Charity Received (18 page)

Kash sat on the edge of the bed, his face as white as the comforter he rested upon.

He was literally shaking, and she wondered if maybe she’d gone overboard. She hadn’t meant to instill such fear, but rather assure him of the truth of her words.

And already the wound was starting to heal, the skin knitting back together.

“A direct descendant of Eochaid Ollathair? How can this be?”

The last thing Charity wanted to do was reveal her humiliation. She’d borne her shame in silence for so long. Shit, her own mother didn’t want her. Never had. So how could she expect any different a reaction from Kash? God, she prayed he didn’t turn from her now. She didn’t know if she could survive that. But she owed him the same honesty he’d given her.

So with nails that had turned to claws digging into her palms, she began her sordid tale. Sucking in a deep breath, she forced the words past her lips quickly as she paced before the tapestries. “Roughly sixty years ago, a sadistic archdemon hooked up with an equally cruel vampire. While I don’t know what he was trying to get out of the arrangement, the vampire was attempting to breed sons. They started with female vampires, but quickly realized that while shifters could conceive only every seven years, they were able to carry more than one child to term and not miscarry like the vampires do. They also discovered they could force these young females to bond with other males, not just shifters. The bastard was trying to weed out the shifters’ short life spans, and he hadn’t had much luck pairing female shifters with male vampires, so the archdemon kidnapped five fae warriors.” She paused before the empty spot where Kash’s new tapestry would reside, wondering if she would ever get the chance to see it. “My father was one of those unfortunate males.”

“And your mother?” Kash asked quietly from somewhere behind her, but she didn’t have the nerve to look at him, to see if he grasped what she was saying.

Charity only nodded, her shoulders slumped in defeat. “I lived there until I was fourteen.” She found herself unexpectedly back behind those barbwire fences.

Christ, the horrors she’d seen. The heat-hunts, where the males would be released from their cages, the first to catch the female in heat getting to fuck her. She still sometimes heard the howls in her nightmares. But it had not all been horrible.

Some of the females had loved their children. And there had been the males…her father. “The warriors tried to protect us the best way they could. My father died when I was eleven, trying to get my mother and me away from that prison. He should have just left that bitch behind.”

“Charity,” he whispered, coming to stand in front of her. He grasped her chin, drawing her to meet his gaze.

Tears streamed down her face, but she didn’t even attempt to brush them away. “My father loved me…truly loved me. When we were rescued, my mother took me with her only because females are rare and she could get shit because of me. Until her pack realized there was no mate to fix me, she was treated like a queen.”

“Fix you? Chérie, I don’t understand.” Kash drew her into his arms and cradled her against his chest.

“It was a fluke. A complete fucking fluke. One of the females had managed to escape, taking her infant daughter with her. We thought them both dead. That was what we’d been told. But it was a lie. Regan lived, and before her first shift, she found her true mate, a wolf shifter. With their mating, the fae blood was completely neutralized from her system. Oh, how they paraded me in front of all those males.

Some just boys, others older than my mother.” A bubble of hysterical laughter escaped from her chest. “But no mate for me, so I remain both wolf and fae.”

Kash rocked her slowly, his silence fraying her already tattered nerves. When he finally spoke, she didn’t know what to make of his question.

“What does that mean, chérie?”

“How old do you think I am?” She hid her face in his shirt as she whispered the words. She was about to admit her greatest shame to the one person who could destroy her with his disgust.

“Is this a trick question?” Kash brushed her hair from her wet cheeks. Charity shrugged, trying to look away, but he held firm, studying her features. “While you don’t look a day over twenty, I know you must be at least twenty-one to work at Club Dominus. You have the maturity that comes with age, but that could be due to your childhood.” Kash paused as his eyes continued to probe. “I’d guess you are about twenty-five.”

With a smirk, she broke free from Kash and turned her back on him. Thrusting her hands in her pockets, she glanced up into the night sky. “I’ll be forty-five this June.”

Charity didn’t know what she’d expected. Recriminations. Mistrust. Disgust.

