Chapter 42 Rae
RAE
MINISTèRE DE L'éCOLOGIE
Commune: Saint-émile-sur-Vigne
Property: Lazarev Estate (Private)
Water Source: Natural thermal spring, 28°C
Depth: 2.4 metres (centre), 0.6m (edges)
Hazards: Drowning risk
Civilian Incidents Logged: 1
For as long as my breath lasts, it’s almost kinda nice down here.
As I fall deeper into the grotto, the water distorts everything. Lukas is a smear of shadow and silver, motionless at the edge. But he’s still clear enough for me to notice one very key detail:
He’s not reaching for me.
It’s then that my lungs start to burn. Not horribly, not yet, but the first whispers of Hey, girl, we need air soon are creeping in. I kick my legs, but the waterlogged silk of my dress tangles around my thighs like a straitjacket.
Through the wavering surface, I watch Lukas watch me drown. His hands hang loose at his sides. His face—what I can make of it through the rippling water—is totally blank.
Oh my God. He’s actually going to let me die.
This is how it ends. Not with a dramatic confrontation or a tearful confession, but just a pool of murky water and an emotionless tyrant watching it all happen.
The burning in my chest intensifies. My vision is starting to spot at the edges.
Lukas. Please…
With the last of my energy, I claw toward the light.
The dress fights me every inch of the way. It’s wound around my legs like it wants to drag me down to whatever lies at the bottom of this spring. More bodies, perhaps.
Something Lukas once said to me rises in my head: You’re exhausted from being in charge of your own survival.
When he said it, I felt like he’d slapped me in the face.
That’s how I know he was right: The truth always stings like a bitch.
Maybe I am desperate for someone to swoop in and save me, to shoulder the weight I’ve been carrying since my parents died and Gideon fell apart and I became the only functioning adult in my own sad little universe.
But I’m not about to prove him right.
Not here.
Not like this.
I kick hard, scissoring my legs through the warm water, and arrow up to break through the surface with a gasp that tears my throat to ribbons.
Ah, air. Sweet, glorious, life-giving air. I’ve never appreciated it as much as I do right now.
I suck it down in greedy gulps, treading water while my heart pounds. My hair is stuck to my face, my mascara is running amok, and what remains of my dress is basically a wet rag glued to my body.
But I’m alive. I saved myself.
Lukas didn’t do a fucking thing.
He still doesn’t, as a matter of fact. He stands there, hands firmly ensconced in his pockets, watching me tread water.
“You think I killed her, don’t you?” he asks softly. “My wife.”
I laugh deliriously. We’re going to talk about this now, here, like this? Alright then. Fine. Have it your way, sir.
“The thought might’ve crossed my mind,” I admit.
Lukas’s face contorts without moving, that familiar how-does-he-do-it display of emotion that involves nothing being displayed at all. Then, grimacing, he stoops down, grabs my wrist, and hauls me out of the pond in one fluid motion.
I’m pressed against him now, soaking through his pristine Oxford in seconds. My whole body is shaking, but what’s worse is how exposed I am.
The dress is plastered against my skin from head to toe, and my impromptu plunge has turned it completely transparent.
I might as well be naked.
“I didn’t kill my wife,” he says. “Not like you think I did.”
It’s my turn to call bullshit, or at least to demand a better explanation. But before I can get there, Lukas’s hand fists in my wet hair and yanks my head back.
“But I’m not a good man, either.”
And then he kisses the hell out of me.
His mouth is hard and unforgiving. I taste salt and sulfur from the spring water on my own lips. He pulls me closer with the hand still fisted in my hair as his tongue pushes into my mouth and clashes with mine.
His other hand drags down my body. When his palm cups my breast through the soaked fabric, I arch into him automatically.
The silk is so thin now it might as well not exist. His thumb finds my nipple and circles it, once, twice, then presses down with just enough pressure to make me moan into his mouth.
He swallows the sound. Takes it from me like he owns it. Hell, maybe he does.
Then he’s walking me backward, his grip relentless, his mouth never leaving mine. My shoulder blades hit bark—one of the olive trees ringing the grotto—and the impact knocks what little breath I have left straight out of my lungs.
Lukas doesn’t give me time to recover. His thigh shoves between mine, thick and muscular, and oh, God, the pressure against my center is everything. There’s nothing between his leg and my aching, throbbing core except a whisper of transparent silk and the damp cotton of my underwear.
I grind against him. It’s shameless, but I’m so beyond caring what it makes me look like.
His beard scrapes against my jaw as he drags his mouth down my throat and nuzzles at the tender skin there. I roll my hips again, hunting friction, chasing what I’ve been denied for days now.
“That’s it,” he growls against my skin. “Take what you need.”
My hand fumbles between us, driven by an impulse I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to. My fingers find the front of his trousers, and when I palm the length of him through the luxurious fabric, my brain goes haywire.
He’s massive.
As in, bigger than big. Devastatingly huge. It makes me wonder if everything I thought I knew about anatomy was wrong. Even in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have imagined something so huge and intimidating. He strains against my palm, thick, hard, and I remember again what he said in the hallway:
I’d bottom out and hold there, making you spasm with how big and cruel it is.
He wasn’t lying about that, either.
I stroke him through the fabric, tracing his length from root to tip, and I’m rewarded with a sound that might be the most satisfying thing I’ve ever heard: Lukas Lazarev, groaning.
For me.
His hips buck into my hand. “You have no idea,” he rasps, “what you’re playing with.”
“Then show me,” I breathe against his mouth.
But just when I think he might actually do it, Lukas pulls back.
His pupils are so blown that the gray of his irises has nearly vanished, swallowed by black. I’ve never seen someone so consumed by hunger. Well, if I could peek in a mirror, maybe I would—but otherwise, it’s just him on the top of the rankings, all by himself.
And then he steps away.
The loss of his heat is vicious. I sag against the tree, trembling, wet, and bedraggled.
“Not here,” he says solemnly. “Not like this.”
I blink at him, still dazed and throbbing from head to toe. “Why not?”
The vein at his temple pulses visibly. His chest rises and falls in controlled, measured breaths that do nothing to hide the way his hands are tightened into fists so he can’t reach for me again.
“Because, when I do finally take you,” he says slowly, enunciating every syllable, “it won’t be against a tree like an animal.”
When.
Not if.
When.