Chapter 45
CHAPTER
A moan fluttered out of my throat.
Steeler’s fangs dragged down my clit, his tongue gliding down my entrance and back up again with a brutality that had my hips rolling forward against their will, wanting more, more, more…
He raised his head before it could reach a crescendo. When I opened my eyes briefly, it was to find him staring down at me with lips that already glistened from how wet he’d made me.
“You taste even better than I remember,” he said, eyes blazing with the reflection of the fire. “But you’re holding back.”
Of course I was holding back. Mere months ago, I’d wanted to drive into him with a knife. Now, he was driving into me with his tongue, and I was scared to let myself enjoy it too much.
His hand circled my throat—not too tight, but tight enough to get my attention, to make my eyes flare wide open.
“I want you to grind on my face as much as your body is begging you to,” he said with carnal intent. “Suffocate me if you must, strangle me, smother me. But do not hold back. I want all of you, little hurricane.”
I nodded, remembering the same words I’d used in regard to him all those weeks ago: I want to see everything.
“Okay. I—I won’t hold back.”
He lowered himself again, diving into me with increased ferocity.
At the sweep of his lips, I moaned again and wrapped my ankles around his neck, yanking him in closer.
At the scrape of his tongue, I rammed myself against him, bucking with pure madness, letting the most intimate part of me feel every hard ridge and curve of his face: the hardness of his chin and jaw against my entrance, the slope of his nose against my clit. And those fangs…
Oh fuck, those fangs…
The world broke and reformed into a million colors at the feel of those fangs.
Every time I grinded against them, their sharp tips pierced my most sensitive skin—not enough to draw blood, but enough to sting in the most delicious way.
“Steeler,” I gasped without knowing what I wanted to say next.
Lightning flashed inside me, a chaotic whirlwind of buzzing energy and light and God, God, God, I was going to fall into it.
Steeler just rammed his tongue deeper into me, filling me, feasting on me, drowning in me…
I tipped over the edge.
The pleasure his tongue and teeth created… it exploded inside me, blinding me with white-hot light that flared against my eyelids, and I screamed.
Finally, when my body had gone completely limp against the coffee table, Steeler removed his head from between my legs and stood up.
He looked wonderstruck, his face dripping with me and a deeply satisfied smile playing along his mouth. I shuddered in a breath, trying to get air flowing through my lungs again…
Only to catch sight of his own want straining against the seam of his pants.
He noted my wandering eye and shook his head slowly, like the taste of me had gotten him drunk and he couldn’t move as fast as usual.
“Don’t worry about me. I just need a few minutes to—”
“I want the rest of you inside me, Steeler.”
His head snapped back to me as I picked myself up off the coffee table, already feeling the heat return to my core again, as if that lightning had exploded into ashes that were settling back into place.
Slowly, I began to unbutton the side of my dress where the fabric joined and parted. Steeler watched the movement with an increasing sharpness until I’d shrugged out of the dress completely.
The lace fell into a heap of crimson at my feet.
“Fuck,” he whispered, looking almost pained. His eyes roved over every inch of my skin, and my nipples ached in the face of such meticulous attention. “Look at you.”
“Can’t,” I whispered, echoing his past words. “I’m too busy looking at you.”
He moved around the coffee table, surging forward to hold my face in his hands, but I shook my head at his touch.
“No. Don’t…” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Anything—everything—but that.”
I still couldn’t bear the thought of his mouth against mine. Maybe it was truly because I was afraid he’d disappear behind my closed eyelids and I’d open them to find nothing but mist. Or maybe I was just too afraid to face whatever emotions were swimming beneath that mist.
Maybe I could face them later.
Tonight, I just wanted to give in to my physical need for the male who had haunted every one of my dreams and blessed every one of my nightmares over the last year.
Steeler removed his hands from my face, his eyes hardening.
“Your lips are too tempting, Rayna. You want to fuck but don’t want me to kiss them? Then turn around.”
I would have done that in a heartbeat, but he was already flipping me around until I was facing the glowing embers of the fireplace.
He pushed me onto my hands and knees and sunk to his own behind me, threading his fingers through my hair to hold me tight.
I arched my back on instinct to bare myself fully to him, already throbbing with need again. The sound of him unbuckling his pants…
My fingernails dug deep into the rug beneath me.
“I want you to see just how pretty you look taking my cock from behind,” Steeler said.
His dark, fathomless presence hooked onto my consciousness and reeled me into his, merging us together in a way I’d never felt before. I wasn’t just reading his thoughts now—I was seeing through his eyes.
My legs were parted, my ass rounded, my pussy spread wide open and waiting for him. Beneath his fistful of my hair, he felt the scars of the brand on the back of my neck.
The heart does not falter.
No part of Steeler faltered as he finally grabbed his pulsing cock and pressed the tip against my entrance.
I squirmed against him, desperate for the friction as much as he was, and he delighted in the way my body moved when I did so. I was so needy for this that it made him want to hold back just to watch me keep squirming under his iron grip—
“No!” I shouted, my voice a hoarse whimper that only made him harder. “Don’t make me wait. Please, Steeler.”
“Such good manners,” he said. “Saying please like that.”
And he sunk himself into me.
We both cried out in unison, but he was already moving out and back in, both of us stunned at the sight of him sliding into me again and again.
I was gripping him so tightly, taking the length of him so well, my body rocking forward with every stroke, my ass thrusting back to meet him again every time.
This… this was everything he’d never dared dream he could have again. But better. So much better after all that had expanded between us. My hips moved with an aggression that finally matched his. He was no longer scared of breaking me, of scaring me, of being too much for me—
So he slammed his entire length into me with all the force he’d always wanted to use, pulling a delirious shriek from my mouth as we finally lined up completely, flesh to flesh.
