Chapter 16
CONNOR
Raven stirring where she’s draped across my chest slowly rouses me from a deep sleep. A sleep blissfully free of nightmares; the type of sleep I’ve gotten used to since I’ve found it up here with this woman in my bed. It certainly eluded me when I’ve been here alone over the past few months.
Those demons that made me run from the homestead followed me up the mountain.
They were less insistent here, at least during the day when I could spend my time working until I was ready to collapse.
It kept my mind and body occupied. But when I laid my head down here, when I closed my eyes, they always returned.
Now, they’ve fled entirely—as long as she’s under me or over me.
Being with Raven has become the safe haven I sought up here on the mountain but couldn’t completely find.
And I have to leave her soon.
She slowly lifts her head from my chest, her golden hair falling over her pink cheeks, and heavy, thick lashes blink slowly as she gazes up at me from under them with sleep-hazed eyes.
They sparkle in the moonlight streaming in from the window above the bed, not a single sign of the hatred that used to reign them so completely when she looked at me
What stares back is a completely open woman.
No walls.
No sharp comeback sitting on the tip of her tongue.
I reach up and brush a lock of her hair behind her ear, letting my fingertips linger against her soft skin. “You okay?”
Raven nods, her eyes never leaving mine.
We’ve been cooped up in the cabin, lost in each other, since she followed me in and asked me to stay, but I have no idea how long we’ve been asleep. It just feels like I don’t have much time…
I’m going to have to get up and leave her.
I’m going to have to return to the homestead.
Far too soon.
She seems to sense it, too, because there’s a sadness in her gaze. One I only momentarily appeased by agreeing to stay one more night. For some incomprehensible-to-me reason, the woman who couldn’t wait to get away from me only a few weeks ago now desperately wants me to stay.
It’s impossible, though.
The story has to get out, not just for the people on McBride Mountain, but for everyone the Lorells have hurt over the years or will in the future.
Raven lowers her head and lightly presses a kiss against my chest.
My whole body thrums to live at that gentle brush of her lips, at the promise it holds. I never thought anything this woman would do or say could bring me to life like this, could make me feel like I’m truly living with just a whispered word or light touch of soft skin.
I’m in so much fucking trouble…
It has nothing to do with the story on that drive and everything to do with the way Raven is looking at me right now.
She feathers another kiss across my chest.
“Mmm…” My little groan fills the cabin, and she continues her exploration across my pecs and down over my abs. Fuck. Every brush of her lips tenses my body even more, and I slide my hand into her hair to tug her head back up and force her to look at me. “What’re you doing, Firefly?”
A lazy grin spreads across her lips as she tips her face down and finally makes it to my hardening cock. “I would think that would be obvious.”
Her tongue darts out along the base of my shaft, and I groan again, this one full of warning as my fist tightens in her hair.
For all the times we’ve been together sexually since we’ve been up here, she’s never done this.
Not because I didn’t want her to, but because I’ve been so obsessed with having my head between her legs that I didn’t give a fuck if hers ever went between mine.
But now the thought of this woman having her mouth wrapped around my cock is almost too much to bear.
I desperately want it…
Yet I’m terrified of it at the same time.
Because I won’t have any control once her mouth is on me.
I can barely restrain myself when I touch her or when I sink my cock deep inside her slick cunt, and her mouth is her most destructive asset. It always has been. On me…it will be positively lethal.
The gleam in her eyes tells me how badly she wants to do this, probably for that very reason. She knows exactly what sucking my cock between those lips will do to me, and she wants to put me in that position. She wants that control.
Why is it so damn hard to say no to her?
It’s what I should have done earlier when she asked me to stay.
I had no problem denying her when she objected to being brought up here.
Hell, I was prepared to tie her up and drag her literally kicking and screaming if I had to, but any will power I may have had when it comes to Raven seems to have fled with her soft touch and wet mouth on my skin.
I slowly release my death-tight grip on her hair, and she shifts up, dragging her tongue along the underside of my quivering length.
My hips buck up wildly, and she grins as she reaches the head and slowly swirls around it, flicking the tip of her tongue across the bead of precum already beginning to seep from it.
Fuuuuck.
That one move is enough to make my balls draw up tight.