Everything she’d been conditioned to while living with her mother’s pack. When Kash cursed, she flinched. It was just as she’d feared. But what she hadn’t seen coming was what he did next.

He stalked toward her. Charity tried to evade him, wondering where her wolf was when she needed protection. She was being herded like prey. He had her trapped between the wardrobe and the bathroom door when he tried to take her into his arms. She fought for her freedom until his fingers gripped her hair painfully, stilling her movements.

“That is the best damn thing I have ever heard,” he barked harshly. “Christ, I thought I’d lose you to death some day.” And before his words even had a chance to sink in, Kash bit down on her bottom lip. He tugged on it gently before sucking it into his mouth, his tongue licking away the sting. As his arm banded about her hips, he slipped his tongue between her lips and curled it around hers, capturing her soft murmur.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and collapsed in his embrace, her breasts pressing into his chest. Her nipples were two hard little points she rubbed against him, the feel of the soft cotton T-shirt she wore only teasing her skin. She almost cried out in relief when Kash yanked the shirt over her head and his fingers replaced the cotton, rolling each hard nubbin. But Charity did squeal when he lifted her breast and covered a nipple with his lips. He drew it into the hot cavern of his mouth and flicked his tongue quickly across the tip.

With fingers entwined in his hair, she held Kash to her breast. She was shaking as he brought her close to orgasm with just his mouth. Then his lips released her, the cold air causing her wet nipples to harden even more. Charity whimpered, trying to drag his lips back to her, but he only chuckled, thwarting her efforts and throwing her completely off-center when he lifted her into his arms.

“Kash,” she cried as she threw her arms around his neck.

“I will not take you on the floor like a whore again.” He moved toward the bed, cradling her against his chest. “You deserved better your first time.”

“And my second? Third?” she asked, grinning broadly.

Kash smiled down at her as he laid her gently on top of the down comforter. “I didn’t get the chance to really appreciate all your charms,” he said as he went to work removing her sweatpants. “I plan to make up for that now.”

Charity’s heart about burst at the appreciation she saw in the gaze that traveled down her naked body. She’d always been overly sensitive about her thin frame.

While magazines portrayed gaunt as the rage, real men tended to gravitate toward the females with large boobs. Maybe if she had grown up in a normal pack, where her build would have been accepted, she wouldn’t be so self-conscious. But she’d been just at the cusp of womanhood at fourteen, and the vampires who had held her captive had liked to tease her about her lack of curves.

“Perfect. Absolutely perfect,” Kash murmured as he stood over her, his own clothes pooled around his feet.

“You don’t have to lie. There’s not much there.”

He frowned, his gaze finally climbing to her face. He cupped her cheek, his fingers brushing gently against her skin. “I see beauty before me. And it humbles me that I’ve been graced with such a gift. I do not deserve you.”

As Kash crawled onto the bed, Charity whispered, “You know this is a sure thing, right? You don’t have to flatter me with pretty words.”

He sat back on his heels, looking shocked, and for the first time, she thought he might have actually meant them. “Chérie, I will excuse such talk this once because of your childhood. It seems you were raised to think less of yourself. But speak badly of yourself again, and I’ll punish you. And I’m not talking the kind of kinky crap Zeke is into.”

Charity opened her mouth to question his statement, but he covered her lips with his, and Zeke was completely forgotten. Settling gently on top of her, Kash framed her face with his hands, holding her still as his tongue stole into her mouth, tangling with hers and drawing a soft moan from her throat. Heat radiated from his skin, warming her bone deep, and surrounded by his embrace, Charity felt sheltered. Consumed. Loved.

She curled her arms around his shoulders and clung to him as he teased with his tongue, his taste a mixture of coffee and something uniquely Kash flooding her senses. Pouring herself into the kiss, she prayed she was conveying all the things she could not force into words and making him feel just as cherished.

She murmured a protest when Kash’s lips left hers to slide along her jaw. Teeth grazed her earlobe before latching on to the spot where her neck met her shoulder, and he sucked on the small bit of skin. Sparks of desire shot down her limbs, and she dug her fingernails into his muscular back as her hips arched involuntarily.

