10. “YOU CAN HIDE BESIDE ME, MAYBE FOR A WHILE” #4
“Keep looking at me, Jocelyn. I need your eyes on me.” Negotiation had no place when his voice held such command.
Anticipation coiled in her belly like a serpent, and her breath shook as she tried to feign calmness, feeling anything but. She only obeyed because rebellion would have cost her more than compliance in that moment.
She couldn’t explain her reluctance to go here with him, didn’t know how to name it. Maybe it was commitment phobia, maybe it was a deep-seated fear of intimacy. All she knew was that this was different from every other time before.
He rolled his hips forward, drawing in breath as he finally penetrated her. “Fuck,” he breathed, pulling back as if he needed time to adjust to the intense pleasure, as if it were even too intense for him.
Soren was the only man to ever make her tremble like this. The only man to want her so completely, it terrified her. She could feel her soul shaking so hard he felt it too, but that kind of response only hardened his resolve and prolonged his patience.
With slow, drugging kisses, he coaxed her mouth open. Shockingly, they hadn’t kissed all that much in their time together. Sex had always been an explosive collision of frustrated need, an itch that desperately needed to be scratched.
“You have the sexiest mouth,” he whispered, dragging his lips to the shell of her ear as the weight of his engorged cock rested between them, heavy and swollen.
“Soren, please…”
He groaned, long and low. “I love it when you beg.” He pressed into her slowly, giving her body time to accept his thick length, and she whimpered, feeling every place their bodies touched. “See how good it can be when you let me take the lead.”
Her hand tightened on his forearm in warning.
“More?” He thrust into her, burying himself before she could answer, and then he held himself there, deep inside, as if to show just how perfectly his body fit with hers.
A low groan escaped him, raw and unguarded, as if the sensations of her tight body gripping his thick cock were too much to bear. He buried his face in the curve of her neck, breathing hard against her skin, and gave himself a moment to reclaim control.
Tension unraveled in her chest as a protective wave washed over her. The need to hold him had her hand lifting. He trembled when she raked her fingers slowly through his hair. “Are you okay?”
He shivered and nodded. “Fine.” His lips found hers in a slow, vulnerable kiss and his hips slowly moved with deep, unhurried revolutions that dragged along her most sensitive places.
Each rock of his hips was deliberate, angled to touch her in ways that built a gradual, unbearable heat from the inside out. His breathing grew ragged against her collarbone.
“Stay with me.” It was a plea wrapped in a command. He cupped her face, holding her still so he could take her mouth as he wanted. “Jesus, Jocelyn…”
His eyes were mercury and fire, holding hers with the weight of something that went far deeper than sex. His free hand dragged along her ribs, mapping her, claiming her, committing every curve to memory.
When his palm swept across her breast, his thumb dragged over her nipple, and she arched into the contact. He bowed his head and took the puckered tip into his mouth.
“That’s it,” he murmured against her sensitized flesh. “Take me deeper. As deep as I can fit.”
He didn’t increase his pace. If anything, he slowed down until each deep push of his hips landed like a prayer, a promise he couldn’t put into words. The patience of it cracked her carefully constructed walls open, and she couldn’t breathe through the sudden tightness in her chest.
She’d seen him aggressive. She’d seen him take what he wanted and move on. But now, he was here, completely present, wholly with her, and it terrified her more than any rough fucking ever could.
Her inner walls involuntarily clenched around him as her orgasm broke loose. His whole body shuddered as a sound escaped him. He groaned, murmuring her name against her skin.
“Soren,” she cried, holding onto him as her muscles locked.
His mouth returned to hers, greedily seeking, overcome with a desperation neither of them could have prepared for. His hips thrust quickly, abandoning any artful tempo in pursuit of hedonistic relief.
When his forehead pressed to hers, he fought for breath. “God, Jocelyn.” His voice barely whispered across her lips. “The way your body grips mine when I’m inside of you, so fucking deep that I can feel your heart beating through my cock.”
She wanted to hide from the weight of that admission, but he wouldn’t allow it.
“Feel it. Feel me inside of you. No one else knows you this deeply.”
Another flutter pulsed low in her belly, different from the first. Slower. Deeper. Drowning her slowly, washing away her armor so thoroughly she feared never being able to protect herself again.
