The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 342

Chapter 342: The Fury Of A Man Reclaiming His Wife

The matebond didn’t care about timelines. It didn’t care about centuries. It didn’t care that Gavriel Sterling was a ghost in a vision watching a life that had ended before his began. It transmitted everything. Including this.

Tristian spun her around, turning her to face him in the bath.

Her pink eyes found his green ones, close enough that their breath mixed, and the vulnerability in her face was total, the princess and the girl and the woman all occupying the same expression at the same time.

He kissed her. Her mouth tasted like tears and wine and the word mine.

She kissed him back. Harder than she had at the altar. The hardest she had ever kissed him. Her hands went into his hair and her body pressed into his and the grief converted into something fiercer, something that lived in the same house as desperation and demanded the same currency: contact. All of it. Now.

He lifted her hips, positioning her above him. Her legs wrapped around his waist, and his hands gripped her thighs, and when he pulled her down onto him, she winced.

The stretch burned.

Gavriel could feel it echo through him, a phantom sensation that had no right to exist and carried the specificity of shared experience. If he were to guess, they had only been intimate a handful of times. Her body was still learning the shape of Tristian, still accommodating the intrusion with a resistance that was equal parts physical and emotional.

Tristan pulled out. Pushed in again. Slowly. Deliberately. Once. Twice. Three times. Four.

Each stroke was measured, patient, designed to let her body adjust, designed to let the soreness and the fullness negotiate their own boundary without his urgency making the decision for them.

"That’s it, baby," he murmured against her ear. "Relax into me. Just like that."

He could feel her tight heat envelope him inch by inch.

On the fifth stroke, something shifted. The pain migrated from foreground to background, overtaken by a pressure building low in her core that was warm and insistent and demanded attention with a voice that was louder than the ache.

Her hips started moving on their own, rocking into him with a rhythm that was instinctive and uncoordinated and entirely honest.

Both of her hands flew into his hair. Rational thought left the building. Her head tilted back, and the weight on her chest lifted.

Gavriel felt it in his own body. The pleasure. Her pleasure. Flooding through him with the clarity of a matebond transmission, as if he were the one making love to her right now, as if the connection between their souls carried sensation across lifetimes and across death and across the impossible distance between a ghost in a vision and a woman in a bath.

The heat built fast. Tristan was hitting a spot inside her that was making her see things that existed behind her eyelids.

Every stroke sent two messages: you’re mine, and I’m yours, and the two messages were the same message spoken in different directions.

His pace increased. The water surged around them, sloshing against the marble rim.

This was a matebond feeding him every sensation in real time, and the fact that he was aroused by the pleasure of a woman being made love to by another man, himself, was a truth he was going to need a very long time and a very large drink to process.

He wondered if it was because she was marked in this life. Because the Fae bonding mark created a channel that his soul was tuned to. Possibly, the channel didn’t distinguish between the man in the bath and the man against the wall.

Then she looked up.

Her pink eyes, mid-orgasm, still pulsing, still glazed with the aftershocks of a climax that was still rolling through her body, lifted from Tristan’s shoulder and locked onto a point across the bathing chamber.

Onto Gavriel.

She screamed.

The sound was high-pitched, involuntary, cutting through the steam and the water and the aftermath with the specific frequency of a woman seeing something that should not be there.

Gavriel jumped. His heart slammed against his ribs.

"Can you see me?"