Chapter 13 #2
Breaking the kiss, he looked down at her, catching a faint gleam off the whites of her eyes.
“I couldn’t fuck the Duchesse if I wanted to,” he said, his grip tightening when he felt her tense, unwilling to allow her any distance.
“But I don’t, goddammit. There are a lot of beautiful women in the world, Rosaline, and I could buy most of them regardless of how I look.
But what sticks in my craw the most, is that I can’t look at a single fucking one of them without thinking of how she isn’t you. ”
She put her hands against his chest but didn’t push him away.
“I don’t think it matters how angry I ever get with you, woman, I’ll come crawling when you crook your finger.
Because no one else makes me this hard. No one else could have me so spitting mad, so close to getting my hands on the one thing I came to this frigid country to obtain, and here I am in a fucking closet for some reason, ready to sacrifice everything for one more chance to be inside you. ”
She met his next kiss with an explosive, confident response he’d not expected.
Her lips were full pillows of pleasure, her mouth smooth and hot, slippery and succulent.
Her tongue sparred with his, matching him thrust for wet, velvet thrust. Each stroke sent dizzying, delirious sensations spiraling through him, whipping him into such a frenzy, he was certain he’d lost his mind.
And was in danger of losing even more to this confounding woman.
If only he could make himself cold enough. Hard enough. Craft a heart of steel and stone to keep her out. To lock it in a glacier at the top of the world. Somewhere her inviting warmth couldn’t tempt him away from himself.
Because she did. That icy wrath that’d overcome him earlier had miraculously melted before the inferno he found in the slick heat of her mouth.
He was flooded with liquid fire. Boiled in days of lonely yearning.
Lost to a tempestuous firestorm of possession and anger and fear and…
and something he couldn’t allow himself to define.
In her arms, he forgot. Forgot the load of his loss and the cut of betrayal.
Even hers.
Eli’s hands roamed her, gripped at her arms, her hips, her ass, letting her feel the true strength of his hands for the first time.
Rather than shrink from his untampered power, she surged against him with a harsh sound ripping from her throat.
For a moment he’d realized, not for the first time, how easily she’d break. How small her bones were.
How could someone so damned fragile possess the power to destroy him?
The thought was sobering enough to stop him. If she’d wanted to, she’d have been able to pull away. To run.
But she chose that moment to score her nails down the front of his shirt, and in doing so, she untethered the last of his control from this beast of lust he’d become.
The one with teeth and claws.
Cupping her neck, he kissed her hard. Dominating her with his mouth. Fucking her with his tongue.
Warning her what was about to happen.
Threading his fingers in her hair, he curled them into a fist, imprisoning her head as he rotated her away from him and bent her over the outline of an ironing table.
A whimper escaped her when he nudged her feet apart with his own.
But she made no move to stop him.
Tossing her skirts above her waist, he ignored a soft gasp as he rent her drawers in half and discarded them at her feet.
It was a bittersweet hell not being able to see her bent for him like this. He could imagine the pouty lips of her pussy splayed beneath the soft curve of her ass and the sight would probably have made him come in his own hand.
He found the smooth curve of her hip in the darkness, traced the cleft of her ass down to find the slit that instantly drenched his hand with desire.
He relieved himself from his own trousers, and drove into her with one savage thrust, branding her with the iron heat of his need, not stopping until he’d ground the bones of his hip against her.
Home. He gasped out a hard breath of relief.
She made a sound he couldn’t identify, her feminine muscles clenching against his intrusion like a velvet fist.
Even in the red haze of his fervor, he was able to still. To seat himself deep within her and soak in the sensation of just being there. Waiting for her soft, tight core to give way to his intrusion.
Sweat bloomed beneath his suit and against his hairline. His teeth clenched. Muscles bulged. After a few pulsing moments, her body relaxed, accommodating his girth.
It was what he’d needed.
Fingers digging into the soft flesh of her ass hard enough to bruise, he drew back to the tip and surged forward again, and again, and again with deep, devastating thrusts.
Agonizing pleasure threatened to sweep him immediately away, but he held it at bay, needing to indulge in this insatiable perversion he’d developed for his wife. He held her hair in an unyielding grip as he surged forward, feeling every feminine muscle clenching around his shaft.
