Chapter 11
Ami
This is happening again.
For the second time today, I’m being kissed. By Gage. Not just any kiss. I don’t know if I can even call what he’s doing to my mouth, kissing.
It’s more like a war he’s waging, his tongue pushing through the seams of my lips when I let out a gasp, stroking mine in a rhythm that I feel all the way to my throbbing core.
It’s like he’s branding me with his hot lips that move in tandem over mine.
I feel the possession in every single searing second of it.
In the way his teeth nip at my bottom lip when he pulls back, nearly hard enough to draw blood.
The way he sighs in disappointment, like that was his objective all along.
In the way his hand tangles in my hair and he angles my head backward, giving him better access to my mouth, tipping and baring my throat to him like he wants to bite my jugular or lick at the pulse nearly tearing from my skin at the juncture of my neck and throat.
He takes his time exploring my mouth as he angles my head back to the point of pain. Tears form at the corners of my eyes and my scalp prickles and screams, but I don’t make a sound past the whimpers escaping my lips.
He tears away suddenly and my eyes fly open at the abrupt ending of a kiss I shouldn’t have enjoyed.
My stomach clenches hard, like a ball of tangled knots that have no hope of ever being undone, when my eyes fall to his lips and I see how swollen and shiny with my saliva they are.
The thought that I’ve marked him, this hardened beast of a man, astounds me.
Gage bends his head again and I stand frozen as he licks at my lower lip. He traces every detail with his tongue, until I’m hyperaware of the shape of my own mouth in a way that I never have been before.
“When I kiss you like this,” he growls, scraping his teeth over my sensitive lip before he pulls away, “I don’t want to sign those fucking papers.”
I’m fucked senseless by his words. I open my mouth to try and form words, a denial of that statement, to tell him that he has to sign, that he said he would, that he came all this way to tell me he’d do it, but nothing comes out.
Instead, my eyes flick down, down the massive breadth of his shoulders, over the expanse of his chest, where his t-shirt strains too thin across the impressive granite of form, past his waist. My eyes widen when I notice the bulge straining against jeans that never looked too tight before.
As if it likes the attention, his cock throbs beneath the denim and my mouth goes bone dry.
Swallowing is an impossibility. Breathing isn’t much better.
I want to turn to go to the kitchen, to get those papers, papers that feel more and more like a curse, like a stone tied around my waist as I’m about to be thrust into the black, inky waters of the ocean, but Gage grabs me again. One hand grips my hip and hauls me roughly up against him.
I let out a garbled gasp of surprise and shock, and my hands fly out to try and brace myself. They splay across his hard chest, and holy shit, he’s so warm it’s like falling headfirst into a pit of fire. I tilt my head up to say something, anything, but his mouth crashes over mine.
I can’t help the whimper and then the moan of pleasure that escapes the back of my throat.
He licks it away, swallows it until it dances with his own strangled noises.
His tongue tangles with mine again, both hands sliding and knotting in my hair, tugging at the strands, pulling and aching and throbbing deliciously.
Gage slides his tongue over my lips and nips me hard.
I taste blood and my senses fire into overdrive, my vision swimming somewhere between black and red.
My head feels like it’s going to float off my body and my heart beast out a brutal rhythm against my ribs.
I mewl and lean in and while strange lights flicker behind my closed eyes and my blood surges so hard through my veins that I can actually hear it, I lean in and bite back.
I wage my own war, attacking Gage’s mouth like it’s mine to do with as I please. Like it’s mine to pleasure and brutalize in turns. Like I’ve been waiting years to do this.
Like it’s been years since I’ve kissed anyone.
The thought sobers me like a bucket of ice cold water dumped on my head.
I lean back, trying to tear myself away, but Gage keeps one hand at my hair and sweeps the other to my hip.
He drives me back in hurried steps, until I’m slammed back against the wall so hard that the breath nearly rushes out of my lungs.
I let out a rush of air that betrays just how brutal being pressed up between that wall and his rock-hard body actually feels.
He attacks my mouth, swallowing the sounds while his hands rove over my hip, exploring the bare, burning skin of my thighs.
