Chapter 36 #2
For the first time, that feels more like a lie than the truth. I can’t stand that thought, so I work her mercilessly to forget my mistakes and cling to this moment.
When her breath hitches and her muscles tighten, I keep the rhythm, even when her legs start shaking against my ears and her sweet, soft cries turn raw and ragged.
The tide creeps higher behind me, swirling cold saltwater around my knees and lapping at her feet.
But all that exists is the heat between her thighs and our desire scorching us everywhere we touch as her muscles lock around me.
“Don’t fight it, baby,” I murmur then suck hard on the small bundle of nerves.
“Yes, yes, oh God—Hatter!” My nickname is torn from her chest, and her hands fist my hair and claw at the dampening sand simultaneously.
She shatters all at once, a rush of pleasure drenches my tongue as she arches off the sand and release racks her body in waves.
I don’t let up. I don’t stop, not until she’s shaking and half sobbing beneath me, the aftershocks rolling through her until she’s given me everything and her body goes boneless in my hands and against the sand.
“Good, good, good fucking girl, Lucy.”
Her response is a mere half-hearted moan that makes me chuckle. I give one last gentle kiss to her inner thigh then lift my head, my mouth slick with her, and the painting that looks back at me rocks me to my core.
She’s wrecked, flushed, trembling—chest heaving, lashes wet from tears of pleasure, lips swollen from her biting them. Her strawberry-blond hair fanning in waves over the damp sand like a Millais painting the Pre-Raphaelites would’ve killed to capture.
She’s fucking breathtaking.
And she’s reaching for me.
“Come here,” she whispers.
She doesn’t wait for me, her hands half-cupping my jaw, half-dragging me up her body to kiss me deep enough that she has to taste herself. But there’s no hesitation, and it’s the hottest thing to feel her drink her pleasure off my tongue.
Her palms slide down my shoulders, and I shiver when her fingers find my scars on my right side and back.
She’s still kissing me but searching me at the same time, tracing glossy patches on one side, and following the twisted paths of scar tissue that interrupt the ink like rivers cutting through landscape.
Her touch lingers, but it’s careful and reverent, so gentle that it sends a shudder through me that I feel all the way down to the base of my spine.
She quickly lifts her hands, whispering, “Does it hurt?”
“Not anymore.”
I shake my head and take her hand to place it back over my scarred forearm, where my Fury skull birthmark used to stand out in stark relief.
Her brow furrows with concern, shifting into a question, as she drifts up to the patch of unscarred skin on my arm, filled with ink instead of scar tissue.
“This hand shape,” she says softly. “It almost looks like someone’s holding you.”
My throat closes.
“That’s because she was.”
Lucy waits for more, her fingers still resting on the handprint, and I cover her hand with mine and press it flat against the tattoo.
“She protected me,” I say, my voice breaking.
I clear my throat, because that’s all I can give her right now in a moment already so charged with emotion. I sigh, then meet her gaze.
“Ask me again sometime. When I’m not trying to focus on you.” My lips kick up in a smile. “You can tell me your Princess Alice story, and I…” I blow out a breath. “I’ll tell you my story too.”
Her eyes soften, and she nods once, letting it go. Her hand slides from beneath mine and drifts lower, and the tenderness between us shifts back toward heat.
When she gets to my waistband, I first take my phone from my pocket and toss it somewhere up on the dry sand, then help her pull my sweatpants and boxer briefs down over my hips with shaky fingers.
The immediate relief of my cock coming free draws a rough, almost feral sound from deep in my chest. Then her fingers wrap around the base, and my hips jerk forward on the first stroke, heat pulsing against her palm, every muscle in my body going taut.
It takes every single fucking shred of restraint that I have to lightly grip her wrist and pull her hand away.
“I want to come down your throat so fucking bad.” My voice sounds like my vocal cords have been scraped over sand and left in the salt air to dry. “But we can do that another time. Right now, I need to be inside you.” I swallow. “Do you want this, Lucy? You have to say it.”
She nods. “I won’t run from you, Hatter. I-I need you.”
Fuck.
Relief and hunger and guilt and desperation—they all knot together into an emotion I don’t have the heart to untangle.
But this might be the last time you want me.
She’s trusting me with everything she has, and I know, I know, I know I should stop here.
But I can’t.
Somewhere deep in my soul, I’m terrified this is my last night with the woman who was supposed to be my wife. And I’m holding out on the one flicker of hope that maybe, maybe if I do this perfectly, I can change that.
“Okay.” I swallow and press my forehead to hers. “Then I want to make sure you never forget the night you were mine.”
She sucks in a breath, but I kiss her fiercely to stop her from saying anything that she’ll regret tomorrow.
Then I remember and curse, because of fucking course this would happen.
“Damn.” My eyes close and I sit back on my heels. “We should stop. I don’t have a cond—”
“I’m on the pill,” she interrupts.
“Oh.” I blink at the abruptness of her confession. “Okay, um…” I chuckle, even as my pulse races over the hope that this night might not be over yet.
“Well, it’s been…” way more than six months. I swallow back that little confession of my own. “It’s been a while. And the last time I was tested, I was negative.”
“And I… I’ve never…” She bites her lip, then releases it. “This is my first time.”
Everything in me goes still.
This is her first time? And she’s doing it with me?
“Fuck, Lucy.” Her name comes out so quiet the tide almost takes it. I frame her face with both hands, making sure she’s looking at me and seeing me, really seeing me, not just the wanting. “Are you sure?”
This isn’t what she deserves for her first time. We’re on a cold beach, in wet sand, after I just murdered a man for her. Okay, that last part she did deserve, but the rest? Lucy McKennon deserves a bed and candles and hours of attention. Hell, at least a locked door.
She takes my hand. “I want you to know I choose you.”
Something shifts between us, something permanent that I don’t think I’ll ever recover from, and I hope to Christ she doesn’t want to take back. It feels an awful lot like the peace she brings to my fury. Like maybe, just maybe, I bring her peace too.
The weight of that hope settles into my chest like an anchor on the seabed. I press my forehead to hers, breathing her in while I try to memorize this. The exact moment she chose me for good and meant it.
“Then I’ve got you, Lucy.” I say against her lips. My voice coming out as reverent as this moment feels. “If you need me to stop at any point in time, that’s all you need to say.”
She looks up at me with those hazel-blue eyes that I have loved from a distance for longer than she will ever know and shakes her head.
“I won’t need to. I want this.”
Say it. Tell her. Tell her who you are.
My heartbeat pounds as I gather the courage to give her what I can, and I hold her gaze because I need her to hear every word I say next.
“Once I’m inside you, there’s no going back between us.” I shake my head. “I’m not like you, Lucy. I’m not good. I need to know that no matter who I am, you want this. You want me.” I put weight into my voice. “Not just ‘Hatter.’ Me.” I inhale. “I need you to know that you’ll be mine.”
Something flickers across her face—a tiny furrow, a half-second of processing—but then her decision blooms brightly over her expression like sunrise filling a room.
“I want you. No matter what. I want you.”
Please don’t regret saying that.