20. Piper
TWENTY
PIPER
I couldn’t stop shaking as I hurried to slide off the side of the bed and onto my knees.
A prisoner to Theo Mallin.
To the severity that rolled from him and the greed that glinted off the surface of his skin.
This man who’d just sent me soaring in a way I never had before, and somehow, I knew I hadn’t come close to reaching the heights he could take me to.
The way my body ached for him to fill it in every way.
I wanted him everywhere.
To be ravaged by every fragment of his being.
Dangerous.
I’d never known it more than then as he rose from the bed and came to tower over me where I was on my knees waiting for him.
A dark shadow that covered.
“How are you so beautiful?” I couldn’t keep the awe from escaping my mouth. How was it possible I was terrified of this man and still couldn’t look away?
He was a sinewy silhouette carved in the night. Nothing but imposing strength as his muscles twitched and jerked with need beneath the fabric of his clothes.
Theo remained almost completely dressed except for where I’d pried him free, his cock jutting out from his opened jeans that had barely been pushed down his hips while I knelt there shivering in only my bra.
Hungering for something I shouldn’t crave and knowing there was no stopping it.
“It’s you who’s stealing my breath, Piper. You who has me contemplating things I can’t. You who makes me want something that I could never deserve. Seeing you like this. All that fierce, turbulent beauty. So fuckin’ gorgeous my guts quake every time I look at you.”
I trembled.
I found comfort in the truth that I wasn’t alone in this tumultuous need.
That I wasn’t the only one who was stumbling around in a storm, trying to find my way out, but was being drawn to the eye of it, instead.
Not even caring that once I made it to its safety, a moment later, it would decimate.
Reaching out, Theo traced his thumb over the rim of my lips before he dipped it between them.
The only thing I could do was suck.
“This what you want, Little Liar? You want me to fuck this sweet mouth?”
I could feel the dare behind it.
A fire lit in my chest, and I lifted my face to him and mumbled, “Yes,” around his thumb.
I wanted to give him a sliver of the pleasure he’d given me. Make him come alive the way I’d felt when he’d looked at me like I could be his undoing.
Theo withdrew his thumb then reached up and snatched the back collar of his tee and pulled it over his head.
He tossed it aside.
The muted light crawled over his wide chest and cut abdomen. Every lean, defined edge of him as ruthless as his face.
His body was a grim canvas of horrors that he’d inked across his bronze flesh. His pecs were covered in what would be a gorgeous mountain scene—the mountains that surrounded Moonlit Ridge.
Only the horizon above the cragged peaks was darkened, demons possessing the air. The lake below howled with ghosts that wisped through the blackened waters.
The large moth with the outstretched winds stamped on the front of his throat seemed to rule over it all.
“Good, because that’s exactly what I’ve been dreaming about with my eyes wide open. Wanting you on your knees with those lips wrapped around my cock.”
He stared down at me as he pushed his jeans farther down his hips, freeing himself more.
My stomach twisted as I took him in. His thick, long penis bobbed as it bulged toward the ceiling.
“That’s where you have me. On my knees.”
And I didn’t know how I was ever going to get off of them.
Tension bound the air, so thick my lungs screamed as Theo inched forward.
He wound a hand in my hair, and he yanked back so my face was tilted up toward him.
Oxygen fled, and dizziness rushed in to take its place.
He gripped himself with the other, and he ran just the tip of his dick across my mouth.
My tongue darted out to lick him as he went, and the saltiness of his precum made my mouth water.
A groan rolled out of him. “Vixen. That’s what you are, isn’t it? Tempting me into mayhem? Into this thing that I can’t escape?”
It was him I couldn’t escape.
He nudged the head of his cock against my lips, and his voice twisted in that seductive cruelty. “Take it, Pipes. Show me what you’ve got.”
Anticipation burned.
Another rush of desire burned through me as I peered up at him, wondering what I’d gotten myself into as I wrapped one hand around his base and steadied myself on his thigh with the other.
Sure I was on a crash course with disaster.
Intensity blistered between us. That rigid jaw beneath his trimmed beard clenched with hunger.
I drew him toward me, and I never looked away as I swirled my tongue around his head.
