Chapter Nine
QUINN
I froze, torn between running from the room and finding out what he’d do if I obeyed.
Curiosity overruled my fear.
Sinking down slowly onto the mattress, I couldn’t hide the way my body trembled. Or the way I jumped at his touch.
He grabbed my ankle and tugged me back toward him on the bed, his thumb stroking along the curve of my ankle bone. “Do you remember the safe words from your contract?”
“Y-yes.”
“Tell me.”
“I…” Wracking my brain for the words I had all but tattooed on it, I struggled to wade through the haze of desire overwhelming me. A hint of fear lingered as well, as the words grew harder and harder to pull from the fog. My breathing quickened. “I know them.”
“I know you do.”
He traced circles over my skin, his tone shifting effortlessly from demanding to soothing. But the gentle strokes of his fingers only aroused me further, and I couldn’t focus on the patterns he drew any more than I could siphon one clear thought in my mind.
“I need to hear you say them, and you’ll need to know that I heard them.” He stroked up and down my leg. “So, you know you’re safe.”
Dragging his fingers along my calf, he pressed down into the muscle.
I groaned. “I can’t think while you’re doing that.”
His touch danced higher, the mattress shifting beneath me as he settled his weight above me. He brushed the skin of my inner thigh, and I buried my face in the mattress to stifle a moan. I only came up for air when his touch retreated, and his palm stroked the hair back from my face.
My eyes closed.
He braced his forearm on the bed, hovering over my right side as his hand made its way between my legs again. This time, he drew closer to my center, inching toward the apex of my thighs as if he was trying to drive me insane. My heart raced when I felt that first graze over my core. Featherlight and fleeting.
I whimpered.
Trying to hide my face, my moan morphed into a cry of surprise. My hair was pinned under his arm— he had pinned it—and he refused to let me hide.
“If you can’t think when I’m touching your ankle…” His fingers skated the line of my panties. “How will you be able to tell me what you need when I’m doing this, Maiden?”
Desire pooled between my thighs. And I moaned, lifting my hips off the bed. Seeking out his touch. Wanting more. Needing it, when he drew his hand away.
A growl of frustration burst out of me, and again, I struggled to turn my head. But he kept me trapped beneath him. A position I didn’t mind as long as he kept touching me.
But he wouldn’t budge.
“I don’t remember.” I wriggled on the bed, rubbing my thighs together to create friction. “Landon, please.”
He dropped his knee between my legs and forced them apart.
But he still didn’t touch me, even though he prevented me from taking care of things myself. He had no idea how quickly he’d worked up my body, how starved it had been for this kind of touch, or how every second without it felt like the most exquisite kind of torture.
I squeezed my thighs around his.
His other knee joined the first, spreading me farther.
“What does it matter?” I growled. “Clearly, I don’t want you to stop right now.”
He slapped my ass, making me yelp. The sting of his palm throbbed on my barely covered cheek and pulsed between my legs. Before I could react, he slapped the other.
“Oh, fuck!” I cried out. “Okay, okay. You’re right!”
“What do you say if you want me to stop?”
Pain heightened my panic and sharpened my mind.
“I yield,” I rushed out. “Landon, I yield.”
“Good girl,” he whispered.
His weight disappeared.
Free to turn my head, I glared at him where he sat at the end of the bed. Resting back on his heels, he watched me carefully as a dizzying storm of confusion, anger, and lust raged inside me.
“What the hell was that?”
“That was only the beginning, Maiden.” His head tilted as he assessed my reaction, palms sliding down his thighs as he leaned forward and got closer. “You need to give me your safe word every time we enter this room. Do you understand? Next time, I won’t coax it out of you. I’ll leave.”
“Coax it out of me?” I shot back. “Is that what you call that?”
He sat back, affronted.
“It felt more like you spanked it out, if you ask me.”
His eyes narrowed. “And that is exactly why you have a safe word, and why I need to hear you say it at the start.” He shook his head. “I didn’t force you to sign up for The Quest, Quinn. No one did. You applied to be a Maiden knowing what it meant, right?”
Fuming, I nodded.
“And you have my word and the King’s that nothing will happen in here that you don’t want. I will push you. I will test what you think you can handle. But I won’t force you to do a thing.” He broke our stare, glowering at the door. “The only one here without a choice is me.”
“What do you mean?”
He snapped his gaze to mine, eyes wide as he realized what had slipped out of him.
For someone who seemed like a grade-A control freak, I imagined that didn’t happen often.
“Nothing.” Climbing off the bed, his fingers moved to the buttons on his shirt. “Now, do you want to continue, or do you want to call it quits?”
I stared up at him, trying to read behind the lines in his expression. My silence only deepened his frown.
