Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
WENDY
T he blankets I’d spread out on the floor of Hook’s chambers did very little to cushion the hard floor. A single hour trying to sleep and my back already hurt. My bruised ribs had taken to reminding me of the precise location of every last smudge of blue and black on my body. To add insult to injury, Princess Hook was snoring away in his bed, perfectly content on the plush mattress with his feather pillow and downy blanket. He’d deigned to give me a pillow, but I hadn’t missed the fact it was the thinnest one on the bed. God forbid his comfort be compromised in any way.
I rolled over again, slitting my eyes open to glare at the room in the moonlight sifting through the windows behind his desk. The ship rocked and creaked and grumbled as usual, but for once it wasn’t the noise keeping me awake. I couldn’t relax on this damn floor, and I was contemplating ignoring his orders and climbing into the bed.
From my week-long stint as captain, I knew it was toasty and so soft, the mattress like a cloud. I rolled over to glare at the shadow of the captain, most of him smothered by the blanket. It wouldn’t have killed him to let me share the bed.
“Selfish bastard,” I grumbled, my scowl deepening.
As if he heard me, he muttered in his sleep, the words not loud enough to carry to me.
“The least you can do is let me curl up on the end of the bed like a dog,” I huffed.
Because I was glaring at him, I saw him move under the covers, his body jerking like he’d been shot. I frowned, my brow bunching when he repeated the movement, and then again. It only took me a moment to realise he was being tormented in his sleep and I froze, an awkward spectator to his torture as he began to thrash.
When he gasped out a plea, I pushed up off the floor, taking a moment to find my balance on the swaying ship. A tight pain nipped just behind my ribs. I wasn’t a stranger to nightmares. They were nasty fuckers, relentless in their desire to break you, and there was no trauma or horror left untouched.
“I think you’ll find,” I told the nightmares as I crossed the floor on nimble feet, “this captain is mine to torment, not yours.”
“Don’t,” he gasped, his neck strained, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead. “Eldrick, please—”
The mattress dipped when I perched on the edge, pulling the top of the blanket away from Hook’s face and sighing quietly at the strain written on every line of his features. A vein in his neck bulged as he struggled against whatever torture was happening in his nightmare, his breaths so rapid they were almost non-existent.
“Hey,” I murmured. “Captain. Hooky.”
I adjusted myself, ready to catch flailing arms or defend myself if he woke violently. It took one gentle touch to his shoulder to bring him awake. I caught his arm before it could connect with my chest.
“It’s Wendy. You’re in your room on the Death’s Right Hand. No one’s attacking you.” After a moment, I added, “Presently, at least.”
A rough breath left his chest and he fell back to the bed with a groan, covering his face with his hand. “This is unsavoury.”
I rolled my eyes, loosening my grip. “Don’t be a baby. We all have nightmares; they’re nothing to be ashamed of, Hooky.”
He dropped his hand, his eyes slitted when they landed on me. “Have I threatened to kill you for the use of that name recently?”
“Not recently,” I replied with a little smile. “You’re going soft on me, captain.”
Exasperation entered his black eyes but it melted into something hazy and heated by the end. I raised an eyebrow, leaning closer.
“I think you like me calling you captain, don’t you, captain?” I made sure to purr the title, to wrap my lips around it like a caress, and was rewarded with fiery desire entering his eyes.
“Don’t test me, mutineer,” he replied, his voice full of gravel. “Not tonight.”
“Cards on the table—” I began.
“You cheat at cards,” he muttered.
“I do fucking not,” I growled, shoving his shoulder. “Cards on the table, nightmares are vicious things that sink their teeth in deeper than sharks, and they can only be beaten by one of two things.”
He sighed, rubbing his face with a hand that trembled. “Let me guess. You’re going to explain them to me.”
Aw, he knew me so well.
“Option one. We have a very heartfelt heart-to-heart, and I help you process your demons the way Joanna helps me process mine after a nightmare.”
“A flagrant overuse of the word heart in that sentence,” was his only remark.
I prodded his chest. “Option two. We fuck the absolute life out of each other until we can’t think, let alone remember demons and nightmares and trauma.”
He tilted his head, staring at me a little too long. “What makes you think I want to fuck you?”
I let a smile play with the corners of my mouth and pulled the covers back before he could stop me, taking hold of the erection I’d felt through the plush material. “This,” I said with a flutter of my lashes.