Never had she suspected such sensitivity, especially without a mating mark.

“Do you like that, chérie?” he mumbled around her flesh, his tongue lapping at her skin.

Her hitched breath was all the answer she could give him as her body became a quivering mass beneath him, those tiny sparks now a full, raging inferno. A soft cry of unimaginable pleasure escaped her lips when his teeth gently scraped over that tiny expanse of flesh. Her clit began to throb, her pussy to weep in need, and Charity sank her fingers into his scalp, but to draw him closer or to push him away, she wasn’t certain.

“And if I did this?” he asked huskily just before he bit into her skin.

The bite was not hard enough to draw blood, but it set off a reaction the likes of which Charity never could have imagined. As a sob erupted from her chest, from out of nowhere, an orgasm slammed through her, so intense, it took her breath away.

Her hips arching in helpless desperation, she rode the waves of extreme bliss until she was certain she must have blacked out, only to discover her eyes were tightly squeezed shut. When she opened them, she was almost embarrassed to find Kash staring down at her.

“That was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” he whispered before brushing his lips against hers. “Absolutely breathtaking.”

“I still want you.”

“Do you, chérie?” he asked with a gentle smile.

“Please. Don’t make me wait.”

“Soon. I’ll give you everything you need soon,” he said before he slid down her body, peppering light kisses and teasing nips along his way.

Anticipation rippled through her, as she knew his destination was the apex of her thighs. He anointed her nipples with his tongue and trailed sucking kisses down her sternum. He swirled his tongue around her belly button, and his teeth lightly scraped across her abdomen, all the while his eyes never strayed from hers. When the bulk of his shoulders forced her thighs wide and he settled in between, his gaze finally shifted to the very core of her. As he inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with her scent, a blush crept over her.

But Charity wasn’t given time to contemplate her embarrassment. From pussy to clit, he dragged his tongue across her flesh and, like a thousand little electrical currents zipping through her body, completely short-circuited her brain. She was reduced to shuddering on the mattress in pulsating need.

Back and forth through her wet folds, Kash alternated between plunging his tongue deep into her vagina and flicking it over her clit. Her hips jerked in restless need, the peak she’d so swiftly hurtled over only moments before rising majestically once again within her. Draping her trembling thighs over his shoulders then clutching her ass tightly in his hands, Kash lifted her hips to his marauding mouth, forcing her to still and accept his pleasurable demands.

Even if it killed her. And with her head tossing back and forth on the pillow, Charity thought it just might.

Kash pulled away despite her quiet objections and blanketed her with his body. He wedged his hips between her thighs, the hardened tip of his cock poised at her opening as, with clenched teeth and a drawn face, he gazed down at her.

“Please,” she whispered, sliding her hand down his back and over his ass, hoping her touch would encourage him to answer her plea. Then, one slow inch at a time, he began to fill her.

“Christ, you feel so damn good,” he whispered once he was seated to the hilt.

“And you feel like home.”

“You are home, chérie. This is your home… Never alone again.” Kash pulled back, then thrust forward, his cock tunneling through her tender folds and sliding along her clit, sending shocks of desire through her. It was there, like an itch that started to slowly spread, her orgasm perched just out of reach. With each deep plunge, Kash brought her closer to the edge, until she felt his teeth again gripping her shoulder, and that was enough to topple her over.

She cried out, the orgasm consuming her, and as she shuddered through the contractions, she felt Kash’s dick spurting deep inside her, washing her with his seed. As he collapsed on top of her, she didn’t ease her arms from around his shoulders until sleep had her in its grip.

Kash looked down at the sleeping form of his mate and knew he had much to do. He had been lax when it came to the fortress’s security recently, and that was something he needed to rectify. He figured he should feel ashamed that he hadn’t considered Faith’s safety while he’d been hunting for his mate, but he was too much at peace with his world at present. Later, he would probably offer Bale his apologies.

It was the least he could do. Now, though, he intended to bask in the knowledge that Charity was safe and in his arms.