36. Delilah
DELILAH
Kane follows me into my bedroom and stops just inside the door.
He has been inside this house before. He sat on this floor while I cried over Vivian’s cruelty.
Tonight is different.
My bloodstream feels carbonated. I’m all sparkles and tingles, every part of me, with a few particular parts lit up even more than the rest.
Every place he’s ever touched me is alive and remembering.
Thighs.
Throat.
Lips.
More.
Kane stands still. He watches me with the patience of a predator who has already been invited inside and therefore has no reason to chase.
His hand gripping the door frame is the only sign that he feels anything close to what I’m feeling. Even from where I’m standing in the middle of the room, with the mattress just grazing the backs of my thighs, I can see how white his knuckles are.
“So… now what?” I ask.
“Well,” he says thoughtfully, “there are two options. One is that I pin you onto the floor right here and do every single one of the things that I whispered to you at the restaurant. You remember that, don’t you, Lilah?”
I swallow and nod. “Mhmm” squeaks out past my lips.
“But the option I prefer,” he says, “is that we continue playing the little game we’ve been playing since this morning. Where we pretend that you can tell me what to do.”
“‘Pretend’?” I ask.
“Oh, yes.” He nods. “Because if you truly give me control, sladkaya, things will get messy. Very fucking messy. I don’t want to frighten you away just yet, so I think it’s best if you tell me what to do for now.”
“Oh. Uh… okay.”
I can’t deny that a shiver runs through me at the thought of what Kane Makov might do if I told him he was in charge. Messy could mean so many things…
But I think he’s right. I’m just tiptoeing my way into this new life of mine.
I don’t think I’m ready for the big leagues just yet.
Unfortunately, what that means is that I have to call the shots. That’s terrifying in its own way.
“How should I start?” I ask with a nervous warble in my voice.
Kane laughs. “That’s for you to decide.”
“Just give me something,” I plead. “This is new territory for me.”
He sighs. “Tell me where to stand.”
I square my shoulders up to him and point at the rug. “There. Come stand there.”
Kane steps onto it.
“Hands at your sides.”
He obeys.
I look him up and down.
Really look, I mean. Not the sideways glances I’ve been rationing out all day while he worked alongside me or sat across from me at the dinner table.
He’s tall enough that my ceiling light hits him wrong, catching the top of his head and leaving the rest of his face in shadow.
The suit is black and it fits him the way nothing has ever fit me, cut close through the shoulders and tapering down.
His shirt has two buttons undone and has somehow survived twelve hours of my dish sink without a single splash of chocolate on it.
Unfair.
His hair is dark and pushed back off his forehead, a little wrecked from our fumbling makeout in the car, one piece falling forward over his eyebrow that I want to fix and also want to leave there forever.
The beard is short. Trimmed with a precision that suggests either a very expensive barber or a man with control issues, and I know for a fact it’s the second one.
Then there’s the ink. It starts somewhere under his collar and climbs the side of his throat in dark, dense lines I can’t decipher from six feet away. It comes back out at his wrists where his sleeves are still shoved past the elbow.
His rings catch the lamp. Four of them, heavy, all silver.
His hands are at his sides because I put them there.
“Well?” he says. “Are you going to keep looking, or are you going to use me?”
I step close enough to touch him. I begin with his jacket, peeling it off and tossing it on the back of the nearby armchair.
Then I open his shirt one button at a time and push it from his shoulders. That gets set aside, too.
The tattoos cover his chest and arms. I have seen pieces beneath his clothes for weeks, but seeing all of them at once makes me forget my next instruction.
Kane waits.
“You can touch me,” I say.
“Where?”
I take his hands and put them on my waist. “Here. Only here until I say otherwise.”
His fingers close around my hips.
I stand up on my toes and pull him down by the back of the neck so my lips can meet his. The kiss is chaste to begin with. Like it’s our first one. Just fluttering lips and breathy sighs.
Then I let my tongue join the party. It darts past his lips and tastes the sweet wine and chocolate from tonight’s dessert course.
I inch closer to deepen it. I gasp when the blunt, heavy length of his cock presses hard against my stomach.
“Look at you,” he whispers, pulling back just enough to stare into my eyes. His green eyes are glowing with a hunger that makes me feel small and cherished all at once. “So shy. So sweet. But I can feel you shaking, can’t I? I can feel how badly you want to be ruined by me.”
“Who said you could talk?” I tease.
