Chapter 28
Elowen
I have to get out of here. Fast.
After what happened yesterday, I’m losing my mind. It’s not because of that ugly fight, where I said all the things I’d wanted to shout at him for a long time. It’s because of what happened after.
My heart clenches every time the memory of him crying surfaces, which is about fifty times an hour. I can see myself sliding down the tunnel of helplessness, and what waits at the end of that tunnel is chronic depression. And then everything will fall apart.
I reach the kitchen, where he’s cooking.
I’ve never seen him cook before, I would have loved to spend that time alone without someone’s eyes on me.
But I don’t need to see him cook to know he has a knife, a big chef’s knife, that I never find in the kitchen or anywhere else in the house during my searches for a weapon.
He looks up as I hop onto the counter, a few feet away from him. His face doesn’t carry the same painful helplessness from last night, I think he has his episodes after sunset too, like me.
“Where were you?” I ask.
I woke up in my bed, and he was nowhere in the house.
He doesn’t say anything for a long minute, just studies me in silence, most likely trying to understand this change in my behavior. His face is blank, no clear emotion on the surface, which means he’s calm, or at least trying to stay calm.
I raise a brow the way he and Salvario do when they have a question.
“I was outside,” he intones.
“What were you doing outside all morning?”
He narrows his eyes. “What do you want?”
I roll my eyes. “Fine. If you don’t want to talk to me. I was just trying to extend an olive branch. We don’t have to be at each other’s throats all the time.”
“I don’t remember doing anything with your throat,” he mutters, going back to chopping.
I bite the corner of my lip, watching his hands, the knife in them, then his face. His lips are pursed, a faint frown set between his brows.
“I thought we could be friends.”
His grip tightens on the knife. His jaw locks.
“What’s there to get mad about?” I ask into his silence.
Finally, he sets the knife down and pins me with his gaze. His eyes are no longer calm. There’s a storm in them—a gray sandstorm.
He steps in front of me, leaving only a few inches between us. “I don’t want to become your friend, Elowen. Actually, I can’t, even if I forced myself to.”
“Why?”
He moves a little closer. I don’t lean back or push him away, I stay where I am. He doesn’t miss it.
He stops, meeting my gaze. I hold it. He takes another step closer.
When I show no reaction—on my face or in my body—his eyes come alive for a heartbeat, a strike of light across ominous clouds on a dead horizon.
Then it’s gone again, swallowed back into darkness, leaving me waiting for the next strike so I can see the clouds clearly, to decide if I want to risk going out under them or if the storm they might bring will be too much and I should stay away.
“Why?” I ask again, my voice lower.
“You know very well why,” he says, a little colder.
“I don’t.”
He moves a little closer. I tilt my head up, keeping our gaze locked. He lifts his hand slowly, giving me time to refuse his touch.
He holds my chin in a gentle grip, bending down slightly to bring his face closer to mine. “You are my wife. That’s the only thing I want you to be.”
“Our marriage isn’t like that anymore. Either we become friends and come to speaking terms, or we stay the way we are.”
He pinches my chin before releasing it, then straightens. “Okay, let’s become friends. What do friends do?”
I shrug. “What friends usually do.”
“I don’t know what friends usually do. I don’t have any,” he says, matter-of-fact.
“Well, they hang out. Do things together that they both like…”
“Like fucking till you black out,” his voice soaked in raw hunger. How fast this man gets horny should be concerning.
I clear my throat. “No. That’s not what they do.”
“But you said we’d do things we both like. And we both love fucking you until you pass out.”
My face burns. I look away to take a few steadying breaths. After collecting myself, I glare at his now-smirking face.
“Friends don’t say such nonsense.”
“Shouldn’t I share my thoughts with you, since you’re my friend?”
“Not those thoughts,” I grit out, then hop down from the counter. “You know what? You were right. We can’t become friends.”
He grabs my waist and sets me back on the counter.
