Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 172: Arousal

This was definitely a déjà vu Chris didn’t want to acknowledge.

He was in the bathroom, again.

Nadia had left two hours ago. Dax was working in the sitting room, entirely unaware that his mere presence was ruining Chris’s ability to exist like a functioning human being and that... that did not allow Chris to live peacefully in this palace.

He braced both hands against the marble counter and stared himself down in the mirror.

’C’mon, Malek. Until now you were fine. Pull yourself together. Six days until the gala.’

The pep talk didn’t help. Not even a little.

Because his body, traitorous, impatient, and apparently done taking instructions, had decided that now was the perfect time to be aroused. The heat pooled low in his abdomen and a slow, unsettling throb between his thighs made him want to kick something.

He exhaled sharply through his nose.

"No. Absolutely not. We are not doing this," he whispered at his reflection, as if he could bully his own endocrine system back into submission.

His body disagreed.

Spectacularly.

His breath hitched, embarrassingly sharp, as another wave pulsed through him. His legs tensed, the tile beneath his bare feet feeling colder than it should. The robe clung wrong. His skin felt too thin.

"Gods," he muttered, dragging a hand through his hair, "Nadia’s going to say ’I told you so’ for the rest of my life."

He squeezed his thighs together.

Instant mistake.

His pulse jumped. His hands clenched. He fought the urge to make a sound, to do anything that would echo off the stone and slide under the sitting room door to where Dax was working.

Dax.

The thought alone made the heat spike.

Because he could feel him.

Even from here.

The faint mix of spiced rum and storm now tugged at something instinctive and inconvenient deep inside Chris’s chest. It wasn’t even fair. Dax wasn’t doing anything. He wasn’t touching him. He wasn’t even talking.

He was just existing.

And that alone was apparently enough to crater Chris’s composure.

"Six days," Chris muttered, rolling his shoulders back. "I just need six damn days."

Except his body clearly had other opinions.

The arousal tightened again, coiling low and warm and insistent. His breath stuttered. He pressed the heel of his hand against the cool marble and tried to think of anything that wasn’t Dax leaning over paperwork, Dax loosening his collar, or Dax brushing a kiss against the top of his hair like it was nothing.

Anything that wasn’t Dax.

But his mind supplied a vivid memory anyway: Dax’s voice earlier, low and certain, "I’ll know before you do."

Chris swallowed hard.

’A cold shower would do.’

—

The steam rising from the shower did nothing to clear his head. If anything, the hot, humid air seemed to intensify the scent of spiced rum that clung to the inside of his skull, a phantom presence as real as the water sluicing over his skin. Chris leaned forward, bracing his forearms against the cool, wet tile, letting the spray beat against the back of his neck. ’Six days.’ The number was a desperate, failing mantra.

His body, however, had a different timeline. A different agenda.

A low, frustrated groan escaped him as his length, already half-hard since he’d fled the sitting room, gave a painful, eager throb. It was a deep, insistent ache that echoed the dull pulse between his legs, a slick, traitorous warmth already beginning to bloom there.

’No. Not yet.’

Chris ground his teeth and shifted under the spray, forcing himself to breathe through the burn blooming low in his belly. But his body wasn’t interested in breathing. Or logic. Or restraint. It was interested in scent and touch and the impossible heat curling between his thighs, slick and maddening.

’This is not heat,’ he told himself.

He wasn’t delirious. He wasn’t hallucinating. There were no sharp spikes, no scent warps, and no sudden loss of cognition.

Not yet.

Just this...this desire built on months of sleeping with Dax in the same bed. Prickling beneath his skin like fire trapped under glass.

He hissed out another breath and shifted his stance, trying to find some position that didn’t press against the ache in his groin or remind him how embarrassingly sensitive he’d gotten in the last twenty minutes. His cock throbbed again, harder now, flushed and fully aroused, pressed too close to his own body.

Worse was the slick, warm, humiliating slip of it between his thighs, gathering where his inner scent glands were slowly waking up, exhaling that subtle chemical signal meant to trigger a response.

Meant to trigger Dax.

"Gods," he muttered, forehead thunking once against the tile wall. "This can’t be happening."

"Thank gods Dax removed the collar earlier; otherwise he would know everything."

It was a weak comfort. A temporary one.

A lie he couldn’t even sell to himself.

Because even without the torque on his throat, Chris knew, knew, that if Dax were standing on the other side of the door right now, even ten meters away, he would smell it.

Chris pressed his forehead harder against the wet tile.

He hadn’t wanted this to happen like this. Not cornered in a bathroom with the water scalding his back and his breathing uneven and his body begging for relief.

But his body wasn’t listening.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

’If I walk out now, he’ll see it on my face. He’ll smell it on my skin. He’ll know.’

His fingers wrapped around his length.

A choked-off cry escaped him. So hot. His own skin felt like fire under his touch, the shaft hard and straining against his palm. The first tentative stroke was pure, undiluted agony and ecstasy.

His hand began to move, a slow, slick slide that was both torture and relief. The water cascaded over his back, his hand, and his desperate grip, making every movement smoother, wetter, and more obscene. The sound of his own ragged breathing and the slap of wet skin were hidden under the shower’s sound.

His other hand joined, sliding lower, drawn to the source of the slick, maddening warmth between his thighs. His fingers slid through the wetness there, over sensitive, swollen flesh he usually ignored. A jolt shot through him. His hips stuttered forward into his fist, back against his own seeking fingers.

’Oh, gods.’ His mind was fracturing, dissolving into pure sensation. The clean, sharp scent of his own arousal began to cut through the steam, a siren’s call his body was screaming into the void. For Dax. It was all for Dax.

His strokes became quicker and less controlled. His breath came out in sharp, broken gasps. He was close, teetering on an edge; he bit his inner lip to keep from crying out, to keep from screaming the name beating in time with his pulse. ’Dax. Dax. Dax.’

The orgasm ripped through him with the force of a lightning strike. White-hot and utterly blinding, it tore a guttural, strangled moan from deep within his chest. His body locked, back bowing violently as he spilled over his own fist, his release washing away instantly in the stream of water, his climax a frantic, pulsing rhythm that seemed to go on forever, draining every ounce of strength from his limbs.

He slumped against the wall, panting. The water began to run cold as he hit the knob, but he barely felt it.

It took him ten more minutes to get out of the bathroom and, mercifully, for the sake of his dignity and whatever was left of his composure, Dax wasn’t in the suite.

The lights in the sitting room were still dimmed, the air still faintly threaded with spice, but the man himself was gone.

Chris paused at the threshold, towel slung low on his hips, water still dripping from his hair in loose rivulets. He scanned the room, half-expecting a smirking king lounging on the couch, half-dreading it.

But there was only silence.

No looming presence. No amused commentary. No sharp-eyed alpha waiting to say something like, "Feeling better, little moon?"

Only the faint blue glow of the tablet Dax had left face-down on the armrest and a glass of water untouched beside it.

Chris blinked, exhaled once through his nose, and stepped fully into the room.

The bedroom was unchanged. The curtains were drawn just enough to let the city lights bleed faintly through, casting a silver wash across the sheets. On the side table, Dax’s phone was gone, but Chris’s own buzzed softly with a single notification.

He picked it up.

’I’ve had to go. Don’t wait for me and sleep. — D.’

Chris stared at the message for a moment, then thumbed the screen off and set it gently down.

"Thank gods."