Chapter 25 #2
Vale groans, a low rumble that vibrates fear through my bones, making me pull my hand back. But his hand shoots out, catching my wrist. He doesn’t hurt me, but his grip is a shackle as he guides my hand back, closing my fingers around the thick, pulsing shaft.
“Grab me like this,” he commands hoarsely, his hips bucking disjointedly into my grip. “Don’t stop.”
His hand covers mine, his palm rough and warm, forcing the rhythm. Gently up. Down again, tighter. It isn’t a frantic motion, but a deliberate, milking drag that pulls a hissed breath through his clenched teeth.
“That’s it,” he grinds out, his hips snapping forward to meet my stroke. “Just like that.”
With each of his broken noises, my terror melts into a heady, intoxicating sense of power. This man is unraveling at the mercy of my hand, clear fluid slicking the head of his cock, spreading down the shaft as I squeeze tighter, mapping the veins that throb beneath his skin.
He releases my hand and nods.
Keep going.
I do, boldly so. I watch the way his head falls back against the stone wall, his throat corded and exposed, his eyes sliding shut as I work him faster, the sound of wet friction filling the silence.
“Fuck,” he breathes, the word a prayer and a curse.
His hands reach for me. They’re deft, impatient fingers that make short work of my laces.
There’s no fumble, no hesitation. Only a peel of cotton, the chill from the window biting my skin for a second before his hot palms replace it.
He shoves the dress and my shift down over my hips, bunching the fabric until it falls in a puddle around my ankles.
I step out of it without stopping my rhythm. Naked now, exposed in the gray light, and for the first time in my life, unable to hide.
And I don’t think I want to.
Vale opens his eyes. They’re dilated, swallowed by black lust, devouring me whole. He reaches out, cupping my breasts, his thumbs rough over nipples that ache for attention. He leans down, kissing the sensitive slope of my shoulder.
“You are so…” His murmur fades against my neck, the vibration going straight to my core. “You walk like the world owes you nothing.”
He kisses his way down my sternum, over my stomach. As he descends, the angle becomes impossible, and his cock slips from my slick grip. I make a sound of protest at the loss of heat, but he ignores it, dropping to his knees before me.
He grips my hip with one hand, and with the other, he lifts my foot, placing it squarely on his broad shoulder.
My breath hitches. The position leaves me entirely open, ruinously displayed.
“Vale—”
“Easy…” His breath ghosts over my clit. “Let me try this.”
My knees buckle when his tongue swipes hot and wet against me. If he wasn’t holding me up, anchoring me with his iron grip, I would collapse. He doesn’t tease. No, he feasts, his tongue broad and skilled, finding the sensitive nub and swirling around it with relentless, maddening pressure.
I throw my head back, a ragged moan tearing from my throat.
My fingers tangle in his black curls, not to push him away, but to hold him there.
To drown him in it. It’s too much sensation—the wet slap of his tongue, the suction of his mouth, the finger he slides inside me to curl and pump in time with his licking.
Pressure builds in my belly, a tightening coil of dark energy. It climbs, higher and higher, the air thinning. So close…
“Please,” I gasp, my hips bucking against his face. “Vale, please.”
He stops.
The loss is sudden, violent. I whimper, opening my eyes to find him looking up at me, his chin slick with my arousal, his expression feral.
“Not like this,” he growls. “You’ll come apart on my cock, with me, or not at all.”
Before I can curse him, he stands, sweeping me into his arms effortlessly. He carries me the three steps to the narrow bed, lowers me onto the mattress, and positions himself between my spread legs.
I reach for him, desperate, needing the friction back, but he catches my hands and pins them above my head with one hand. He looms over me, his chest heaving.
“Look at me, Elara.” When I do, he uses his other hand to position the tip of his cock at my entrance. It is swollen, weeping fluid, lewdly spread. “If there is pain, you will say. Yes?”
I lock eyes with him. There’s no deception here, only concern carved between his brows with a sincerity that stalls by the next inhale.
I nod.
He leans forward, a shift of weight so subtle it’s barely a movement. Pressure builds against my entrance, stretching the sensitive skin, demanding space where there is none. I suck in a breath, my body tightening instinctively against the invasion, bracing for a pain I’m sure is coming.
He stills instantly.
“Don’t close up,” he roughs out, his voice deeper than ever before. “I’ll go slow. I promise.”