“Astute,” he remarked, his nostrils flaring. “Move your hand, Wendy.”
I made sure to squeeze his base before I stroked up and down his length, my smile deepening at the thickness of him. I was a little obsessed with the way he slept naked.
“You know that’s not what I meant,” he groaned, but pulled the covers all the way off, shoving them against the wall as he hauled me up his body. My hand ended up splayed across his chest, his skin hot against my palm, and a flutter went through my belly when my pussy landed over his cock, only the fabric of my trousers between us. The subtle sway of the ship rocked me over him, stroking my clit with his tip. I sank my teeth into my bottom lip at the feeling.
“Goddamn,” he groaned, grabbing a fistful of my hair and dragging me down for a bruising kiss. “You’re determined to ruin me, aren’t you?”
I brushed my lips over his, as soft as feathers. “I just think you’d be really pretty ruined.”
His laugh travelled all the way down my spine and pooled between my legs. “Oh, darling. You’re the one whose ruin is near.”
I caught his bottom lip between my teeth, delighted by the flash of heat and warning in his black eyes. Running my tongue along the places my teeth had marked, I surged forward the moment his mouth parted on a groan. He was mine to taste, mine to consume, mine to claim.
“Get this thing off,” he growled in that gravelly, inhuman way that made me hot and cold at once. He pulled at my shirt until I helped him remove it, and he showed a blatant disregard for the garment by throwing it across the room, reaching for my trousers with a wild impatience that made my blood spike and heat burn like a furnace inside me. “And these are an insult to my every sensibility,” he growled, fighting with the fastenings single-handed.
When I moved to crawl off him to remove them, his hand fastened to my hip, denying me a single inch of space from him.
“You’re like one of those dogs who wants to play fetch but refuses to relinquish the ball.”
“A dog,” he repeated, his voice quieter, deeper. Hairs pricked along the back of my neck, a delicious fear joining my pleasure.
“A very cute dog,” I assured him, executing a magic trick by wiggling out of my pants, one leg at a time. When I settled over him, the hot velvet of his cock stroked over my bare pussy, and we both groaned.
There was no illusion that I controlled our kisses this time. Possessive fingers wrapped around my neck, bringing me down for a biting, sucking kiss that made me throb and drip all over him. I was so aroused it hurt, so needy I rolled my hips, trying to get him inside me. The tilt of the ship thwarted me when I was so close, the Banshee itself a damn cockblock.
“Needy little mutineer,” Hook laughed when my hips jerked at the way he sucked my tongue, scraping his teeth to make my heart race. Every last scrap of pain in my body vanished, my injuries forgotten. “Your body’s begging for my cock. You might be a killer and a thief but one kiss and you’re mine, aren’t you?”
His hips rolled against me in a way that made my breath catch, answering his taunt far less important than giving myself over to the relief and pleasure that every stroke of his cock gifted my clit. I gripped his shoulders, the heat and strength of him like a drug when mixed with pleasure. I matched his movements without conscious thought, my eyelids low.
“Did I say you could stop kissing me?” Hook demanded, fingers tightening around my throat. His other arm banded across my back, muscles flexing as he controlled the motion of my hips. I was at his mercy, his to do with whatever he pleased, and that should have scared me, but I was far too desperate to feel that fear.
I kissed him with a roughness that mirrored the way I clasped his shoulders, the way I dragged my pussy along the hard length of his shaft. I would burn the feeling of his mouth into my tongue, bruise his lips as badly as he’d bruised mine. I nipped his bottom lip, teeth sinking a little too hard, and blood bloomed across my tongue, making me groan.
“Wendy,” he warned, his deep voice lighting up all my senses. “I said kiss me, not bite me.”
“I want all of you,” I confessed, sinking one hand into his hair, tilting his face so I could kiss him deeper, my tongue ruthless in its hot exploration. Hook’s hand found my nipple, tugging hard enough to make sensation spike from my breast to my clit. I refused to stop kissing him, letting the storm of stimulation drive me to madness.
He tore his lips from mine with a groan so low and bestial I almost came right there, turned on by the reminder of how easily could he have shifted to his monstrous form and wrapped me in constrictive, suffocating tentacles? 1
“Wendy,” Hook hissed like a curse, his voice sharp and soft at once. His thumb stroked my nipple as his gaze settled on my face, moving from my lust-hazy eyes to my flushed cheeks to my swollen lips as I grazed the bottom with my teeth.
