Chapter Five #3
I think I might actually die when he pulls one, then the other, deep into his mouth. He sucks, hard.
And I think it’s possible that I explode.
He laughs, testing their weight with his hands, and then does it again.
Everything is champagne and heat. Fire and a long, slow simmer into golden, so sweet it hurts.
And I don’t know if I’m the one who’s glimmering, or if it’s him, but it becomes all the same bright heat. He finds ways to make parts of me I’ve never considered all that much feel beautiful and sexy and his .
He does this with every part of me he touches.
Lower and lower he goes until he finds its way to the crease of my thighs, and then in between them.
I don’t even have time to think about this. Or maybe it’s that I can’t think past all the sensation that only seems to build in me with every touch, every scrape of his jaw against my soft skin, every breath across my body.
He pushes one thigh out of his way, then settles in.
I hold my breath again. He laughs as if he knows, then lifts me up and spreads me open wide.
Then he licks deep into me.
And I lose my senses entirely.
It is all heat. Him .
I’m aware of what he’s doing, and who is doing it, and that it is his mouth—
But there is nothing but the way he tastes me. The way he feasts on me and I arch into him, again and again, noises spilling out of me that I didn’t know I could make.
And then the pleasure, sharp and growing, surging and expanding.
So hot and so intense it’s almost scary. Maybe it really would be scary if I could do anything at all but surrender to it.
It hits me like a punch, a detonation, exploding inside and then shooting everywhere, leaving nothing behind.
I am obliterated.
I am outside myself. In pieces.
He laughs and I can feel it, there against the tenderest part of me, and then he begins again.
And again.
I quickly lose track of how many times I come apart. How many times he takes me to the precipice and flings me out to that bright, hot flight into glory.
I hear a sobbing sound, and realize it’s my voice. I hear a low, hot murmur, and I know it’s his.
There is nothing, now, but the dark of the cottage around us, the softness of the bed beneath us, and all the sparks we light as we roll and taste and bite and moan.
He teaches me how to take him deep in my own mouth, and when I have difficulty with his thickness, his length, he runs a hand over the side of my face.
As if he knows I need the touch. The reminder of softness while he is so hard in my mouth.
He moves his hand in a soothing way that makes me want nothing more than to open wider and take him deeper.
And I do.
But he does not give me the release I want. He pulls himself out, despite my protests. And then, murmuring words that sound somewhere between prayers and apologies, he switches our positions once again and settles himself between my legs.
And I feel so dizzy, so gloriously new, that it takes me too long to remember the one little thing I should have told him from the start.
“Luc—” I begin.
His gaze flashes to mine and I realize we’re both still wearing those masks over our eyes. Something about the eroticism of that, and the fact I can feel that blunt, hard part of him nudging up against the softness of my center, makes me shiver.
“Don’t call me that,” he says, as if it hurts him.
And then he slams his way inside me.
Then, immediately, freezes.
And for a moment, I cannot tell the difference between pain and pleasure. For a moment, we are both strung out there in that single mad thrust—
“Cosita , I did not know,” he is saying against my ear.
When I pull in a breath, not sure if I want to stop or shout or cry, something else happens instead.
It’s as if the breath floods through me, and that hot place where we’re joined…shifts. One moment it’s a tight, hot pain, and then the next it becomes something else. Something like a white-hot heat, not comfortable, not sweet, but addictive.
I move my hips. He sighs, but I want more.
“So be it,” he says.
He pulls me to him, so it feels as if we are one.
And then slowly, almost tenderly, he begins to move.
But I don’t want slow and I don’t want tender. I want all of him.
I realize I said that out loud, growling it like some kind of wild thing, when his gaze finds mine once more.
And I can see the laughter there.
Masks and bittersweet tea and laughter, and a bolt of something like lightning goes through me, hard.
He rolls us over so I sit astride him, and when I look around in concern, not certain what to do in this new position, he settles me with his hands on my hips. He moves me experimentally, and I get it. Then I meet it.
Soon enough, I am the one lifting myself up, sliding down, and learning the rhythms that make him groan, too.
And when I feel that precipice coming, I try to hold it off, but he really does laugh at me then. He pulls me down so that our faces are close as he takes my mouth with his, and kisses me with such dark passion that it’s hard to tell which part of him is doing the most damage.
Beautiful, life-altering damage.
It comes on slow at first. A winding heat, moving inexorably out of my control. Then like an avalanche, rolling faster and faster and taking me with it, until I’m sobbing and jerking and slamming myself against him.
Then he’s rolling over and surging into me with none of that careful restraint, and it’s beautiful. It’s glorious.
And then it’s happening for both of us, wild and hot and ours—
Until he roars out my name in the crook of my neck as we fall.
He does the same more times that night than I can count.
But in the morning, he’s gone.
Just as I knew he would be when I never dreamed I would get naked with him, in more ways than one.
I wake up with that damned mask still on my face, but askew. I know he’s not in the bed before I open my eyes. I know things about him, about me, that would sound delusional if I put them into words.
Things that only come from an intimacy that shouldn’t be possible between people who are playing games and hiding in plain sight—but that’s the thing. Last night there were no barriers.
Last night I knew him.
Last night I gave him me.
It was so intense and so perfectly ours that I can’t even regret it as I sit up and confirm that he is not here.
He is not here. As expected, the man who was never Luc Garnier disappeared with the dawn.
Leaving nothing at all behind but the card that fell out of his coat pocket to the floor. When I pick it up and frown at it there is the name of an attorney on the front, with offices in Nice.
And there is a name written across the back of it in slashing script. Amara Mariana Vizcaya.
But all I can think about is the fact that in this Cinderella story, it’s Prince Charming who isn’t who he pretended to be and ran away anyway, leaving me here to figure out how to take my poor heart and shove it back into my body.
When I already know it won’t fit.