Chapter Fifty-Eight Patrick
She met him with teeth and nails. His tongue swept over the points of her canines and she groaned, dug her fingers into him, tried desperately, desperately to find purchase on something.
And his own hands? They were finally free of shackles.
He set them loose, and they fled from him, sprinting over the land of her, starved.
He let his thumbs weigh the underside of her breasts, let his fingertips trace ribs, felt the breath collecting in her sternum, the heat of her thighs, the swell of her hips.
All of this, he mapped again, as though recounting favored haunts, relieved to have arrived.
Relieved to languish there, a weary traveler.
He collected her gasps and stored them away in his lungs, and he thought, This is what greed is, what hunger is.
He felt as though he could drink those sounds of hers until they drowned him.
Only when he could no longer bear it did he let his hands venture down her body, over the soft planes of her stomach, the breath filling there, and expending, and finally, finally, into the valleys of her, the slick, hot center of her sex.
He made sure his mouth had closed over hers, so that he drank that whimper, too.
Her spine arched under the persuasion of his hand curved into her lower back. Their foreheads jammed together, and her hands pulled at his clothes, wrestling buttons away as though disconnected from thought.
“You’d better tell me to stop.” He thought he might die if she did.
“Don’t,” she said, with an urgency that bordered on madness. “Please. Please.”
And he was helpless to her, had been from the beginning. He was too drugged by her proximity to know if it was right or honorable or if he was merely sating a need, and afterward he’d feel like she owned yet another piece of him that he’d never retrieve, and he a piece of her.
But he was just a man like any other, and not a very good one, had never pretended to be.
He flipped her around so that her hands were pressed against the door, her arse to the aching ridge of his cock. He groaned without restraint.
He leaned down to her ear, and she whimpered. “Don’t beg, darlin’,” he said, and his hands ran over her backside. “Hard to stay gentlemanly when you beg like that.”
“I don’t want a gentleman,” she growled.
“No?” he said, playing with her clit now. Her head tipped back. A keening sound came from her chest, and he exploited it for a moment. “Do you want me to fuck you like this, then?”
“Yes,” she said immediately, trying to turn her mouth around to his.
He could have taken her against that door. Lord, but she looked like heaven. Arching back, her bare arse already rubbing, seeking. Her breasts flattening against the door.
But it wasn’t what either of them needed.
He withdrew his touch. “Get on the bed.”
She moaned in sufferance, but she went. She only ever listened to him when he had her like this—wound tight, thrumming, balanced on the tip of a blade.
He watched her perch herself on the mattress edge with that straight Artisan posture, that defiant Scurry chin, the blush betraying her courage, creeping up her breast to her throat.
He strolled languidly toward her, and it tormented them both.
He undressed as she had, without hurry, undoing his cuffs first, then one shirt button at a time. The suspenders next. Impatient, she reached forward and took hold of his belt, pulling it free from the buckle, and he chuckled.
Eager. She was always too fucking eager. Always testing the bounds of his control.
But those bounds were obliterated when she freed his cock from his trousers and pulled it past her lips. He gripped the back of her head on instinct and sucked air through his teeth. “Fuck,” he snarled. The sound seemed to break through the cage of his chest.
She pulled him further, her mouth too hot, too wet, her cheeks hollowing, and he felt it in every nerve ending of his body.
The muscles of his stomach contracted. Her wild curls freed themselves from their pins as his fingers delved into her hair.
She had the tenacity to look up at him, her tongue running over the underside of his length.
It was almost his undoing. He groaned. “When you look up at me like that, darlin’,” he said in warning, “it’s like darin’ me to ruin you. You understand?”
She pulled him deep then, so that he could feel the moan in the back of her throat.
And he could take it no longer. He pulled himself free of her mouth and fell to his knees, spread her thighs apart before she could stop him.
Her legs were already shaking, her lips glistening. Before he pushed his mouth to the inside of her thigh, she was already falling back onto the bed. “Please,” she was murmuring again. Always fucking begging. Lord, but she’d be the death of him.
Then he closed his mouth over her clit and sucked, tasted her again, finally. Every moment until now, he’d been deprived. He understood that now, how he’d only ever been fighting a losing battle.
Nina exhaled his name, and it was the sweetest song he’d ever heard. Before long she was trembling, her legs clenching. He felt her thighs contract beneath his hands as he held them apart.
“Patrick! I—”
She broke beneath him, pulsing against his tongue. Her fingers in her own hair. He waited for the waves to subside before he stood.
