Chapter 62 Paige
PAIGE
I wake up in Rafe’s arms.
He’s curved around me, one leg through both of mine, and his arm heavy over my waist. He’s warm.
He’s also awake. I can tell it, by the steadiness to his breathing and the way his thumb smooths small, tight circles by my ribs.
“Don’t run,” he tells me.
“We’re breaking the rules,” I say. But I’m not moving a muscle.
He chuckles against my neck. His stubble tickles, and then there are his warm lips, right beneath my ear. He kisses me. Just once, like we do this all the time. “You love breaking the rules.”
“I do.” His hand grazes the underside of my breast. I feel heavy, and lazy, and warm down to my very bones. “It’s my favorite pastime.”
“No, it’s not. You like it. But it’s not your favorite pastime.” He kisses me again, on the sensitive skin of my neck. He did that in the dressing room too.
“What’s my favorite pastime, then?”
“Jumping into bodies of water.”
I laugh, and his arm around me tightens. “Yes. You hate that one.”
“Only when you’re unsafe.” He keeps kissing my skin, and I arch my neck. Warmth spreads from his touch. Little tendrils of electricity.
Against my back, I can feel his hard length. It’s nestled perfectly against my ass, and I press back a little.
He groans against my neck.
“You once told me to ignore it,” I murmur.
“I did. But you’ve never been very good at doing what you’re told.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” I ask. My fingers find his wrist, and I tug it up. He settles his palm fully over my left breast. The tennis court was hard and fast and perfect. We’ve never really done slow. It’s been fast and frenzied or timed and quiet.
“How do you always smell so good?” His nose is against my collarbone. “Always.”
His thumb brushes over my nipple, and it hardens beneath his touch. The silk slip I’m in is one I bought on that wild shopping spree, weeks ago, with his card. Back when I wanted him to hurt. It has thin straps and rides up easily on my thighs.
“We’ve never done this without arguing at the same time.”
“No, I suppose we haven’t.” His hands smooths down to find the length of my thigh. “Doesn’t mean I can’t still make you feel good.”
“Kiss my neck again.”
He chuckles and does what I ask. It doesn’t take long before I’m squirming against him and the hard cock so distractingly pressed against me.
He relents, finally, and pushes back the covers, revealing our legs lying tightly together.
Both tan, but his a shade darker, covered in a smattering of dark hair.
My red toenails are a shock against the white sheet.
“Off,” he tells me. “I’ve never had you fully naked.”
I smile at the order and shimmy my silk slip up and off my head. I try to turn, but he shakes his head, keeping me on my side.
He pulls down my thong. I lift up, and the black fabric makes it halfway down my thighs.
“There we go,” he mutters, and returns to press his long body tight against mine.
Just like we slept together, him the big spoon and I the little, but with his hand coming to bury itself between my stacked legs.
It shouldn’t work. But it does, his fingers finding my clit and rubbing it steadily while he lavishes my neck with his hot mouth.
“You know how much I love this, right?”
“You’re going to have to be more specific.” My breathing is coming fast, with my clit under a barrage of his movements.
“Your pussy,” he says. “Is that more specific?”
My breath hitches. “Um. Yes.”
“Do you know what I told you in French the last time I fucked you?”
“No.”
“How angry I was at us both for not doing this earlier.”
I groan, wanting to turn. There’s no movement, and everything inside me is begging for movement. That beautiful rush of feeling of moving limbs, of losing myself in him, in us. In this.
“I’m going to fuck you slow now. Can you take that, darling?” He kisses me, my neck turned back to meet his lips. There’s a building inside me that needs more.
I nod against his kiss.
I’ve rebelled against his orders everywhere else, but here, I find them oddly comforting. “My perfect wife,” he tells me. “Look at you behaving.”
“Don’t get used to it,” I murmur, but I’m warm inside from his words.
His hand grips my top leg, and he lifts it up as much as my pulled-down panties can allow. Then I feel the nudge of his thick head against me, and he thrusts forward slowly, pushing inside me.
It’s a tighter fit this way.
When he’s fully inside me, hips flush, he groans. “Fuck. I’ve dreamed of this,” he mutters. “Every single time I’ve woken up with you in my arms like this.”
I can barely take it. The intimacy and the words and the want that threatens to swallow me whole. He’s so much. Covering my body and buried deep inside me. My skin feels taut.
I push against him, wanting him to move.
His arm tightens around my waist. “You can stay still,” he tells me. “Can you do that for me, Wilde? Just lie here with me.”
“Too slow,” I mutter, reaching to grip his wrist. His hand is back working patiently between my legs. He starts to thrust lazily into me from behind.
“It’s not too slow.” He kisses my neck and moves inside me in relentlessly deep strokes. Our bodies are so tightly locked together that it’s hard to move.
“I need… I need…”
“I know, darling.” His circles my clit. “I know what you need.”
