Chapter Sixty
Feralyn
My heart. My soul. All of his perfect answers…
And his taboo one.
I’m not saying I won’t fuck you, because I will.
Said while his hands were on my body.
Oh my God, his hands.
His slow caress up my legs, his recon excuse for touching me, saying he was checking for injuries. Maybe he had been. But he wasn’t now.
And my reservations, this very wrong line we were crossing—had crossed—it was washing away under the warm shower spray.
The indelible part of my brain that held the nightmares of violence that’d been perpetrated against my flesh and bones, the brand of violence I’d witnessed him unleash last night, it was all blending.
The epicenter of where my fears resided—violence, pain, death, loss, abandonment—it was swirling away in the steam and leaving me here.
With Helios.
Everyone in my life had always left. My mother, my father. Ares. Helios.
My mother chose her demons over her only child. My father only cared about himself. And yes, Ares had stayed. He’d physically been present after Helios had left, except he’d been pulling away for years.
But Helios, when he’d left, he’d said he was leaving.
When he came back, he’d said he was staying.
He’d kept his promise for eight years, but more than that, he’d given me his time and his full attention.
Every forced outing, every pushed boundary against my fears, every outrageous, dangerous, insane, thrilling, commanding, dominating assault of my senses he could think of, he’d done.
It hadn’t been pretty or cautious or even romantic.
Sometimes it’d been downright perilous. But it had always been purposeful.
And it’d been loud.
It’d been Helios.
Not a single part of me wanted to live without him. “All right. I trust you.” I’d always trusted him.
Grabbing my ass and kneading, too hard but oh so perfect, Helios made my mind bend toward his touch and my thoughts still.
He leaned down to my ear. “There’s my Haven. That’s my woman.”
Hot water cascaded down my back, but a full shiver wracked my body as chill bumps spread. Fighting the moan bursting to escape was hard, but I held it back because I had a confession he needed to hear before we went any further.
I had to tell him about the texts.
But his hands. They were magic. They always had been.
The lightning-fast pull of his trigger finger.
The rapid precision when he dismantled his guns to clean them.
The cavalier quickness of his knife skills.
The way he gripped my chin, held my face, traced his fingers down my arm—every single movement of those impossibly large hands of his was intoxicating.
I had watched them with a hunger that surpassed the need for food.
I’d watched them for years. Every corded vein had been memorialized by my lens, and I still couldn’t get enough. But it wasn’t only his hands.
Every part of Helios was my addiction.
But with addictions came pitfalls, and I was quickly learning that the hollow emptiness in my core was a form of torture.
That the pulse deep in my womb eclipsed the one on the side of my neck.
That weakness wasn’t about lack of strength but forfeiture of agency.
Which was why I was desperately trying to hold in this allegorical moan, because I knew where this was going.
Helios was going to cannibalize my boundaries.
He was going to push.
He would use every sound, every reaction my body made, and he would shove us into the wilds where control disintegrated, and I feared that.
I feared an unrestrained Helios.
God, did I fear it. Because I thought I’d experienced the softest caress from a violent assaulter.
I thought I knew what affection felt like from a man named after the god of the sun.
But I saw firsthand how violently brutal he could be, and those hands that’d gently swept my hair over my shoulder minutes ago belonged to the warfighter who’d ruthlessly killed hours prior.
And now, I was here.
My body not my own, my reservations a pool at his feet, and my trust as free-flowing as the water raining down from the showerhead.
Except I was terrified.
I didn’t know how to meld my trauma with the safety I’d felt in his hands, because Helios wasn’t safe. I didn’t know how to let him into my heart without it destroying me, because Helios would destroy me. He already was.
And yet, he was all I wanted.
The competency of his thumbs digging into my flesh, the resulting release of tension followed by full-body tingles, he already had me in a state of surrender.
Come on, Haven. Surrender to me.
Over and over, slow and hard, his deft, strong fingers made firm circles over my ass. Then he gripped my hips and pressed his thumbs into my lower back, drawing wide ellipses.
You and me, Feralyn, we’re deep. Soul fucking deep.
I couldn’t hold the words in anymore. “Those texts I sent you, I didn’t use your Wi-Fi.”
“I know.” His massage didn’t stop, and his tone wasn’t angry.
He didn’t react in any way.
Dropping my hands from the wall, I turned.
Then I looked up into gray-blue eyes that were a raging storm, and my voice caught.
“It-It’s how the Vulture found your island.
I compromised… I compromised everybody.” I’d compromised him.
“I ruined your island.” I’d told him I hated him, and that ugliness was still hurting my heart.
“No one’s compromised, and you didn’t ruin shit.” He grasped my waist. “Stop apologizing.” Slowly, he drew his skillful hands up my back with intentional firmness, but his voice was too calm for the look in his eyes.
“You knew.” I should have realized.
“Saint texted.” With a featherlight deftness, my bra was unhooked.
I glanced down as the straps fell from my shoulders.
“You’re….” Oh God, my bra was about to fall from my breasts.
The exposure, the nudity, it was almost trivial relative to where his hands had already been, but it was monumental to a photographer’s eyes.
“You’re not mad.” Would it be monumental to him?
“It lured those motherfuckers into a kill sack. They’re all dead. Not fucking mad.”
I looked up. “Even though I made a horrible mistake?” My bra fell away from one breast.
His gaze dropped, his intense stare turned fierce, and his nostrils flared.
Then he met my eyes again. “Not a mistake. Safety protocol oversight,” he corrected, reprimanded.