“Fuck,” he grunted. He flipped us so suddenly that I was under him before the room stopped spinning. On all fours, Hook positioned me how he wanted, my ass propped high, my elbows keeping my chest off the bed. “Hands on the headboard, darling.”
A wave of heat went through me, gathering heat and fire the lower it kissed my skin, until my pussy clenched around air, desperate for him. I reached up and wrapped my fingers around the cool wood of his headboard, a shiver raising goosebumps on my spine as I waited, unable to see him, to predict his next touch.
I arched into his touch as he mapped the goosebumps on my back with his wrist, travelling lower, lower, and stopping before he could graze my pussy where I so badly needed touch.
“You’re so beautifully responsive,” he said with reverence that made me melt. “Normally, I would reward such good behaviour by giving you three orgasms first, but this is what bad girls get for calling me a dog.”
A cry ripped from my lips and bounced off the low ceilings when he palmed my ass in his rough hand, the head of his cock brushing my entrance with a split second’s warning before he drove into me. The sudden stretch burned, awakening every nerve in my body, diverting every ounce of brain function to the sensation. My head dropped, my forehead hitting the pillow as I panted. Hook’s legs brushed the backs of mine as he withdrew and drove deeper with a grunt. It took three more before he was buried from hilt to base, and by then I’d completely forgotten how to do anything except grip the headboard and pant moaning breaths.
“Good girls,” he told me in a rumble, “get slow, patient love. Bad girls get fucked rough and fast. Bad girls get cock so deep they can feel it in their guts.” To emphasise his point he slid out all the way and thrust in an explosive use of power, hitting so deep that my eyes crossed.
“Hook,” I gasped, my breaths coming faster, the way he handled me and spoke to me almost unbearable. My clit ached, pleading to be touched.
“No,” he said firmly. “Good girls get their way. Bad girls take what they’re given.” He increased his pace, not softening the roughness of his treatment, making sure I felt him in every damn inch of me. “Bad girls get fucked like whores.” He leaned over me, my back arching at the feeling of hot skin on mine, the contact fulfilling a need I usually tried to ignore. Lips brushed my ear, hot breath sending another shiver through me. “And bad girls like it, don’t they, Wendy?”
I didn’t need to answer. My pussy clamped around him in a powerful spasm, pushing me closer. So close. A cool sense of warning rushed through me when Hook folded my fingers tighter around the head board.
“Better hold on tight, my bad girl. Feel that?” He ground his cock in mind-melting circles and my chest fell against the bed, my eyes slamming shut. “Feel how hard you make me? Even when you’re trying to kill me, I’m so goddamn hard for you. You drive me insane, Wendy.”
His teeth grazed my throat, canines pressing deep enough to threaten a bite. “And now I’m inside you, I don’t think I can ever go without you.” I tilted my neck when his tongue flattened to my pulse, sucking in a way that made my inner muscles bear down on him. We both groaned. “I’m never letting you go. You’ll never escape me.”
He slid out and drove back inside in a rush, setting a punishing pace that made me glad I had a good grip of the wooden slats. Hook fucked me with so much passion, so much obsession, that I felt it in each movement. Every deep thrust was a claim, echoed in his growling breaths. My thighs shook. His hand bruised my hip, hot against my skin as he lined my ass up in a way that adjusted the angle of his strokes so devastatingly. I began to fall apart, teeth biting my lip as moans poured freely.
“Hook, god, please,” I whined, so far from the woman who declared him her enemy and drove a sword’s blade through his shoulder, and I could not care one bit. This felt so good it was insane. I never wanted it to end.
“Look at you,” he groaned. “Taking all of me so damn perfectly.”
His breath hitched; the sound drove me to madness. His hand tightened on my hip, his other arm locked under my hips as skin slapped skin, the sound of him fucking me erotic and divine.
Heat crawled up my neck, my breaths panting, desperate. When his hand skimmed up my back, wrapping around my shoulder so he could fuck me harder, still grazing that euphoric spot inside me, I took one hand off the head board, my clit aching for stimulation.
Hook pinned my wrist to the pillow, a growl in his voice. “No. I told you, Wendy, bad girls don’t get what they want. You’ll come for me without a single touch to your needy clit.”