I was spurred by his pleasured groan, and I drew him all the way in. Pulling him in so deep the way he was pulling me.
Like it was gravity.
No way to evade the attraction that dragged me into his orbit.
Theo hissed as I swallowed him down as far as I could, my lips stretched to the point of pain as I gagged around his fat, hard length.
His hand tightened in my hair. “That’s it. So fuckin’ good. This mouth. Sweet fuckin’ paradise.”
Each word was coarse gravel, and his stomach flexed and bowed as he tried to maintain control.
He wound his other hand into my hair so he was holding my head on both sides.
His muttered words were grit that filtered out into the energy that whipped around us.
A storm that surged in from the ends of the world.
“Going to fuck your mouth. Tell me you’re going to like it.”
My nod was spastic, and that dark arrogance was stealing to the edge of his mouth as he pulled all the way back then drove in.
Hard and deep.
“Such a good girl, aren’t you? Letting me own you the way I was meant to do?”
I gagged around him as a rush of lust went sailing through my body.
An ember that sparked.
Because I loved it. Loved the way it felt to let go.
To give in.
To feel something other than the vacancy that had left me depleted.
Emptiness had been my constant partner, and the only thing that had been there to fill it was the fear.
And with him…
“This mouth is heaven, Piper.” He grunted as his hands tightened in my hair before he withdrew then surged forward again. “Nirvana.”
His hands slipped down to my jaw, and he angled my head back a fraction.
Theo was a dusky tower above me.
Casting me in shadow while the only thing I could see was him.
He was nothing but cruel, perfect barbarity as he began to fuck my mouth the way he’d promised. Pulling out then driving back in. He quickened his pace with each plunge of his dick.
“How’s this sweet, dirty mouth the best thing I’ve ever felt? Nothing like it,” he grunted.
He kept rocking, harder and harder with each thrust. Low, grating words spilled into the room and drove the frenzy higher. “Everything about you. Want it all, Piper. Want to consume you in every way, the same way as you’re consuming me.”
I thought that maybe he’d gone delirious. That he’d gotten caught up the same way as he’d taken me.
No discretion to be found in the praise that tumbled off his tongue.
Desire boiled in my stomach, and another wave of lust battered through my insides as I stared up at this foreboding man.
One I knew full well I shouldn’t put my trust in, but I couldn’t help the wash of submission that flooded me right then.
It felt purposed.
The connection that thrummed and shimmered between us.
The need that would be impossible to sate.
The need that gripped and blew, and I writhed where I knelt on my knees, attempting to press my thighs together as if it might staunch the ache that throbbed in me as intensely as earlier.
Embers he stoked with each dominating drive.
I couldn’t look away from him as he pounded into my mouth. Close to the point of pain. The type of overwhelming pleasure that I hadn’t understood before this.
I gurgled a sound of submission, giving myself over to the desire that he provoked, then I tried to decipher the rush of emotions that flickered and flared over the harsh lines of his face.
Passion and possession and greed.
Fear and dread and his own terror that I couldn’t make sense of.
“You feel it, baby? Do you feel what you do to me? Way I want to rip you apart and put you back together?”
I garbled a, “Yes,” around his length.
I swore, the vibration rolled through both of us.
He groaned, and his hands tightened where he had them on my jaw. Heat saturated my being as it seeped from his big, powerful hands.
“Fuck, Piper. What have you done? This fuckin’ delicious, hot mouth. But it’s those eyes that have put a spell on me.”
I moaned a needy sound as he continued his assault, squirming as I tried to find any friction that might quell the fire.
“You need to come again, sweet girl? You need it?”
My eyes watered as I stared up at him as he drove in at a reckless, hard pace.
My jaw aching.
Saliva dripping out of the sides of my mouth.
While my body burned in the quick of white-hot flames.
Theo gripped my face even tighter, his jaw clenched as he possessed me in a way I’d never been possessed before.
“I know what you need. Can smell it coming off you. Can feel it tearing through this perfect body. I’m gonna come in this dirty mouth and you’re gonna swallow me down like you were meant to do, then I’m going to put you out of your misery. Way I want to do over and over again.”
