Chapter 19 #3
“Don’t you dare stop to do that,” I say, and he laughs, then helps my fumbling effort to get his shirt off.
“Much better,” I say, because we’re skin against skin now, at least above the waist, and I moan as he kisses his way down my throat, my collarbone, the slope of my breast. Then his hands are working the buttons of my jeans and shoving the denim down my hips with no patience at all.
I kick free of them, thankful I slipped off my shoes earlier.
He stands just long enough to strip off the rest of his clothes, and the look on his face as he sits on the sofa and orders me to straddle him is enough to make me melt—a combination of power and lust and need that makes me wetter than I can remember being.
His fingers tease my core, and I fumble to open his fly, part of me wanting him naked and another part liking the wildness of knowing that we’re moving at the speed of lust. It’s wild and decadent and delicious, and right now I need that.
Need to forget the weight of the realms on my shoulders and simply feel.
“I want to hear you,” he says right before his mouth claims mine. I fist a hand in his hair as he touches me in all the right ways. He knows my body better than I do—knows exactly where, and how much, and when to ease back just enough to make me beg, desperate and shameless.
The pleasure builds fast and hot, winding tighter with every slow, certain stroke of his tongue, and I’m gasping his name, my hips chasing his mouth because I have never once been patient and I’m not about to start now.
“Chase—” It’s all I can manage. “Chase, I’m—”
“I know.” He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t slow. He takes me right up to the edge and then over it, and I shatter with his name in my mouth and his hands holding my hips still, riding it out until I am boneless under him.
I am still trembling when he rises over me. I reach for him, get my hand cupping his cock, and he groans with need before he settles between my thighs, the blunt heat of him right where I crave it. “Please,” I beg when he pauses, his forehead dropping to mine.
“Look at me,” he says, lifting his head.
I look.
His stunning golden eyes are dark and wrecked and fixed on mine like I’m the only thing in five realms.
“Mine,” he says. Not a question. A claim.
“Yours,” I tell him, and it’s true. It will always be true, even if there’s another who has me, too.
When he pushes into me, I gasp, and for a second, neither of us moves, and I’m lost in the feel of my body stretched around him. Of the heat of him. Of the wild and intense pleasure of simply being his.
Then he begins to move, slow at first, then faster and harder, like he’s trying to drive himself into me so deep that wherever I go tonight—whatever realm, whatever man—some part of me will still be here. Still be his. And I let him.
More than let him—I wrap my legs around him and draw him deeper as I drag my nails down his back, meeting every thrust until his control snaps and there’s nothing left between us but an explosion of pleasure and want and need.
I don’t know how long we lay like that, wrapped in each other’s arms. A minute? An eternity? All I know is the feel of him and the heat of his words when he whispers, “Stay with me. Just here. Just us.”
“Just us,” I gasp, as he enters me again.
I mean it, too, because right now there is no Nightmare Realm and no king and no keystone and no falling sky. There is only Chase and the heat between us and his slow, deep, claiming rhythm that takes me apart all over again.
I come with a cry I can’t hold back, my whole body locking around him, and he follows a heartbeat later—driving deep, going rigid, my name breaking out of him like it costs him something. Then he collapses over me, and we lie there tangled and slick and sated.
After an eternity has passed, his lips brush my hair as he whispers, “Are you still going?”
“You know the answer to that.”
His arm tightens around me, just a fraction. Then he sits up, releasing me.
I clean up, and when I’m back from the bathroom, he’s shirtless in his jeans. I find my clothes, then tug them on as he watches in silence, his expression like stone.
“I’m coming back,” I say, and his lips curve. Just slightly.
“I know,” he says. “It’s just that I only now realized I have something in common with my brother.”
I stand a little straighter. “You mean me?”
He shakes his head. “I’m an impatient fucker,” he says. “And greedy, too.”
“Yeah,” I say. “You and Adric make quite a pair.”
“Tell him I said that, and I’ll deny it.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
When I’m dressed, I cross to the window. Chase comes with me, but he doesn’t take my hand.
“You don’t have to watch,” I say softly.
“Yes,” he says. “I do.”
I nod, only then realizing that this will be the first time I’ve crossed alone. I almost take his hand just from sheer nerves. But I don’t. Instead, I find the power inside me. A power that will let me walk from one realm to another as easily as entering a room.
I glance once more at this man I love, then take a step forward toward another man who waits for me.