Chapter Twenty-Four
Why hadn’t he done this sooner?
The beratement was real and painful in every one of Apollo’s synapses, especially as he unveiled every new inch of the woman’s body with his careful ministrations.
Very careful.
Since he’d never tried this before, stripping a human by singeing the garments with intense light instead of his actual fingers, he proceeded with painstaking caution—and fixated interest.
“Now what was that you were saying, Little Monster?” he crooned. “Go ahead. I’m all ears.”
And she was all of everything else.
Drenched skin. Strained limbs. Stormy beauty. Open surrender.
A fantasy he’d never had, because even his imagination wasn’t this fucking good.
“W-What?” she blurted, almost as if she’d heard his musing, until she swung her dazed gaze over.
Her face, dripping with rain and shadowed by the thunderheads, was also painted in dark hues that had nothing to do with the downpour.
Holy shit. Did his freaky little beastie actually like his bold new move?
Were her lips parting wider with desire?
Did her lungs pump harder, struggling from more than just air, crowned by nipples that were almost gothic finials from passion?
“You heard me.” His voice was a matching grate as he ordered his legs to carry him forward, every step an exercise in erotic torment. His fingers twitched from the craving to sharpen her breasts even more. “I said speak, woman. Exactly what were you going to repeat to your god on high?”
Beneath his scrutiny, her lips trembled with a misty smile.
Though the tremors resounded through her body, especially the muscled stretches along her inner thighs, she jutted her chin to align her gaze with his.
Her greens were as startling and spellbinding as the moment she’d first pierced him with their focus, on her back in a pool of her own blood.
She was just as slick and slippery now—only twice as trapped for his ultimate capture.
“Ah. Okay. Let me try to remember,” she uttered then, her wry sarcasm poked into little spaces between the breathy words. “Wasn’t it something about me being wet and pleading and uncomfortable?”
Against his every inner decree to refrain, a smile tapped the edges of his own mouth. It lingered too long to hide from her, but he also made sure she noticed the lusty tension beneath his jaw.
“And are you, right now?” he derided, once more close enough to frame her chin with a determined tug of his fingers. “Wet?”
Her mouth opened more. As he slid his thumb in, along the pad of her welcoming tongue, she nodded.
“Hm. And pleading?”
She closed her mouth around his digit. Rolled her tongue up and down its length. Then whimpered out her answer.
Apollo forced in a steadying breath before concluding, “And . . . uncomfortable?”
Irowen released his thumb. But he kept it close, pushing at the pads of her lips, as she husked, “Not enough.”
Well, damn.
The words might have left him audibly, as well, but he wasn’t sure.
Not when the sky itself conspired with this enchantress, who’d surely been staging a masquerade on him these last twelve hours.
Her brush with death had to have been a game, her “fatigue” and “heartache” mere ploys to delight in his wonderment now . . .
As lightning blinked boldly from the clouds, exposing a new vision of her nudity.
The dripping tracks along her form, like phosphorescent vines beneath a full moon, outlined her curves and muscles in bright shades of blue and red and gold. He was stunned and immobile, while every bright path was an entreaty to reach in and touch.
Touch . . .
Please, Lordship of Light.
Touch . . .
“Irowen,” he implored in return. Fuck. “What . . . is . . . ”
While his logic assembled the answer—this was what his paranormal touch and the lightning charges on the air had wrought—deeper parts of his soul greedily stuck with the illusion.
Reality, whatever the hell that was right now, could wait.
For just this moment, in this vast gale and this timeless garden, she was his unique, exquisite creation: a storm siren for him alone to woo and worship, capture and claim.
“Oh, my goodness.” Soft strands of awe filled her voice when she raised a leg and circled it around his waist. “Look. You spawned a new Glow Worm.”
He chuckled and palmed her cheek. “No, Sweetheart. I created a new butterfly.”
She sighed past a smile, and he captured both with his own lips.
She was cherry-sweet yet sinfully spicy, especially as she opened her mouth to accept him in full.
Her heated need was irresistible, pulling him to step in and crush his chest to hers.
His heartbeat thudded, matching the cadence of the clouds, as his cock borrowed more than its fair share of the electricity overhead.
When they dragged their mouths apart, he indulged a long moment to examine the uplifted angles of her face.
Rain and agony raced across her eyebrows, crunched the length of her nose, and gripped the planes of her cheekbones.
