Chapter 17 #3
“That’s right, foxglove. You take it. You take it because you came for it.
You walked into my house wearing nothing under your skirt and you sat at my table and you ate my food and you let me bring you up here and now you are going to take what you came for, all of it.
Every inch of me. Every fucking inch, foxglove. Take it.”
Fucking hell. A strangled noise comes out of me.
“Christ, you are tight,” he groans.
“Oh god.”
Oh god, oh god, oh god.
“You’re wet for me. You are dripping for me. Look at you.”
“I can’t, I—”
“You are going to come for me again before I come in you. Do you understand that?”
I make a feeble noise.
“Do you understand, Iris?”
“Yes. I understand,” I manage to say, breathless, heart hammering each word.
“Aye. That’s right.”
His hand leaves the post above mine. It comes down between my legs. His fingers find me where I am already swollen and wet and he works me with them while he fucks me, hard, the combination of his cock and his fingers and his voice in my ear undoing me in a way I didn’t think possible.
I come hard again. I come crying out against the post with my hands gripping the wood so hard my knuckles go white, and he fucks me through it. His voice in my ear has gone hoarse, and I’m afraid we might break the fucking bed.
“That’s it, foxglove. That’s it. Christ. You are mine.”
He’s close now. I can feel him close. His pace stutters. His hand at my hip tightens.
He pulls almost out again. He holds.
“Tell me where you want me.”
“Where you are right now,” I manage to say.
“Tell me where you want me to come.”
“Inside me.”
“Iris.”
“Inside me, Alasdair. I want you inside me. Come inside, come inside. Come inside me, please.”
I can’t see his face, my forehead is still pressed to my knuckles, but I can feel him looking at me for a moment that stretches on forever.
“That’s all I needed,” he says.
And with a loud, shaking groan, he pushes back in to the hilt and he stays.
Then…he comes.
He comes inside me with a sound that is more animal than man, low and broken and almost a growl, and I feel him in me, the hot pulse of him deeper than anything has been in me in my life, his hand fisted in the bedpost above mine and his other hand at my hip hard enough to bruise.
He stays, riding it out, his pumps short and dragged out, his breath ragged, until he stops entirely.
He stays inside me for a long beat after.
His forehead drops against the back of my neck. He is breathing in a way I’d never heard from him before, hard, winded, undone.
The room is very quiet.
The rain is still pattering on the window, a little louder now.
He kisses the back of my neck. Once. Soft.
“Foxglove.”
“Yes.”
“I have you now.”
“You have me,” I say dreamily.
He withdraws from me slowly. He helps me unwrap my fingers from the post. They are stiff and hurt but who cares about pain right now when I have been so thoroughly ravaged.
He turns me carefully and lays me down on the bed and the sheet is cool against my back while the rest of my skin is sweaty hot.
He goes to the basin and wets the cloth.
He comes back.
He cleans me with the same care he showed yesterday, slower this time, more reverent, sliding the warm wet cloth between my legs and over my hips and down the insides of my thighs. He cleans himself too, then sets the cloth aside.
He gets back into the bed beside me, and pulls the heavy quilt up over both of us.
He tucks me against his chest.
“Iris?” he whispers.
“Mmm?”
“Sleep.”
“Mm.”
He kisses my forehead.
I fall asleep against him.
I wake in the dark with the urge to pee.
The fire has gone down to embers. The candles on the mantel have burned out.
The rain is hammering against the leaded glass, the sound of it filling the room in uneven lashings thanks to the wind.
I have no idea what time it is. Somewhere in the small hours, probably, the deep middle of the night when the body knows the dawn is still a long way off.
The creepy hour, I sometimes think.
I turn my head on the pillow to look at Alasdair.
He is not asleep.
He’s sitting up against the headboard; his back against the dark wood. The quilt is pooled at his waist, his chest bare.
He’s watching me.
I blink.
His eyes…
For a beat, in the low light from the dying fire, his eyes are wrong.
They’re so terribly wrong.
They’re all black. No blue, no iris. Just black and it fills the whole of his eye, edge to edge, like a void.
I make a small sound. Not even a word.
He blinks.
His eyes are his eyes again.
The blue is rimmed with dark; the pupil is where the pupil should be, the whites are white.
He’s the man I fell asleep against hours ago.
He smiles. A small, careful smile.
“Hush, foxglove. Sleep. I’ll be here.”
I automatically close my eyes.
I tell myself I imagined it. I tell myself it was the dying fire on his face and my eyes still adjusting from the dark and the wine still in me from dinner. I tell myself a lot of things these days.
And I’m too tired to think about it.
I fall back asleep with the rain on the window, and the last thing I’m aware of is that he is mine now, and I am his, too.
I don’t know yet what that’s going to cost me.