This time, he doesn’t shy away from keeping any distance between us.
He parts my legs and stands between them.
His hand moves from my waist to my hair in the time I spend thinking about our proximity, and while I’m still processing how his hands are gripping my hair, tilting my head back, his mouth comes crashing down on mine.
Neurons fire in the parts of my brain he fucked with last night, and I accept his hot, hungry kiss.
And when he finds me not resisting, he goes wilder, sucking my lips with more force, feeding on my mouth like a hungry beast finally out of its cage, the prey he watched from inside now under his claws.
His other hand on my waist pulls me closer; his hardness presses against my core. My whole upper body tilts back, and he bends over me, pressing himself against me, leaving no space between us. His tongue moves inside my mouth, licking every corner.
He pulls away, just his mouth. His body doesn’t move an inch. I pant against his lips, breathing through both mouth and nose.
“I can become your friend, but not just a friend,” he whispers against my tingling lips. “I can never stop wanting to fuck you.” I feel each word against the skin he’s kissed raw.
I push against his chest. He releases my head and waist and moves back, though reluctantly.
“We can slowly figure out how to be friends,” I murmur, avoiding his eyes, looking around the kitchen.
He grabs my jaw. I let him read me as he searches for something in my eyes. I hope he doesn’t find anything that could ruin my plan. Finally, he nods. I hold back the sigh of relief that almost escapes.
I hop down from the counter again. “I’m going to take a bath.”
Hunter
I watch her as she leaves for the room. I want to believe things are getting better, but that would be very stupid of me.
She can’t change this much in one night, or can she?
Just yesterday, she was ready to kill me. I know she couldn’t kill—she can’t even kill an ant—but at least she wanted to. And how can I forget the way she reacted to any slight closeness from me? It has planted a fear in me, the fear of seeing hatred and disgust in her eyes.
I’m not the least bit afraid that she might one day kill me. But I’m so fucking afraid of seeing that hatred and disgust in her eyes.
The sound of running water comes from the kitchen. The house is small, with no doors, so I can hear almost everything she does in the room and bathroom. It puts me at ease, I would hear her if she tried anything to harm herself.
She usually bathes while I cook, and I don’t dare disturb her. Today, however, I have too many questions, and a very hard dick, to stay here while she’s standing naked under the shower. So I leave the kitchen and walk into the bedroom.
I stop at the bathroom doorframe and lean against it. She’s washing the body wash from her small, round breasts and waist. I can’t see them with her back to me, but I can see her round ass. The feel of squeezing and spanking that soft flesh is etched into my palms.
She turns. A gasp leaves her lips, and they stay parted. My eyes slide down her long neck, over her collarbones, to her breasts. Her nipples are hard.
I know how every inch of this body feels.
I can never forget her, even if I forget myself.
She is my Elowen, the woman who can change my life with a snap of her fingers. If she wants, I’m a king who has everything; if she wants, I’m a beggar who has nothing. When I have her, I have the world. When I don’t have her, even if I had the whole world, it would be nothing.
I step inside, letting my gaze slide lower, to her clenched thighs. I strip in front of her. Through the glass separating us, her eyes follow every movement of my hands and the clothes falling to the floor. Once I take off my boxers, her gaze fixes on my cock, hard and already leaking for her.
I enter the shower cubicle. Her eyes move slowly up. I can’t wait for them to reach mine, I need to see what those big doe eyes have to tell me.
Do they want me to be a king or a beggar?
They tell me nothing. She’s hiding her emotions.
I move closer until I can feel the heat of the water on her skin seeping onto mine.
“I’m done. You can bathe,” she says, stepping back and leaving the shower to me.
I move under it. Hot water drenches me instantly. I don’t bathe with water this hot, but she only bathes in hot water. After fucking her countless times in shower, I’ve grown used to standing under it.
She doesn’t leave. She stays standing in front of me, watching me wash myself, making things difficult for my dick.
