Chapter 6: The Florist's Return
The scent of his own shop hit Rowan like a forgotten memory. Damp soil, chlorophyll, the sweet decay of cut stems, and over it all, the layered perfume of a hundred different blooms. It was richer, more complex, than he remembered. Or maybe it was just him. His senses had been deepening, shifting, alongside the changes in his body.
He stood just inside the glass door, his hand resting on the pronounced curve of his belly. The loose linen shirt did little to hide the swell now; he was five months along, and carrying what Kaelan’s nose insisted was four kits. His center of gravity was a foreign country.
“Okay?” Kaelan’s voice was a low vibration at his back, closer than a shadow. He hadn’t wanted this. The drive into town, the exposure, the idea of Rowan around others. A tense negotiation had ended with Kaelan’s grudging agreement, provided he came along. He was a wire pulled taut, his amber eyes scanning the empty shop, the quiet street beyond.
“It’s just my shop, Kael.” Rowan’s voice was softer, but held a thread of something new. A quiet insistence. He walked to the central worktable, brushing dust from its scarred surface. “I need to check on things. Water the cold storage. Feel normal for an hour.”
“Normal,” Kaelan repeated, the word sounding alien on his tongue. He leaned against the counter by the register, a panther disguised in black jeans and a tight charcoal tee, his arms crossed. Watching.
Rowan lost himself in the work. His hands remembered the motions: trimming thorny rose stems, stripping lower leaves, the snip of shears. He gathered pale pink peonies, their heads heavy as fists, and wove in sprigs of silvery dusty miller. The familiar action soothed the constant, low-grade hum of anxiety that lived in his chest now. He was making something beautiful. He was more than a vessel.
The bell over the door jangled.
A man walked in, tall and broad-shouldered with the easy, swaggering gait of a wolf. His gaze swept the shop, dismissive, before landing on Rowan. It paused at his hands, then dropped, lingering on the undeniable round of his stomach beneath the apron.
Rowan felt the shift in the air behind him. Kaelan had gone preternaturally still.
“Help you?” Rowan asked, his voice thankfully steady.
“Just browsing,” the wolf said, but he didn’t look at the flowers. He took a step closer, his nostrils flaring. A predatory smile touched his lips. “Caught a new scent in here. Something… ripe. Didn’t know bunnies could swell up so pretty.”
The words hung in the fragrant air, crude and violating.
Rowan froze, a peony stem digging into his palm.
There was no warning snarl. Just a blur of motion and a thunderous impact.
Kaelan moved so fast he was a streak of darkness. One moment he was by the counter, the next he had the wolf slammed face-first into the edge of Rowan’s worktable, petals exploding into the air. His hand was fisted in the man’s hair, grinding his cheek into the wood. The growl that ripped from Kaelan’s throat wasn’t human. It was the sound of the forest’s deepest dark, a promise of dismemberment.
“Say that again.” Kaelan’s voice was gravel and broken glass. “Breathe in his direction again.”
The wolf shifter went rigid, a whine escaping him. Submission bled from his pores, sour and sudden. “Didn’t—didn’t mean—”
Kaelan wrenched his head back and slammed it down again. A vase rattled. “You don’t look at him. You don’t speak to him. He is mine. What grows in him is mine. You are nothing but a stain on his air. Understand?”
A frantic, choked sound of assent.
Kaelan released him with a shove that sent him stumbling into a rack of ribbon spools. “Get out. If your scent is within a mile of this place tomorrow, I’ll peel your pelt off.”
The wolf fled, the door banging shut behind him.
Silence rushed in, thick and ringing. Rowan stood trembling, crushed petals sticking to his apron. He watched Kaelan’s back, the muscles in his shoulders and arms coiled like steel springs, his breath heaving.
Slowly, Kaelan turned.
His eyes were fully wild, the gold nearly swallowed by black pupils. There was no tenderness there now, only a possession so ferocious it stole the breath from Rowan’s lungs. He stalked forward, each step deliberate.
“Kaelan,” Rowan whispered.
He didn’t speak. His hands came up, gripping the straps of Rowan’s apron, and tore it away. The buttons on the linen shirt followed, scattering like tiny teeth on the floor. The cool shop air hit Rowan’s skin, raising goosebumps. Kaelan’s gaze burned over his exposed throat, his chest, the heavy, sensitive swell of his breasts, and down to the taut curve of his stomach.
“He saw you,” Kaelan rasped, as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did.
He turned Rowan around, bending him over the very worktable he’d just pinned the wolf against. The scattered, bruised petals were cool against Rowan’s flushed skin. Kaelan’s hands pushed his jeans and underwear down in one rough jerk.
There was no gentleness. No preparation. Just the slick, blunt pressure of Kaelan’s arousal against him, and then the ruthless, single-minded push as he sheathed himself inside in one deep, claiming stroke.
Rowan cried out, his fingers scrambling against the wood, finding purchase among stems and leaves. It wasn’t pain, not exactly. It was a fullness so intense it bordered on violation, a physical rewriting of the fear and violation of the wolf’s words. Kaelan fucked him with a hard, driving rhythm, each snap of his hips a punctuation mark of ownership.
“Mine,” he growled, his body curved over Rowan’s, one hand splayed across Rowan’s belly, the other gripping his hip hard enough to bruise. “Every part. Every scent. Every kick. Mine.”
The knot began, a thick, urgent swell at the base of his cock, stretching Rowan further with every thrust. It was too soon, too much, and yet Rowan felt his own body responding, softening, yielding, a treacherous tide of heat rising to meet the punishing rhythm. His neglected cock ached between his legs.
As the knot locked, swelling to its full, impossible size, Kaelan’s teeth found Rowan’s scent gland. It wasn’t the tender press from the cabin. It was a bite, sharp and definitive, breaking the skin as Rowan’s climax ripped through him, a silent, breathless convulsion that made him see stars.
Kaelan came with a roar muffled against Rowan’s neck, his hips stuttering as the knot pulsed, locking them together. Rowan felt the hot rush deep inside, and then, as the lore promised for predator-prey pairs, another pulse, and another, a relentless series of releases that milked his own oversensitive body into a second, shuddering wave of pleasure.
Bound, filled, Rowan went limp over the table. His cheek rested in a bed of crushed lavender. The scent, his secret scent, filled his nose, a quiet anchor in the storm.
Kaelan’s weight settled over him, heavy and warm. His breaths were ragged against Rowan’s marked neck. His hand, the one that had been a fist in the wolf’s hair, now stroked the side of Rowan’s stomach with a terrifying, shuddering gentleness.
“I’ll kill anything that looks at you wrong,” Kaelan murmured into his skin, the words a raw vow. “You’re everything. The den. The heart. You can’t be out here where they can see.”
Rowan’s eyes were open, staring at the scattered blooms. His hand unclenched. Nestled in his palm were the broken stems of lavender, their fragrance clinging to his skin. He was trembling, sore, claimed all over again.
And yet.
The fear from the wolf’s words was gone, burned away in the ferocity of Kaelan’s response. In its place was a weary, profound understanding. The panther would tear the world apart for him. The world, in turn, would always see him as something to covet or threaten. There was no safe middle ground.
“I know,” Rowan whispered back, his voice hoarse. It wasn’t agreement. It was just… knowledge. The first chill of a coming winter, felt in the bones.
He closed his fingers around the lavender, holding his tiny, fragile piece of green in a world of teeth and claiming. The knot held them fast, a physical chain and a primal comfort, as the last of the petals settled softly on the floor around their feet.