Chapter 42 Rae
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
RAE
I shouldn’t.
I really shouldn’t.
I shouldn’t want him so badly, shouldn’t feel my body catch on fire everywhere we touch, on every inch of my skin where his gaze alights, every shift of his mouth, every shadow in his eyes…
I want him. I need him. I pictured his face a million times as I floated in the deep sea.
I’ve craved his touch a million more.
He has my heart, and my body follows, desire becoming part of what I feel, this urge to become one with him and never let him go.
When he laid me on the velvet sofa, I was scared. Scared of everything he’s done or may have done, against other humans. Against my own family. That if he admits to hurting them, I’ll break.
Losing him once shattered me.
Losing him again will blow me to smithereens.
But my body won’t listen to reason, just like my heart. I was only going to find him, make sure he’s okay. I was going to sit down with him and talk, demand more answers, more memories.
Instead, here I am, kissing him, clinging to him when he sits and pulls me down, back into his lap, as if I’m drowning. Me! Of all people. A sea creature. Drowning. I’m dead already. What fear should I have of dying?
This death is pleasant, though, this sinking into him, and I’m crying even as I’m kissing him, demanding his touch, my fingers sliding into his hair, tugging him down to me.
I crush our mouths together, sobbing when his lips part and he kisses me back hard, our tongues meeting in a hungry tangle.
He wants me, too.
I don’t need the kiss to tell. Where he’s pressed between my legs, I feel him, his cock long and hard, hot even through the layers of fabric separating us.
So hard.
I don’t know why it gets me so hot. So excited. The burning between my legs is turning into a deeper, sweet ache.
Experimentally, I bend my knees and gather my legs in, lifting my pelvis, rubbing against his hardness, and he gasps against my mouth, his body twitching as if hit by lightning.
“Fuck, Rae…” He groans when I shift, planting his elbows on either side of my head, pressing his hard cock more firmly between my legs. “You have no idea what you do to me.”
But I think I may have a clue… a big clue.
I like his reaction, his intense and instant response, the thickness of his cock, the sensitivity of it as he rubs slowly against my soft, aching parts.
I like it way too much.
When he moves down my body, nuzzling the tops of my breasts that threaten to spill out of the silken bodice, I gasp.
“You’d better be sure you want this,” he breathes, “because soon it will be hard to stop, quite literally. Very goddamned hard.”
I grin. “I’m sure.” I bite my lip. “It doesn’t get you off the hook. I still want answers.”
“So do I,” he says gruffly, “believe me.” His mouth is back on my neck in an instant, leaving sweet bruises behind. “I want to push you down and take you,” he growls, “enter you and fill you up until we become one.”
“Yes…” I tremble, his words turning me on so much I ache with it. “Take me hard…”
“Is that what you want?” he murmurs against my skin. “Is that how Phaethon did it?”
I catch my lower lip between my teeth again, my thoughts warring between desire and trepidation. “I like how he took control. Pushed me a bit. Made me take it.”
“Well, I’m not Phaethon.”
“I know you’re not him. You’re Mars. My Mars. What do you want? Tell me.”
“I want you to feel safe. And in control. I want all of this, every part of it, to be your decision. Your wish.”
Warmth fills me. “And how?” I can’t help a small flinch when he lifts his hand and strokes my neck.
His dark brows bunch together. “Rae. Are you scared of me?”
“I don’t… With Phaethon, I liked it and yet—”
“I told you, I’m not him.”
“Aren’t you?” I ask, more bitterly than I thought I would, because that’s another thorn in my mind, another question I need answered, another dilemma, because I like Phaethon and hate him, too.
“Fuck. You… Do what you want with me.” He spreads his hands, sitting back on his heels and bowing his head, black hair spilling on his forehead. “Punish me, if you will, though if you walk out now, that would be the cruelest punishment.”
“Jai—”
“Slap me. Punch me. Toy with me.” He peers at me from under his long, dark lashes. “I want you to. Hurt me like I’ve hurt you.”
“You haven’t.”
A small shake of his head showing me he disagrees.
“Doubt is hurting you, and you shouldn’t have to doubt.
I’m not a good person, Rae. I haven’t been good since I lost you, and maybe I wasn’t good before that, either, and…
and I don’t want you to feel pressured. I want you to do what pleases you. To take what you need.”
I can’t deny that there’s a measure of excitement in doing as he says. In having him still and vulnerable as I touch him. Having him at my mercy. Finally letting out some of that sorrow I’ve carried around for a century, letting him feel its sharp edge.