Patrick thought it wouldn’t matter if he saw her like this another hundred times, another thousand. The wonder of it would never dim. She was so beautiful, so utterly perfect that it sent pain through his chest and into his stomach. His cock ached unbearably.
He feasted on the small eruptions of desire in her eyes, need returning with every passing second. Desire doubling. He’d never be strong enough to resist her again.
“You need to work some of that anger out, darlin?” he asked, and she nodded. “Then you work it out with me.”
She made to back away then, slide herself farther up the bed.
Lay herself out for him like a goddess. “Ah, no you don’t, Scurry girl,” he said, and he scooped her up easily, felt her soft body slide against his, and he carried her to the windowsill, the lip just the right height, its position opposite the mirror, where she could watch him fuck her over his shoulder.
He planned on doing so until she was mindless, until she was slivers of herself. He planned on showing her just how ungentlemanly a miner could be.
Her back pressed to the glass of the window, and he rubbed the head of his arousal down her slit.
“What if someone sees?” she whispered, tits heaving with each breath, nipples so delectably rosy he could hardly keep from devouring them.
“Let them see,” he said, and he pushed himself inside her, watched her eyes widen and glass over. He pushed his hips up, and she gasped a curse, clawed for purchase on his back.
He groaned at the feel of it, deep within her again. All of her surrounding him.
“Lord, I’m a weak man when it comes to you.” He pulled out slowly, to the edge, then rammed in again, right to the hilt. Her legs squeezed at either side of his abdomen.
“Fuck,” she cursed, her head falling back to the glass.
Patrick pulled her chin down, so that she could see where they were reflected in the mirror, his whole body at her disposal, bending to her will. “You’ll keep your eyes open,” he said. “And watch what you do to me.”
He took her without apology then, pounding into her over and over without mercy, her mouth hinged open in that breathless O, her moans growing louder and louder each time he pushed inside.
“Patrick,” she said, her cheeks reddening, scandalized.
But moments later, she murmured, “More.” Then it came louder, something awakening inside her. “More.”
He pushed her thighs back, angled her to his advantage, growled in her ear all the ways she drove him to madness with nothing more than her presence.
He told her she was the strongest person he’d ever known, ever would know, and that he promised…
he promised they’d find what they were owed. He’d restore what was taken.
In answer, she kissed him, unrestrained, pulling him closer, her body undulating and meeting his with every thrust.
The window rattled, their pace increased, and he drove inside her like a man possessed, felt the walls of her sex compress around him in response.
And he exalted in the knowledge that this intensity between them had not been taken with everything else.
That some of what they’d built in Kenton had remained.
He imagined a time and place where the tethers of their souls had somehow restored.
Coalesced in the heat of her, it did not seem like such a wild fantasy.
Time became meaningless. Beyond the window, the sun was toppling over roofs. Somewhere in the Trench, the infantry were circling, closing in.
Patrick had forgotten it all.
“Patrick, I need to—” Her body was keening, rising.
“Just a little longer, darlin’,” he told her. “You can take it.”
Her thighs squeezed around him once more, her moans increasing in volume.
He felt heat burst in his lower abdomen, his own climax swelling in response to her, back arched, hips rolling, completely detached from reality.
He reached down to where they were joined and pressed the pad of his thumb to her clit. She became frantic, her eyes pinning to his. “Patrick!”
His mouth came over hers so that he could swallow her release, taste all that fire she was now made of, just like him.
She was burning alive, the walls of her cinching tighter, tighter, until she exploded, every muscle in her body taut with pleasure, his name a prayer on her lips. Unable to stand the rapture of it, Patrick allowed his own release to follow.
They came back to themselves slowly, but fused, their limbs still wrapped tightly.
He did not allow her feet to touch the floor again, as though she might descend through it and disappear, and she didn’t try to detach herself.
She only wrapped her arms around him, shaking slightly.
Puffs of breath fanned over his shoulder.
“I love you,” she said again, then pressed her lips against his collarbone and stayed there.
Eventually, Patrick took her tenderly back to the bed and laid her down. He covered them both with a blanket as though he could hold the rest of the world at bay with it.
Their mouths stayed connected for a long while after, neither willing to allow the havoc of the night to rush in. With their lips sealed, nothing that ought to be said could escape.
In his mind, whirring like a siren, Nina told him again and again that she loved him. And it felt like a salve, a drug.
A trap and a liberation.
In her sleep, she said his name.
Wide awake, he whispered that he loved her.