Royal Wolf Box Set by Haley Weir

Chapter Seven

There was a nervous tension in the castle that night as everyone thought about the possibility of war. Aeron couldn’t sleep again, and neither could Samar. In the middle of the night, he got up from his bed, which Cassandra was soundly asleep in, and walked out into the familiar cold and empty corridors again. He walked aimlessly wherever his feet led him and found himself standing outside of Samar’s bedroom. This time, he didn’t press his ear up against the wooden slab to listen. He just stood outside the door thinking about Samar curled up in her bed. After a few moments of standing there, he went to turn and walk away. But before he left the doorway, he heard Samar’s voice softly call out.

“Don’t leave,” he heard her say.

Aeron wasn’t sure if he was imagining it or not. It would have been difficult for her to know that he was standing just outside of her room, unless her Kitsune senses were more enhanced than he thought. As he lingered there, trying to decide what to do about the voice that he thought he heard, he heard it again.

“Aeron,” Samar’s voice called from inside the room. “Don’t leave.”

He sucked in a deep breath and decided to follow his instincts. What was the worst that could happen? He might startle Samar in her sleep and then need to apologize profusely for coming into her room uninvited. But in the alternative, what if she really did know that he was there, and really was calling for him?

Aeron slowly lifted the handle and pushed the door open. There on the bed, he saw Samar lying down and turned to face the doorway with her eyes open wide and staring at him. She didn’t seem at all surprised to see him, which meant that he hadn’t been imagining it.

“How did you know I was there?” he asked as he closed the door quietly behind him.

“I could feel you there,” she answered.

“Is that a Kitsune thing?”

“No,” Samar said. “I think it’s a you thing.”

Any other time, Aeron would have asked what something like that meant. But not this time. This time he knew what it meant because he had been having the same kind of feelings. There were just things that he felt or seemed to know, with no other explanation than it being a gut feeling that he had around Samar.

He walked further into the room and stood beside her bed. He didn’t even know why he had come in there to begin with, and now he was standing here, looking at how beautiful she was, lying in a white silk nightgown that seemed to caress each curve of her body. He was wondered whether he should have stayed on the other side of the door. Samar’s eyes looked up at him, and then traced down the lines of his bare chest and onto the defined muscles of his torso until he could feel her gaze fall onto the soft front of his pajama pants. He tried not to let himself feel her stare and not to allow himself to sense her quickening heartbeat or the deepening of her labored breaths.

He tried to hold on to every last bit of restraint that he had in order to keep himself from pouncing on her, like his trembling body was urging him recklessly to do. He was king and alpha, and she was under his protection. His feelings were already muddied and crossing past lines that they probably shouldn’t. He would stay and talk to her for a few minutes to try to put both of their minds at ease, and he would not get into the bed with her.

As Aeron was trying to listen to his inner monologue, Samar’s eyes darkened. Suddenly, before he knew what was happening, she reached her hand toward the prominent bulge between his legs and wrapped her fingers around him. The fabric was so soft and so thin that Aeron could instantly feel the pressure of her touch, and it caused him to groan and tremble in her hand. He reached for the bedpost to steady himself as he swelled and throbbed against the stroking motion that Samar had just begun to do.

But no matter how much he tried, Aeron couldn’t resist her anymore. He reached for her face with his hands and climbed on top of her in the bed. With his body straddled over hers, he leaned down and kissed her mouth and slid his tongue between her open lips. The sensation of their circling tongues only made him engorge more, until he could barely stand the tantalizingly torturous feeling of rubbing against her beneath him. He ran his hands down her body, slowly tracing the curvature of her breasts. And then he reached to pull the clothes from between their bodies. Any layer of fabric between them now was a barrier that neither of them could bear. As soon as her nightgown had been tossed aside and her bare body squirmed with eager anticipation beneath him, Aeron slid his pants off and kicked them to the floor. Now, there was nothing between them except the heightened sense of carnal desire that had been slowly pulling them together since the very first night when Samar had shown up drenched on the castle doorstep.

Aeron lifted his mouth from hers in a momentary pause just long enough to look into her eyes, which beckoned him not to stop. She wrapped her legs around his waist and rolled her hips toward him, and with her arms pulling his back toward her, Samar reached her face up to put her mouth back over his. As soon as he felt her tongue reach into his mouth again, Aeron pushed his throbbing body into hers and groaned into her mouth with a utopian stimulation. He moved within her with a strong and steady motion that made Samar gasp with small fits of pleasure as they tried to make the moments last as long as they could possibly draw them out. When finally, they both convulsed in a climactic release together, Aeron fell against Samar, careful not to crush her beneath his weight.

“I have wanted you since I first arrived here,” she said as he carefully rolled over and brought her with him to lay onto his shoulder.

“As have I,” he said. “I just couldn’t bring myself to give in to having you.”

“And now?” she asked softly.

Aeron laughed.

“Well, I’m pretty sure that I’ve just given in to having you now,” he said.

Samar laughed too.

“That’s not exactly what I meant.”

Aeron looked over at her and softly kissed the top of her temple.

“What did you mean then?” he asked as he looked into her deep eyes.

“I meant to know if you are still expecting us to try to resist each other now,” she said.

“Not exactly,” Aeron answered. “I know what you think. You see me as married, but Cassandra and I have an arrangement so that she can be with Rubius, so I’m sure she won’t mind us being together. How could I possibly expect us to resist each other again now? And why would I want to?”

“I don’t know, but you are married, and you are a king. And are also an alpha who is about to go to war with my previous alpha. All of those seem like the kind of things that would get in the way of giving ourselves to each other freely.”

He wanted to argue, but he sensed her discomfort. “We can take it slow. We can be friends. You don’t have to do anything with me that you don’t want to.”

Samar was comforted by his words of assurance, and after a few more silent moments lying on his chest and listening to the steady beat of his heart, she fell asleep in Aeron’s arms.

Aeron was later to fall asleep, though. He found himself torn now. Not only did he still feel fated to be with Cassandra, but he had also developed strong feelings for Samar. By the time he had finally fallen asleep and morning was just beginning to peek through the glass bedroom windows, Aeron still had not deciphered his thoughts.