Chapter Twenty-One. Duncan
Temperance tasted like Fireball Whisky.
Duncan wasn’t sure what was hotter—the cinnamon blaze of her tongue, or how efficiently she’d dropped his pants and his boxers without disengaging her mouth from his. Once he was bare-assed, she shoved his tuxedo coat down his shoulders and ripped his dress shirt open with savage enthusiasm. The buttons popped off like miniature champagne corks, landing on the floor of the hotel room with cartoonish high-pitched ping! sounds.
His singular remaining brain cell was aware of two things—he definitely wasn’t getting his deposit back for the tux rental, and how the hell had the buttons made that sound when they’d landed on carpet?
Like a spliced film reel, they were on the bed in the next blink, and Temperance was magnificently naked, clutching at him, clamping every centimeter of her body against his. Then he was plunging into her, and it felt like free-falling from space, or falling in love, or both at the same time.
He was still wearing his bow tie. Only the bow tie.
With every one of his thrusts, the pulse in his skull beat out a pounding rhythm. It had a voice, chanting, It’s happening—this is happening—it’s happening. He fucked her up the mattress, slapping a palm to the cushioned headboard for more leverage once they got there.
He forgot to breathe and nearly blacked out, losing himself in the body of the woman who owned his every molecule.
It’s happening—this is happening—it’s happening—
Then Temperance began to cry.
“Don’t stop,”she demanded through the tears, and he wanted to tell her he’d give her anything, everything she’d ever wanted, but his mind was so overclocked all he could manage was an incoherent, heaving growl of assent into the hot skin of her temple.
Instead of streaking down her face and to the pillow beneath her, her tears defied gravity and moved upward, leaking into the corners of his mouth, climbing his cheeks, drifting past his ears. Drenching him with her salt. The tears moved beyond him, trembling skyward in slow motion—what the fuck?—like rain in reverse. Her body shuddered with the force of her sobs, but she clung to him. Frantic. Gouging fingertips like masonry nails into his scalp, into the bunched muscles of his shoulders, his back, his ass, his thighs—god, how did she have so many hands?—and her legs were locked so supernaturally tight around his hips, churning him into her so hard he couldn’t have relented even if he’d wanted to.
“Don’t ever stop,”she said.
It’s happening—this is happening—it’s happening—
Don’t stop.
He came with a terrible roar, hating himself for rutting so relentlessly while she cried, and loving her at the same time—god, he loved her. He threw his head back with the ecstasy of it, baring his teeth at the ceiling—
An ocean.
There was an actual ocean on the ceiling. Roiling and turbulent, impossibly vast. The walls of the hotel room fell away like a set on a theater stage, and Duncan could feel the misty spray of the crashing waves above him. Brine stung his eyes, puckered his tongue, dripped down the back of his throat. And that roaring—it hadn’t been him. It was Temperance’s ocean of tears, in all its enormous, terrifying power.
In another rapid splice of the film reel, he was sitting naked in damp, cold sand on a monochromatic beach—grit in his hair, between his bare toes, in the crack of his ass—and Temperance was gone. The bed was gone, the hotel room was gone. The ocean rose up and came for him with sentient purpose, and he knew—he knew—he wouldn’t survive it.
He started to scream.
“FUCK!”Duncan vaulted out of bed and fired his pillow across the room with a vicious swing of his arm. The sheet around his waist and thighs was as twisted as seaweed, nearly tripping him to the ground. He yanked it off and tossed it away, stumbling toward the bathroom.
He was wet from temples to toes, but it wasn’t ocean water that soaked him, or Temperance’s tears. It was the thick, stinking sweat of a nightmare.
Duncan looked down. His dick curved gleefully outward, raging hard and flushed, slick at the tip. His balls felt so heavy they might have contained that same ocean from the dream. His privates clearly missed the signals of terror his dream brain had sent to the rest of his anatomy.
The ones that were simultaneously horny and horrifying were a truly diabolical joke of his subconscious.
He shoved sweaty hair out of his face. Goddamn it.
He cranked the shower and stepped in before the water got hot. The icy spray hit the back of his neck and shoulders, drawing goosebumps across his skin, tightening his groin. He pressed his back to the cold tile wall and took himself in hand, sucking a breath through his teeth against the cold. Squeezing his eyes shut, he tried to summon Temperance from the earlier part of the dream. Before it had turned into a fucked-up Christopher Nolan flick.
He couldn’t find her.
The shower got hot fast, inciting the furious heat between his legs, in his gut, in his chest. He planted his feet wide and clenched the cheeks of his ass as familiar explosive tension coalesced at the base of his spine and deep in his balls. Sixty seconds was all it took, primed as he was from the dream. His knees buckled, and he slid down the wall, riding the eruption all the way to the shower floor.
He came so hard he felt nauseous.
His hand hung loose between his legs as he gasped and seethed at himself for being so pathetic. Hot water beat against his scalp, running into his eyes, into the corners of his mouth.
There wasn’t any denying it. The Temperance-shaped place inside him that he’d kept meticulously hollow for more than a decade was filling up again, and like a tipped hourglass, there was no stopping it.