When my muscles ease, he enters me not by the inch, but by smaller fractions.
He presses forward until the ring of muscle stretches, until I feel the absolute limit of what I can take—and then he stops.
He squeezes his eyes shut, a hiss escaping through his teeth as his arms tremble violently, fighting the strain of holding his massive weight in check.
“Fuck…” The word is wrecked, stripped of all arrogance.
“Vale?”
He opens his eyes, pupils blown so wide they swallow the green. “You…” he grinds out, looking down at me with something bordering on accusation. “You’re gripping me like a vise.”
It sounds like he’s blaming me for his lack of control, but the flush staining his neck betrays him.
He waits for my body to accept the width of him.
Waits for the tightness to slacken, for my hips to lift in a silent, unconscious plea for more.
Only then does he move: a careful, shaking slide forward that parts me. Parts me more.
He buries inside me, filling me with a tingling pressure that borders on pleasure and pain. Instinct takes over and I lift my hips, rocking them to the rhythm of his in a slow, gentle glide that synchronizes so perfectly.
Time loses its meaning.
Retreats feels like hours.
Thrusts feel like seconds.
Until his hand snaps down to my hip, pinning me to the mattress with bruising force. “Stop. Don’t move.”
“Why?” I gasp, dazed.
“Because if you grind into me one more time, this ends right now.” He glares down at me, looking furious at his body’s betrayal. “And I refuse to spill myself on the threshold after all this waiting. Be so still, Elara.”
Power, sudden and intoxicating, floods my veins. He isn’t just holding back for my sake, isn’t he?
He’s hanging on by a thread.
One I desperately want to undo. I slide my heel up the back of his thigh, the friction of skin against skin deliberate and slow, hooking my calf around his waist. Like that, I pull, urging him deeper inside me.
He groans, fighting the leverage. He tries to hold back, his hips locking, but the lure is too strong. He gives in with a guttural groan, sliding another inch deeper, the thickest part of him stretching me wide.
“Fuck, Elara… I can’t…”
He stops dead again. His head drops to my shoulder, his breathing ragged, sounding like a man drowning. And then I feel it—the rhythmic throb of his cock deep inside me, the pulsing of his flesh against mine.
That sensation undoes me.
The feeling of him twitching inside me sparks a fire that runs straight through my core, making me pulse my hips in time with it, faster, harder. It pushes me right to the very edge, where I teeter.
Crying out in frustration, I dig my heel into the small of his back and pull with everything I have, forcing his hips down, pulling him deep into me. “Move!”
The sensation of him bottoming out, hitting the deepest, most secret part of me, shocks a gasp from my lips. Vale tosses his head back and unleashes an animalistic growl that shakes the walls.
His control snaps.
There’s no more patience, no more gentle siege. He withdraws almost fully and slams back into me with a wet, heavy smack of skin against skin, burying himself to the hilt.
“Saints,” he snarls against my ear, thrusting so hard the bed hits the wall with a crack. “I can’t hold back.”
Neither can I.
The force of that thrust, the sudden, violent claiming, shatters me. My climax hits instantly, a white-hot explosion that clamps my body down around him in tight, rhythmic spasms.
Vale roars, burying his face in the crook of my neck as he, too, erupts inside me. I feel every pulse of his release, hot and torrential, flooding me, coating me deep inside where no one else has ever been.
Then he collapses, his weight pressing down on me for a second before he shifts it to the side. Like that, we lie tangled in the cooling aftermath, the silence of the room crashing down on me louder than any scream.
Slowly, the golden haze begins to lift from my mind, replaced by the sharp, cold edges of reality. The ceiling comes back into focus. The smell of dust and carnations return.
It’s done. This was it.
I should feel triumphant.
Instead, I just feel…empty.
The intimacy—stripped of the driving madness of lust—suffocates my lungs. The stickiness between my thighs, the sweat drying on my skin, the sheer proximity of his heart beating against my ribs…I don’t know what to do with that.
I look beside me, where his hard breaths into his pillow return to something more even. I should go. I should gather my clothes and my scattered wits before I do something foolish.
Like trail my fingers through his damp curls…
I wiggle, trying to shift his bulk off me. He grumbles low in his chest, a sleepy, satisfied sound, but he rolls onto his side, releasing me from the cage of his limbs. But before I can sit up, his warm palm settles down on the back of my hand.
He squeezes it ever so slightly before he rasps, “Stay.”