She gripped his arms, her nails leaving crescent marks in his skin. He moved faster, stealing a moment of pure pleasure so intense, she was able to slip away. He smiled against her neck, the curve of his lips pressing into her flesh before he pulled back just enough to look at her again.
His eyes tracked every micro-expression, reading her body’s language like a man who’d spent years studying nothing but her. When he registered the clenching of her jaw, the tension in her shoulders, he slowed even further.
“Breathe.” He caressed her throat, gently dragging his hand over her collarbone and splaying his fingers wide where her heart hammered against his palm. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
Safe. The word shouldn’t have hurt. But it pierced her heart fast and hard enough to make her eyes sting under the burn of unshed tears.
He shifted his angle, and the hard length of him stroked along every nerve. Her breath caught, held, and then released in a sound she didn’t recognize as every muscle spasmed and she came apart in his arms.
“That’s it,” he breathed against her temple. “Come for me. Let me fuck you just the way you need. The way no one else can.” On cue, his grip tightened around her throat, and that slight show of power was enough to push her completely over the edge.
Her body bowed, rocking into his as her hips pressed up to meet each possessive thrust. He increased the pressure without increasing the pace.
The orgasm rolled through her like a landslide, not sharp or sudden, but full and powerful, radiating outward until every nerve ending sang. She clenched around him, her whole body locked tight, and he groaned, the sound so raw it cost him some of his precious control.
He didn’t let her recover. As her body trembled through the aftershocks, he withdrew almost completely and drove back in with slightly more force, resetting her, building toward another peak before the first one fully subsided.
His control frayed at the edges as his breathing shifted. “You’re mine,” he said, his eyes wild and his mouth on her. “Say it. I want to hear it from your lips.”
She couldn’t. The words lodged too deep for her to reach.
He withdrew, and her body felt instantly incomplete.
She made a sound of protest.
His unrelenting stare challenged her. “Give me this, Jocelyn. Admit you fucking belong to me.”
“Soren—”
“Say it.” His voice remained soft, but beneath that calm exterior lived an iron will that would not accept defeat. “Tell me you’re mine.”
Her jaw trembled. He was asking too much. “I can’t—”
“We don’t always get to choose. It’s already true, and you know it. You feel it. This—” He kissed her hard, and she gasped when he drew back. “This is what it feels like to…belong to someone. It’s pointless to keep lying to ourselves.”
Shaken and overwhelmed by his words, her chin trembled. She abandoned all sense of self-preservation and finally conceded. “I’m yours.” The words came out broken, unwilling, true in ways she’d try to deny later but couldn’t deny now. “I fucking hate you for doing this to me.”
“I know, baby. I know.” He kissed her again, softer this time, then he whispered, “Thank you for giving in.”
“No more talking,” she bartered, on the verge of tears.
“Okay. No more. I promise.” He drove into her, abandoning the last of his control, and giving her the escape she needed.
Desperate and possessed by his long-fought claim for her heart, he thrust with hard, unmeasured resolve, commanding a level of truth that left no space for denial, and left nowhere for her to hide.
The more he took, the more she could get away. She was dust on the wind, and he was the breeze. Undone and wild, siphoning her away in fractions but somehow claiming the whole of her.
Broken cries pierced the air. His mouth dragged over her as he whispered unframed promises against her skin of how things were going to change. He held her like he never planned to let go.
His scent, warm and familiar, wrapped around her as he turned her, shifting her onto her side and drawing her back against his chest. She wanted him to take control. She couldn’t think any more, and welcomed the relief that came with such ultimate surrender.
His arm barred across her ribs as he resumed his rhythm. His hand splayed across her lower belly, fingers spread wide, holding her possessively against him.
“There’s no going back now, Jocelyn.”
She felt the shift, and it terrified her.
“This is my pussy. These are my tits.” He dragged his thumb over her lips, holding her jaw open as he fucked her. “My dirty little mouth to kiss and fuck as I please.”
Every instinct told her to push back, but he’d broken her down so completely she had no defenses left. Besides, he was right. No one had ever owned her body and her pleasure the way he did.
“Who do you belong to?” he murmured into her hair. “Let me hear you say it again.” He reached between her legs, rubbing her clit as he continued to fuck her possessively.
“You.”
“That’s right. Me. You’re mine. You’ve always been mine, ever since that first time I pictured you naked and came in my own hand. Even then, I knew I’d someday have you like this.”
She whimpered, the sound completely formed of fear.