“One you won’t let happen again.” He grasped my chin.
“And, woman, you haven’t done a single fucking horrible thing in your life. That’s not who you are.”
My nipple hard and bare, every part of me feeling exposed, guilt noosed my heart. “I told you I hated you.”
The ardent storm in his eyes instantly shut down as his warfighter mask immediately locked into place. “I exfilled you from a plane at eight thousand feet.”
A shock wave rippled through my own desire. “Is that an apology?”
“Are we here?”
The question a demand, he didn’t mean here as in alive.
He meant in this shower. He was also testing me.
And Helios only did that when he felt vulnerable.
Except same as can’t, that word wasn’t in his vocabulary.
Any vulnerability would be a weakness in his eyes.
One he would never directly express. But he did, unknowingly, brazenly, wear his heart on his sleeve.
I answered simply. “Yes.”
“Not an apology, woman. What triggers do I need to be aware of?”
“I….” My brain scrambled to catch up to the abrupt subject change. “What?”
“Eight years ago,” he stated with zero intonation. “You declined the SAK, but you were assaulted.” His gaze still Delta-operator impenetrable, his hands fell away from my back. “I didn’t ask then what happened. Now I am. I need to know if you have any triggers related to sexual acts.”
I was inexperienced. Right now, uncomfortably so.
But I wasn’t na?ve. I read books, watched movies.
I’d paid attention during the wholly inadequate sexual education class in school.
But none of it prepared me for this—his question, this conversation, the sudden enormity of it all, of how I was different.
The worst part, though, was the new layer of shame now blanketing me.
That I was so broken, it necessitated him having to ask if I was going to have a panic attack if he consensually touched me.
What if that made me a burden? Or worse, undesirable.
And the horrible part was, I couldn’t even answer his question because I didn’t know.
“Stop internalizing, Feralyn,” Helios ordered, his tone brooking no argument.
“Am I a burden?” I blurted the question before I could think it through.
“No.”
I reminded myself that Helios had never outright lied to me, but I still had to look away from his intense stare before I clarified. “At all?”
He gripped my chin and tipped my face up to his. “No. Triggers?” His statement was emphatic, but his question was clinical.
“I don’t know.”
“When was the last time you had sex?”
The heat of the shower suddenly flushed through me.
“Answer,” he demanded.
“Never,” I whispered.
The warfighter mask instantly gone, the raging storm in his eyes immediately back, his palm landed on my throat, and Helios rushed me.
His heated gaze level with mine, his mouth a hair’s breadth away, the full weight of his carnality landed against my lips. “You are so fucking mine.”
The deluge of his dominance washed over my body, and I shuddered.
He kissed me.
Raw, possessive, but closed mouth. Gentle.
My soul floated in that sunrise sky.
Then, staring at me with utter hunger, at my breasts, at my painfully hard nipples, he hooked a finger in the center of my bra and pulled the lacy material all the way down my arms, letting it drop to the shower floor.
His growl was low and rough, and the hard, thick, impossibly long length of his erection, barely contained by his formfitting black boxers, grew even larger.
I wanted to touch him as much as I wanted to feel the vibration of his reaction.
Brave, terrified, emboldened, shy, I reached up and placed my hand over his throat.
He cupped my breasts and stroked his thumbs over my nipples. “You’re fucking stunning, Haven.”
The reverberation of his voice tingled my hand, his touch shot to my core, and his words sank into my heart. My moan escaped.
“Fucking knew you’d be responsive to me.” His voice pure electricity against my palm, he pinched my hard peaks, sending shock waves straight to my core.
My back arched, my chest thrust up toward him, and my moan unraveled into a guttural groan.
All at once, I was jerked up by the waist. My back hit the shower wall, my legs were yanked around his hips, then his mouth slammed over mine.
Helios Titan Grayson was kissing me how he had on his island, but this time, it was everything.
My body wrapped around his, he gripped my face and thigh with bruising possessiveness, and his tongue delved in without restraint. It was heated and venereal and dangerous and savoring.
It was punishingly hard and intoxicatingly addictive.
And it wasn’t enough.
His tongue stroked deeper, the head of his hard length stabbed the center of my nerves with too much force, and my core constricted as an emptiness I didn’t know existed pulsed like punishing pain between my legs.
Then his thumb slid past my thong, swirled over my clit, and a thick finger was at my entrance. He pushed inside.
“Oh God.” Painful, perfect. FULL. So, so full. Finally. “Helios.” Oh my God.
“So fucking wet. So fucking sweet. You feel that, woman?” He licked my neck, then bit my ear as his thumb swirled. His finger pressed deeper. “You’re gonna come so damn hard for me.” He stroked. Inside me.
My world exploded.
Every one of those haunting muzzle flashes turned into fireworks.
Shattering pleasure erupted from my core, my legs shook, my hands fisted in his hair, my back bowed, my toes curled, and a pleasure-addicted animal crawled out of my body. The throaty moan echoed in the shower before my raspy voice was begging, rejoicing, crying. “Ahhhh! Please. Oh my God. Helios!”
“That’s right. I fucking own that, woman. Your orgasms are mine.” Hard and fast, his finger pumping in and out of me, milking me, too much, not enough, he stroked with his thumb over my clit, but then he pinched the overly sensitive bundle of nerves. “You’re giving me a second one. Right now.”
His hot mouth landed on my breast, teeth bit my nipple, my clit was assaulted, and a second finger drove into my core.
For an impossible moment, I absolutely levitated. Then I completely shattered.