“Eli,” she gasped.
He barely heard her over the sounds of his hips slapping against her ass. Of hard, wet flesh pistoning against tight, wet flesh.
He bent over her, curling his wide shoulders against her slim ones, stinging into her with swift curls of his spine. “Don’t ask me to stop,” he growled, though it escaped closer to a plea than he’d intended.
“No,” she said around a tight whimper. “No. I’m going to… It’s coming. I’m afraid I’ll…I’ll scream.”
Fuck if that wasn’t the hottest thing she’d ever said.
Eli covered her open mouth just in time. She buried a strangled cry against the rough skin, then another as she bucked back against him. Twisting and writhing, pulling and arching as her intimate muscles clenched and pulsed.
He fought his own release valiantly, and won, too, until her sharp little teeth bit into the fleshy pad of his palm.
The pain seared him so sweetly, he barely had the time to clamp down on his own thunderous cry, nearly biting off his tongue in order to do so.
Never had he felt a climax so completely. So intricately. From his own seed leaving his body, jettisoning her womb before he sank so deep, he touched the edge. It pulled from him in confounding surges, like waves breaching the shore and crawling higher than they dared before.
Finally, his pleasure ebbed, and he dropped his forehead between her shoulder blades.
She pressed a soft kiss against the indents her teeth had left in his palm, and the tenderness in the gesture threatened to unstitch him.
A tremor undulated down her spine, passing between their joined flesh and licking his own back with electric pleasure.
It was like being released from chains he’d worn for damn near four days.
Andromeda had nothing on him, as he’d have preferred literal chains to the ones she held over his soul.
“I’d better make peace with this now,” he lamented breathlessly.
“Doesn’t matter how hard I try to be free of this, I will never be able to give you up. ”
It was Rosaline who disengaged from him, moving as far as she could in the confined space to straighten and smooth her skirts back down her legs. As he tucked himself back in his trousers, she bent at the knees to retrieve her ripped undergarments before facing him.
“How hard did you try to be free of me?” she asked, her voice dull between her own beleaguered breaths.
Smoothing down his hair, Eli castigated himself for making it sound worse than he’d meant it, but he answered her honestly. “That morning I left, I’d almost convinced myself I wouldn’t return…”
“Because of our predicament.” Her shadow shifted, and he wished like hell he could see her face. “The predicament I put us in.”
“Because you stole the chalice and lied to me about it for weeks. Weeks. While I tore this world apart looking for it.” He turned from her, his hand landing on the latch of the closet. Why the fuck were they hiding in here, anyhow? They’d done nothing wrong.
“No one would blame you, if you went back home to America,” she said tersely. “It’s very probable you will feel less trapped there in all that wide open space. Don’t they call it the land of the free?”
And just like that, his warm afterglow flared into a temper. “Don’t act like your life wouldn’t be easier without me to keep an eye on your sticky fingers. I’m not the thief here. I’m not the liar, or have you forgotten? I’ve done nothing to break faith.”
She was silent for so long, their breaths became cannon blasts over a dark battlefield. He could sense her behind him. Close but not touching. Her heavy exhalations breaking against his spine.
They’d been as connected as two bodies could be only seconds ago. Hell, his orgasm still shimmered along his spine.
But there was a chasm growing between them he couldn’t see his way across.
“You abandoned me for days,” she accused in a voice so low he had to strain to hear it.
“Left me with no word, no goodbye. You did that to be cruel. To hurt me, because I hurt you. But there’s a difference between what we’ve done to each other, Eli.
I never intended you any pain. Had I known how my actions affected you, I would have cut off my own hands to keep from offending you like I did.
But you…you deserted our marriage without ever allowing me a voice.
And now you’ve decided to return to our bed, because your lust will not allow you to leave your thief of a wife? ”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“It’s what you meant,” she insisted.
“And what if it is? This thing you do, it isn’t right. Why can’t you just stop?”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” she railed, her voice raising in both pitch and volume. “I don’t want this. I would give anything not to be this way!”
At that, Eli paused, utterly confounded. “Then…why?”