Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Corvus…
I needed to immediately switch gears. She lay trembling beneath me and had taken everything I’d demanded of her body beautifully.
But be that as it may, her soul was pointedly in distress.
She couldn’t catch her breath, and it wasn’t lost on me that she was sobbing.
Though I didn’t feel as though I’d broken her completely, she was definitely in need of some repair.
I hadn’t banked on shifting her completely off her foundation, but I was definitely getting a sense that was what had just happened.
God, she’d felt incredible, and the sight of her blindfolded and chained to my bed, powerless and as tame as a new kitten, had fucking done so many outstanding things for me.
I had ravaged her, thoroughly and completely, and though I knew she’d come, and that I’d made her come undone, her fear had spiked at the same time, and now she lay shattered and vulnerable beneath me.
I lay over her, smoothing her hair back from her face, the blindfold beginning to stain, the satin turning from white to gray, and her makeup transferring and bleeding through with her tears.
“Shhh,” I soothed, and kissed her lips lightly. “Let it out,” I urged. “I’ve got you, Bright Eyes. You feel whatever you need to feel.”
The permission made her gasp and pause in her trembling. It was anyone’s guess whether she would collect herself or fall apart completely.
I unshackled her wrists, and her arms came down to hide herself from my sight. There was a part of me that was swamped with immense guilt.
Too much, too quick, I surmised, and I captured her face between my hands, pushing the blindfold up out of the way, pulling her to me, and burying her face into my shoulder. Kissing the side of her head, I breathed into her ear, “Take your time. Take as long as you need to.” And I meant it.
She dissolved into a flood of tears, and I could only admit to myself my folly.
She wasn’t at all who I’d thought her to be.
I had thought she was just another rich girl, used to these sorts of head games, guarded, stronger than steel – but this?
This was something else, something completely unexpected.
I had one of two choices – stop now, let her go, and hope that she didn’t breathe a word of this to anyone, or sink my claws deeper, hold on to her even tighter, and take my time figuring her out and what made her tick.
As she trembled finely against me, sobbing into my shoulder, my cock softening inside her and the condom both, I had to admit to myself that the mystery that was Savannah Kittridge was thoroughly under my skin. Option one was a nonstarter.
There was only one way to go, and that was to keep going, albeit more cautiously than I had moved up until this point.
Clearly, Savannah wasn’t just another pretty face with an icy-cold heart, even if she had played the part so very convincingly up until this point when it came to our mutual business practices.
This? On a personal level? It was such an unexpected and completely different animal, but no less intriguing to me.
I was a man of my word and did what I promised her.
I held her and kissed her forehead. When she looked up at me in hopeless confusion, I kissed first one eye, then the other, kissing away her tears, the salt of them still on my lips when I pressed them to hers, grateful to an extent that she wasn’t so distressed as to not let me in.
Her lips parted, and I slipped my tongue past mine to taste her bottom lip and see if she would be amenable to something deeper between us at the moment, or if I had well and truly scared her off.
I found myself hoping against hope that I hadn’t, and my heart fell when she hesitated.
I fully expected a rejection, but then at the last moment, when I was about to withdraw from her, her hand fluttered to the side of my face with the kiss of a butterfly’s wing, and she parted her lips to let me in, meeting my tongue with a tentative touch of hers.
I kissed her with reassurance and captured her hand with mine, where it touched the side of my face, pulling my lips from hers to turn them into her palm and kiss her with reverence there.
I breathed deep her perfume, no doubt daubed on the inside of her wrist, and my senses were filled with bright light and sun-ripened peaches.
It suited her more than I could have thought.
I looked into her somber blue eyes and murmured to her, “Stay right where you are, Bright Eyes. I’m going to draw us a bath.”
She swallowed hard and searched my face as I reached between our joined bodies to hold the condom on myself so I could withdraw from her.
She sucked in a breath and shuddered beneath me as I pulled from her.
I pushed up, getting off the bed and stripping the rubber from my flaccid cock, tossing it in the waste basket tucked between the bed and the nightstand.
I went into the bathroom and started the bath, testing the water to make sure it was neither too hot nor too cold.
She appeared in the doorway a moment later, hugging herself, hiding herself from me, and said, “I need to use the bathroom.”
