20. Bella – The Sensual Dream
Chapter twenty
Bella – The Sensual Dream
I’ve stabilized Tom as best as I. He’s on an IV, cleaned up, antibiotics administered, his wound dressed. Finn will stay with him tonight.
I have Lena coming back for blood tests tomorrow and the two girls, Jenna and Maris, a few days later for follow-up. Silas is better but the blood we took from him is unconventional, acting odd. Will he take a turn for the worse or just heal? He’s happy to stay here a little longer.
After checking on Tom and Silas one last time for the night, I go upstairs to bed.
Darius fills my thoughts. I’ve met the man in my recurring dreams. He happens to be the man that sends a chill through me every time I look at him or hear that deep voice. It’s crazy. I’ve known him for only a few days and he’s dominating my senses.
He’s not only gorgeous, but head of this island. While I can’t stop thinking about him, I’m also confused. What am I supposed to do with the fact that we were in each other’s dreams? What am I to him, and him to me?
There’s an undeniable spark and attraction between us, but we barely know each other.
What of the words You made your way back to me?
I climb into bed, exhausted. A morning on the boat, the afternoon with Darius and then the emergency in The Wilds to help Tom has wiped me out.
Charlie curls up by the door, my personal guard, and I lie down.
Exhaustion settles into my bones like lead. Sleep doesn't creep in. It swallows me whole.
I sink through layers of consciousness like a stone dropped into dark water. The room fades, the clinic fades. My own name fades. And then—
I’m in darkness. Complete and velvety, wrapping around me like a living thing.
I open my eyes—or I think I do—and I'm somewhere else.
Not my bedroom. Not any room I recognize.
The walls exist only as suggestions, shadows that shift and breathe at the edges of my vision.
A faint glow pulses from somewhere I can't locate, casting just enough light to reveal the shape of a bed beneath me.
Velvet, I realize. The sheets are velvet, deep burgundy, soft against my bare skin.
My bare skin?
I'm naked. Completely, utterly naked, spread across this enormous bed like an offering laid out on an altar.
The air is warm—unnaturally warm—and it carries a scent that makes my nostrils flare and my pulse quicken.
Sandalwood. And something beneath it, something darker, like roses pressed into the earth.
The fragrance coils through my lungs and settles low in my belly, stirring something I haven't felt in longer than I care to admit.
This is a dream, I think. My hands twitch against the velvet.
I should be afraid. I should be searching for an exit, for a weapon, for my clothes.
But my body refuses to obey the rational commands my brain sends.
I lie here, breathing that intoxicating scent, and I wait.
I don't know what I'm waiting for until it happens.
"Bella."
That deep voice rolls through the darkness like distant thunder, like the lowest note of a cello sustained until it vibrates in the marrow of my bones. My name in that voice—my name shaped by those lips—affects me deeply. It’s him.
He says only my name, and it's enough.
My thighs press together. My nipples tighten against the air. I arch my neck, turning my head toward the sound, toward the deeper shadow at the foot of the bed where the darkness coalesces into a shape. A man's shape. Him.
Darius. Moving toward me with a fluid grace that doesn't seem entirely human—but I don't care about that now. I only care about the way his presence fills this chamber, this bed, the way the air thickens with that sandalwood-and-earth scent until I'm practically drowning in it.
He doesn't speak again. He shows me what he wants to do with his mouth.
His lips find my ankle. The inside of my left ankle, where the skin is thin and the veins run close to the surface.
His tongue—warm, impossibly soft—traces a slow circle there.
My leg jerks, a reflex I can't control, but his hands grip my calf and hold me still.
Firm. Commanding. The kind of grip that tells me he could break me if he chose to, but he won't.
"Bella," he breathes against my skin, and the vibration of his voice travels up my shin, past my knee, into the muscle of my thigh.
He licks a path as he speaks, dragging his tongue in a long, deliberate stripe from my ankle to the bend of my knee. Slow. Methodical. Like he's claiming every inch of terrain he crosses and is marking it with his tongue and his heat.
My fingers curl into the velvet. My breath comes faster, shallower. I want to speak—to ask why this feels more real than any dream I've ever had—but my voice won't cooperate. I can only make small sounds, moans, gasps and whimpers that escape without my permission.