I can feel my flesh tremble against his hands, and all the reasons I’ve just had for not wanting to do this, all the memories that assaulted me just a minute ago, are banished by his brutal, wondrous touch.
The last man who touched me like this ended up ruining me.
I know that I shouldn’t. That I shouldn’t do any of this. That you can never truly know another person, so you can never truly trust them.
Still.
I don’t pull away. I don’t break his furious kiss to tell him no.
I let him feast on my mouth. I let him run his hands over my straining, trembling thighs.
I lean into that touch, let his warmth spread through me, easing the ache of years of feeling things I never wanted to feel, the memories I wished I could wipe from my mind, the nightmares and everything else I kept locked inside of me, a Pandora’s box that I will never open because I know if I do, that’s it.
I’ll be broken forever. This way, I still have a hold on my humanity.
I stitched all that shit up long ago, sewed it into every fiber of my being.
I might know that I’m ruined, but no one else does and I’d give the few small pieces of me that still exist, the me I was before it all happened, to keep it that way.
My muscles strain and bunch against Gage’s hand as he strokes from my knee up the skin of my thigh and the rough rasp of his calloused fingers sends a thousand shivers biting into my skin, my muscle, my fucking bones.
I feel that touch straight to the marrow of my being. Straight to the center of me.
He strokes higher, lifting the hem of my dress just a little, letting his fingers trail below.
I could push his hand aside. I could break away.
I could stop this from happening, but I don’t.
I could run. I need to run, but my feet are like cement blocks rooting me to the floor.
I don’t want to be vulnerable. I know what happens if you let yourself let another person in.
I know how badly they can hurt you. All of you.
How they can tear you apart and maim you the same way the blast of an explosion could.
How they plant the seeds of their hate straight into your soul and those seeds fester and take root and break you open bit by brutal bit. For years.
For a lifetime.
“Have to taste you,” Gage growls by my ear, slamming me back into myself.
Into the present. Into this moment with him.
His harsh breath rasps hot over my earlobe, and a shiver tears up my spine.
“Been thinking about this ever since that first day I saw you, scowling in that wedding dress. I thought that you looked full of fire and vinegar, but if I tasted you, you’d be sweet.
Sweeter than fucking honey and wine and just as heady. ”
Holy. Shit. That shiver is back, rippling down my spine from my neck, where my hair stands on end.
It floods my stomach with shivery pangs and creeps into my thighs, which suddenly feel as weak as water.
I realize that I’m soaking between my legs, that my panties are drenched, and I can feel the beads of moisture trickling down my thighs.
I feel… I feel alive.
I’m here. I’m here with him and though his hands are rough and brutal with the strength of a man twice my size and probably nearly three times my weight, a man who could easily hurt me, snap me in half, damage me and ruin me. I’m here with him.
And somehow, I’m calm.
I don’t want to run.
I know that he won’t hurt me. He won’t destroy me. I don’t know why I trust him. He’s little more than a stranger, this man who is my husband, but I do. I trust him.
And I want this.
For him. For me.
To prove to myself that I can still do this. That I’m still human. That the bastard from nearly a decade ago didn’t steal everything from me. That I can still know and experience pleasure.
So when Gage slides down me and drops to his knees, I don’t shove his face away, run to my bedroom, and lock the door.
No. I fist my hands in his dark hair, surprised to find it soft and silky.
I expected it to be rough, shaggy, manly like the rest of him.
Instead the strands tickle the sensitive skin between my fingers, until they meet my palms. I close my hands, fisting them as his hands slide up my thighs.
He leans in and his lips blaze the same trail his hands just traveled.
My face heats up at the rasp of his stubble on my skin, the way his breath tickles the inside of my thigh, where my skin is silky and tender.
When he lets out a groan and his tongue snakes out and licks a fiery path from behind my knee, all the way up, nearly to my soaked core, that heat spreads from my face and explodes in my stomach.
My nipples pebble painfully beneath the flimsy lace bra I have on.
“Fucking hell, Ami, you soaked through your underwear. I can taste you. Taste the sweetness of your cunt down your legs.”
I vibrate against him, jerking hard at the filthy words. My legs feel like they’re made of a cross between butter and jelly and something else equally as useless at holding up the rest of my body weight.