40. Emery #2
That energy rose and lifted, vibrating through the room as he followed me up. I wrapped my legs around his waist, urging him to press himself against the throbbing at my center.
To quench it the way he’d promised, then beg him to make good on doing it all over again.
He rubbed his hardness between my trembling thighs.
A growl rolled through his wide, wide chest.
On a ragged gasp, I arched up.
“That what you want, Little Warrior? You want to feel my cock buried so deep inside you that you can’t feel anything else? Nothing else but the pleasure I’m going to bring you?”
I writhed against him, and my nails raked down the fabric of his tee that covered his back. “Yes. I want to feel it. I want to feel you.”
His mouth came to my ear, his words a raw rasp. “I’m going to mark myself so deep in you that you can never erase me. Going to claim you in every way. Going to write you in ecstasy.”
He began to kiss along my jaw, rumbling as he licked across the sensitive flesh. “Every. Fucking. Inch.”
Arousal rushed, pulsing through my body and trembling my thighs.
“So needy,” he said as he continued down the column of my neck, his lips raving across my collarbone and down to the exposed skin on my chest. “Can scent you, Emery. I know that you’re soaked. Dripping for me.”
I squirmed as he let his mouth wander along the neckline of my tee then lower over my shirt.
I gasped when he pulled my nipple between his teeth, and my shoulders arched from the bed.
There was far too much fabric separating us, but maybe it was exactly what he intended, because there wasn’t an ounce of pain in the bare sting. It was only enough to send a bolt of desire streaking to my center.
My hands fisted in his hair. “Kane. Don’t play with me. I need?— ”
“Going to give it to you. All of it.” He lifted his head, and my belly tumbled at what was engraved in his features.
His own vulnerability seeping through.
“All of me,” he murmured in that scratchy, rough voice.
I should reject it, but I couldn’t.
Not anymore.
That was probably what should have scared me the most, but instead, I was stretching out a shaky hand, touching the defined angles of his unforgettable face as I whispered, “All of me.”
Emerald eyes flashed, and he edged back and lifted onto his knees.
He looked so imposing there.
Glorious and awestriking as he reached for the hem of his tee and slowly peeled it over his head.
My mouth went dry, throat squeezing at the sight.
All that golden, inked flesh on display, the dueling demons on either pec twitching over the packed, hard muscle that bowed and flexed.
Chest wide and abdomen trim, his hip bones jutting out over the waistline of his jeans.
I gulped, and the words I released were shallow and thin. “You’re so beautiful, Kane. This terrifying beauty that captured me the first time I saw you. There was something that first time…something inside me that the sight of you unlocked.”
“Was never a believer in fate or any of that bullshit. Not until I met you,” he mumbled.
Maybe it’d been the same for both of us.
That instant when our spirits had met.
Because what I’d felt for him had been impossible.
And now I was sure it was unescapable.
“You brought me back to life.” Once the confessions had started, I couldn’t stop them from tumbling free. “I was dead inside. Numb. And then there was you, and suddenly everything I’d been terrified to feel was there. Alive and real and so powerful there was no chance I could ignore it.”
It didn’t matter if it was wrong. Didn’t matter if I was wracked with guilt by admitting it .
It was true, and I wanted him to know.
Old grief crawled through his expression.
“Lost my heart the day I lost my mother. I believed it gone forever. That I’d live my life for the only things I could.
The temporary. The superficial. That I’d give to my crew what I could, but it wouldn’t count all that much because I didn’t have the capacity to really feel it. ”
There was a mystery woven within his confession. Something right there. All these threads sticking out around him. Like the only thing I had to do was pull the end of one to unravel and expose what was patched underneath.
Reverence filled his voice. “She taught me to love, Emery. To love and to cherish that love with everything I had. But I thought it died with her.”
I could almost see the dead, wilting rose tattooed on the back of his hand coming back to life.
“Then there was you,” he whispered.
My heart flailed. An erratic bid to meet with his. To accept what he was saying. To hold it and cherish it, too.
I wanted to say it.
And maybe he knew it.
Maybe he knew he would taste it on my tongue because he dipped down and took my mouth with his.
This time, he kissed me slowly and deliberately.
Fully and completely.
He kissed me and kissed me until my pulse was racing wild and my spirit was screaming with desperation and my body was writhing with need.
