Rejected in the Rain: The Alpha's Secret Heir

Three weeks before Dorian Vale broke her in front of his whole council, Maren Cole lay in his bed and let herself believe she had everything.

The fire had burned down to embers. Rain ticked against the window of the Alpha's room, the soft kind that meant nothing, and his mouth was on the back of her neck, and his hand was already sliding up under the shirt of his that she had stolen to sleep in.

"You took my shirt again," he murmured against her skin.

"You have others."

"I want it off you." His teeth grazed her shoulder, slow, deliberate. "Now."

He peeled it up and over her head and threw it somewhere into the dark, and then his hands were on her, turning her to face him, pulling her bare body flush against his own.

She felt every inch of him. The heat of his chest, the hard muscle of his stomach, and lower, already, the thick length of him pressing insistent against her hip.

Two years, and he still wanted her like it was the first night.

"Dorian." His name came out half a laugh and half a sigh as his mouth found her throat.

"Mm."

"It is late."

"It is." He did not stop. He rolled her onto her back and settled over her, caging her in, his eyes in the dark gone from pale grey to almost black. "Tell me to stop, then."

She did not tell him to stop.

She dragged his mouth down to hers instead, and kissed him until they were both breathless, her hands fisting in his dark hair.

He kissed his way down. Her jaw. The hollow of her throat. The slope of her breast, until his mouth closed hot over her nipple and she arched up off the bed with a gasp.

His tongue circled her. His teeth caught the stiff peak and tugged, just hard enough, and her hips rolled up against him on instinct, searching.

"Patient," he said against her skin, and she felt him smile.

"I hate you."

"No, you do not."

He kept moving down. His lips traced the centre of her, down her ribs, the soft plane of her stomach, lower, and her breath went ragged when she understood where he was going.

He settled between her thighs and pushed them wide with his shoulders, and looked up the length of her body once, just to watch her face, before he lowered his mouth to her.

The first stroke of his tongue tore a sound out of her she did not recognise.

He took his time. He always took his time, this cold and careful man the rest of the pack flinched from, and only she knew that the stillness everyone feared came apart completely the moment he had her under his mouth.

He licked into her, slow and deep, and then found the aching knot of nerves at the top of her and circled it with the flat of his tongue until her hips were lifting helplessly off the bed.

One of his hands held her down by the hip. The other slid up, and he pushed two fingers into her, curling them, stroking that spot inside that made her see white.

"Dorian." Her hands clutched at his hair. "Dorian, I am close, I am so close."

He did not slow. He sucked at her, fingers driving, and the pleasure built and built until it broke over her all at once, her whole body going taut and then shaking apart, his name ripped out of her on a cry she muffled against the back of her own hand.

He worked her through it, gentler now, until she was boneless and gasping and pushing weakly at his head.

Then he crawled back up her body, and she could taste herself on his mouth when he kissed her, and she did not care. She reached down between them and wrapped her hand around the hard length of him, and it was his turn to groan.

"Maren." A warning, low in his chest.

"Now," she breathed. "I want you now."

He notched himself against her, slick and ready, and pushed into her in one long slow stroke that buried him to the hilt.

They both went still. Foreheads pressed together. Breathing each other's air.

The mate bond flared wide open between them, bright and alive the way it had hummed for two years. She could feel his want pouring through it, raw and unguarded, every wordless thing he would never say out loud laid bare in the one place only she could reach.

"You are mine," he said against her mouth. Not a question. A vow. "Say it."

"I am yours."

Then he moved.

He drew almost all the way out and drove back in, and the drag of him lit her up everywhere at once. She wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him deeper, and he braced a hand by her head and set a rhythm that stole the breath from her lungs.

The old bed creaked under them. Neither of them cared.

Slow at first, deep and grinding, his hips meeting hers. Then faster, harder, the careful Alpha gone entirely, only the man left, only the heat and the slap of skin and the bond singing so loud she could not tell where she ended and he began.

"Look at me," he growled.

She opened her eyes. He held them as he took her, his jaw tight, sweat at his temples, and the raw open want on the face he showed no one else undid her more than his body ever could.

She felt the second wave coiling tight and low. "I am going to," she gasped. "Dorian, I am going to come again."

"Do it." He reached between them and pressed his thumb to her, circling in time with his thrusts. "Come for me. Let me feel it."

She shattered a second time, harder than the first, clenching around him in helpless pulses, and that was what finished him.

He buried himself deep and held there, shuddering, her name torn out of him in a broken whisper as he spilled inside her, the bond flaring white-hot behind her eyes.

Afterward they lay tangled and slick and breathing hard.

He did not move off her. He stayed buried in her, his weight a comfort, his lips pressed absently to her shoulder, and she ran her fingers through his damp hair and stared up at the ceiling and let herself believe, fully, that this was her life now.

That she had won it. That a healer's apprentice with no name and no blood had somehow ended up here, in the Alpha's arms, wrecked and warm and loved.

"Marry me properly," he said into her skin.

Her heart stopped. "What."

"At the next full moon. In front of the pack. I am tired of you being a secret." He lifted his head and looked at her, and there was nothing cold in his face at all. "I want them to call you Luna. I want it done."

Tears stung her eyes and she blinked them back, because she was not a woman who cried, and she laughed instead, wet and disbelieving.

"You mean it."

"I have never meant anything more."

She kissed him to keep from crying. He kissed her back, and it turned slow and deep, and she felt him hardening inside her again, and they did not sleep for a long time after that.

She did not know, that night, that something had already begun in her. A small impossible thing, taking root in the warm dark, that would change the whole shape of her life.

She did not know it would be three weeks before he stood in front of his council and called her a healer's apprentice with no bloodline and no standing.

Three weeks before he tore the bond out of her chest and turned her out into the rain.

She knew none of it. She only knew that she was warm, and that she was loved, and that the man still moving inside her had just asked her to be his Luna.

It was the last good night of her life.

She would spend five years learning how to live without it.