Chapter 9
Brom
Insistent rapping at my door brings me out of my dark thoughts. Thoughts I’m not sure belong to me or someone else. The other.
I get up and hurry over to the door, the knocking continuing, assuming it’s Crane, hoping it’s Kat.
I open it to see Crane on the other side, fist raised to knock again, his face contorted, hair wet and sticking to his neck.
I’ve never seen this man look like this before. Haunted, broken and wild, an animal torn between being predator and prey, and for the first time I see what it must be like to be him looking at me.
“Crane?” I ask, wondering what’s happened. “Has the horseman—”
He bursts into the room, kicking the door shut with his foot as he grabs my face hard and kisses me even harder before I can finish the sentence.
His mouth is lush and wet and warm but there’s no tenderness here, there rarely is these days, and he fucks me with his tongue like he’s taking complete ownership.
My beard scratches against the stubble on his face, and his skin is hot to touch.
He tastes like rain.
We both stumble backward until I’m pressed against the wooden wardrobe, the handle digging into the soft flesh by my kidneys but the pain only feels right.
His fists go to my shirt, holding on as the kiss deepens, becomes violent, and I moan against his lips, unable to contain myself.
I haven’t felt this wanted and desired in such a long time.
Last night was punishment, this is something else entirely.
“Hit me,” he rasps, his eyes like flint as he pulls back. “Hit me, Abe.”
I blink at him rapidly, at the sound of my old name, at the oddity of his request.
“Sir?” My old moniker for him slipping out as well.
“I said fucking hit me,” he growls. “Hurt me.”
I shake my head, licking the taste of him from my lips. I’ve been full of such hatred and anger toward him, but now seeing him like this, wounded and lashing out, I can’t do it. The turmoil I’ve felt about him seems to evaporate.
“No, I—”
“I’m not asking, I’m ordering you to,” he says, grabbing me by the throat and spinning me around so that his back is against the wardrobe. “You fought back so well last night.”
“Crane…”
“Want me to get you in the mood, is that it? Get you to hate me again? You seem to do it so easily, you slippery fucker.” He says this all with a sneer on his upper lip, his eyes flickering between madness and desire, if desire was a fever he needed to be cured of.
“How about all the times I fucked your fiancée and made her come screaming my name? How I made her forget you even existed? How I told her she belonged to me and only to me and she wanted it, she wanted, needed, to be with me, not you, never you, you missed your fucking chance, you—”
I unleash.
I strike him right across his sharp cheekbone, my knuckles feeling like fire.
The back of his head smacks against the wardrobe.
Then he raises his head, his damp black hair flopping across his forehead, and his eyes search mine in the same way that Pastor Ross’s did when he was praying to God.
“Do it again.” My fist shakes, I hesitate, and his hand is still on my throat.
“Do it again or I’ll tell you how I used a riding crop on her ass and a ruler on her cunt and I dominated that sweet witch until she was puffy and pink and slick with—”
Pure jealousy slams into me and I punch him again, this time getting his jaw until I hear his teeth clank together, and his grip on my throat loosens, his chin dipping down.
“Crane,” I say, breathing hard, my knuckles burning, my shoulder hurting from the action, and somewhere deep inside me I feel the horseman stir in that darkness. “Please don’t make me do it again. I don’t want the Hessian to come out. He might break the rules and come out during the day.”
Crane lifts his head, his hair obscuring most of his haunted eyes. “Maybe that’s what I deserve. Maybe that’s what I want.”
I swallow hard, not liking any of this, how quickly our roles have reversed. I’d always wanted to see Crane snap, to see that flippant mask slip, to know what it’s like to punish him for a change, but I don’t want any of it. Not like this.
“Well, I don’t want it,” I say gruffly. “I don’t want it, Crane. This isn’t safe.”
I knew that word would get his attention.
He nods slowly, my words sinking in. His gaze drops and his hands go down to my trousers, pressing the heel of his palm against my erection, which I hadn’t given much thought to until now.
“Then I just want to fuck,” he says, his voice low and husky, sounding more normal again, and when he gazes at me, I see his pupils blacken in lust. “I want to fuck. I want to come inside you and make you come too.”