After all, I enjoyed Phaethon taking me as he did, that rough coupling, that near violence, the edge of fear accompanying the pleasure.
But this is Jai. Jai is different from Phaethon, and I love him. Gods, I love him so much…
This is breaking me apart.
“Rae?” He’s watching me, his eyes asking more questions. “Let go. Take that pain and give it to me.”
He can read my mind sometimes. Or else he can read my face.
This isn’t only about me, though. He blames himself for being who he is, for what he has become since the king took him away and got him addicted to his bite.
No matter who he was before, he was still a boy when the king manipulated him to do his dirty work.
He’s my Mars, the first and only man I’ve loved. I don’t want to hurt him—but pleasure him? I want that, and I want to see how else I can make him lose control.
My body hums with arousal as I gather my legs under me and kneel on the sofa, mirroring his posture.
“Undress,” I whisper. “Undress for me.”
He watches me still, not moving, and my gaze is caught on the uneven rise and fall of his broad chest, the dark fabric covering him almost up to his chin, then by the bulge between his muscular thighs, the shape of his hard cock evident.
I lift my hand to touch his long lashes, his cheekbones. “These black marks on your cheeks…”
“The shadows have sunk deep into me,” he says softly.
“Bled into my skin, my neck, my chest, my arms… People think it’s exotic ink but it’s darkness.
The inside made manifest.” He looks away.
“How do you think I know you died? I felt it. Felt the bond crack. You don’t lose half of yourself and not know it. ”
“Jai…”
“That’s how the king became so obsessed with bringing back the dead.”
“What do you mean?”
“His mother was killed by the finnfolk. He doesn’t want to understand that if she comes back, she won’t be the same person she used to be.”
Not the same person. So what does that make me?
I swallow hard, place a hand on his chest, over his heart, the chiseled lines of his muscles pressing like rock against my palm. “Maybe I should help you get started,” I whisper, and my voice sounds cracked. Broken. “With the buttons.”
I start unbuttoning his shirt, starting from its high collar, my breath catching as I part the stiff fabric to reveal a triangle of pale skin.
I hurry to undo more buttons, parting his shirt completely, unveiling his sculpted chest and the black marks on his pecs that even cross over his small brown nipples, the hard stomach that contracts, throwing those delicious muscles into stark relief, when I trail my hand there.
The eye-shaped mark I’d noticed before seems darker now.
He grabs my hand, brings it to his mouth, unfolding my fingers. Kisses my palm. “Command me.”
He has said that before. More than once.
Echoes. Echoes and whispers.
Gods, he’s so beautiful, his beauty honed and dangerous like a blade. With Phaethon, it excited me. With Jai, it wrenches my heart.
I withdraw my hand and he allows it, dark eyes watching me, his mouth soft with a faint smile.
My body clenches as I push the shirt off those broad shoulders. He shrugs it off carelessly, letting it fall to the floor, and his muscles flex.
So strong. He could crush me with one hand, lift me off my feet with barely any effort. He lays that power at my feet.
My mouth waters. I want to run my mouth over every inch of warm skin, smooth or scarred and marked. It’s all perfect to me. His strength, all that power leashed in his tall body, calls to something old in me, a part not ruled by logic but by instinct.
I need him against me, over me, under me, inside me.
Not yet. I struggle for control—especially when I lower my hands to his pants, sitting snugly on narrow hips, a dark trail arrowing down, pointing at the bulge of his trapped cock.
He’s offering himself to me to unwrap, to touch as I please, and how often had I dreamed of touching him when I first met him? Back on that river shore, when everything had seemed possible and yet this strange ending to our story was nothing I could have ever imagined?
I undo the leather belt, pull it slowly off him, then pop the buttons at the front. One, two, three, four bone buttons. His hands are balled by his sides. He’s breathing faster now.
“Rise,” I whisper, gesturing at his lap. “I need to push your pants down.”
His mouth turns up into a smirk, revealing that sexy, faint dimple in his left cheek. “Tell my cock to rise higher and see what happens.”
My mouth twitches.
He lifts up on his knees, and with the movement, his stomach contracts again, forming ridges, his pecs bulging, all those delicious muscles outlined for my pleasure.
It’s enough to make a girl feel faint with desire.
Then I push down his pants and discover that he’s wearing nothing underneath. His scarred, muscular thighs part and his hard cock swings up, slapping his taut stomach, thick and long.
He’s right, it can’t rise any higher. It’s large and powerful, like the rest of him.
Breathtaking.
Knowing he has already been inside me does nothing to lessen my excitement.
That was Phaethon, I repeat to myself. This is my first time with Jai.
Right?