Chapter 54 Rae #2
I’m sweat-slicked and shaky. Little jitters rock through me every few seconds, passing through my limbs in rippling waves and emerging through my mouth in the form of breathy sighs.
My nipples are so pointed it’s almost painful, and between my legs, I’m throbbing, aching, needy, and sopping fucking wet.
As for Lukas… Even fully clothed, there’s no hiding his desire.
Those pupils are wide open like the gates to hell, blacker than black, drunk on lust. One peek at his crotch shows that he’s bulging so hard it’s a miracle he hasn’t ripped his slacks wide open.
Those hands are still shaking to match my tremors, and the breaths escaping his lips are more like strangled grunts.
I clearly don’t want to stop.
He clearly doesn’t want to stop.
And yet here he is, pausing to make sure I’m okay, and ready, and willing.
The courtesy of it. The care. I melt in a way I’ve never melted before.
I shake my head frantically and reach for his belt. “Don’t you dare stop,” I tell him, my voice hoarse from crying out his name. “I want all of it, Lukas. All of you. The beast and the man.”
Because that’s true, isn’t it? What drew me to him originally was the taboo sinfulness of it. I shouldn’t want him, I couldn’t want him, I wasn’t allowed to want him, it was a bad idea and he was a bad man and wanting him would surely ruin us both.
That’s exactly why I wanted him so bad that it fucking killed me.
I’ve spent my whole life painting inside the lines like a good little girl, and it’s left me so empty inside.
Then this big bulldozer of a man comes barreling through out of nowhere and upends everything.
It’s made me start to question those lines I thought were etched in stone.
What if they’re all made up? What if it’s okay that he’s older, or forbidden, or scary?
He certainly made no apologies for any of it.
He lived in the gray spaces I’d always been told were off-limits.
Thrived in them. Bounced back and forth between right and wrong however he pleased.
He can pin a man against a wall with murder in his eyes one moment, then cup my face like I’m made of fragile glass the next.
Scarred hands can tremble, too. A cruel, filthy mouth can also ask, May I?
The beast is real—there’s no denying that. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. I’ve felt its shadow fall over me in wine cellars and grotto pools and the back seats (and footwells) of lavish cars. He’s a hard man with a hard cock and harder edges.
But the gentleman is just as real. Only a gentleman could cook a dinner the way he did. Or kiss me the way he did as he took me by the hand and led me out of that meeting room.
Both halves terrify me.
Both halves are what I want.
I watch and see in real time as the last of Lukas’s self-control crumbles away. He growls wordlessly, then stoops down to capture my mouth in a savage kiss.
Then he rises up and—well, “takes his clothes off” doesn’t do it a lick of justice. He rids himself of everything he’s wearing like it offended him, or burned him, or spoke an ill word about me and deserves to be punished for it.
The buttons of his shirt don’t stand a chance.
When he seizes the fabric with two hands and rips, they scatter across the dusty floorboards.
His belt follows, ripped from its loops with a popping whip that makes my thighs clench.
Then his slacks and his boxer briefs, all of it shredded and cast aside, instantly forgotten.
When he’s finally naked above me, I stop breathing.
Oh.
My.
God.
I knew he was big. I’d felt him through his clothes and felt him in my mouth, but seeing him—actually seeing what he expects to put inside me, just before he does it—is something else entirely.
He’s massive everywhere. Shoulders like granite slabs, chest covered in silver hair, defined abs that have no business existing on a man his age. My eyes keep drifting lower, to where he juts out from his body, incredibly thick, the head of him already glistening and straining toward me.
At the sight of it, fear slices through my arousal.
Lukas sees it immediately. “Listen to me.” He cups my face in both huge hands, thumbs stroking my cheeks. “It’ll fit. I’ll make sure of it.”
I gulp, but my mouth is so dry suddenly that my throat just bobs painfully. “Let me just… let me just touch you first,” I plead. “To… get acquainted.”
Lukas chuckles, but when my fingertips graze his chest where it looms over me, that laugh turns into a hiss. You’d almost think I’d scorched him.
He lets me pull him down to lie next to me. Propping myself up on my knees, I let my fingers start to wander all over him.
I touch his chest first. Hard muscle beneath warm skin, softened by that dusting of silver hair. My fingertips trace the ridges of old scars, thin white lines scattered across his ribs, sporadic and ugly. Some are faded almost to invisibility. Others are raised and rough beneath my touch.
“What happened here?” I whisper, following one that curves along his side.
“Old business,” he murmurs. “Nothing that matters now.”
I don’t push. Instead, I let my hands drift to his shoulders, then around to his back. He rolls away to let me keep exploring.
