Chapter 10 #2
Every fantasy I refused to have comes crashing in at once.
"Part your legs."
Her breath hitches.
She obeys. Slow.
I drag my hand up the inside of her thigh. Featherlight. She jerks and hisses.
Then my fingers find it.
I stop.
I pull back and push her legs open to see what I’m feeling. Crescent-shaped cuts on the inside of her thigh. Fingernails.
The garter sits just above them, silk edges framing the damage like a frame around something obscene.
I go very still.
Elle's breath changes. She's been waiting for this moment. Dreading it. Rehearsing whatever she was going to say.
I don't ask.
I lower my head and press my mouth to the wounds that had bled. Once. Twice. I feel the tension bleed out of her legs and her hand comes up to cover her face.
She doesn't make a sound. But her chest shakes once.
I stay there a moment longer than I need to. My thumb traces the edge of the marks.
Then I look up at her.
"She won't touch you again."
Not a promise. A fact.
Elle uncovers her face. Her eyes are dry but wrecked. She looks at me like she doesn't know what category to put me in.
Good. I don't know either.
"Now," I say quietly. "Where were we."
She lets out a soft moan when I hook my fingers into her panties and tug them down. She's wet. No, screw that. She's soaked. Drenched.
I look up at her face. Eyes half-closed. Cheeks burning. Like she should feel ashamed. But I'm not having that. Not in my bed. Not with the most beautiful woman I've ever put my hands on.
I grip her hips. Lower my head.
And taste her.
Her thighs jolt the second my tongue hits her. A choked gasp tears from her throat, wild and startled, the sound of a woman who wasn't expecting pleasure this fast, this deep, this deliberate.
I pin her hips with one hand, keeping her exactly where I want her, and drag my tongue in one slow line from bottom to top. She shudders so violently the mattress shifts.
I exhale against her. Savoring. Then I wrap my mouth around her clit and suck, and the scrape of my beard against her inner thighs makes her cry out so loud the sound echoes off the ceiling.
Raw. Uncontrolled. Real.
I don't look up. I shake my head against her and go right back to devouring her like the rest of the world doesn't exist.
Her hips try to buck. I press them harder into the mattress. Her breathing turns frantic. I go slower. Tongue soft now, almost teasing, tracing lazy circles until her fingers tangle in my hair and pull.
"Nikolai..."
It's barely my name. More plea than word.
I slide one finger inside her. Curl it. Find the spot.
Her head flies back. Her fist slams the sheets. Her body doesn't know what to do with itself except shake.
I add a second finger. Stroke deeper. My tongue never stops.
"Please," she gasps. "I can't. I can't."
"Yes you can." I growl it into her. "Give it to me."
She breaks.
Her entire body arches, back bowing off the mattress, toes curling, and she comes hard. So hard she tries to close her thighs around my head, but I hold her open and make her ride every last wave of it.
Her voice breaks around my name.
I don't stop until she's shaking.
Only then do I ease my fingers out. Kiss the inside of her thigh with a reverence that would surprise me if I stopped to think about it. But I don't stop. I don't think. I just crawl up her body, watching her glassy, stunned eyes track me like she can't believe what just happened.
Yeah. Me too, sweetheart.
I hover over her, body caging hers against the mattress, forearm braced by her head. I lower my hips just enough for her to feel how hard I am. Every aching inch.
"Elle."
Her gaze snaps to mine.
"I told you. I don't want to get this over with."
I brush my mouth over hers. A slow promise.
"I want to make sure you never forget it."
She opens for me without a word. When I push inside her, slow and steady, the heat of her pulls the air from my lungs.
She's tight. So tight I have to stop, forehead dropping to her shoulder, breathing through the urge to lose everything right then.
"Fuck," I groan when I'm fully inside her. She squeezes around me like her body is trying to keep me there, and my vision whites out for a second.
I begin to move. Deep but measured. Not rushed. This isn't the hotel, where everything was urgent and reckless and half-drunk on the unknown. This is something else. This is deliberate. Every stroke is a claim I'm not sure I've earned but I'm making anyway.
Her hands find my shoulders. Nails dig crescents into my skin. Each thrust draws a soft, sharp gasp from her, and the sound goes straight through me like a current.
"More," she whispers. Eyes locked on mine. "Please."
I shift my weight. Sink deeper. My hand slides between our bodies, and when my thumb finds her clit, her whole body jolts like she's been electrified.
"Oh God," she breathes, back arching.
I circle slowly. Matching the rhythm of my hips. Watching her face as the pleasure builds behind her eyes, watching the moment she stops thinking and starts feeling, watching the exact second her mouth falls open and her body starts to tighten around me.
This. This is what I meant by memorize.
The sound she makes when I press harder, when I angle deeper, when I give her everything I have and don't hold back. That sound. I'm carving it into my fucking bones.
"Nikolai," she gasps, and it sounds like a prayer she didn't mean to say out loud.
I drive harder. The bed protests. Her body meets mine, thrust for thrust, her legs wrapping tight around my waist, pulling me deeper, and the wet, slick heat of her is destroying me from the inside out.
My thumb doesn't stop. My hips don't stop. My mouth finds her throat, her jaw, the corner of her lips.
"Come for me," I murmur against her mouth. Not a command this time. A request. The most dangerous word I've ever said. "Come for me, Elle."
She shatters.
Her orgasm hits like a wave, her body clamping down on me so hard my vision goes white. She cries out, back bowing, and the way she clenches, pulses, trembles around my cock breaks whatever restraint I had left.
I bury myself deep. Release rips through me, raw and violent and so complete it feels like being unmade.
We come like we're breaking.
And I don't stop until every last aftershock is wrung out of both of us.
I told myself this was forced on me. I didn’t choose this woman. She didn’t choose me.
But she’s mine now. And I protect what’s mine.