“Yeah, yeah, Mom. I know the Nazis settled here.” Bethy was naked, pacing back and forth across the floor at the foot of our bed, talking on the phone. “Yes, I have the American embassy on speed dial.” She gave me an apologetic look as Marlee continued yapping in her ear.

I grinned lazily back at her, engrossed in enjoying the view from where I lay stretched out on my side across the bed, propped up on my elbow, watching the sway of her hips and the jiggle of her bumper as she moved.

I was coming in that ass of hers next. My balls tightened at the thought of it.

“Well, I’m sure it looks that way, but I’m not the rebounder type, Mom. You know that.” She rolled her eyes and made a wrap-it-up gesture as she proceeded to pace closer to the windows.

It was dusk outside, and our bedroom was well lit. I shook my head. Definitely an exhibitionist. She was going to be the death of me with that shit. I didn’t share. So I didn’t particularly like the idea of anyone else even looking at what was mine.

But Bethy clearly enjoyed the thrill, despite her being somewhat in denial still about those preferences. I knew we’d have to establish some ground rules in order to make it work for us both. Maybe do what we’d done in the club the other night—where my men had surrounded us and shielded her from view. I’d probably start with fucking her in the garden maze tonight—giving her the excitement of potentially being watched.

Or … I could start by fucking her right now in front of the windows. While she talked to her mom on the phone.

I got up from the bed and stalked over to her.

“Yes, I realize the suddenness of it all must seem a bit unbelievable to you and Dad, but I need to spend some time with Raul here at his home. I’ll be back in a week to square things away with the hospital, and we can talk in person then, okay?”

Bethy gave me a stern look and shook her head at me the moment she caught sight of my approach—and the size of my erection pointed straight at her.

It was hard not to laugh. Fuck, she was fun. She was giving off a serious schoolteacher vibe with her expression.

“Mom, I really have to get going now.” She glared at me again, while backing up toward the window—exactly where I wanted her.

In one supernaturally fast move, I had her lush body pinned against the pane. Marlee’s voice was still prattling away in Bethy’s ear as I spun her around so that her back was to my front and her naked front was on full display in the curtainless, giant arched window of my bedroom that overlooked a courtyard in the garden below.

Bethy didn’t need to know there was a longstanding spell in place on all of the windows in my room that worked better than any tinted glass to prevent anyone from seeing in.

What would be the fun in telling her that?

She squirmed frantically against me as I pushed her legs wider apart with my own, pressing my cock between her ass cheeks as my hand skated down her abdomen, between her thighs, to palm her sex.

Soaking wet.

Yep. Complete exhibitionist.

Pinching her nipple with my other hand, I dragged my fingers through her folds before sinking several inside.

She began giving breathy, one-word answers into the phone, and otherwise letting her mom do all the talking, as my thumb joined in to work her clit.

Her squirming only got me more aroused as her ass pressed and rolled up against my dick. And somewhere amid her silent squirms of protest, she began shamelessly riding my hand.

My whole palm was soaked, but she was still holding back, so I reached out to Tiago through our mind link and told him to send a dozen or more werewolf guards—both male and female—out to the courtyard. And have them stare up at my bedroom window.

Because Bethy was my mate, and I would do whatever it took to make her happy. And just because I could. Sometimes it was good to be king.

Lining up my cock with her dripping entrance, I told her to hang up the call and brace her hands against the glass.

She did. She straight-up hung up on her mom before dropping the device. It clanked to the marble floor—the second phone she’d broken in less than twenty-four hours.

Slipping my right forearm under her right thigh, I raised her knee up and out, spreading her open wide for the whole courtyard to not see as I shoved into her ready center from behind.

She went up on tiptoe, balanced precariously on one shaky leg and supported by her sweaty palms against the glass as I began to fuck her, slow and deep.

At first, her eyes were riveted on our reflection in the pane as she watched my dick glide in and out, disappearing between her spread pink folds.

My free hand alternated between pinching her nipples and rubbing her exposed clit.

Then I had Tiago illuminate the garden area, drawing her attention there as the first several guards entered the courtyard below and looked right up at us. She started desperately pushing back against the glass, trying to get away from view—which only served to press her ass into my groin and push my dick deeper inside her.

