Snow Leopard's Lady (Veteran Shifters 1)

He pressed in achingly slowly, one hand caressing her—her breast, the curve of her stomach, her hip, a loving touch that sent shivers of pleasure through her, coalescing at the point where they were joined.

When he was seated fully inside her, looking down at her with eyes that seemed like silvery flame, he asked, with strain audible in his voice, “All right?”

“More than all right,” Mavis said back. More all right than I’ve ever been in my life, she thought. “You feel so good.”

“Good,” he said on a gust of breath, and started to move inside her, thrusting deep and slow. It felt like she was being carried away on a wave of him, as he moved her, his body all around her, his cock inside her. Like she could just let everything else go, relax, and be his.

Mavis shuddered as the pleasure started to build again. She was on a hair-trigger after coming once and being brought to the edge a second time, and the deep press of his cock was making her clench around him, pulses of pleasure starting to echo through her body. She reached up to hold him close, needing an anchor, and he wrapped her up in his arms and kissed her fiercely as she came again.

This orgasm didn’t fade away, though. As she spasmed in pleasure, he kept thrusting, and it was like every push of his cock into her sparked another wave of climax. Mavis almost sobbed in pleasure as it went on and on and on.

Finally, he groaned, deep and low, and his cock jerked in her, his hips thrusting hard and deep one last time as he came. Mavis sighed as her second orgasm finally came to an end, the pulses weakening into an overall feeling of shuddery bliss.

After a long moment, he withdrew, and stretched out next to her, his arms still around her, holding her close in a pocket of heat and joy. Mavis closed her eyes and held him back, nothing in her mind but the pure happiness of the moment.

The future would bring other things, and there were plenty of reasons her feelings didn’t make any sense, wouldn’t lead to any good outcome. But it didn’t matter.

In this moment, she loved him.

***

Wilson felt Mavis breathing softly in his arms. Her eyes had drifted shut, and after a few moments, it was clear she’d fallen asleep. A smile still lingered on her lips.

Wilson was torn in two directions—on the one hand, he wanted to immediately wake her up and tell her what he now knew, down to his bones, without any doubt.

On the other hand, he needed a moment to sit with this knowledge, to understand that his entire life had been bringing him to this moment. To rearrange his future in his head, and understand that it was so much brighter than he’d ever dreamed.

Mavis was his mate.

He’d been so certain that it wasn’t in the cards for him. Married to my job, he’d said with a jovial tone to anyone who asked, as though that’s all he wanted from his life. As though his work made him plenty happy, and there was no need for anything more.

He’d been lying, every time. And he’d known it—he pretended hard, even to himself, that the military was all the home and family he’d ever need. When he’d been overseas, it had even seemed true, if only because he couldn’t imagine subjecting any woman to the fear and uncertainty that came from a husband deployed into combat.

But in the years after he’d been posted to Washington, he’d had to pretend harder and harder. Because the truth was that underneath the fiction he presented to the world, he was deeply unhappy.

And lonely. That had always seemed like a childish word to him, something that should be easy to conquer. But what it represented was long, empty evenings, weekends where he went on walks or drove out of the city to shift alone. Reading books without anyone around to talk to about them, coming home from a long day of work an

d having no one to wrap their arms around him and take his mind to happier things.

Now he could have that with Mavis.

But could he? She wasn’t going to leave Glacier, he knew that. She’d stay with her daughter until her last breath, after what had happened.

That story had broken Wilson’s heart. Her daughter missing for so long...and she’d had to stay with the man who’d caused it all, or risk losing Nina forever.

That made his fists want to clench in anger, though he kept his body relaxed to avoid waking Mavis.

But if he ever met that man, the man who’d throw his own teenage daughter onto the streets, cause his wife and his child so much pain...well, even decades of military training would have a hard time restraining him from teaching the man a lesson he wouldn’t forget.

He’d protect Mavis from now on. The idea filled him a with a fierce love. Nothing so awful would ever happen to her again, because Wilson was going to stand between her and trouble from now on.

And Nina. That was something he’d never considered. A stepdaughter? He blinked at the ceiling in wonder. A stepdaughter.

But he was getting ahead of himself. He had to tell Mavis what he already knew down to his bones, and see where they went from there.

She wouldn’t know they were mates yet, not like he did. Because she was human. A human mate—what a strange thing. But perfect. Mavis was perfect in every way.

He couldn’t wait to tell her.