7. Ofelia #3
I open my eyes to find him staring up at me, his lone eye barely discernible in the gray light.
Mortified and aroused in equal parts, I curl my hand inside his shirt neck, my entire body quivering as my fingers touch the brilliant eagle inked over his heart.
Emboldened by my current position above him, his body trapped between my legs, I lean forward without thought and touch my lips to the ink.
He makes a sound low in his chest.
His hands tighten on my hips, and for a delicious, giddy moment, I think he’s going to kiss me.
Then suddenly I’m on my back, and Alexei is looming over me, his face grim. He puts his mouth close to my ear. “What the fuck are you doing?”
If your intention was to deter me, I think dimly through the intense haze of desire, you really shouldn’t have done that.
His voice in my ear is too close to a thousand dreams. To the forbidden memories only he and I share.
To the illicit fantasies that have been bringing me to orgasm for the past six years.
I turn my own head, not missing how tense and still he becomes when my lips near his skin. “Touch me,” I whisper.
I shift my mouth to the soft skin beneath his jaw.
He trembles slightly, and I feel the unmistakable surge of his arousal against me.
Then he rears back onto his knees, raking his hands through his hair, his eye darting toward the door.
We’re in one of the bedrooms off the main suite, but the door is locked, and the crowd either haven’t returned yet or are all asleep, because the room beyond it is silent.
He turns back to me. My legs are bent up, open wide around the place his body recently vacated.
My dress is still hitched up around my waist, and I don’t need a mirror to know that my underwear is soaked through.
My arms are up, hands open on the pillow from where he flung me down, and some loose strands of hair that have pulled out of my updo are caught between my fingers.
For a long moment we stare at each other, the grainy darkness cloaking our faces in shadowy deception. But I don’t need light to feel his inner conflict—nor to know that in a moment he will pull away, leaving me with yet another frustrated fantasy to fuel my hopeless state of limerence.
Except this isn’t limerence, I think in a sudden moment of clarity.
Alexei took me home and carried me upstairs.
He fed me.
Then he carried me to bed—and stayed with me.
And now he wants me, just as much as I want him.
Driven by some dark instinct, I raise my hips and slowly run my hands down over my breasts, my eyes never leaving his face.
Alexei doesn’t move, but his eye follows my movements all the way until my fingers slip beneath my underwear. Then his hands move swiftly, covering my own, his lone eye flashing. “Don’t,” he breathes.
But despite covering my hands, he doesn’t move them away. The broad pads of his thumbs move slowly across my silk underwear. Then, as if it was inevitable, they move downward with unerring accuracy, to the thin scars left by his blade.
I freeze. My heartbeat slows to a heavy, rich pulse, as if even my blood recalls his touch.
His eye never leaving mine, his thumbs move along the innermost creases of my thighs, tracing the barely discernible silver lines. I lie utterly still in his hands, hardly daring to breathe, as acutely aware of his touch now as I was all those years ago.
But this time, there’s no knife. No spectators urging him on. No Masha cowering in terror against the wall.
Only the slow, sensual pressure of his thumbs, edging closer to the molten heat craving his touch.
I close my eyes and my body pulses in anticipation, sending a trickle of moisture along the path of his thumbs.
They find the slick heat and halt abruptly, his sudden intake of breath audible in the hushed silence of the room.
My hips strain toward him as I take shallow breaths, too fiercely focused on his touch to be ashamed of the blatant evidence of my arousal.
Finally his thumbs move again, with slightly more pressure this time, stroking the slickness along the silver scars then returning to rest just either side of my opening. Beneath the silk of my knickers, his thumbs find the wet trail that began before I even woke.
“Fuck.” He barely breathes the word, but it slams into me like an aphrodisiac.
I arch off the bed with a small cry, my hands slipping from beneath his to clench the bedsheets.
Alexei holds me surely as I buck and strain in his hands, but I can feel his indecision in the same way I can see his own savage arousal straining against his pants.
Seeing me staring at his cock, his eye darkens. Slipping one of his hands out from beneath my underwear, he puts a warning finger over his lips.
I nod slowly, biting my lip, and his eye narrows.
I lift my hips, almost sighing in relief as he slides the silk down my legs and throws it aside.
His hands encase my ankles and for a moment rest there.