“Take your time,” I moved past her and shut her inside. It wasn’t long until the toilet flushed, and I gave her just a moment before I slipped back in, letting the door swing wide.
She stood before the mirror, her dress halfway up her legs, and I went to her, hands on her hips, pushing it back down, taking it from her hands.
“You’re okay,” I breathed in her ear. “You’re not going anywhere but the circle of my arms, tonight.”
“I don’t know how to feel,” she confessed, her confused gaze meeting mine over her shoulder in the silvered glass above my sink.
“I know,” I murmured. “We’ve got nothing but time for you to sort that out.” I drew her back from the sink, palming her hair clip, and led her to the bath.
“Is that too hot?” I asked.
She left my arms to sink to the edge of the clawfoot tub and stuck her hand in the water as it flowed.
“No, sir,” she said. I smiled and kneeled down in front of her, gathering her hands in mine.
“Playtime is over for tonight, missy.” I brought them to my lips and kissed her fingers. “Get in the tub.”
She was sweetly obedient, getting into the tub, standing, and swishing her feet in the water to get used to the heat. I got in with her and got down first.
Fucking hot! I didn’t make a face or jump or any of that nonsense, though.
I simply parted my legs and gave her hands a gentle tug to come join me.
She turned and got to her knees in front of me, sucking in a breath as the water rose and she waited, growing used to the heat before uncurling her legs and sitting back against me.
“Mm.” She made a short noise as I curled my arms around her and caged her gently within my legs.
“Lean back,” I urged. “That’s it. There you go.” I kept my tone gentle, and she didn’t protest. She just sank back against me, as I held my hands out of the water on the edges of the tub. The water was creeping, and I asked her, “Sit up just a bit?”
She did, and I wiggled to sit up just a little straighter. I gathered her hair, her clasp between my lips, as I twisted it into a ponytail, and kept twisting until I could put it up and fasten it out of harm’s way.
She sat very still for me, and I sank back down and pulled her back against me. When the time was right, and the steaming water had reached the peak amount we needed for a nice, long, hot soak, I used my foot to turn it off – first one faucet, then the other, as quickly as I could.
The rushing water ceased, and a silence crept into the bathroom.
“Better?” I asked after a time, her arms layered over mine, where I hugged her around the middle.
“I don’t know,” she said haltingly.
“Talk to me,” I murmured and kissed her behind her ear. She sighed out with the little touch, and yet remained stiff in my arms.
“It’s been a long time since I was with anyone,” she confessed.
I had kind of figured that part out, but I still lied and simply came back with, “Oh?”
She made a rude noise, somewhere between a scoff and a snort, and said, “Don’t play with me. I’m not going to run and scream abuse or anything. I think I’m more shaken because I…”
“Liked it?” I hazarded.
“Parts of it, yes.”
“It’s important you tell me what you liked and what you didn’t like,” I told her.
She was quiet. I didn’t think she would speak, that she was shutting down and wouldn’t share, but she surprised me. Though she was halting in her speech at the beginning, waffling back and forth on whether she should, she did the brave thing and ultimately did share.
“I liked it, at the restaurant, even though that was way out of my comfort zone,” she said. “I’ve never done anything like that in a public setting.”
I chuckled a little darkly and gently reminded her, “It wasn’t exactly public.”
“No, I know no one could see us… but they definitely heard things.”
I chuckled again and said, “I concede the point.”
“What else did you like?” I asked when she was quiet for too long.
She swallowed hard and said, “I liked the blindfold, and your rules… but I…”
I waited her out. “I didn’t like that I couldn’t touch you,” she said. “It made everything feel so sterile and – and impersonal.”
The complaint was a valid one and a point I could concede as well, however, that was by design. I didn’t precisely want her to catch feelings – nor did I want to fall victim to any, either.
“I see,” I hedged. “You would rather be loved than fucked?”
She sighed wearily. “Loved?” she scoffed. “I don’t see that happening. I think respected is a better word. I don’t mind doing dirty things, but I like to be able to participate. That just… it felt…”
“Defiling?” I supplied.
“Yes,” she whispered, and I could feel her hurt, almost palpably.
“I see.” I held her a little tighter and rested my lips on her shoulder, breathing her in, thinking furiously.