“I need it,” I whined, my eyelids shut tight, need a wild animal clawing through my skin.
“No.” His voice was so hard it hit me like a strike and I arched up from the bed, clawing at the pillow, my heart skipping when his fingers locked with mine. “What you need is to come for me, like I told you to.” His teeth scraped down my throat and my inner muscles squeezed around him. Oh god, I was so close, I just needed— “I can feel you there, Wendy. You’re so fucking tight, squeezing my cock like you’ll die if it ever leaves you. I know you want to come. I know you’re aching, so desperate. Oh yeah, that’s it, milk my cock, just like that.”
“Hook.”
“I know,” he said with mock sympathy, fucking me into the mattress, my moans sinking into the pillow. “It must hurt so badly. Poor little bad girl, so desperate to come. It’d take a single touch, wouldn’t it?”
“Please.”
“I just don’t know if you deserve me to touch your clit, darling.” His lips wrapped around my throat and sucked, and I shook, right on the edge, a frantic sound in the back of my throat. “But I suppose you were a good girl when you surrendered the captain title to me.”
My breathing broke into pieces. I squirmed under him, my hips rocking back unconsciously even as I sank my teeth into the pillow, overloaded with sensations and denial.
“Please.”
His fingers squeezed mine before they slid under my hip. “I’ve got you, darling.” His fingers weren’t gentle when they finally touched me, massaging my clit with enough pressure to make my breath catch and stars explode behind my eyes. I came with that single touch, my climax so powerful that my eyes rolled all the way back. “That’s it, that’s my girl, come for me.”
I couldn’t stop if I tried, especially when Hook exhaled a curse and buried his teeth in my shoulder, his cock going wild inside me as he followed me over the edge.
“Fuck,” he chanted against the skin. “Fuck, fuck.”
I forgot how to breathe, a living star inside my body, every sensation alive in me. I was addicted to the feeling of him coming inside me, my pussy squeezing over and over, the waves of pleasure never-ending. It was everything I’d needed, everything I secretly dreamed it would be when I thought of Hook, alone with my thoughts at night.
“Goddamn,” he groaned after a long, long minute, rolling onto his back and pulling me on top of him. I splayed there, shuddering with aftershocks, my eyes screwed shut. “God fucking damn, Wendy.”
When I remembered how to make sounds with my mouth that weren’t whimpers and cries, I laughed, stretching against him, a deep satisfaction working through me until I was limp and content.
I patted his chest. “You’re not too bad yourself, captain.”
His hand wandered up and down my back in slow, languorous strokes, hypnotising me into a state of bliss. “I meant what I said. You’re mine now. There’s no escaping.”
“With dick that good, who wants to escape?”
He snorted, a kiss brushing my temple. “Although I don’t mind if you want to challenge me every now and then. That fight on the deck was so hot it’s seared into my memory.”
“Mm,” I agreed, a smile on my face. “I won that fight, by the way.”
His laugh was loud, his voice freed of a weight it usually held. I opened my eyes, dying to see his face, to know how good laughter looked on him—true laughter. His eyes were bright, black irises shining like silver, and his mouth pulled into a warm smile. “Darling, we both know I won.”
“Damn,” I breathed. “My pussy must be incredible. It’s addled your mind.”
“Ha. Ha.”
I grinned, matching his smile, a strange lightness to my body that never usually accompanied sex, even with great orgasms. It was him, and whatever magic he’d worked on me. And he called me a witch.
Light fingers stroked up my spine and dove into my hair, angling my face so he could kiss me, slowly this time, exploring me with an affection and tenderness that made my chest full. I only drew back for air, and then we were kissing again. He hardened inside me, sending a zip of thrill through me. I began to ride him slowly, content to take my time, to make this one last longer than ten frantic minutes.
Neither of us brought up his nightmare, or the name he’d cried out in plea, or the shadows I’d seen in his eyes. They were gone now, so I was happy to pretend they’d never existed. At least until tomorrow morning.
“Slower,” he growled when I began to circle my hips faster. His hand found my waist, thumb stroking circles on my skin. “That’s it, nice and slow. This time you’re—”
He cut off abruptly and both our heads snapped towards the door when the ship’s bell began to ring, violent peals cutting through the night.
When shouts of alarm followed, I swore colourfully and climbed off Hook’s cock, giving it a remorseful glance as I reached for my discarded clothes.