My hands wandered, eager to touch him everywhere. Gliding down his sides and over his shoulders and across the muscled expanse of his undulating back.
All while his seared and gripped and caressed.
Over my breasts. My hips. My waist. My belly.
“You,” he murmured at my mouth.
I swore he poured that single word directly into my soul.
Find me in the darkness, bring me to the light .
Is that what he was doing? Did he have the power to end this pain?
He edged back onto his knees, this time pulling me up to sitting so he could peel my shirt up and over my head. Cool air brushed my overheated skin, and I trembled with it.
Kane groaned a low sound as he stared down at me with my chest heaving.
“Black lace. You really are my every fantasy.” He dragged the back of his knuckle over my left nipple that was pebbled and hard.
“Look at you,” he murmured. “Most fucking stunning thing I’ve ever seen. Stealing my breath and my sanity. Most of all, stealing my heart.”
God. This man. The things he said. He undid me with every word that dropped from his mouth.
“The ways I’m going to find to say thank you.” A bit of that cockiness pitched through his demeanor when he said it.
Shivers raced, though I somehow managed the smallest smile. “Is that so?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Then you probably should get started.”
A low chuckle rolled from him. “That’s it. My needy girl. You want it, don’t you? You’re never going to have to go without it again.”
Another promise.
One I didn’t even want to reject.
Because he reached around to unsnap my bra and dragged the straps down my arms before he tossed it behind him to the floor.
I had no urge to fight or shield or cover.
Goosebumps lifted across my flesh, and my stomach tightened as he gazed down at me.
“Perfect tits. But you’ve got perfect everything, don’t you? Perfect heart and perfect spirit and this tight, perfect body that I’ve been dying to get lost in.”
My head barely shook. “I’m far from perfect.”
Kane reached out and tipped up my chin, attention so intent I was chained by it. “You might not be perfect, Emery, but what I know is you are perfect for me. Meant for me. My match that I didn’t know I was missing. ”
Energy streaked, pounding against the walls and reverberating back into us.
As if the ghosts that had haunted us had been freed. Freed to find this moment’s peace.
Kane eased off the side of the bed and came to stand over me.
He never looked away as he kicked off his shoes and his hands went to the button of his jeans. Just touching the bronze that glinted beneath the rays of sunlight that poured into the room through the windows.
The man lit in shimmery beams.
A beacon that had called me home.
Home.
I trembled at the thought.
“You good with this?” he asked, the man full of caution and care all while being this shaken bottle of severity.
I guessed for both of us, this felt insurmountably different than it had last night.
As if a barrier had been broken.
A door opened that had been locked shut.
“I’m more than good. I’m the best I’ve been in a long, long time.”
It should have been impossible after what had happened this afternoon, but it was true.
I’d never felt this alive before.
“Oh, you just wait, Emery…I haven’t even touched you yet.”
He flicked the button, dragged down the zipper, and slowly began to rid himself of his jeans, taking his underwear with them.
He bent over to shove his jeans the rest of the way off his ankles.
Then he stood.
A tower of vibrating strength.
Completely bare.
His cock hard and enormous with that piercing at the tip on full display. The emerald balls on either side of the rod struck in a ray of sunlight and sent colorful baubles of light scattering against the walls.
Maybe the whole intended effect was to have me hypnotized. Enthralled and mesmerized .
Because I was. I was completely caught up. Every molecule in my body lurched toward him in a fit of greed.
His tongue stroked over his bottom lip as he edged forward, the man watching me as he leaned over and traced his thumb over the button of my shorts.
And for one beat of a second, the cockiness evaporated. “You sure, Emery? All you do is say, and we stop.”
“I’m sure.”
I’d never been so sure of anything in my life.
His thick throat bobbed as he swallowed, and he gave me a short nod of understanding before he popped the row of buttons.
The breath left me as he hooked his fingers in the waistband of both my underwear and shorts. My back hit the mattress as he began to drag them down, my hips lifting from the bed to help him.
“Fuck,” he hissed as he wound them free.
He left me completely naked.
Bare and exposed.
And for once in my life, I wanted to be.
“You knock me straight onto my knees, Emery.” The hoarse words scraped through the dense, lust-soaked air. “The sight of you. Most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen. These legs and this body and that face. Every time I look at you, I’m done for.”
Energy thrashed.
A shockwave of it.