26. Briar
The tremble in Killian’s hands and the sheen on his forehead tell me everything I need to know.
As badly as he wants me, part of him still resists. He hews closely to an innate, rough code of honor and there is no doubt that bedding me behind his friend’s back violates it.
But then he slides home and all the air rushes out of my lungs. It feels like he’s rearranged all of my internal organs with his sheer size. Flesh that’s never been stretched before screams protest. Startled, I grip the back of his neck.
“Fuck, I love that, Briar.”
Not I love you, but close.
“Scratch me like that again. Use your nails.” He pulls back. There’s a beat of relief, followed by the resurgence of that aching sense of hollowness.
This time, when he fills me again, it doesn’t hurt. Still strange, but not painful. The third time, I understand. Pleasure rolls deep in my core, pulsing up my abdomen.
This is what I needed. This is the man I needed it from.
I let him know how much I love what he’s doing to me by scoring his skin with my nails, and discover that he was holding back. He grunts—he really does enjoy it when I’m rough—and thrusts hard, burying his full length inside me. Stars blot my vision. Pain and pleasure entwine in an intoxicating flood of sensation. I don’t know where he begins and I end.
The play of his shoulders beneath my hands would be enthralling in its own right. I could explore his body for days. Memorizing the primal way he moves. Mapping every scar. I don’t have days, at least not yet, so I greedily trace every part of him I can reach, drunk on the feeling of him.
The way his hips piston powerfully between my thighs, his movements tight and precise, raw and real. He captures my mouth and slides away with a grunt, his lips brushing my cheek and his arm pinned around my back. I let him take my weight. He’s strong enough to hold me. He’s my anchor in this storm, keeping me from losing myself entirely.
But suddenly, I do. A massive wave of pleasure rolls through my abdomen, stealing my breath as my back stiffens and my core pulses.
“That’s it,” he grits out, one hand braced on the rock beside my hips for balance as I lock my ankles around the backs of his thighs and cling to him with blind desperation. “Take everything, Princess. Take it all.”
When I can breathe again, he rights me slowly with a gentle kiss to my forehead.
“You didn’t…”
“We’re not finished.”
“Oh.”
He drags me off the rock and turns me around, shoving my shift down around my ankles before he bends me over and enters me roughly from behind.
“—gods,” I sob.
He hits new parts of me from this angle. I arch my spine, seeking more of him. He bottoms out with a low groan. My elbows lose the battle to support my torso and I sink down inch by inch, until he fists my long hair and drags my head up. This changes the way he hits inside me, but each stroke and tug of my hair unleashes something wild in me. I can’t claw or fight, only take, and gods, do I love the way he’s handling me.
Not like a fragile flower.
Like I’m strong enough to take it.
Strong enough to love every second of it.
“You don’t know what you do to me, Briar,” he says through clenched teeth.
But I do. He’s a monster, like me. The beasts are drawn to me, the beauty. My curse was terrifying enough to make my own family abandon me, and I feared they could cost me everything I held dear.
They still might.
I can’t be caged in Alistair’s castle. They’ll tear it apart to get to me. This is why Killian is meant to be mine. He is the one man strong enough to defeat them and stand at my side.
I can’t think enough to form words, but in this fleeting moment, face-down and naked on a mossy rock, I finally understand what brought us together—and what could yet tear us apart to the destruction of all Belterre.
He drags my hips back with a fierce grip on my hip. I bump my knee painfully against the rock and hiss, wincing. I’m too lost to truly feel it. I don’t know if I can take one more climax, but if I can get there before he does, I want it. “Close, Killian, I’m so close. Wait for me.”
“I shouldn’t,” he pants. “Not inside you.”
“Don’t you dare pull out.” I shift my weight onto one arm and twine my free hand around his neck to bring his face near mine.
“Couldn’t stop now if my life depended on it.”