His movements are studied, exquisite. A roll to his hips and the push of his length inside me. I’ve never felt so enveloped. He touches me from his lips at my neck to his calf by mine and his arm beneath my neck. It’s almost too much and not enough.
I reach behind me and hold on to his hip.
He’s right. I can be this still, but it’s torture, and it doesn’t take long before it brings me right to the brink of orgasm.
I love this feeling. The edge right before I come, the razor-thin moment of time where I’m nowhere and everywhere at once.
Where I cease to be, when it’s only my body and its sensations.
I come.
He holds me through it and then shudders through his entire body, still buried tight inside me. His own groan is muffled against my neck, and he holds me tight as he comes inside me.
I squeeze my eyes tight to stop the tears that threaten to leak out. I feel too hot all over and boneless, sinking into the mattress like a wrung-out towel.
“Darling,” he says, and brushes his hand over my cheek. “Darling, look at me.”
I shake my head. He groans and shifts me, pulls me so that I’m lying flat on top of his long body. My breasts smoosh against his chest, the warmth of his skin and chest hair, the heat of his length against my stomach. I bury my face against his neck.
“Don’t look,” he says, and a large hand cups my head. “But stay. Can you do that for me? Then we’ll go for a morning swim. Together.”
I nod against his neck. I’ve never come like that before.
Not in a frenzy, but in a slow, meandering walk toward intimacy.
His hands start stroking over my body again, not to arouse, but to soothe. I walk my fingers through his chest hair.
“I’m going to want to do that again,” he tells me. “You’re gorgeous. You know that, right? And you come so beautifully.”
I close my eyes, and it’s almost too much, the kindness. But it fills me up too and makes me want to cry.
“I’m going to eat you out later,” he murmurs against my hair. “I need your taste on my tongue. It’s hard to believe I’ve only done that once. What an oversight on my part.”
I laugh and turn to my side. “That can be arranged.”
“Mhm. Thank God.”
His hands continue to stroke. One of them finds the curve of my breast, and his ring glints in the sunshine. It’s not his wedding band. It’s the other one, the one I’ve wondered about.
“What is this ring?” I ask. I stroke over his hand and find the worn gold face of it. I wiggle at it until it slides right off. “I saw that the other guys had these too. Your friends.”
“Mhm. They do.”
I turn it over to face me. It’s a signet ring, with a B in the center. It’s worn, like it’s been on his finger for a long time. I turn it over. That’s when I catch the inscription on the back.
“Per dolum…? There’s something Latin in here.”
“Per dolum vincimus,” he says. His leg slides between mine, and against my hip, I can feel him starting to harden again. It makes me smile.
But he’ll have to wait a little longer. “This is from your boarding school? Belmont Academy.”
“Yes.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s not the school’s official motto. That’s per arduum floremus. Through Hardship We Flourish.” His lips find my neck. “We inverted it. Through Deceit We Conquer.”
“You did not.”
“Yes. James paid attention in Latin class.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. I already spoke three languages.”
“Show off.”
He chuckles and finds the edge of my ear with his teeth. “I didn’t have to work for them. Why this sudden interest in my past?”
“Who became friends with whom?”
He lifts his eyebrows. “So you want a history lesson?”
“I’m doing research,” I say primly, and reach down with my free hand to play with his hardening cock. He sucks in a breath.
“Well, if you’re going to do that at the same time… I saw West first. Hated him on day one. Then he stopped me from getting expelled a week later, and, well, he stuck around.”
“You tried to get expelled?”
“Yes. Wasn’t very successful at it.”
“Wow.” I think to his past. The dates, the timelines… “You went to boarding school right after the avalanche?”
He nods. For a long minute I don’t think he’s going to say anything else. But then he sighs. “I saw it as punishment, and I didn’t want to stay there. America was my mother’s home, and it was where I spent many summers, but it wasn’t home. And I knew no one.”
“Do you still see it that way? As punishment?” I turn on his arm and look at him. The sunlight dapples over his tan skin and disappears in the dark, inky swirls of his hair.
His eyes are a lighter shade of green in this light.
“I think it was a Hail Mary pass. My parents aren’t… weren’t… the best at emotions. They were heartbroken over Etienne. They didn’t know what to do with me. And they handed the problem to someone better equipped to deal with it.”
It’s not hard to picture him at fourteen, lanky and crushed and defiant. I don’t like that he was sent away. I don’t like that he’s spent half his life feeling responsible for the powers of nature.
I didn’t deserve to survive, he said.
Rafe’s thumb brushes over my lip. “Don’t be sad.”
“I’m not sure I like this boarding school.” I put the ring back on his hand.
“It saved me,” he says simply, and pulls me closer. “And I think it’s time I correct my previous oversight…”
I end up on my back, with his head between my thighs and all semblance of thought wiped from my mind.
He is very good with his tongue.