She might’ve been fooling herself, but she didn’t fool me. Because her pussy began gushing and fluttering like mad the moment she thought we had an audience.

Fuck, the things I was going to do to her once she was a werewolf and went into heat. Then it occurred to me the things I could do to her now that I had access to her mind at last.

Ask permission.

I waited until she was on the brink of her first orgasm—knowing she’d say yes to anything. “Baby?” I licked the bite on her shoulder as she began making incoherent sounds. “Would it be okay if I entered your mind now to make sure everything’s feeling good for you?”

I took the next little squeak she made as a yes, and carefully, gently slipped inside just as she was going over the cliff. And oh, fuck me, I nearly shot my load prematurely, it was so beautiful inside Bethy’s orgasmic mind.

Feeling what she was feeling and hearing her disjointed, dirty thoughts in her highly aroused state was the ultimate turn-on—the most exhilarating sensation I’d ever known. I had to count to five and calm my shit to stop myself from running wild like a kid in a candy store triggering every single nerve bundle in each of her erogenous zones all at once.

Subtle and gentle, I reminded myself.

The gentle approach was best for her first time having me in her head. And her ass—which was where I was going next.

I started by causing her to feel a steady, light pulse against her G-spot, and then I added a sucking sensation on her clit. Her leg gave out and she released a gasp of alarm the moment I added the less subtle sensation of phantom mouths latching on and sucking her hard nipples.

“Raul?”

“You’re okay.” My arm tightened around her midsection, taking all of her weight. “You’re safe.” I nuzzled the shell of her ear. “It’s just me. It’s not real. It only feels real because I’m inside your head directing messages throughout your body—causing it to believe it’s experiencing certain things.”

“You’re in my head?” The question came out breathless. She sounded surprised. Dazed.

“Yeah. Remember? You gave me permission.” I sent a wave of calm through her system as I said it, helping her to relax. “You like that?”

She moaned and nodded. Her head lolled back against my shoulder. Her hands slipped from the glass pane.

“Good.” I kissed her cheek. “Just relax and feel good for me. If you don’t like something, let me know, and I’ll stop.”

Slowly, I began to arouse the nerves throughout her anus next, building anticipation. Getting her used to the sensation. Stimulating her desire to feel more of me there.

Then I worked two slick phantom fingers inside her asshole, twisting and scissoring them, preparing her to take me as I continued to slowly fuck her.

I watched her reflection in the glass as her eyes rolled back—as the sensations began to overwhelm her, making her body tighten and coil with need. My own eyes had shifted; my fangs were extended and salivating with the need to pierce her flesh.

Her arms reached up over her head to wrap around my neck; her fingers gripped and pulled my hair.

She was so ready to come, but I was in her head and able to delay her orgasms now, thank God. Otherwise I would’ve spilled inside her a long time ago.

“Keep looking out the window, baby,” I told her.

More guards had arrived in the courtyard. I’d requested that Tiago grab a few mated couples, too—and preferably any females who were in heat who felt like putting on a show. One of the couples was already going at it. Bethy’s exhibitionist tendencies weren’t entirely novel within a werewolf pack.

She started coming apart again when she saw the crowd gathered below staring up at our window. But I stopped her orgasm and simply held her there—leaving her dangling over the precipice, her inner walls throbbing and pulsating with need around my painful erection. I told her she’d get to come once she took my whole cock in her ass—because #relationshipgoals.

Then I waited until she was a shaking, babbling, desperate-to-come wreck before I finally pulled out of her drenched pussy and went for her smaller hole.

Raising her bent leg higher, I nudged her upper body forward and pulled her hips up and back. I told her to brace her hands against the window again as the head of my wet cock sought her tighter entrance.

I reminded her to breathe and push out as I pressed forward.

Phantom mouths and hands alternately rubbed, sucked, and gave her clit light slaps as the head of my cock slowly breached her ring of muscle. Phantom fingers filled and fucked her pretty cunt.

“You okay?” I forced myself to pause and check, even though I was sure that she was, based on the thoughts and sensations I was privy to in her head. And based on the noises she was making that were driving me insane. She moan-babbled in reply, and I kept going, pushing farther inside.