I’m seconds away from bending her over and fucking her tight pussy or her sweet mouth.
The only thing stopping me is her words from yesterday: “I’m disgusted by you and by every inch of my skin that you touched. ”
The daggers she lodged in my chest twist again at the memory. I push the pain away, shut down my head, and grip my cock in a tight fist.
Her eyes instantly drop to my cock, which I’m jerking off with enough force and speed to bring tears to it. The pain in my dick is better than the suffocating pain in my heart, which only beats for her.
How utterly fucked am I? My dick only gets hard for her, my heart only beats for her, and my head only lets me stay at peace when she’s with me.
When did she consume me this much?
From what I remember, that night on her father’s balcony. And from what I don’t remember, maybe it happened years ago. Maybe I’d known her longer than that motherfucker. Who knows? No one.
“What are you doing?” she breathes, licking her lips, and a spike of pleasure travels through my dick. I beat it harder.
“I’m sure you know what I’m doing.”
She doesn’t say anything, keeping her focus on my hand and cock. Her nipples are so hard I could make her come just by flicking them with my tongue, I know because I’ve done it before. The harder they get, the more sensitive they become.
“It’s not—”
“I know it’s not what friends do. But I’m also your husband.” I lean closer. “I have every right to jerk off imagining my dick fucking your pussy.”
She takes one last look at my dick and walks past me out of the cubicle without another word.
Not a minute after she’s gone, my dick softens. I drop my hand and switch the water from hot to cold.
Elowen
I set my Kindle on the nightstand and sit up in bed. It’s around midnight, and he’s still working. Feeling my gaze on him, he lifts his head.
“Let’s go to bed,” I say, keeping my voice neutral.
He raises a brow.
“I mean, it’s already quite late. You can work tomorrow if it’s not urgent.”
He closes his laptop, sets it on the table, and comes to the bed. He slips under the quilt. The mattress shifts under his weight.
He lies on the pillow beside mine. Then he reaches out, grabs my waist, and pulls me onto him. I fall against his chest, my hands bracing on either side of him, my face hovering just above his. His warmth bleeds through the thin fabric between us. His scent of spicy citrus invades my senses.
“I didn’t invite you to bed,” I mutter, pushing against the mattress to hold myself up.
He tucks the hair falling across my face behind my ears, one side at a time, slowly.
His knuckles brush my cheeks with a featherlight touch.
Finally, his hand settles around my neck, his thumb stroking the line of my jaw in a reverent rhythm.
My pulse stutters beneath his palm. I know he can feel it.
Thankfully, he doesn’t say a word. He just keeps stroking me, watching me with those dead eyes that aren’t quite dead anymore.
“Then ask me to leave.”
I bite my lower lip. His thumb moves from my jaw to my lip, pulling it free, and he stares without trying to hide the heat in his gaze at all.
“Since we’re friends now, I’ll let you sleep in the bed, but no touching.” I push away from him and fall onto my back beside him.
He turns onto his side. I can see him watching me, but I keep my eyes on the ceiling.
It’s working well so far, after that shower, we had lunch together on much better terms. He didn't talk nonsense, thankfully. In the evening, we went for a walk in the forest and made small talk about the area and all that.
Only now do I know I’m still in Italy, and this forest is a few kilometers from Trento. He didn’t tell me how big it is, in fact, he watched me with suspicion when I asked. I shrugged it off, saying I was just curious. I don’t know if he believed me. I hope he did.
Unable to stay calm under his stare, I turn onto my side, my back to him.
He immediately slides his hand over my stomach and pulls me back.
My back presses against his chest, my ass against his hardness.
He buries his face in my neck, taking long breaths, like he’s inhaling me. I clutch the sheet in a tight fist.
“Good night, baby.” His voice brushes against my skin.
I don’t respond, just close my eyes and wait for sleep to take away all the thoughts from my head and all the feeling from my skin.