What I find there makes me gasp.
The scarring is catastrophic. It’s the strangest pattern I’ve ever seen: a huge grid of puncture marks, each one ringed with mottled tissue, repeated over and over.
When I saw him shirtless from across the kitchen in Bordeaux, I thought they were straight lines, but I’m realizing now that it was simply so many repeated stab sites that they blurred into endless mountain ranges.
He looks like he was pierced again and again and again by something with deep talons.
Shoulder blade to shoulder blade, nape of his neck to the base of his spine, like someone plotted out the exact contours of his vertebrae and kept coming back to extract more and more.
I want to ask so badly. But it’s not the time. It’s obvious from the way his breath freezes that he doesn’t want to discuss it.
So my hands slide lower, past the dip of his tortured spine, then around to his front again.
He rolls onto his back once more to face up at me.
I circle over the rippling muscle of his thighs, the divot of his hip bones, the deep V where his abs swoop low.
His breath is taut and his eyes never leave me.
I get the feeling he’d let me spend hours like this, if that was what I wanted. If that was what I needed.
But I’m too turned on for that, and now that I’ve gotten “acquainted,” I’m ready for more. I need something from him, yes, but it’s not just these feather-light touches while I swallow down my fear and inexperience. It’s something else. It’s…
This.
“Fuck, Rae,” he groans as I wrap two hands gingerly around the base of his cock where it rises straight up in the air. “I’ve never… You’re going to… Fuck.”
I’m almost deliriously giddy. I never in a million years thought I’d hear Lukas Lazarev like this: stuttering, drooling, at a loss for words. All it took was my two hands on him and he’s falling to pieces.
It’s the most intoxicating high I’ve ever felt.
I stroke him once, slowly, marveling at how it feels. Like velvet skin stretched over iron. He pulses against my palms. He’s so hot to the touch that I half-expect my hands to come away singed.
“You’re going to kill me,” he rasps, head thrown back against the pillow, throat exposed. “Death by virgin hands. What a way to go.”
I laugh despite myself. “Would that be so bad?”
“The worst.” His hips twitch involuntarily as I squeeze gently. “Because it means I’d die before I got to be inside you. And that, sweetheart… that’s unacceptable.”
I lean down and press a kiss to his chest, right over his thundering heart. His hand comes up to cradle the back of my head.
“Enough exploring,” he growls. “I need you. Now.”
The world whirls. Suddenly, I’m on my back again, pinned beneath the endless, warm weight of him, and his cock is nudging against my entrance.
Lukas reaches down to line himself up with me. That brush of him makes me squirm, but with his other arm bracketing my head and his bulk trapping me in place, there’s nowhere to go. I’m cocooned in him. Swaddled up completely. I’ve never felt safer.
“Look at me, Rae,” he commands in a hoarse voice. “I want you to look me in the eyes as we cross this line together.”
My gaze finds his. Those gray eyes are molten now, burning with something that goes far beyond lust. There’s reverence there. Fear. Hope. Everything he’s spent eighteen years burying, rising to the surface all at once.
And then he begins to push forward.
Slowly.
Inexorably.
Splitting me open inch by devastating inch.
The pain is immediate and sharp, ripping the breath from my lungs. My body fights to accommodate his size, my delicate frame struggling against the sheer breadth of him. He’s so big, too big, scarily big, and I feel every millimeter of his invasion cleaving me in two.
I whimper.
Lukas freezes. His entire body trembles with the effort of holding back, every muscle locked tight, cords standing out in his neck. I can feel him pulsing inside me, and the stillness costs him everything.
“Breathe,” he whispers. “Just breathe, sweetheart. I’ve got you.”
I let his voice replace mine. Breathe, Rae. He’s got you.
Then I exhale and unclench. The burn recedes somewhat. It’s still there, and sharp, but more manageable now.
Lukas watches my face, reading every little tell. When my breathing finally steadies, he leans down and takes my mouth in the softest kiss we’ve ever shared. It’s pure love where we’re sealed at the lips.
Then, down where our hips meet, he broaches the final barrier.
Unable to help myself, I scream into his mouth. Lukas swallows the sound whole, burying himself to the hilt as my virginity tears apart around him. The pain is blinding, white-hot, a knife blade splitting me from the inside out. My nails rake down his back hard enough to draw blood.
I feel him pulse inside me. My body is clutching around his girth, and I know he feels it, too—the hot slickness of blood mixing with my arousal, coating him, marking this moment as irrevocable.
Just like that, I’m no longer a virgin.
I belong to Lukas Lazarev now.