My hand ran soothingly up and down her spine. I paused several more times to allow her body to adjust—to wait for the pleasure receptors within her to catch up and override any discomfort she was experiencing.

Meanwhile, I was barely keeping it together as I watched my dick slowly sink to the hilt inside her. As soon as I was balls-deep in her ass, I knew I wasn’t going to last much longer. And neither was she.

The moment I stopped holding back her orgasm, she went off like a rocket, her mouth falling open in a silent scream, her ass clenching around me, her pussy exploding against my palm as I cupped it, then slapped it one final time.

Fuck me, her ass was so incredibly tight and hot as her walls convulsed around me and her orgasm choked my cock. A growl rolled up my chest.

Gentle! Be gentle, I reminded my inner beast as my body went rigid, my movements becoming hard and jerky as I withdrew barely an inch before shoving back into her. Once. Twice.

I was just about to blow when suddenly I heard a vaguely familiar male voice speaking inside of Bethany’s head.

“Bethany? Can you hear me?”

What in holy—?

“This is Remy Bertrand, Milena’s brother-in-law. You may not remember me, but ten years ago—”

“What the fuck, man?” I shouted back at him. “Get out of here!”

“Raul?” Remy sounded genuinely surprised. “Wait. How’re you in Beth—Oh!”

“Omigod, what’s happening?” Bethany asked aloud, freaking out as her orgasm waned and she became lucid enough to realize I was arguing inside her head—with another guy!

“Well, this is a little awkward.” Remy’s voice was amused. “I’ll just … have Alex call you.”

“That anal orgasm was intense,” Bethy confessed, her voice quiet despite the echo in the large bathroom. Her blue eyes were still a little dazed, her cheeks a freshly scrubbed pink. “Way more earth-shattering than the clinical studies and dirty Cosmo articles I read ever made it out to be.” She was sitting on the edge of our bathroom’s sunken tub, my bathrobe dwarfing her frame as I towel-dried her hair. “But I think having two werelocks in my head is an exhibitionist hard limit for me.”

I nodded and forced a placid expression. I wasn’t sure I pulled it off, considering my jaw was clenched so tightly it felt like I might crack teeth. “It’s an absolute hard limit for me,” I told her stiffly. “And it will never happen again.”

Because I was going to invent the most complicated, most powerful mind shield of all time to place on Bethany.

Following the epically awkward Remy interruptus, I’d settled Bethy into a warm bath to relax her. And then I’d dialed Alex. After laying into him about Remy’s intrusion, I’d discovered that the Reinosos had never lifted the mind block on Bethy.

Once word had finally reached Miles through Alex’s siblings about Bethany’s situation and about Kai’s coed being poisoned, my sister had promptly ordered Remy to lift the emotional shield on my mate. So Remy had entered Bethany’s mind to check on her and carry out Miles’s command.

Except the emotional shield had already been lifted on its own, and Bethany’s blocked memories recovered as well. The question remained: How? What had triggered it?

“Honey, I need you to tell me what happened when you first woke up after your fainting spell. What were you thinking about when your memories resurfaced?”

“Well, I’d just had a really vivid dream about my baby brother, and as I woke up, I was still thinking about him. And then all of a sudden I started to rememb—”

“What?” The towel stilled in my hands against her scalp. “You have a brother?” Since when?

She nodded. “Yeah. Had.” Her eyes watered as she gave me a soft smile. “Evan only lived to be thirteen months old.”

“I—I’m sorry,” I sputtered. How in the world had I not known this? I let the towel fall around her shoulders. I straightened and backed up a step, floored.

How was it possible that I hadn’t known Bethy had a sibling? A baby brother who had died? I ran a shaky hand through my hair. I was such an insensitive asshole.

And an idiot. Evan had been the key to her emotional shield all along. It should’ve been so obvious, and yet, I’d never heard about him before.

“Fuck, I—I should’ve known that already. I don’t know how I didn’t know.”

“Raul, stop.” She shook her head, her gaze on me nothing but kind. “Don’t beat yourself up. Not for this. There’s no way you could’ve known. I think I only mentioned Evan to Milena maybe once when we were little—twice our whole friendship at most. He died before I turned four—before Milena and I met in kindergarten.”