A satisfied moan slips from her lips. “I can taste both of us on you.”
Holy fuck…
Her eyes flick up to mine again, and what I see there steals my breath. “We taste incredible together.”
Jesus Christ.
This woman will be the death of me.
I have no doubt.
One way or the other, Raven Perry will be my destruction.
As she slowly eases down on my cock, taking me deeper and deeper into her hot, wet mouth, I drop my head back and enjoy the sensation of being utterly decimated by this woman.
My hand tightens in her hair again, searching for anything to cling to in order to keep me from losing control and violently fucking her nuclear mouth the same way I did her cunt that night in the woods.
She moans around me, the vibration enough to make my hips buck and drive me even deeper down her throat. But she doesn’t gag. She doesn’t fight it, she just groans and swallows.
Any ability to form a thought let alone a coherent sentence flees as the muscles of her throat ripple along the head of my cock.
Raven takes me deeper than I knew possible, until her lips brush against my pelvis, then she retreats slowly, wrapping her hand around my shaft as she does, only to suck me back down again.
“Fucking hell, Firefly…”
Those strangled words barely leave my mouth before she does something with her tongue against the underside of the head of my cock that makes a trickle of come drip out.
I clench my teeth, fighting the release.
Fighting her.
Because I am not ready for this to be over.
I open my eyes and glance down, and with her hair spilling to one side, her head moving between my legs, and my cock disappearing between those perfect pink lips, she’s a vision of pure fucking ecstasy.
Grasping her chin, I hold her in place with my cock pressed all the way to the back of her throat. “You have no idea how many times I fantasized about shutting you up this way.”
Her eyes flare wide, but it isn’t just heat in them. It’s a challenge, and I apparently just threw it down. Whatever she had planned for me when she slid down there, it appears to have changed with my words.
I release her, and she slowly eases back off my cock, her lips glistening as she feathers them across the head.
“You know, Connor…” She trails her tongue along the underside of my length again, all the way up to the tip to flick it across that hyper-sensitive spot right underneath the head. “When you say things like that to me”—her gaze cuts to mine again—“it reminds me that we’re mortal enemies.”
Fisting my hand in her hair again a little too tightly—tight enough to make it hurt, to make her really feel it—I growl low. “Are we?”
The question hangs in the thick, sex-scented air between us.
It’s the one I’ve been asking myself more and more, but after hours, days, weeks spent up here with her, I don’t have a fucking clue how she really feels about any of this. I don’t even know how I do.
I’ve spent years watching Raven fuck different men in McBride Mountain. Never in anything even resembling a serious relationship. She seems to enjoy sex for the sake of sex. The pleasure is her focus, the release. And that’s likely all this is for her.
A momentary ceasefire so we can redirect at the greater enemy.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that bullshit…
Looking into her eyes now, I can’t tell. She doesn’t respond, either. Doesn’t attempt to offer an answer that might alleviate some of the tension. She just licks down one side of my cock and up the other side, making my entire body tense and bow up toward her.
Apparently, that is my answer.
Everything that’s happened between us has only been because we were up here, and as soon as we return to civilization, we’re going to go back to the way things were.
That somehow makes tonight even more meaningful, and I understand now why she wanted me to stay. Because she wanted to have this one last opportunity to torture me like this before we went back to not being able to be in the same room together without fighting.
Raven smiles coyly at me. “You know what enemies have to do, don’t you?”
I shake my head. “No.”
She lightly grazes her teeth over the head of my cock, and I almost come instantly. Only that deep-seated instinct to defend myself against her keeps me from blowing my load straight down her throat. Her hand slides up on the bed, and she grabs my balls, squeezing them tightly.
“Fuck!”
My strangled cry floats through the cabin and she chuckles low, a sinister sound from a woman like her.
“They have to get under each other’s skin. Torture each other any way they can. They have to do whatever it takes to win.”
Panting now, barely able to catch my breath, I tug her head to the side. “Is that what you’re doing now?”
She rolls my balls in her hand. “No. This is just for fun.”
Fun.
Raven tilts her head back down and sucks me all the way to the back of her throat, and I resecure my grip in her hair as she starts a slow rhythm of hard, tight suction, and then slowly sinking back down.