10. The Beauty in Begging #2
He pushed into me in one long, devastating stroke, and the sound that tore out of me was nothing short of obscene.
He swallowed it with his mouth, groaning into the kiss as he seated himself fully, stretching me, filling me, until there was no part of me that didn’t belong to him.
For a moment, neither of us moved. He just held there, buried deep, his forehead dropping to mine as a fine tremor ran the length of his body.
“You feel,” he breathed raggedly, “like something I was never meant to deserve.”
My heart cracked clean down the middle.
“You have me,” I told him, echoing his own words back, sliding my hands up into his hair. “All of me. So, stop being so damn noble about it and move my king.”
A breathy laugh escaped him.
“As my queen commands.”
Then he began to move, and every clever thought left in me scattered to the four winds.
He set a rhythm that was nothing like gentle.
Deep and demanding and relentless, each drag of him pulling sounds from me I had no hope of containing, while that low, devastating voice poured filth and praise into my ear in equal measure.
Telling me how perfect I was. How well I took him.
How long he had ached to have me beneath him again, just like this, falling apart around him with his name on my lips.
And the whole time, those eyes never left mine.
I kept mine open too, even when the pleasure built so fast and so fiercely that it would have been easier to let them fall shut.
Because he had asked me to. Because there was something almost unbearably intimate about watching him watch me.
About seeing every flicker of hunger, wonder, and devotion play across his face as he took me apart piece by piece.
“That’s it.” His hand slid beneath my thigh, lifting, changing the angle until I saw stars. “Let me see you, little warrior. Let me see what’s mine.”
It was the word mine that did it.
The first peak hit me like a wave breaking, sudden and shattering, and I cried out as it rolled through me.
Atlas groaned at the feel of it, his rhythm faltering for the briefest moment before he composed himself and pushed me straight through the climax.
Refusing to let me come down, building me back up before the last of the tremors had even faded.
“Again,” he ordered roughly. “I want it again. I could watch you fall apart a thousand times and never tire of it.”
“I can’t…” I gasped, even as my body called me a liar, already winding tight once more.
“You can.” His mouth dragged along my throat, my collarbone, never once dipping lower than he should, never once asking me to move in any way that might turn me from him. “You will. You’re going to give it to me again, Alexandra, because your pleasure belongs to me now, and I am a greedy king.”
Somewhere in the haze, a small, watchful part of me stayed grateful for that. Grateful that he kept me here, beneath him, face to face, my spine pressed safely into the mattress, and the scar Riley had branded me with was hidden there.
He didn’t know.
He couldn’t know.
Not yet… not tonight.
Not when I had no idea how to tell him that the same darkness twisting through his brother had carved its mark into my skin.
So, when his hands roamed, I guided them.
When his grip shifted as though he might roll us, might turn me, I tightened my legs around him and pulled him back down, kept him exactly where I wanted him.
Where it was safe.
And if Atlas noticed at all, he only seemed to take it as eagerness, rewarding me with a deeper thrust and a groan of pure approval that chased the worry clean out of my head.
“Good girl,” he rasped. “Just like that.”
The second peak built faster than the first, coiling tight and low until I was clinging to him, nails biting into the broad muscle of his shoulders, his name a broken chant against his skin.
He worked me higher with every stroke, every filthy word, every press of his clever fingers between us, until I hovered right at the edge, trembling, desperate.
“Eyes open now,” he reminded me, his own control visibly fraying now, his jaw tight, his breath ragged. “Look at me when you come for me. Let me have it.”
So, I did.
I held his gaze as the next wave crashed over me, and the look on his face as he watched me shatter, the awe and the hunger and the helpless adoration of it, sent me higher still.
Only then, only once he had wrung every last tremor from my body and seen each one with his own eyes, did he finally let himself follow.
“Alexandra!” My name left him like a vow torn from somewhere deep, his whole body going taut as he buried himself to the hilt and spilled into me with a groan that I felt in my bones.
The markings across his skin flared crimson, the bond surging bright between us, and for one suspended moment, there was nothing in either world but the two of us.
Both lit from within and wholly, impossibly each other’s.
Then he collapsed over me, careful even now to brace most of his weight on his forearms, his chest heaving against mine.
For a long while, neither of us moved.
The fire crackled. Beyond the windows, the unfamiliar stars wheeled slowly across a foreign sky. And I lay there, thoroughly wrecked and entirely content, with a king’s heart pounding against my own and his breath warm against my neck.
“If you tell me that was merely adequate,” he murmured eventually, “I will be forced to do it all again until you revise your review.”
A laugh bubbled out of me, weak and helpless.
“Is that a threat or a promise?”
“With you?” He lifted his head, and the smile he gave me was so soft, so unguarded, that it made my chest ache. “I have learned they are very often the same thing.”
He eased away just far enough to gather me to him, rolling us both until I was tucked against his side, my cheek over the steady thunder of his heart and my back, mercifully, turned to the shadows of the wall rather than the man.
One arm wrapped around me, holding me close, while his free hand traced slow, idle patterns along my arm.
Over the faint silver lines of my scars, as though he couldn’t quite stop touching me now that he was finally allowed.
“Stay awake with me a while,” he said quietly, pressing a kiss to my hair. “I am not yet ready to share you with sleep.”
“You’re the one who exhausted me,” I mumbled, already losing the battle, my eyes sliding shut despite his protest. “Take it up with yourself.”
His chuckle rumbled beneath my ear, warm and low.
“Sleep, then, little bird.” His arm tightened around me, anchoring me against him as though even unconsciousness might try to steal me away. “I’ll be here when you wake. I will always be here.”
And wrapped in his warmth, his heartbeat steady beneath my cheek and his vow soft against my hair, I let myself believe him.
I let myself drift.
And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I slept without dreaming of the dark.
I woke to the sound of knocking.
For a moment I had no idea where I was. The bed was too soft, too vast, the warmth wrapped around me too solid and too alive.
Then it all came back in a slow, delicious rush.
The throne, the chase, the tearing of silk, the long, devastating hours that had followed.
Then I realised the warmth I was curled into was Atlas.
I lay facing him, my cheek tucked against the solid heat of his chest and my back turned to the cool, empty stretch of the bed.
His arm still locked possessively around my waist and his breath slow and even in my hair.
The knocking came again. Firmer this time.
Atlas groaned.
It was, without question, the most disgruntled sound I had ever heard a grown man make, a low, rumbling noise of pure aristocratic suffering that vibrated straight through me.
He tightened his hold and buried his face deeper into my hair, as though he could simply refuse to acknowledge the door’s existence, and it would eventually go away.
“Ignore it,” he muttered, voice rough with sleep. “Kings are permitted to ignore things. I’m fairly certain it’s written down somewhere.”
I bit back a smile.
“I don’t think that’s how being king works.”
“It is precisely how being king works. I make the rules. I have just made that one.” His lips found the curve of my shoulder, lazy and unhurried. “There. Settled.”
The knock sounded a third time.
Atlas said something then, low and vicious, in a language I didn’t recognize, and I didn’t need a translation to know it wasn’t fit for royal company.
“Your kingdom appears to want its king,” I said sweetly, thoroughly enjoying myself now.
“My kingdom,” he growled, “has appalling timing.” But he was already moving, pressing one last kiss to my shoulder before he rolled away with the air of a man being marched to his own execution.
“Do not move. Do not get cold. Do not vacate that bed. I will be returning to it, and to you, the very moment I have dispatched whoever is foolish enough to be on the other side of that door.”
“So commanding,” I teased, rolling to watch him.
Which turned out to be an excellent decision, because watching Atlas cross the room gloriously, unselfconsciously naked was rapidly becoming one of my favorite pastimes.
He snagged a white robe from a chair and shrugged it on, the fabric pulling taut across those impossible shoulders, and tied it loosely at the waist with all the urgency of a man who fully intended to be out of it again within minutes.
Then he hauled the door open with enough force to make whoever stood behind it think twice about ever knocking again.
“This had better be the gods themselves come to…” He stopped.
“Aster.”
I went very still.
“Apologies for the interruption,” came Aster’s voice, dry as ever and entirely unrepentant. “Truly. I can see I’ve caught you at a deeply inconvenient moment, my lord.” A pause, and I could hear the smirk in it. “Robe’s a good look on you, by the way. Very regal.”
“Aster,” Atlas warned.