He switches to my right leg. Same methodical attention.
His tongue traces the curve of my ankle, then ascends—slowly, so slowly—along the inside of my calf.
The muscle quivers under his mouth. He pauses at my knee, nipping the soft skin there with teeth that feel sharper than they should, and the tiny bite of pain sends a jolt of electricity straight to my mound. I'm wet already.
"Please," I manage. One word. Barely a word at all—more like a fractured syllable that breaks apart in the humid air.
He doesn't answer. He continues his ascent.
His tongue reaches my thigh. The inside of my thigh, where the skin is silk-soft and the blood runs hot.
He licks me there with broad, flat strokes, covering every inch of flesh from my knee to the mound where my leg meets my hip.
His hands slide under my thighs, lifting them, spreading them open, and I let him.
There's hunger. There's possession. There's the unmistakable intention of a man who is seducing me piece by piece.
I feel how much I want this—how much I want him—and the raw animal truth of it strips away any pretense I might have clung to. I'm not the town doctor here. I'm not the meticulous professional who keeps her life organized and her emotions locked in a sterile cabinet.
I'm a woman on a bed, trembling under his tongue, and I don't want him to stop.
He doesn't stop.
His mouth now flicks at my mound. The crease of my hip, the slope of my lower belly, the outer edge of my pubic bone—he licks each contour with the same deliberate attention he gave my ankles, my calves, my thighs.
But when his tongue finally touches the center of me—when he drags that warm, soft muscle across my clit for the first time—my whole body seizes.
I cry out. A raw, uncontrolled sound that echoes off the shifting walls of this shadowed chamber.
My hips buck upward, chasing his mouth, but he presses me down with one hand flat on my belly while the other hooks under my thigh to hold me open.
Pinned. Exposed. Unable to escape the slow, maddening rhythm of his tongue as it circles my clit again.
And again.
And again.
"Bella," he murmurs between strokes, and my name in his deep vibrating voice is a caress and a brand.
"Bella. Bella." He repeats it like a liturgy, like a spell, like a claim he's inscribing on my flesh with every syllable.
His tongue flattens against my clit and presses, holding me on the edge of release without pushing me over.
My chest heaves, my hands fisting the velvet so hard my knuckles ache.
His fingers now join his mouth. Long, elegant fingers—I remember noticing those hands and fingers, from the brief moments I've seen him in waking life—slide along my inner thighs, tracing the wetness on my skin.
One finger circles the entrance to my body, teasing the slick, swollen flesh there without penetrating.
Just circling. Just reminding me of how empty I am, how much I need to be filled.
"Please," I say again, and this time the word comes out more clearly, hungrier. "Please, I need—"
He knows what I need. He doesn't require my clumsy verbal request.
His fingers slide inside me in one smooth thrust that makes my back arch off the bed.
I clench around him—three fingers—and the pressure is enough to make my vision blur.
He curls them, finding that spot inside me that I've only ever reached on my own with careful, sensual precision, and he strokes it with a rhythm that matches the circling of his tongue on my clit.
Dual stimulation. Internal and external. His mouth on my most sensitive flesh, his fingers inside me stroking that secret place, and the combination dismantles me.
My orgasm builds like a wave gathering mass over deep water—slow at first, then faster, then unstoppable.
I finally come against his mouth with a force that shocks me, my pussy clenching and releasing around his fingers, my clit pulsing under his tongue, my whole body shaking in waves that seem to last forever.
He doesn't pull away. He tongues me through it. Every spasm, every aftershock, every whimper that escapes my lips—he consumes them all with that patient, relentless mouth. And when the orgasm finally ebbs, leaving me gasping and trembling, he starts again.
His tongue circles my clit. His fingers pumps slowly inside me.
I'm still coming down from the first climax, still sensitive, still raw, and he pushes me back up the slope without giving me time to recover.
My body resists for a single heartbeat; then it surrenders.
The second orgasm crashes through me harder than the first, my internal muscles clamping around his fingers, my hips grinding, my voice breaking on a moan and a scream I can't silence.
Still, he doesn't stop.