Still, she quirked up her lips in a sassy smile while roping her other leg around his ribs.
“A butterfly, eh?” she offered in a coarse whisper. “Then make me soar, Your Godship.” As if knowing what the words would do to him, she bucked the crux of her hips against that matching part of him. “I mean, I have to know if this boy glows too.”
Apollo lowered his mouth and took hers in another mushy but urgent coupling. Holy hell, what she did to every pore of his skin just from how she relished making out with him . . .
“With you, little Mothra, nothing would surprise me.”
She pushed her face up and nipped his bottom lip. “You going to let me see?”
He dipped his head, going for a punishing nibble of his own along her jaw. “You going to keep your promise and plead for it?”
She reacted exactly as he hoped. Her reply was gloriously glottal, fighting its way up her taut throat. “Please, Apollo. Will you take out your cock for me?”
“And then what?” he baited, worsening her wait with the slow, sonorous grate of his zipper tines saying goodbye to each other. “Should I use it to make you uncomfortable, sweet monster?”
“Oh, God.” Her gaze fell to where he scooped his stiff stalk out of his jeans.
Just those two words from her rain-stained mouth, and she erased any remaining soft spots between his balls and tip.
While the edge of his fly teased the former, he slid his palm up to the dark red bulb of his head, stroking it in a battle to relieve the pressure under his weeping slit.
Who the hell are you kidding about that one, dick brain?
The insult was painfully accurate. Every operating neuron in his head centered solely on his lust, swelling to degrees he’d never known with a lover.
If there was any shred of doubt about the point, she demolished it by hurling her bossy words even after he’d strung her up like a sex dungeon subbie—or like the helpless manhunter he’d originally found in that marble foyer.
Whether bloodied and prone or tied up and squirming, the woman refused to let him dent her spirit—
Unless he earned it.
Challenge accepted, my beautiful little kaiju.
Though he kept the verbal version of the vow to himself, he demonstrated the point with solid clarity: bringing more droplets to his cockhead with defined tugs.
“Well, no glow,” he muttered, “but I’ll work damn hard to make up for it.”
Her breath hitched. Her nipples puckered.
She parted her lips as if to throw back a matching quip, but he stole even that from her throat by working his length with artful twists.
Still, he didn’t credit himself for the new growth of the erection.
That magic was all Irowen, and the yearning siren entering her greens as she watched him work his milk along her swollen pussy lips.
“Oh, my . . . ” she panted out at last. “Apollo. Ohhh.”
Lightning flared again with perfect timing, brightening the trails of his pre-come along with the fluorescent trails along her inner thighs. The markings disappeared beneath her pretty patch of dark curls, as if pointing the way for him. Like he needed any damn guidelines.
“You want it?” he snarled softly, studying the entrancing planes of her face. As soon as she nodded, he went on: “You do? You want it to make you uncomfortable? Because this might be a little more than that, Monster.”
She huffed and flung back a needy growl of her own. “By your own father’s balls, Apollo. If you don’t fuck me right now, I swear I’ll—oh! Oh, ssshhhiii . . . ”
He grinned as she worked her mouth, fighting to voice her final emphasis but yielding to a strained shriek instead.
It was the perfect firework for the moment he rammed all the way in, dazzled by the naughty smack of his balls against her ass, as the heavens broke open in a new deluge.
He deepened his thrusts, driven by the tempest around them, breathing heavily on scents of pine and musk and lust.
By every inch of this huge sky, he wanted to pound her harder than the thunder.
Somehow he held back long enough to spread his fingers along her jaw once more.
“You okay?” he soughed, seeking the depths of her stare. The sexy little thing nodded with fast force.
“Y-Yeah.”
Her hurried stammer was his downfall. His dick swelled against her walls as he conquered her precious, pulsing sheath.
“Uncomfortable?” He had to know.
Beneath his suckling mouth, her neck undulated from a hard swallow. “Y-Yeah.”
He scraped his teeth down the line of her jugular. “Hurts?”
“A . . . A little. You’re . . . you’re so big.”
“So you want to stop?”
“No.” She dug fingernails into the meat of his shoulders. “Damn it, no way!”
“Then what do you want, Irowen?” He reared his head up and back, just enough to observe every line of her expression as he pumped into her with more purpose. “Tell me, Monster. More of . . . this?”