His brusque admission is enough to push me over the edge a third time. I’m already weak at the knees from all this sex, and the force of this climax is enough to crumple me onto the rock. He yanks my hair and tenses, barely withdrawing between thrusts.
Killian releases my hair and leans over me, his manhood impossibly hard within me. He braces his hands on either side of my ribs and takes me like this, until a rush of hot fluid takes me by surprise.
It shouldn’t. I knew what would happen, but experiencing it is different. The idea of my belly swelling with his child rolls through me with a shiver of desperate need.
I brace myself partially upright, cold moss sticking to my breasts, as the enormity of what I’ve done dawns on me.
I could go to my marriage bed pregnant, and I don’t even care.
I have no intention of marrying Alistair. After this, there’s no way Killian will refuse to take me away from here. He’ll have to save me from my fate now.
Killian kisses my shoulder. My temple.
“You all right, Princess?”
“Never been better.”
I’m face down in moss, my hair festooned with twigs and bits of leaves, my knee bleeding, and already sore in places I didn’t know existed, but I finally feel whole. Despite my contentedness, the rocks are digging into my stomach and thighs. My hair is a tangle over my face, and there’s dirt everywhere. My dress is torn.
I can’t lay here trapped beneath Killian’s hard body indefinitely.
He withdraws, a graceless exercise that sends a gush of liquid down my inner thighs. Brushing away the dirt, embarrassment creeps over me. There is a vulnerability to letting another person put you in such a disordered state.
Killian’s thick raised skin was the bright pink of newly healed flesh when I last saw it. Now there are dark streaks embedded deep within the wound. Surprise hits me.
“Your arm.” I gesture to it. “Your scar doesn’t look right.”
Killian turns away and fastens his pants with the efficiency of a trained soldier. He snatches up his shirt and shrugs into it, watching me from the corner of his eye as I pull the shift up and start trying to find the ribbons to close the neckline. Like I’m a wild animal he’s suddenly wary of.
My stomach drops. I shouldn’t have said anything about his arm. He’s clearly sensitive about the injury. I don’t want him to feel as though the only reason I desire him is because he can protect me from monsters, human and animal alike, yet I can’t quite articulate what else it is that draws me to him.
I like his bluntness. After Alistair’s honeyed lies and the insincere flattery of the courtiers, Killian’s honesty is a breath of fresh air. He wasn’t kind to me at first, when I awoke on the mountain, but he was truthful when I needed it most, even here at Castle Belterre where I feel as though everyone is lying to me all the time. He doesn’t treat me like I’m stupid or foolish.
There is a sweetness in him, buried deep down. A wounded part of him that’s been roughly treated in life. He’s surrounded it with armor as thick as that scar, but I want to break it open and cradle that part of him in my cupped hands.
Yet he’s suddenly wary of letting me get that close.
He drags me in for a kiss, and the feeling that I’ve made a terrible mistake eases.
“I love you,” I whisper against his ear.
He kisses me hard and lets me go without responding. Dread surges back into my middle. Embarrassed, I hold up my torn dress and examine it ruefully. “Not much to be done for it.”
Should I be worried that Killian brushed off what I said? Or is he simply being his stoic right self, reluctant to put into words what he feels?
“We’ll tell them you were attacked.” He’s strapped on the dragon scale armor as though he needs to protect himself. From me. “It’s mostly true. We can show them the dragon’s tracks.”
I nod and play along. “You arrived in the nick of time. I was cornered. I fell. You fought the dragon valiantly and drove it off.” I ponder the timeline and finally come to a logical explanation for our prolonged absence. “I was upset and didn’t want to return because of the state of my dress.”
Killian sweeps a tendril of hair behind my ear. His gray eyes glimmer with emotion I want to believe in, but might be nothing but the reflection of a rising moon.
“They’ll believe it, or they won’t. Either way, we need to get back. We’ve been gone a long time.”
I clutch the shreds of my clothes and follow him wordlessly out of the forest.