The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 477

Chapter 477: Love-Bombed By A Queen

DRAKENFELL — DEXMON’S CHAMBERS

Serena made it to their chambers on fumes and stubbornness. The stubbornness was doing most of the heavy lifting because the fumes had run out somewhere between the third corridor and the staircase, and the staircase had been a negotiation her legs almost lost.

Dexmon was behind her. Close. The specific close of a man who had been denied the right to carry his mate on a training field and whose denial was expiring the second they crossed the threshold of a private room.

The door closed.

His arms were around her before the latch clicked. He pulled her against his chest, her back to his front, and pressed his face into her hair and inhaled with the deep, full-lung intake of a man who had been standing on a sideline for thirty minutes watching his mate bleed and shift and get thrown across a training yard and whose intake was the first unrestricted breath he had taken all day.

"You’re sore," he murmured against her hair.

It was a statement. The matebond was open again, the necklace off, and every ache in her body was broadcasting through the channel at full volume. He could feel all of it. The joint pain, the muscle fatigue, the bone-deep exhaustion of several shifts in thirty minutes, every receipt her body had been accumulating while the necklace held the tab.

"A little," she said.

"A little." His voice carried the specific skepticism of a man whose matebond was currently receiving a symphony of pain from a woman calling it a little. "I can feel everything, baby. You’re more than a little."

She leaned back into him. Let herself be held. The holding was warm. His scent and the particular warmth that her body had been craving.

"Bath," he said. A decision, delivered as a word.

He ran the water himself. Hot. Steam rising from the stone basin, filling the bathing chamber with warmth that loosened the knots in Serena’s shoulders before she was anywhere near the water. Dex tested the temperature with his hand, adjusted it, tested again. The testing was precise, careful, the attention of a man whose mate’s comfort was a project he took seriously and whose project had specific parameters.

He got in first. Settled against the back of the basin, legs extended, and pulled her in after him. Her back rested against his chest. His arms wrapped around her midsection, loose, warm, the hold of a man who was containing her without constraining her because the difference mattered and he knew it.

The water was perfect. The heat sank into her muscles and started undoing the damage that multiple shifts had written into her body. Her head rested against his collarbone. His chin settled on top of her hair.

For thirty seconds, there was quiet.

Then Dex’s hands stilled on her waist.

"You’re tense," he said. "Something’s on your mind."

Everything.

"I feel funny," she said.

"Funny how?"

She was quiet for a moment. Sorting. Deciding what to say and what to bury and how deep to bury it and whether the burying would hold. The sorting took four seconds and the four seconds were long enough for Dex to notice and short enough that the noticing could be attributed to fatigue.

"I feel bad about how harsh I was with your mother."

Her voice cracked on mother. Small. Barely audible. The fracture of a syllable that carried more weight than the sentence around it, and the weight was genuine, and the genuine was the part she hadn’t expected.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify