36. CHAPTER 33 #2
“Give it to me,” I ordered against her clit. “Come on my tongue, Léa. Don’t hold back.”
Her thighs squeezed around my shoulders, and then her pussy clenched, hard.
Violent spasms rippled around my fingers as she came, the orgasm ripping through her.
I watched her face as it hit—her eyes squeezing shut, her head tipping back, her mouth opening on a silent scream before the sound finally broke free.
It was every bit devastating. I fucking loved it.
I didn’t look away once. I wanted every second burned into my memory.
Only when the last wave broke and she sagged backward into the counter did I ease my fingers out and press one last open-mouthed kiss over her clit, licking slow through the aftershocks just to feel her twitch.
When I finally stood, her breath was uneven, her eyes half-lidded with hunger.
I pulled her closer, caught her face in my hands and kissed her again, slower this time, letting her taste herself on my tongue. She whimpered softly, the broken little sounds thrumming on my mouth, making my cock thicken.
I might’ve left it there. This was mercy enough for the both of us. The reset we needed. But the question that had been haunting me since the storm wouldn’t let go.
“How long has it been for you?” I asked almost breathless on her lips. Hoping she’d answer me this time. “And why did you run the first time I asked?”
She let out a shaky exhale, as if she’d been bracing for this moment.
“I ran because I was scared,” she confessed.
My jaw clenched. “Of me?”
She shook her head immediately. “No. Not of you.”
She swallowed as if what she was about to say felt heavy on her tongue. “ I was scared of letting you know—”
I slid my palms up her sides, my thumbs tracing the sides of her ribs. “Letting me know what, Léa?”
She looked at me intensely, weighing her next words…deciding how to open up to me.
“I’ve never done this before, Orion,” she said at last
The world stilled.
“This?” My voice was barely a whisper. Was she saying what I thought she was?
She held my stare. “I was scared you’d want to go further and I wasn’t sure if I was ready.”
Memories immediately clicked into place. How her body would sometimes tense under my touch The flash of panic in her eyes for a split second before desire won. I'd thought it was a lack of interest. I never imagined she was navigating completely uncharted territory.
All the ugly, calculated things I’d done—the surveillance, the cycle tracking, the meetings where my mother and the board spoke openly about heirs as if Léa were a prized thoroughbred suddenly felt… cheap. Small. Vile.
I had been hunting a woman I thought was playing the same dark games I was. I hadn’t realized I was trying to break someone who had never even been touched.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, and the reverence in my own voice startled me.
“I didn’t want to disappoint you by seeming inexperienced.” Her eyes dropped, that familiar stubborn tilt to her chin making an appearance even now.
Inexperienced. The word rang in the hollows of my mind. She thought her innocence was a flaw, while I was sitting here feeling the weight of my own sins pressing down on me.
“Inexperienced, hmm?” My mouth tilted despite myself. “Your mouth didn’t seem inexperienced the last time.”
She smacked my shoulder, scandal flaring in her eyes. “I’d done that before.”
Shit. I deserved that. Walked right into that one.
The done that before hit me where I didn’t like.
Suddenly, my brain was a riot of static and violence.
I was tortured by a flicker of an image—her on her knees for someone else, someone who wasn't me, someone who hadn't earned the right to breathe her air.
Heat flared, and possession took hold, a dark red curtain dropping over my vision.
I wanted to demand a name. I wanted to find whoever it was and make sure he never remembered she existed.
No. I forced the darkness back. Not tonight.
My hands rose to frame her face, my thumbs brushing the delicate ridge of her cheekbones. I needed to ground myself before I did something truly primal.
“You could never disappoint me,” I said gently. “Not like this. Not with this.”
Her breath faltered.
“I want you so bad. Way beyond human reasoning,” I admitted, the words scrapped raw from my throat. “But if you’re still not sure—”
“I am,” she cut in, confident, even with all the emotions pulling at us.
I swallowed, feeling my throat close up around the words. “You kept it all this time. Never gave it to anyone.”
The question hovered on my tongue—why me?
I wasn't the kind of man you gave your firsts to. I was the kind of man you survived. I was a monster covered in generational wealth and fancy titles. But I wouldn't ask. I didn’t want details of anyone from her past poisoning this moment. I didn’t care who they were.
I only cared that none of them had reached the core of her.
“If I ask what’s truly on my mind, I’ll want names,” I said, mostly to myself, “and that will ruin my mood.”