She rolled one shoulder, looking small and vulnerable wrapped up in my giant bathrobe. “I guess I’ve made it a habit for most of my life not to talk about him much. Close friends like Kylie and Jessie don’t know I ever had a brother. Maybe it’s weird of me, but I have such precious few memories of my baby brother, I’ve never liked sharing them. I always wanted them to remain mine alone.”

I sat next to her on the side of the tub, taking her hand in mine. “Not weird at all. I get that.” Boy, did I get that.

“For years, I blamed myself for Evan’s death, even though I knew it had absolutely nothing to do with me. Because that’s what kids do: blame themselves for bad things that happen, and for the things that upset the adults around them.”

I linked our fingers and brought her hand to my lips as she continued.

“My parents weren’t the same after Evan died. They fought a lot at first. Then they’d go weeks at a time barely speaking. I blamed myself for that, too. Then at some point it was like my Mom stopped loving my Dad—like she couldn’t move past the loss of Evan and was mad that my Dad had.” Her forehead creased. “Or rather, she couldn’t accept that my Dad had processed his loss in a manner that was different from how she had.

“Anyway, it made me feel as if nothing I did would ever be enough—not enough to fill the void Evan left behind, you know? Not enough to make them happy again. Certainly not enough to make them love each other the way I’d thought they once had.

“They talked about divorce a lot. Threatened divorce a lot to one another, I should say,” she clarified. “It got pretty intense sometimes. To the point that I starting wishing they’d just get divorced and get it over with. I always felt like they only stayed together after Evan’s death because of me.” Her throaty chuckle was dry. “But then they stayed together after I went to college and moved out.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose, shutting her eyes and shaking her head. “And I finally realized they were locked in their own dysfunction that had nothing to do with me.”

“I’m sorry.” I stared down at our joined hands in my lap. “I can’t even imagine.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about.” She leaned in and laid her head against my shoulder. “And I have a feeling you can imagine—that you can relate all too well, actually.”

She tilted her chin back, looking up at me from the side of my shoulder. “Remember how I told you I had an emotional reaction to seeing that Tagore magnet at the grocery store? A similar thing happened when I was studying obstetrics and learned about amniotic fluid embolism—the rare condition your mom suffered in childbirth.”

My heart began to beat faster. I was grateful Bethy couldn’t hear it as I averted my gaze.

“I got so emotional reading about it,” she continued, “so frustrated learning how impossible a condition it is to diagnose and treat with any success. It felt so deeply personal to me for some reason, and I couldn’t understand why.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told—”

“There are no signs, Raul.” She raised her head from my shoulder and pulled back to look at me. Reluctantly, I met her eyes. “There are virtually no formal studies on the condition because it can’t be prediagnosed, and when it happens, it hits so fast that by the time there are any symptoms, it’s almost always too late.”

As she proceeded, her tone became purposely clinical. Detached. There was even a hint of that schoolteacher vibe again. It was something I would later look back on and remember as a moment in which I fell even more in love with my mate and future wife, as Bethany spoke like she was merely stating medical facts rather than attempting to exonerate and free me from some of the worst demons of my life.

“Once amniotic fluid enters the mom’s bloodstream, it sets off an anaphylactic reaction, usually leading to rapid multisystem organ failure and cardiovascular collapse. Both the delivering mom and the baby have only a twenty percent chance of survival when they receive the right immediate emergency medical attention at a hospital.

“Paramedics couldn’t have saved your mom, Raul. They didn’t have the tools or the skills—much less the ability to properly diagnose what was happening. Your mom made the right call—the only call left at that point. If she’d let them waste time taking her to the hospital, neither she nor Milena would’ve survived. It was a miracle Milena survived anyhow, and the only reason she did was because your mom was already in the final stages of labor by the time the paramedics arrived.”

I wanted nothing more in that moment than to pull Bethy into my arms, kiss her senseless, and eat her out on the golden tile floor until she cried for mercy.

Unfortunately, Alex and Miles were teleporting in to meet with us in the next twenty minutes.