go home from school that day, which was when Mum worked out you were my mate. Scared the shit out of me. Like, I knew a bit, from what the old fellas said, but… Let’s just say it’s weird to suddenly find a lump in your dick that wasn’t there before. After that, I got real familiar with your cycle…”
“Oh god…” I gasped, feeling a shadow of that teenage fear that someone would work out you were menstruating, despite it being perfectly natural.
“Wherever possible, I tried to keep clear of you mid-cycle because…” He smiled sheepishly. “I ache for you most days that end with a Y, Shan, but when you’re ovulating, when that egg drops inside you…” He reached for me, but I tightened my fingers around his knot, forcing a moan from him. “Everything in me wants to fuck you, fill you with my cum until I’ve made you mine.”
“Ovulation…” My brain whirred in ways it well and truly should have before I had unprotected sex. “I can’t… I’m on birth control. I’ve got the implant.”
He moved in now, brushing his lips against mine. “I know, but, baby, something’s changed because you smell ripe.”
“Whoa, whoa—Jai, stop!”
He prowled along the bed as I scrambled back, hanging over me when I ran out of bed.
“Jai… Jai!” He paused where he was, halfway towards kissing me senseless again. “Doesn’t that strike you as weird?”
He blinked a few times, as if forcing his attention back to me rather than the instincts that rode him. He frowned as he sat back on his heels.
“I guess I just assumed it was all part of the changes… Pack women usually start ovulating when they take their mates.”
“Against all the hormones this thing is pumping into me?” I said, poking the spot on my arm, but the only resistance it met was my own muscle.
My guts sank through the floor. Shannon, you fucking idiot… I told myself. He said he wanted to get you pregnant.
When I looked up, I saw the cage anew. Hollingsworth saw us as sub-human, and this was a breeding box, forcing proximity, giving us nothing else to do. Ramping up desire. Making sure I was about to come into heat. My hands shook as I placed them in my lap, my whole body taking over when they stilled.
“Shan, it’s OK.” I looked up at him blindly, unable to understand the words coming out of his mouth. The other guys had been in here for over a year. I’d…give birth to any child I had in these walls, my baby not able to—
“Shannon, look at me.” His voice was sharp and insistent, my eyes moving to do his bidding automatically. “You’re not pregnant, not yet. That’s what the knot does, love. It delivers viable sperm. We ejaculate without it obviously, but no actual swimmers without the knot.”
“And then…?”
We knew where we were headed, my eyes dropping down to his still rigid cock, seeing the lump and knowing it was only a matter of time before it was in me. A year without formalising things? More? Not happening.
“And then, if we’re lucky enough to get pregnant? It’d…” My eyes jerked up when his voice broke, catching the suspicious shine in his eyes before he glanced away. “I just want you, babe, in whatever capacity you’ll have me. But having my kid?” Those eyes slid back to spear straight into mine. “I won’t lie. I want that more than I want my next breath. To have a little girl or boy with your fair hair.”
“They’d probably take after you,” I muttered, and he shot me a lopsided smile.
“If they’re happy, healthy, and ours, that’s all I care about. You and them. Is that… Would you want that?”
The subsequent silence fell hard upon me, smothering and total, with the exception of little groans and sighs coming through the PA system. We were having this insanely personal moment in a bubble, one that was force broadcast into the other cells. What we’d been up to, my heat… A disturbing montage of all of the men I’d met today, naked and lying on their beds, listening to us, breathing in my scent, hands—
I jerked my mind away from that train of thought, forcing my eyes to meet Jai’s.
I was going to say not yet, not now, that we needed to let the relationship develop first. That would have been the eminently sensible thing to say, but when was I ever sensible about Jai? This whole thing was doomed