His gruff words spiraled through me, and I opened farther to him.
My nails sank into the front of his thighs to hold on.
He thrust. So deep that the only thing I could do was swallow around him.
His hands slipped around to the back of my head as he pulled me closer to him.
Grunting.
One second later, he split apart, his cock throbbing in my mouth as he poured himself down my throat.
He attempted to subdue the roar of ecstasy that ripped from him, the sound a dark reverberation that rolled through the room. Bouncing from the walls before it hammered back into me, sending a tremor rocking through my body.
I swallowed and shook while a thousand praises fell from his lips.
“Such a good girl, taking it like you do. So perfect. This mouth. Everything.”
Theo hadn’t gone limp before he pulled out of my mouth and scooped me off the floor. He spun with me in his powerful arms and took three steps across the room to prop me on top of the long dresser that sat on the far wall. He left my butt barely hanging to the edge.
He hooked one of my heels to the wood, spreading me at the same second his mouth dove into mine.
His tongue was as desperate as his cock had been as he began to kiss me into a stupor at the same second as he thrust three fingers into my pussy.
I gasped as I was hit in a wash of lightheadedness.
The earth disappearing below me as I got swept away.
My knees parted for him in a plea as my nails scraped over the solid planes of his shoulders and chest.
Trying to get closer.
Wanting to disappear.
Or maybe just to rest in the safety of who he was.
He drove his fingers hard and fast as he rolled his thumb over my clit.
I was already so spun up that it didn’t take anything at all for the glimmers of pleasure to light at the edges of my sight.
For a blistering sensation to crawl out from the brink of my being and rush to meet the glowing orb in the middle of me.
“Come on my fingers, and imagine what it’s going to be like when I finally give you my cock.”
That was all it took for that energy to burst. All it took for me to be coming apart and soaring through the night.
I buried my face against his neck and rasped, “Theo,” as I splintered into a thousand unrecognizable pieces.
My fingertips sank into the flesh of his shoulders, digging in deep like I might be strong enough to keep from completely floating away.
To keep from being completely engulfed in his storm.
But I was pretty sure there was no chance of that as bliss cracked through my body.
A freedom I had never felt, all while being utterly pinned by everything that he was.
I could feel it.
Something inside me fracture.
A giving that I couldn’t afford.
Because I already knew what the cost would be.
And still, I was clinging to him as he slowed, his fingers lingering inside me as aftershocks twitched and shivered beneath my skin. His other hand moved to the back of my head, and his hold became light as he slowed the kiss.
Gentle plucks and whispers of his lips over mine as he picked me up from the dresser.
Arms curling around his neck, I held on tight as he dipped down and snagged my underwear from the floor before he carried me the rest of the way into the en-suite bathroom on the far side of the bedroom.
The light over the shower was already on, and I blinked against the intrusiveness as he settled me onto unsteady feet.
He shifted me around so I was facing the framed, rectangular mirror in front of the sink.
The man was a dim, starless beacon where he stood tall and powerful behind me.
Our eyes clashed in the mirror.
The darkest night sheering into an icy blaze of blue.
Maybe what scared me most was that the ghosts that glimmered in both of them appeared almost identical.
As if we shared the same threads of sorrow.
Like maybe he could understand me the way a very reckless part of myself wanted to understand him.
Awareness thrummed while the small room shouted with a million questions.
In the dense silence, Theo took my wrist and shifted my arm so he could see the cherry blossom tattoo on my forearm.
His eyes narrowed as he focused on the words woven in between.
In sorrow we must stand.
I saw the way the statement impacted him. The way he flinched as if they were bullets. My spine started to go rigid before he suddenly knelt behind me.
I didn’t think to stop him. It didn’t even occur to me what he would see. What he would recognize as he wound my underwear back over my ankles and slowly dragged them up my legs.
I wasn’t thinking straight at all when his fingertips grazed over the two deep scars on my lower back.
Fury suddenly lit him through as he trembled his touch over them.
No question, Theo recognized exactly what they were before he pushed to standing.
A reaper that covered me in shadow from behind.
His voice lethal.
“Who the fuck hurt you?”