Her lips twitched, a tiny spark of amusement in the middle of my crisis.
“Not because I’m worthy of taking it,” I went on, because I needed it said aloud, “but because I’m selfish Léa. I want you to myself. All of you.”
I planted my hands on either side of the counter, caging her in until our eyes were level. “Knowing I'm about to be your first and your only does things to me I don't have words for.”
It made me feel like more of a bastard and, at the same time, more determined than ever to shield her from everything, even from myself, if I had to.
“Are you sure?” I asked again. My voice was a wreck. I was a man who took what he wanted, but for the first time, I was terrified of what I was about to hold. “Really sure?”
“Yes.” Her fingers reached up, holding onto the hair at the nape of my neck, gentle and terrifyingly sure. “I want to give it to you.”
My heart stuttered uncontrollably. It felt like a bird trapped in a cage of ribs. “Why?” The word felt raw, stripped of all the layers of armor I usually wore. “Because I’m your husband? Because you feel obligated—”
“There’s that,” she said, honest in a way that made me feel like a liar. “But mostly because my heart says so. It feels right.”
Her words cracked my heart wide open, and I was just a man again.
I’d entered this marriage with signed contracts and self-serving terms. A cold, calculated mission to secure an heir and keep my old habits. Yet, here she was, offering me something utterly irrational and unearned—her first time—because her heart said so.
She was handing me a diamond while I still kept the ugliest parts of myself out of sight.
“I don’t deserve you, Lea,” I groaned, burying my face in the curve of her neck, inhaling her scent with greedy, desperate pulls. “You’re so much trouble… but worth it. You’re worth every war I’m going to have to fight for you.”
Her fingers tightened in my hair, pulling me closer.
“I’ll give you the world,” I found myself promising against her skin. It was a reckless vow of a priest promising paradise while he was still tending the fires of his own hell. “I don’t know how yet. But I will.”
She pulled my face up and kissed me, savoring the kiss before deepening it. It was the kind of kiss that didn't just ask for a body, but for a soul. A simple yes with her mouth.
And in that moment, I knew it… I knew I’d burn the entire world to the ground before I let anyone touch a single hair on her head.
I slid my arms under her thighs and lifted. She yelped, her arms flying around my neck, as she folded into me perfectly.
“Where are we going?” she asked, breathless, her heart pounding hard between us.
“My bedroom,” I said. My voice was a low rasp, stripped of its usual calculation. I’d thought about this far too many times for it to happen anywhere else.
Her lips parted, forming a small, silent "o."
“Your first time,” I added, holding her gaze as I took the stairs, “is not going to be on a kitchen counter as some common afterthought. I didn’t wait six months to fuck you without thinking this through.”
Her lashes lowered, her eyes darkening with a look that mirrored the hunger tearing me apart. Trust. Want. All wrapped in one. There was also a trace of fear in there too, not because of me, but because we both knew there was no coming back from this.
I carried her up the stairs. The estate felt eerily calm. Everything was holding its breath.
The weight of her in my arms felt like the most natural thing I’d ever done, and yet the most reckless.
Six months of this marriage, six weeks of stolen glances and aching restraint, and it all came down to this. Her body pressed softly against my chest, ignited every nerve I’d kept locked behind a vault.
I wasn’t just carrying my wife; I was carrying the only thing in this world with the power to end me.
I reached the heavy doors of my room and pushed through them. The lock clicked behind us, and there was no running from this anymore.
I set her down gently on the bed. The same bed I hadn’t shared with anyone in over twenty years. The only exception, now, was her.
She lay there, propped on her elbows, watching me with those wide brown eyes as I knelt between her legs. My hands shook with the force of weeks—months—of pent-up need. I crooked my fingers into the edges of her lace underwear, the fabric soaked through, clinging to her swollen lips.
I dragged them slowly down her thighs, baring her completely. Her clit peeking out begging for attention, like it hadn’t gotten enough of my mouth already.
The air in the room became thicker, charged with the scent of her skin and her arousal. My cock strained painfully, and impatiently on my zipper,
She sucked in a breath as the sudden chill of the room hit her and a soft sound escaped her throat, half-embarrassed, half-needy. It shot straight to my groin, and I groaned in response, committing the sound to memory alongside every other piece of her I'd been hoarding in my head.
I forced myself to stop and look up at her.