Chapter 14 #2
Next, he takes his shirt off in one fluid motion, and I sigh as his body is revealed, so perfect and familiar.
The lamplight is low and gold, and his arms are covered in those intricate black-ink tattoos—symbols and creatures twining across muscle, darker in some places than others, almost alive in the low light.
He starts to tug my jeans off, and I squirm, helping him along. He tosses my jeans and panties off the bed, then stands to strip off his own pants as I watch this very delicious show, only to fight a small whimper when I see the wolf-scar, still new, but perfectly healed thanks to Adric’s blood.
Without thinking, I sit up, then reach out to touch it, and he draws in a tight breath.
“Sorry,” I whisper. “Does it still hurt? It looks like the bite was years ago.”
“It hurts,” he says. “But not in the way you think.”
Adric. It hurts because it was Adric who saved him. A deadly wound, magically healed. And yet for him, it will always be a reminder of how his brother won again, this time by claiming me.
Gently, I brush the pad of my thumb over the scar. “I can belong to you and still be his bride.”
He shakes his head. “No. You can’t.”
I want to argue—to promise him that I mean it. That I want them both. But now isn’t the time.
Now is the time to simply be his, and as heat flares inside me, I pull him back onto the bed with me, then crawl over to straddle him once his head is on the pillow.
I meet his eyes, then grin as I scoot down before kissing my way back up his thigh until I reach his cock.
I look up long enough to see the heat in his eyes, then tease his cock with the tip of my tongue, relishing the way he tastes, all heat and lust and male.
“Christ, Cora,” he murmurs as I draw him in. I feel him go even harder in my mouth.
I keep my eyes open, watching his face, but even so, I don’t see it coming—the way he shifts his hips and pulls me up, then kisses me deep before he rolls us so I’m on my back, and he’s moved to kneel on the floor at the foot of the bed.
“Chase,” I begin, but he puts a finger to his lips, then wraps his hand around my ankles and pulls me down so that my ass is at the foot of the bed and I’m losing my mind from the erotic feel of the cool air hitting my bare skin—and his heated, unrelenting gaze.
“Chase,” I murmur, fighting the urge to squirm, certain my cheeks are blood red.
“Hush. I want to take in every inch of you.”
I nod and bite my lower lip, ignoring my burning face as I force myself to watch his eyes moving over me, slow and hot and wildly erotic.
His hand traces a slow line from my collarbone to my breast to the soft skin of my belly.
Then lower and lower until his fingers slide between my thighs—and the breath leaves my body in one long, ragged exhale.
“God, Cora.”
“Chase—”
“You’re soaked.”
“I’ve been soaked since we got here.”
That gets me a soft laugh, and then his fingers are doing things to me that drive every coherent thought out of my head.
His thumb finds the place that sends wild, heated ripples through me, making me moan as I arch up, as if I can launch myself into heaven.
Then his fingers thrust inside me, slow and deep, and I cry out with a wild, desperate need.
His mouth closes over my breast, and his thumb teases a path around my nipple, slow then faster as if he can tell that the heat that’s been building since the door closed behind us is coiling tight and hot, and I’m so close. So blissfully, wonderfully close…
“Chase—”
“Let go.”
“Not yet. I want—”
“Let go, Cora. I want to watch you come.”
As if his words opened a gateway, the orgasm crashes over me like a wave, and now all I feel is white heat and his name on my lips and his hand still moving, riding me through it.
I squirm shamelessly, wanting to claim every tiny bit of this sensation. Wanting it to never, ever end.
As if he understands, his mouth closes on my breast, his fingers still busy between my legs, and I fist my hand in his hair as I arch up, my entire body exploding, then again and again and one last time until I’m spent and tingly and lost someplace that feels like heaven.
“Wow,” I say as he smiles down on me. “You deserve a medal.”
He laughs. “I’ll just take you as my prize.”
“I can live with that. I bite my lower lip, then lift my brows. “So long as you take payment now.”
“I do love a woman who thinks like me,” he says, as he settles back over me.
Skin to skin. His mouth on mine. His cock right at my core.
I try to stay still, but patience is a virtue I’ve never possessed, so I cup his ass with my hands and thrust my hips up as he pushes into me again, so deep I can’t help the wild sound that comes out of me begging and pleading for more.
“Look at me,” he says, moving inside me.
I do, my eyes locking on his. Golden Eyes. The man I’ve loved since he rescued me from a freaky wolf-monster when I was fifteen years old. The man who almost died for me.
“Just us,” he says, somehow thrusting even deeper as I arch up to take him as deep as he can go.
For a second, neither of us moves. I just feel him—the fullness, the heat, the stretch of my body around him. His forehead drops to mine. His breath comes ragged against my mouth.
“I love you,” he whispers, and I let the words wash over me.
“I love you, too,” I say. “Tell me you know that.”
“I do.”
I believe him, but there’s something in the way he holds himself still, something tight and almost desperate, that tells me this isn’t only about our love. It’s about what I am to Adric now. What Chase wants, and what Adric will take. Or, worse, what I’ll willingly give him.
Chase knows that what’s happening in this bed with him will happen in another one, too. Another bed in another realm, with the man whose blood saved his life.
Worse, it will happen because I want it to.
Chase hasn’t said any of that. Not aloud. But it’s all there in the set of his jaw and the grip of his hands and the way he’s looking at me like he’s trying to brand himself onto every part of me at once—so that whatever I do later, wherever I go, I will always come back here. To him. To us.
Of course I will. The words are hard and certain in my head. But at the same time, I know what it costs him to love me with his brother standing in the wings, and the only thing I can give him as solace is all of me, right now, holding nothing back.
“Don’t leave.” His voice is barely there.
I curl more closely against him, but say nothing. I won’t make promises I can’t keep, so I tell him the only way I can. Touching and kissing until he’s hard again, then drawing him inside me once more to ride him hard and deep.
He groans, rough and low as I move slowly, doling out punishment and pleasure until he flips us so that I’m on my back and he’s moving in a way that makes me insane in the best possible way.
Slow at first, almost punishing in how good it is.
A long drag out and a hard thrust back in as I moan and gasp and beg until there’s just the steady pounding of him into me, the bed rocking, his hand sliding under my rear to tilt me up so he hits something that makes me cry out with the kind of pleasure that pretends to be pain.
He knows my body like he knows his own. Exactly where and how and how hard, and he uses every bit of it—drawing back when I’m close just to feel me clench around him, then giving it back harder until I can’t do anything but hold on and take it.
“Mine,” he says against my throat.
“Yours,” I whisper, because it’s true right now in this room, with his weight pinning me and his cock buried in me and his pulse hammering where my mouth is pressed to his neck.
He needs to hear it, and I need to say it, and neither of us thinks about how it’s only part of the truth. Because part is all we have tonight.
His control snaps, and the careful, contained man I know comes apart over me, his hips driving harder, his hand fisting in my hair, making the wildness climb higher and higher until I cry out his name when I explode, the orgasm tearing through me, my whole body locking around him and then breaking apart.
He follows me over a heartbeat later, spilling into me on a sound that’s half groan and half my name. I hold him through every shudder, my arms around his back, my legs around his hips, both of us slick and shaking and wrecked.
For a long moment, neither of us moves. His weight pins me to the bed, and I don’t want it gone. I can feel his heart slamming, slowing, steadying.
And in his soft embrace, I don’t let myself think about tomorrow, or the betrothal, or the man in another realm who owns just as much of my heart as the man in my arms.