My dress is around my waist, my knees up, baring me entirely to his gaze, but he isn’t staring between my legs.
He’s looking into my eyes, his own narrowed in a silent question.
Yes. I mouth the word, reaching blindly for his kneeling figure but falling short. Oh, God—yes. I lift my hips again, my body saying what my mouth is forbidden to.
His gaze slips between my legs, his hissed intake of breath as he blatantly stares at my swollen, dripping pussy almost as much of a turn-on as the pounding shaft straining for release.
I want him to take it out, want to touch him, want his mouth on mine.
But I know Alexei’s every subtle signal as if it was a flashing neon light. His hold on my ankles might be featherlight, but I know better than to move.
His hands slide up my legs until his thumbs return to their earlier exploration, his fingers curled around my hip bones as his thumbs slowly travel the inner creases of my thighs.
My eyes are glued to the thick bulge pounding against his pants, eliciting another trickle of moisture.
Alexei’s breath hisses inward as his thumbs slick through it, and he moves his hands away, making me almost cry out with frustration.
I raise my eyes to his face to find him watching me as he slides his hands down the length of my thighs, all the way back to my ankles.
Very deliberately, he picks up each foot and moves them wide apart, opening me so brazenly to his gaze that I lift my hands to cover myself.
Mistake.
His hands flash out to grip my own, and he shakes his head, his eye gleaming darkly. Reaching for my left ankle, he turns his head and presses his lips to my instep.
Oh my God.
I close my eyes as his tongue slowly curls along the arch, my hand clutching the bedsheet convulsively.
His mouth moves agonizingly slowly over my ankle and up my calf, pausing to tease a place behind my knee that makes me arch off the bed, panting.
As his mouth climbs inexorably higher, his hands slowly slide back up to their familiar position.
This time, instead of tracing my inner thighs, his thumbs come to rest on my outer lips.
I gasp, straining upward, silently begging for more.
His thumbs press down and spread me wide open.
I freeze, feeling utterly vulnerable, and open my eyes to find his lone one boring into mine. Just as in my dream, its blazing intensity sends the blood thrumming through my veins. I reach out, my fingers just grazing the rough stubble on his jaw.
He turns his face sideways and presses his mouth briefly to my palm. Then, with a dark, dangerous smile that sends a shiver through me, his head drops between my legs.
Fuuuuuck!
Alexei’s mouth covers me completely in wet heat.
His tongue curls around my opening with the same dexterity it did beneath my knee, then makes a long, languorous sweep along my inner lips that would make me scream if he hadn’t warned me not to.
He flattens his tongue over the puffy mound, then repeats the same motion in reverse down the other side.
His hands slip beneath me, raising me to his mouth and spreading me even wider, and I surge up to meet him as his tongue dips and swirls on parts of me I didn’t even know existed.
My entire world is reduced to his mouth and tongue, and the increasingly urgent need he seems determined to draw out until it’s exquisite torture.
My hands touch his head. I want to push it against my clit, to demand the orgasm I’ve been close to from the moment I woke up, but when I try, I feel his silent rumble of laughter against my most sensitive parts and want to scream.
He’s doing it deliberately, I realize. Alexei knows exactly what I want.
He’s just making me wait for it.
The realization turns me on even more.
My hips jerk upward. One of Alexei’s hands slides up beneath my dress to splay across my belly, holding me down, and when my own hand comes down atop it, my fingers slide between his.
My other hand clutches his head, urging him onward, relishing his low groan as he slips a thumb just inside my slick opening.
“Oh, God,” I breathe, rocking against his hand.
His thumb is replaced by one finger, then two, making my hand clutch his convulsively on my belly.
He slips them a little farther inside, then abruptly stops.
He raises his head from between my legs, his eye meeting mine with an expression I can’t make out in the dim light.
Then his head lowers again, his tongue stroking me with such intricate delicacy it’s like a thousand fronds driving me toward oblivion, and instead of thrusting deep inside me, his fingers curl upward.
“Oh.” It’s impossible to stifle my cry, and Alexei’s fingers clench warningly around my own.
Grabbing the pillow beside me, I push it over my face, just in time to stifle my scream as his tongue finally lands on my pounding clit.
His fingers stroke something inside me that would have me leaping from the bed if his hand wasn’t holding me firmly down, and I howl into the pillow as my entire world explodes.