Olwen #2
The praise shot through me like lightning. My fingers clawed at his shirt, yanking it free of his trousers, shoving the fabric up until I could press my palms against his bare chest.
He groaned at the contact. My hands were fever-hot from the petal, his skin warm beneath them, and the combined heat was overwhelming. Too much. Not enough.
“Desperate little bride.” He lifted me higher against the wall.
My legs wrapped around his waist, the heavy skirts bunching between us, and then his hand was sliding beneath the velvet, beneath the layers of petticoat, finding bare skin.
“Your pulse is racing. I can feel it everywhere I touch you. What are you so afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Liar.” His fingers traced up my inner thigh. Slow. Deliberate. “You’re terrified. I can taste it under the chemicals. Fear and need and something else.” His fingers found my center, stroked once, and I gasped. “Hunger. You’re starving for something, aren’t you? What do you need that badly?”
“You.” I pulled his mouth back to mine, kissed him with all the desperate wanting burning through my borrowed veins. “I need you.”
Something shifted in his expression. The interrogation faded, replaced by hunger. Raw and consuming and almost frightening in its intensity.
“Then take what you need.”
His fingers tested my readiness. I was slick, aching, the petal’s false warmth translating into real arousal, real need.
“So wet for me.” His voice had dropped to a growl. “So ready. Has anyone ever touched you like this?”
I shook my head. Words were beyond me.
“Good.” His fingers withdrew. I heard the rustle of fabric, felt him freeing himself, felt the blunt pressure of him at my entrance. “Then I’ll be the first. The only.”
He thrust into me in one long stroke.
The stretch burned. He was bigger than I’d expected, filling me completely, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Could only feel.
Full. So impossibly full.
He held still, buried to the hilt, his forehead pressed against mine. His chest heaved. His arms trembled with the effort of holding back.
“Look at me.”
My eyes opened. Met his.
“Say my name.”
“Cador.”
He pulled back. Thrust forward. Harder this time, driving a moan from my throat, driving everything from my mind except the sensation of him moving inside me.
“Again.”
“Cador.”
Another thrust. Another. He set a rhythm that had me clinging to his shoulders, my nails raking down his back hard enough to draw blood.
He growled at the pain. Took my mouth in a bruising kiss. Drove into me harder, each stroke hitting something deep inside, each impact sending pleasure cascading through my body.
“You feel incredible,” he rasped against my ear. “Hot and tight and desperate. I could fuck you forever just to feel you clench around me.”
I couldn’t respond. Could only hold on as he took me apart, as the pleasure built and crested, as the petal’s manic energy merged with genuine arousal until I couldn’t separate them anymore.
His hand found the place where we were joined. His thumb pressed against the bundle of nerves above my entrance, circling, stroking.
“Come for me.” A command, not a request. “I want to feel you shatter.”
“I can’t, I don’t know how to...”
“You can.” Another thrust, deeper than before. Another circle of his thumb. “Let go. Give me everything.”
The pleasure crested.
I broke.
The orgasm tore through me like nothing I’d ever felt. My body clenched around him, pulling him deeper, and I screamed his name. Cador. The sound echoed off the stone walls, raw and desperate and real.
He didn’t slow. Didn’t give me time to recover. His hips pistoned against mine, his thumb still working that sensitive spot, wringing every last shudder from my trembling body.
“Again,” he demanded. His voice was rough and ragged. “Give me another one.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.” He changed his angle, hit something inside me that made my vision blur. “You will.”
The second orgasm built faster than the first. A wave gathering strength, threatening to pull me under. I clung to him, fingernails digging into his shoulders, legs locked around his waist.
“Please.” I didn’t know what I was begging for. More. Less. Everything. “Please, Cador, I need...”
“I know what you need.”
He thrust harder. Faster. His thumb pressed down, and the wave crested, and I shattered around him with a sob that might have been his name.
He followed a moment later. I felt him pulse inside me, felt the flood of his release, felt his whole body shudder as he buried himself deep and let go.
For one shattered moment, I was alive. Truly, completely alive.
Then the wave receded.
I was cold again.
He finished moments later, his body shuddering against mine, his breath harsh and ragged in my ear.
For a long moment, neither of us moved. We stayed tangled together in the alcove, his forehead rested against my shoulder, my fingers still knotted in his sweat-damp hair.
“You’re cooling,” he said.
I closed my eyes.
“You were burning a moment ago. And now...” His hand rested flat against my chest, palm over my heart. Searching. Counting. “Your heartbeat is slowing.”
I said nothing.
“Eighty beats per minute.” His voice was strange. Thick. “Sixty. Forty.” A pause. “Twenty.”
The petal was dying in my blood. I could feel it, the stolen warmth draining away, the false pulse stuttering toward silence. In minutes, I would be cold and still and obviously, undeniably other.
“What are you?” he whispered.
The last of the warmth left me. My heart went still. My skin went cold. My lungs stopped their performance of breathing.
I opened my eyes. Looked at him, at this man I’d just let inside my body, this monster who was watching me with something I couldn’t name heating his gaze.
“Yours,” I whispered. “For now.”
Then a scream cut through the night.