He presses harder against my length and I gasp. The foolish little noises I make when I’m with him embarrass me and I feel my cheeks already going hot.
“There’s that color I like to see,” he murmurs before he grabs me by the back of my neck and gives me a possessive kiss that makes my fingers curl at my sides. “My pretty boy,” he adds as he breaks away with a smirk.
Then he reaches up and grabs my hair in his hands and gives it a sharp tug, making my mouth drop open, the pain causing my dick to twitch with blood, with need. It’s fucking beautiful.
“Yes,” he hisses, leaning in to lick the rim of my open mouth. “Oh damn it, Brom, I’m going to fuck your seed right out of you.”
With another tug that makes my eyes water, he leads me over to my bed and orders me to get undressed, and then undress him when I’m done.
I work as fast as I can with shaking hands, shucking off my clothes and his, my dick already so thick and swollen that I feel the faintest breath on it will make me climax.
Then, when I’m nude, and his naked body is standing before me, those extra inches on him seeming to have that same effect on his cock, I stare openly at him.
Last night I never saw a thing, but now he’s raw and open and right in front of me.
Crane looks like a god. Perhaps a fallen one at the moment, but still a fucking god.
His lean, long, yet defined body, his skin pale as the moon, smooth as silk, only a dusting of black hair under his arms and the trail running from his stomach to his cock that stands up like a heavy, darkened pole between his muscular legs.
It thrums through me, this want, it fills up every crevice and hollow until I can’t see straight, can’t think straight.
Then Crane pushes me so I’m on my back and on the bed and he comes over me, the heat of him overpowering and even though it’s the afternoon and gray light is coming in through the window, it feels like the whole world goes black and is whittled down to just him, like he’s standing at the end of a tunnel.
“Can I be your savior?” he murmurs, running the tip of his nose over mine.
I can only swallow in response, hoping my eyes tell him the rest.
Except he’s not the only one who needs saving in this bed.
I hope he knows that too.
He kisses me, hot, deep, violent, and my breath catches in my lungs, wrung out, and it’s so easy to succumb to this man.
I reach up, running my fingers over the defined bones of his clavicles, his shoulders, then down over the hard planes of his chest and the chiseled grooves of his abdomen.
I’m trying to remember this, the way he feels, in case it doesn’t happen again.
In case there might be a day soon, too fucking soon, where the horseman takes over and doesn’t give me back.
That day is coming, isn’t it?
And soon?
How much time do I have?
“Do you have any oil?” Crane says gruffly, biting at my neck and bringing me back to the present. His teeth pinch and hurt but then he soothes it with flat sweeps of his tongue. I’m trembling with need now, hard as stone, all my blood gathered in my cock, leaving the rest of me to feel empty.
“No,” I say through a disappointed gasp as I let my hands trail over his lean hips to his thick cock that juts out between us.
He feels like fiery iron in my hands, veiny and rigid, all of this for me.
I run my thumb over the flared tip, gliding along the slit and pushing the beads of arousal down his length until he lets out a low groan that shakes the bed and gets me even harder.
“Touching me without my permission?” Crane muses, though the tremor in his voice betrays his easy tone. “I’ll allow it.”
Then he lays his entire body over mine, his weight taking my breath away, and then pulls back enough to spit into his palm. He brings that hand down to his cock, his wrist rubbing against mine as he does so and causing me to press my hips up into him in a desperate need to fuck.
“Open your mouth, sweetheart,” he says to me, and I obey as he dips his head down and licks the inside of my lips, tasting, savoring, so wet, wet, wet, before he presses his hips down against mine, rubbing his cock against mine.
“Fuck,” I cry out, my eyes rolling back and spine bowing toward him as the sensations threaten to destroy me.
There’s enough moisture from our arousal and his spit to make the rutting silky smooth and I feel myself let go, lost to the sensation of this man above me, taking what he wants from me and keeping me safe at the same time.
He might not be able to save me but at least, in this moment, he’s all mine and I’m all his.
“God, you’re handsome when you’re beneath me,” he says in a throaty, lust-choked voice that makes my blood run even hotter. “I’m going to have to keep you for life.”
I hate the way my heart jumps at those words, the lightness inside me, like I haven’t seen the sun in years.