Chapter 19
NINETEEN
Octavia didn’t surrender. She seized.
Her fingers twisted in his hair and dragged him down to her, and the sound he made — low, fractured, torn from somewhere below language — sent a bolt of heat through her core that obliterated every wall she’d built since the auction.
Every hostile session where she’d weaponized her tongue because touching him wasn’t an option.
Every night curled in her bed with sketches she hid like contraband, tracing the line of his jaw in graphite because she couldn’t trace it with her fingers.
Every breath she’d held when his scent hit her, every pulse she’d bitten back, every lie she’d told herself about anger and artistic detachment.
Done. All of it. Burned to the foundation.
She pulled him closer with her legs locked around his waist and felt the sheer impossible scale of him — the width of his chest against hers, the arms that held her like she was both precious and combustible, the heat radiating off his skin like a furnace door left open.
He lowered her onto the chaise with a deliberateness that bordered on worship, one hand cradling her head, the other spread across her lower back.
His body followed hers down, and the weight of him pressed the air from her lungs in a rush that turned into a gasp when his mouth left hers and found the hollow of her throat.
His lips were hot. His fangs grazed the tendon of her neck — not piercing, just there — and the razor edge of danger made her vision white out at the edges.
His hands found the hem of her shirt. She lifted her arms, and it was gone. His fingers found the clasp of her bra and dispensed with it with a dexterity that made her laugh once, breathlessly, before the laugh died when he pulled back and looked at her.
The candlelight caught his eyes — luminous now, burning toward white at the edges — and the way he looked at her was not the appraising gaze of the lord or the predator’s assessment of the hunt.
It was the look she’d seen for thirty seconds in a sunlit studio when he’d forgotten the mask: open, undone, a man encountering something he hadn’t let himself want and finding it looking back at him.
His hands came up. Cupped her breasts with a gentleness that defied their size, thumbs brushing across her nipples, and the sensation drew a sharp breath from her throat.
He watched her face as he did it — cataloging, learning — and when his thumb circled again with more pressure her head fell back and he made a sound low in his chest. The growl built beneath it, that low sustained frequency, and she felt it vibrate through his hands where they held her and into her skin and down through her core before his mouth had even descended.
His lips closed over her nipple and his tongue circled — slow, deliberate, with the focused attention he brought to everything — and heat speared straight down through her, pooling low and urgent.
She was already wet. The awareness of it hit her with the same involuntary honesty as everything else her body had decided without consulting her mind.
His hands spread across her ribcage, holding her steady as his mouth moved to her other breast, his tongue tracing the same slow circle before his lips closed and he pulled — a long, deliberate suction — and the sound she made wasn't polite and she didn't care.
Her fingers drove into his hair and held on.
He kissed down her stomach. Her breath came faster with each inch he descended.
The jut of her hip. The soft skin below her navel.
His hands found the waistband of her pants and pulled them down with her undergarments in one unhurried motion, and the air of the studio was cool against her skin for exactly one second before the furnace heat of him replaced it.
His lips found the crease of her inner thigh and paused.
He breathed. The heat of his exhale moved across her where she was most sensitive and her hips surged upward with a want so sharp it was almost pain.
A sound escaped her — his name, or the beginning of it, cut off when his hands pressed her thighs open with a firm, unhurried authority and he settled between them.
He looked up at her.
Those burning eyes finding hers in the candlelight. The question in them was also a statement — I see exactly what you need and I intend to give it to you — and her answer was her fingers tightening in his hair and pulling him down to where she was already aching for his mouth.
His tongue traced the full length of her, slow and deliberate, and the sound she made was nothing she recognized as her own voice.
He learned her the way he learned everything — with patience and absolute attention.
His tongue circled her clit in slow, tightening spirals, and she felt the sensation build the way pressure builds behind a dam — inexorable, structural, beyond her ability to manage.
Her hips moved against his mouth, and his hands on her thighs held her exactly where he wanted her.
The growl in his chest vibrated through every point of contact and she came apart when he closed his lips around her clit and sucked — a long, sustained pull that sent white light crackling through her vision and her cry fragmenting into syllables that might have been his name.
He worked her through every aftershock. Relentless. Thorough. Until her thighs were shaking and her fingers had gone slack in his hair, and she had to pull him up her body by the shoulders because she needed him inside her, now.
She turned onto her side and pushed him onto his back.
“Lie down. Here,” she ordered.
He went — surprised, she thought, or choosing to be surprised, which amounted to the same thing.
She swung her leg over his hips and settled her weight onto him, and watched his eyes go fully luminous, the ice-blue flooding with light until they burned like pale stars in his obsidian face.
“You’ve been sitting in my chair for weeks,” she said. Her voice came out low, steady, and certain. She reached for his belt. “Letting me look at you.” She worked it open. “My turn.”
A growl built in his chest. Low, sustained, the resonant bass of it traveling through his sternum and into her thighs where they bracketed his hips, and the vibration moved through her like a current — up through her core, her spine, the back of her teeth — and she gasped and gripped his chest harder because it didn’t stop.
He watched her feel it with those burning eyes, and the growl deepened.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” she managed.
“Yes.” Rough. Unrepentant.
Her hands found the buttons of his shirt and worked them open with fingers that shook, not from fear but from the fury of wanting something this much for this long without admitting it.
The fabric parted. Obsidian skin stretched over architecture that would have made Michelangelo weep—dense, carved muscle that shifted under her palms like tectonic plates.
She spread her fingers across his chest and felt his heart slamming against her hand, and the violence of that heartbeat told her everything his mask never would.
She got his belt undone. His hands came up to help, and she batted them away. “I said my turn.”
His hands dropped to the chaise. The muscles in his forearms corded with the effort of holding still, his claws extending slightly from his fingertips and puncturing the paint-spattered linen.
He was letting her. Choosing to let her take him apart the way she’d been taking him apart for weeks — with her eyes, with her brushes, with questions that stripped away the surface and found the truth beneath. Now she had her hands.
She learned him the way she learned a subject before she painted them.
Thorough. Unhurried. Her palms mapped the architecture of him — the dense plates of muscle across his chest and abdomen, the ridges of old scar tissue she’d glimpsed during sessions but never touched, the way his skin ran hotter than any fever she’d known, heat that poured into her hands and traveled up her arms and settled low in her belly.
He was still beneath her except for his breathing, which was losing its steadiness in direct proportion to how carefully she touched him.
She pressed her lips to a scar along his side. Felt his whole body seize.
“Octavia.” Her name in his wrecked voice. A warning. A question.
His expression stripped her bare—desire so raw it looked like anguish, restraint so tight the cords of his neck stood out like bridge cables.
She answered by wrapping her hand around the solid length of him.
The sound he made had no name in any language.
He was velvet-soft against her palm despite the scorching heat of him, the deep blue-black of his skin unbroken, and the size of him sent a complicated message to her nervous system that resolved, after a breath, into yes.
She ran her thumb along the length of one ridge.
His hips surged upward, his claws shredded the linen, and his eyes went so bright she could read her own expression in them.
Hunger. Certainty. No fear at all.
She leaned down and kissed the center of his chest, directly over the battering ram of his heart.
“I’ve got you,” she said. “Let go.”
Something unlocked in him. She felt it — a physical shift, the iron tension beneath her hands releasing by degrees as the man and the beast stopped fighting each other and simply were.
She sank onto him slowly, and her breath left her in pieces. His hands came up and found her hips, huge and careful and no longer pretending at stillness, and the growl in his chest dropped back down to that frequency that lived in her bones.