Chapter 8
FAUGH
The word falls from her lips again, breathy and uncertain, and something fundamental shifts inside my chest. "Faugh."
She stares up at me with those wide hazel eyes, her pupils blown dark with something that mirrors the primal hunger currently tearing through my carefully maintained control.
Her small hands are pressed flat against me, and I can feel the rapid flutter of her pulse through her fingertips, can smell the shift in her scent from lavender and turpentine to something warmer, headier, laced with arousal that makes my jaw clench around my tusks.
I have been fighting this pull since the moment I stepped into her chaotic apartment weeks ago.
I have maintained rigid boundaries, kept my distance, channeled my increasingly possessive urges into domestic tasks and protective gestures that gave me plausible deniability.
But standing here in this cramped kitchen with her trapped between my body and the counter, feeling her heat and smelling her want, I am rapidly losing the ability to pretend this is simply a convenient living arrangement.
"Chantel," I rumble, her name emerging from deep with far rougher than I intend, each syllable weighted with the barely restrained hunger coursing through me.
The way her name sounds in my own voice, raw, territorial, stripped of the careful civility I have maintained for weeks, sends another surge of need through my veins.
"You need to be very certain, absolutely certain, about what you are asking for right now.
Once I cross this line, there is no returning to the comfortable distance we have maintained.
I need you to understand the full gravity of what you are inviting, what I am capable of becoming when my control finally breaks completely. "
Her throat works as she swallows, the movement with predatory focus, imagining what it would feel like to press my mouth there, to feel her pulse racing beneath my tongue.
"Maybe," she whispers, and her voice trembles slightly but her gaze holds mine with surprising fierceness, "maybe you should protect me.
From everyone else. From myself. From all the voices telling me I'm not enough. "
The last thread of my control snaps cleanly.
A growl tears from my chest, low and feral, and I see her eyes widen fractionally before I move.
My hands leave the counter to grip her waist, my fingers spanning nearly the entire circumference of her soft middle, and I lift her effortlessly onto the countertop.
She gasps at the sudden movement, her hands flying to my shoulders for balance, and the height difference is corrected enough that I can look almost directly into her face instead of down at the top of her head.
"If I start this, I will not be gentle. I will not be civilized. I will not treat you like something fragile that might break."
Her breath catches, and instead of fear I see heat flash across her expression. "Good," she breathes. "I don't want gentle. I want you. All of you, not the polite version you show the rest of the world."
That permission is all I need. I close the remaining distance between us and capture her mouth with mine, and the taste of her explodes across my senses like nothing I have ever experienced.
She makes a small, desperate sound against my lips and her fingers dig into my shoulders, clinging to me as I devour her mouth with single-minded intensity.
Kissing her is a revelation. Her lips are impossibly soft, yielding beneath the demanding pressure of mine, and when I trace the seam of her mouth with my tongue she opens for me immediately, welcoming the invasion.
My tusks force me to angle my head carefully, but she adjusts without hesitation, tilting into me and kissing me back with a fierce enthusiasm that makes my cock harden painfully against the confines of my tailored slacks.
My hands roam her body with possessive urgency, mapping the generous curves that have been tormenting me from a respectful distance for weeks.
She is all soft warmth beneath my palms, her body yielding and plush everywhere mine is hard and unyielding.
I span my hand across her lower back and pull her closer to the counter, fitting her hips against mine, and the feel of her heat pressing against my aching erection makes me groan into her mouth.
"Faugh," she gasps when I break away from her lips to trail hot, open-mouthed kisses down the column of her throat. Her head falls back, granting me access, and I take full advantage, tasting the salt of her skin and feeling her pulse hammering wildly beneath my tongue. "Oh god, that feels—"
"Tell me," I demand roughly. I drag my teeth with deliberate care along the sensitive, delicate skin just above her collarbone, mindful of my tusks even as my grip on her waist tightens possessively.
"Tell me what you feel. I want to hear every word, every thought, everything that is running through that beautiful, chaotic mind of yours. Hold nothing back from me."
"I feel—" She breaks off with a shuddering gasp as I find a particularly sensitive spot just below her ear and focus my attention there, sucking hard enough to leave a mark.
"I feel like I've been waiting for this, for you, and I didn't even know it.
Like every other person I've been with was just..
. practice. Preparation. This feels right. "
A possessive snarl rumbles through my chest at the mention of other men touching her, and my hands tighten on her waist with enough force that she whimpers.
"No one else," I growl against her skin.
"From this moment forward, no one else touches you.
No one else gets to see you like this, gets to hear these sounds you make, gets to feel your body respond like this. Mine."
"Yours," she agrees breathlessly, and the surrender in her voice makes something primal and triumphant roar to life inside me.
I pull back just enough to look at her properly, taking in her flushed cheeks, her kiss-swollen lips, her dilated eyes dark with want. She looks thoroughly debauched already and we have barely started, and the visual evidence of my effect on her makes my cock throb with almost painful intensity.
"You are wearing far too many clothes," I inform her, my hands already reaching for the hem of her paint-stained sweater, the worn fabric soft beneath my fingertips. The casual observation comes out with all the gravity of a formal decree,as I prepare to divest her of every last barrier between us.
She laughs, the sound slightly unsteady but genuine, though there is an edge of breathlessness to it that tells me she understands exactly what I intend.
"Says the guy in three layers and a belt," she counters, her hazel eyes dancing with challenge even as her chest rises and falls more rapidly.
She reaches up as if to touch the henley stretched across my chest, then seems to think better of it, her small hand falling away.
"Though I suppose fair is fair. I could help you with that particular problem if you would like. "
The offer hangs between us, heavy with implication, and I feel that low growl building again at the thought of her small, delicate fingers working the buttons free, peeling away the layers of control I have maintained for so long.
"A problem I intend to remedy shortly," I assure her, dragging the oversized sweater up and over her head in one smooth motion.
The movement reveals a simple cotton bralette, pale blue and completely unadorned, and somehow the casual practicality of it is more arousing than the most elaborate lingerie could be.
"But you first. I have been fantasizing about getting you bare beneath my hands for weeks now, and I refuse to wait any longer. "
Her breath hitches sharply at my blunt, unfiltered admission, the sudden intake of air audible in the charged silence between us.
Color floods across her cheeks in a deep, flustered blush that spreads down the delicate column of her neck, staining her skin a warm rose that makes her look impossibly younger, impossibly more vulnerable.
She processes exactly what I have just confessed to her, weeks of desire, weeks of restraint shattering in a single sentence.
"You have?" she asks, her voice emerging small and uncertain, a thread of wonder woven through the question.
Her hands, which had been so confidently working at my shirt moments before, now fall still, and I can feel the rapid staccato of her heartbeat beneath my palm, matching the frantic rhythm of my own breathing.
"Constantly," I admit, reaching behind her to unhook the bralette with fingers that are almost comically large for such a delicate task.
The fabric falls away and I am greeted with her breasts, full and soft and perfect, her nipples already peaked and begging for attention.
"Every time you walk around the apartment in those thin tank tops, every time you stretch and that sliver of your stomach shows, every time you chew on your bottom lip while you are painting.
You have been driving me to distraction, Chantel.
Making me want things I had no right to want from my roommate. "
"Well," she says, her voice taking on a breathless, teasing quality even as her hands come up to work on the buttons of my shirt, "I guess it's a good thing I'm giving you permission to want them now."
I capture her hands before she can finish with the buttons, bringing both of her small wrists together in one of my much larger hands and pinning them gently but firmly against me. Her eyes widen at the casual display of my superior strength as her pupils dilate even further.