“See?” Steeler grunted, our minds still fused together, me still viewing myself through his eyes from behind. “You see how good you are at taking my cock, Rayna?”
“I see,” I moaned.
“Say it, then.”
The delicious drunkenness of pleasure was hammering at every one of my senses, so it took me a second to realize what he wanted as his length slid out and drove into me again. “I’m good at it.”
“Good at what, Rayna?”
“At taking your cock, Steeler. I’m good at taking your cock.”
“Damn right you are.” He let my consciousness go, and I catapulted back into my own mind, breathless with the alternate pleasure I had just experienced…
just in time for me to feel the small nip of his fangs against my ear.
“And you know what, little hurricane? I’m good at taking all of you.
” I jolted forward as he plunged back into me.
“Whether you’re in the mood to kiss me—” I jolted forward again.
“—or kill me—” I jolted again. “—or somewhere in between—I’ve got you,” he said earnestly. “No matter what, I’ve got all of you.”
“You’ve got me,” I repeated.
Now Steeler increased his tempo, pulling my head back with that fistful of hair and using his other hand to circle back under me and massage my clit again.
The thump of his thrusts vibrated in my very bones, taking over the thump of my own heart. Pure bliss hammered into me each time, and I gripped it tight with the possessiveness of someone who never wanted to let go of what was rightfully theirs.
A storm twisted around my core. Wind shrieked in my lungs. Sparks exploded in my head.
I unraveled. Sinking my face low into the rug, I screamed out his name as if it was the only one I would ever remember again.
Steeler roared mine through his final thrusts as he came apart inside me.
For a moment, we both quivered to stillness, him still inside me while I faced the dying firelight on my hands and knees.
A boom of thunder made me jerk. Steeler slowly untangled his fingers from my hair and eased himself out of me with a tenderness that I once would have never imagined possible from a male so brutal.
“Are you alright?”
A laugh escaped my mouth. “Alright?” I sat back on my heels as he circled around to face me, his naked body glimmering so beautifully in the low light. “I think I’m more than alright, actually. I just hope Felicity is a heavy sleeper.”
He didn’t chuckle back, but bent to brush a thumb across my face. I didn’t realize he was wiping away a tear until I felt the wetness of it streak across my skin.
“What’s this?” Concern slid across his features.
“Oh, I…”
I was about to say I didn’t know. That beneath all the pleasure and passion we’d just given each other, there was no reason for me to be sad.
Instead, I blew out a breath and asked, “Why don’t you like my mind anymore?” If I was going to demand honesty from him, he deserved to get it from me. Even if that meant saying my insecurities out loud.
“What?” His brows pinched together.
Lightning flashed outside, illuminating the room for a split second before it disappeared again.
“You told Garvis you didn’t want to train me because you couldn’t stand being in my mind, but that was back when I felt nothing but hatred for you.
Yet now that there’s... more than hatred, you're still avoiding it.” I wrapped my arms around my bare breasts.
“Whenever you talk to me mind-to-mind, you loiter on the outside and never stay longer than you have to. Just... just then…” My belly fluttered at the mention of what had just happened.
“…you pulled me into your mind rather than planted images in mine. And whenever you talk about how… beautiful my mind is, it’s always in the past tense. Is it too barren now? Too cold? Too—”
Steeler kept a strong hold on my face.
“I once told you, Rayna, that the first time I laid eyes on you, I saw you had the most beautiful mind I'd ever experienced.
No, not just beautiful—striking. Breathless.
Wild and captivating and everything I'd never known I needed. It took every bit of control I had to let my eyes slide past you, to remember my job, to not sink into you and lose myself in that stunning labyrinth.”
I blew out a breath of disappointment.
“And all that is gone now.”
“No,” he said firmly. “It’s still there.
But it’s my fault that you had to wrap it in ice to protect it.
My fault you had to hide it all in that armor.
It’s not that I don’t like your mind anymore, Rayna.
I am in love with your mind just like I’m in love with the rest of you. But I do not deserve to be inside it.”
I stood up, and he followed suit, our naked bodies separated by nothing but a thin strip of candle-warm air.
He started to turn. “I’ll go get us a washcloth…”
I tugged him back.
“I think you do deserve it, actually. To be in my mind. I think you are forgivable. I think all of your thoughts come from your heart, too. And I think your heart has always been in the right place, no matter how dark it had to become to survive.”
I was close. So close to telling him the thing my subconscious knew that I didn’t want to admit, even to myself.
“Co—” I started.
BOOM.
The bang of thunder was so much like Lexington’s rampage into the Element Wielder house that we both broke apart, our heads whipping toward the front door of the cottage.
“No one’s there,” Steeler said. “I don’t sense any minds.”
I lowered my blockade to test that out for myself—
And heard the clicking of hundreds of little minds seconds before the creatures themselves came streaming through the crack under the door.
Spiders. Streams and streams of spiders of various sizes and shapes came scuttling up to my feet, and I backed into Steeler in alarm.
I hadn’t seen this many spiders in ages. Had Rodhi sent them? Had something happened to him?
“What…?”
“We come on behalf of the Good Council,” the spiders said in unison, the overlap of their words and thoughts like an avalanche of fingernails tapping against glass, and my heart plummeted.
If Dyonisia had made one of her Wild Whisperers send them, then she knew about the lighthouse.
She knew where we were.
I tried to keep fear out of my voice, keeping my blockade down so that Steeler could use the flow of my thoughts as a translation.
“And what message do you bring?”
I could have sworn the spiders smiled, revealing all their little fangs dripping with venom.
“That Hallow’s Perch will be attacked at dawn.”