He did up the buttons on his shirt quickly, dropping his hands to his belt and walking to the door. His hand landed on the doorknob and jarred me out of my silence.
“No, wait!”
Scrambling into a seated position, I knelt on the bed the way he had. I sat back on my heels, running my fingers through my hair as I tried to find the words I wanted to say. I threw my hands in the air when the words wouldn’t come and dropped my open palms to my thighs.
“Just wait. Please.”
Landon turned back, his eyes lingering over my posture. His nostrils flared, and he stepped toward me. “Tell me.”
I hesitated, holding back the truth and wondering if I could really go through with this. My teeth sank into my lower lip, gnawing at the tender flesh as indecision ate me up inside.
His eyes fixed on my mouth, and they darkened as he came close enough to reach out and touch me. “Tell me.”
“I need to do this.”
The admission weighed heavily on my tongue, pressing down with all the responsibility left on my shoulders. At that moment, I missed my dad more than ever, and I hated that he was gone. I hated what he might think of me if I went through with this—a thought only made worse when the truth hit me.
He couldn’t think about it at all.
And it killed me every single day because it was my fault.
Dead parents—even the best ones—couldn’t be a guiding light anymore. I never realized how much I had relied on mine, not as distinctly as I did right then, fumbling my way through this in the dark. I had been lost ever since that night on the mountain road, like I’d never find my way again. Every step I took left me wondering if I was on the right path, and to this day, I still didn’t know.
But all I could do was keep going—keep moving forward, keep feeling. Keep my eyes on the Knight in front of me and hope that he’d see me through this.
Freeing my bottom lip with his thumb, Landon’s eyes locked on my parted mouth. He tilted his head and searched my features for everything I wanted to hide. “What are you afraid of?”
My eyes dropped to the floor.
His finger tipped my chin, lifting my head until I looked him in the eye. “Tell me.”
I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “I’m scared of what it says about me if I do this. That I couldn’t find another way. Couldn’t survive without resorting to something like this. I feel like I just walked into a fucking viper’s nest. Everyone I’ve met—” Threading my fingers through my hair, I sought out my scar. “I’m scared of who I’ll be if I go through with it.”
Landon captured my wrist with his free hand and eased it away, circling his thumb over my pulse. It thrummed like a hummingbird’s wings.
My eyes dropped to his lips.
And a darker truth coiled inside me. A truth I needed to control if I intended to set it free. A truth prepared to bite me in the ass if I wasn’t careful. But even knowing I could regret this, I let the truth out.
“Mostly, I’m scared of how much I want it. I…I don’t know anything about you. Or this place or The Quest. Not really. But still, I…” I tried to look away, but his hold on my chin wouldn’t let me turn my head.
Landon didn’t want me to hide. He wouldn’t let me.
That scared me, too.
“I want to do this.” I reached for him, sliding my fingers through the belt loops in his pants and using them to pull him closer. “And I want to do it with you. If you’ll show me how.”
Pressing our bodies together, I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.
The air rushed out of me when he banded his arm around my waist and held me there. His cock hardened against my lower belly. “What do you say if you want me to stop?”
“I yield,” I responded instantly.
“And if you want me to slow down?”
“Mercy.” My eyes opened to find him staring down at me, his gaze like a flare of amber light in the darkness. “I ask for Mercy.”
He nodded, releasing my waist and nudging my hip gently. “Lie back on the bed.”
My voice trembled and my knees suddenly felt weak. “Face down?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I want to see you. I want…” Brushing a hand over my cheek, his eyes drank in my features in a way that made my chest ache. “But there are rules we have to follow.”
“Rules?”
“Mmhm.” He threaded his fingers into my hair, tugging lightly on the strands.
I groaned and let my head fall back. He’d somehow managed to pull on the hair right by my scar, and the damaged nerve endings lit up, sending a rush of tingles down to my toes. He had no idea how good that felt.
How much I hated that it did.
Or how much it reminded me why I needed to do this.
But his touch drowned out the guilt, allowing me to take in the pleasure. “Okay. Yeah. Rules…I agree.”
His soft chuckle in my ear pulled me out of the trance I’d fallen into, snapping my eyes open. The hint of a smile on his face, the way his lips twitched as he tried to hide it.
I was so fucking screwed.
It made me wonder if this was how it was supposed to be. If it was always supposed to feel like this. One look—one touch—and I wanted to lie back and let him in completely.
I’d never felt that before. Not even once with my ex. And I had started to wonder if I even could feel it. If the part of me that was meant to be wild, the part of me that could crave another person so hard and so quickly, was just defective. Now, it felt like maybe I hadn’t been broken.
“Broken?”
I blinked. “Huh?”
