly, thumbs playing over her sensitive nipples. “I like you outside,” he murmured in her ear. “We should always do it outside.”
“We—mmm—we can’t always,” she said, though, at this moment, she felt as though she would give him whatever he wanted if it meant he would keep fucking her.
It was only the first day of Sophie’s three-day mating ceremony, and she was surprised by how much she was already enjoying herself. Perhaps it was because of the way things had played out at her last mating ceremony that it felt like such a surprise to be having a good time.
Nowadays, she rarely thought of Josh, the alpha of the pack to which she had once belonged. She seldom thought about the way he had tried to force her into a mating ceremony against her will, in front of the entire pack, and how the incident had resulted in him declaring her feral when she’d refused to submit, exiling her to the north.
If she had thought about those things, she would have been thankful for them. If it hadn’t been for her exile, she would never have met her true family.
It had been a few months since she had given birth to her first litter, and she and her alphas had decided as a unit that it was time for her to become pregnant again. It had been Marco’s idea to make a celebration of it, to hold a mating ceremony, and the men had arranged all the details.
Sophie’s only job was to be fucked. Just the thought of it had had her feeling hot and desperate for days leading up to the event.
They hadn’t touched her for a week. Ordinarily, with three alphas, Sophie never had to go more than a day without sex, but they seemed to have gotten together and made some kind of agreement. “We want you begging for it,” Ryker had said when Sophie had asked him about it. “We want you hungry.”
“I’m always hungry for you,” she’d protested. It was the truth. Her sexual appetite had never been unusually high before she’d met her alphas, but the moment they’d come into her life, it was as if her body had come alive. She wanted them all the time now, even when she was distracting herself with other important things.
By the time the week had ended, she had been half-mad with desire. The men had left the cave last night—the pack’s betas and the children had been camping by the side of the river for a few nights now—and she had been alone, under strict and inviolate orders not to give herself any relief.
She had awoken this morning to the blissful feeling of Burton’s body curled up behind hers, his hand slowly stroking her arm, his hips rocking gently, betraying how badly he wanted to bury himself within her.
Ordinarily, Burton would have teased her. Made her wait.
But it soon became clear that he had been as desperate as she was. They had lasted only moments before he had thrust into her, leaving them gasping with shared relief.
Without separating, he had lifted her and carried her out into the sun. Now she stood in front of him, one hand braced against the trunk of a tree, the other reaching back to tangle in his hair.
He leaned forward and lifted her off her feet. Her shoulders tipped forward and she caught herself against the tree trunk with her other hand, hooking her ankles around his thick calves, pinned between a tree and her alpha. She moaned with delight at this strange new position, at how exquisite it felt to be trapped on his cock like this. With her feet off the ground, she couldn’t have moved away from him if she’d wanted to.
And she didn’t want to. She wanted him to hold her there, keep her there. He gripped her hipbones and lifted her higher, creating a deeper angle for himself, and she sobbed happily, unable to find words to articulate her pleasure.
He rolled his hips slowly, allowing her to adjust to the depth of his thrusts. She closed her eyes, desperately grateful for the perfect understanding he had always seemed to have of her body. He knew what she needed now, and she knew she could trust him to give it to her.
He slid one hand around the top of her thigh and brought it to rest between her legs. Now, because of the way her body was positioned, most of her weight had come to rest on those fingers.
It was exquisite. She tried to rock her hips, to create friction, but there wasn’t much she could do with her feet off the ground.
Burton chuckled and began to move his fingers.
It was what she had needed. It was what she had known she would be given. She forced her body to still, to relax and just enjoy this without fighting for more, without trying to chase the orgasm she knew was on its way—
And then it was crashing over her, her body trembling, her palms scraping against the trunk of the tree, her legs shaking their way free of their tight grip around his. His name escaped her mouth in a low, satisfied cry.
Burton wrapped his arm around her waist like a seat belt and fucked into her three quick times, and then she felt him release as well.
He sank down to his knees, taking her with him. At some point, they slipped apart, though he kept his arms wrapped around her tightly. They lay down on the ground, Burton holding Sophie tightly against his chest, his fingers still gently exploring her skin in less sensitive places—her cheekbones, the plane of her stomach, the swell of her hip.
“I can’t wait until you’re pregnant again,” he murmured into the back of her neck.
She couldn’t keep from smiling. She couldn’t wait to be pregnant again, either. She would never have been able to predict how satisfying it would be to watch her body swell up, to know that she was carrying her alphas’ children, that she would give birth to the next generation of the pack she had helped to start.
Pregnancy had been uncomfortable sometimes, but it had also made her feel beautiful and useful in a way that nothing else ever had. Perhaps it was just a function of being an omega that her body craved pregnancy so much. Whatever it was, she was looking forward to it.
“Do you think it will happen right away?” she asked.
“Sure it will,” Burton said. “We timed our mating ceremony to line up perfectly with when you were most fertile.” He chuckled. “Not that it matters, really. As an omega, you could probably get pregnant any time you wanted to. I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t happened yet, just by accident.”
“We’ve been using birth control,” she pointed out. The alphas had stolen packs of condoms from drugstores several miles away from their cave to ensure that Sophie didn’t become pregnant again before her body was ready to deal with a pregnancy.
“Still,” Burton said. “Omegas are designed for pregnancy. It’s like a sponge soaking up water.”
She chuckled. “Is that what it’s like?”
He kissed along the line of her shoulder. “You’ll be pregnant by the time this ceremony is over, no doubt,” he said. “I’m just lucky I get to be with you first.”