His grin flashes as he mimes zipping his lips.
“Oh, no, no, no,” I inform him. I hook my fingers into his belt and pull him with me as I go sit back on the bed with him between my thighs. “Those need to stay open. I have some very detailed plans for them.”
I turn my attention to his lower half. His belt is heavy black leather with a steel buckle. I get my fingers under it and work it loose, then rip it through the loops and throw it into the corner.
Then the button.
Then the zipper, slow. Tkkk-tkkk-tkkk.
Kane exhales through his nose.
“Problem?” I ask.
“No problem.”
“You sure? You sound like you have a problem.”
“I have a rule,” he says. “You gave it to me. I’m just struggling to honor it.”
I hook my thumbs in his waistband and push his pants down over his hips. He steps out of one leg, then the other. I kick the pants aside.
Now he’s standing between my knees in nothing but black boxers. The tattoos run all the way down. His thighs are enormous. There’s a scar on the left one, an old one, puckered and pale.
He’s hard. Obviously, undeniably hard, straining against the fabric.
But it’s his hands I keep looking at. Both of them, fisted at his sides, fingers flexing and releasing. The tendons stand up in his forearms. The muscle in his jaw vibrates.
He wants to move them so badly that he’s sweating.
But he’s staying still.
Because I said to.
“You’re enjoying this,” he accuses.
“Enormously.”
That’s only partly true, though. I’m doing it this way because he suggested it and because he’s right: I need to protect my heart and body. I can’t take everything Kane Makov is offering me yet.
Still, though, there’s that piece of me deep down inside that wants to see all of him unleashed. Not just white knuckles and beads of straining sweat, but the full beast out of his cage.
His erection jumps when I exhale.
I’m brave enough to let that beast out of its cage, right?
I grab the hem and slowly peel the boxers down until he steps out of those, too. He springs out to meet me, flushed and throbbing. My mouth starts to drool automatically.
I’ve always been shit at assembling furniture, but even my spatially slow brain can’t help but look at the size of him and wonder how the hell he’s going to fit in me.
He’s just too big.
Thick through the middle, thicker than my grip would close around. The head is a deep purple and already wet at the tip. A vein runs up the underside and disappears where the shaft meets his body.
The ink stops just above it. There’s a clean band of bare skin at his hip where the tattoos give up, pale against all that darkness, and for some reason, that’s the piece that makes my thighs press together.
“This is unfair,” I say.
“What is?”
“You look this good naked, and I had to spend an hour choosing underwear.”
“Show me.”
Those two words fill me with anxiety, but we were gonna have to cross this bridge sooner or later. Might as well get it over with now.
I scoot back from him, leaving him standing naked at the foot of my bed.
I peel out of my outer clothes and toss them toward my closet. My bra and underwear match, which deserves acknowledgment because I have worked since before dawn and could easily have arrived in industrial shapewear and one orthopedic sock.
I start to reach behind me to unhook my bra, but I lose confidence halfway and revert to hugging my torso instead.
I’m just too curvy. He’s chiseled and perfect in every way, and I’m just… me.
There’s more of her every year.
Isn’t there? Weren’t they right? My boobs are too big and my stomach isn’t perfectly toned. My hips are wide, my thighs wider. My skin doesn’t gleam like flawless porcelain, the way Vivian’s did in the video that set my whole life ricocheting off-course.
He’s going to see all that and leave. And who could blame him?
I look into his eyes, bracing for The Shift. This time, it won’t be a shift toward anyone else. Just away from me. Toward the door, maybe. Mumbling excuses along the way. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come home with you. I don’t want you. You are not fuckable, loveable, any of it.
It’s coming in three, two, one…
“Don’t you dare hide from me,” Kane snarls. “You are a fucking masterpiece, Lilah. Look at these curves. This soft, gorgeous skin.”
He drops to his knees on the floor at the foot of the bed, though he’s so tall that he’s still head and shoulders above the mattress. He reaches out to cup one ankle in each hand.
I didn’t give him permission with my words, but he knows I need this. A push to keep things going in the right direction.
His hands slide up my thighs to cup my calves. He begins to worship me, his lips pressing kisses into the soft flesh, nibbling, nipping, pulling me a little bit closer to him with every flick of his tongue.
“I’m obsessed with you,” he mumbles against my skin. “I want to eat every single inch of you. I want to know exactly how you taste when you’re begging for me.”