Landon withdrew the hypnotic tangle of his fingers in my hair to cup my neck and tilt my head up. “You just mumbled something about being broken.”
Oh, fuck.
“Oh. Nothing. I just…My ex popped into my head and I?—”
He pulled back. “Your ex?”
“Yeah, he was a total tool. Anyway, we would?—”
“You’re thinking about your ex while I’ve got my cock wedged against your stomach?”
“Um…” I pressed my lips together.
He huffed a laugh and grabbed my hips. “Yeah, that won’t do.”
Lifting me by the waist, he tossed me onto the bed. I shrieked as I hit the mattress. And again when he pounced on top of me.
“You can learn the rules as we go. Right, Maiden?”
He didn’t give me a chance to respond. As soon as a laugh burst out from my throat, it died on my tongue. The exact moment his stroked a path up my neck.
He licked his way to the sensitive spot behind my ear, sucking on my skin as he settled his body between my legs.
My knees fell to the side, opening my hips to let his press forward. The first rock of his erection against my core pushed every errant and insignificant thought out of my head. The only thing that existed was this—him and me—and the need rising between us.
The need to know what he would feel like inside me. The need for more. And the need for him to take what I so desperately wanted to give.
Not because I wanted to get it over with.
But for the first time, because I couldn’t wait.
I lifted my hips to meet every gentle rock of his. My legs tightened around him. Moaning each time his cock grazed over my clit. Whimpering when he pulled back.
Until he slowly repeated the process again.
Over and over, he drove his body into mine.
He never stopped working me up with his mouth, greedily nipping and sucking at my neck, my collarbone, and even the swell of my breasts. Running his hands up my sides, down my arms, he slithered his palm between our bodies and into the waistline of my panties.
I bit my lip to keep from crying out. But the second he cupped my sex, my eyes rolled back, and a drawn out moan filled the room. When he slipped one finger inside me, a deeper groan followed.
I didn’t know if it came from me or him.
“Fuck.” He panted as my walls clenched around him. “You’re so wet. So fucking tight.”
“Landon—” I gasped, writhing on the bed.
His face hovered an inch from mine, taking in my reactions to adjust the pace of his hand. He gently worked his finger in and out, easing deeper before each slow withdrawal and coaxing my body to relax.
My legs fell away from his hips as I let him in more.
“Landon, I—” When he slowly added a second finger, my eyes widened at the stretch. “Kiss me.” I begged. “Please, I?—”
He shook his head, pulling away abruptly to bury his face in my neck. Easing back down to one finger, he slowed his thrusts.
“That’s rule one,” he said gruffly.
I whined, both at his refusal and the way he circled his thumb over my clit.
“I plan to kiss every inch of your body. I’ll do it over and over until you scream.” He sucked deeply over the beat of my heart in my throat. “But not on the mouth.”
“Wha—” I cried out as he increased the pressure of his thumb, rubbing with tight quick strokes over my clit.
“No exceptions, Maiden.” His ministrations stopped and he withdrew his finger. “If we’re going to do this, there have to be rules.”
I groaned and wriggled on the bed underneath him. My mind begged me to ask more questions, but even as my heart—that bitch who wasn’t even supposed to be involved—protested the lack of intimacy, my pussy throbbed with need. That ho was resolutely against the idea of arguing semantics at a time like this. And my mouth agreed.
“Fine.” I huffed. “No kissing. Not exactly how I pictured my first time, but fuck it. Let’s do this.”
He recoiled. Eyes wide, they jumped between mine as he hunted for my meaning. He opened his mouth to ask a question that never came.
Thrown off by his sudden retreat, I frowned. “I’m not a nun or anything. I mean, I fooled around with my ex in the past, but we never…We were going to, but—” My fingers found my scar, tugging on the strands of hair around it. Shame and guilt rushed through me, and I blurted out the truth. “Fuck. I chickened out, okay?”
He stared at me for a long time before he finally spoke, stating plainly, “You’ve never had sex before.”
But something in the way he looked at me felt different, realization or understanding registering. It was like my status of Not Penetrated had just been stamped on my forehead and it explained everything. But I didn’t know what that was.
“You’re telling me you’re a virgin?”
Groaning internally, I muttered. “Yes, that’s typically the word for it.”
He stared at me, a muscle in his jaw tightening as he worked through whatever was going through his head, his eyes starkly shifting from arousal to anger. Betrayal flickered in his expression. Suspicion creased the line of his brow. And rage tightened his hands into fists where he clenched them at his sides and far away from my body.
A torrent of dark emotions rained down on me with all of Landon’s intensity, and he echoed the words I’d heard earlier but still didn’t understand.
“You’re here for the King.”