39 #3
The taste of him knocks the next word clean out of me as my spine meets the wall, his hands already at my coat, my waistband, stripping through the last layers of civility we’ve been hiding behind.
‘What—’ I wrench in half a breath. ‘We can’t do this here.’ My fingers twist into his jacket even as I say it. ‘Someone could come in.’
He catches the change in my breathing before the protest is done. His hand slips beneath my waistband, finds the proof of exactly how little my body agrees with my mouth, and the rest of the argument dies the moment his thumb presses against my heat.
A low, ruined sound leaves him as my body opens for him. ‘Then tell me to stop.’ He drags our jeans and thermal layers down just far enough to free our hips.
‘I said someone could come in.’ I pull his mouth back to mine. ‘I didn’t say stop.’
He lifts me against the wall, shoves between my thighs and drives into me in one hard stroke.
The ache hits us both at once, drawing the same broken exhale from our mouths.
‘Already wet,’ he murmurs against my lips.
My tongue can’t form words while his girth is stretching me so thoroughly.
‘I know you can be a good girl and that’s exactly what you’ll be,’ he rumbles against my lips as he takes a soft nip at my chin and exhales shakily when that final inch of him settles inside me.
‘You came in here with his name still on you.’ His hand closes tighter over my hip, holding me still against the full, ruthless size of him.
I can’t make out his face amidst the constellations swirling in my vision.
‘You’re leaving with something of mine.’
My breath falls apart half in surrender, half in defiance. Then his mouth drags along my jaw, and all thoughts disperse again. ‘You’re doing this today, Leah.’ He thrusts once, and a moan wrenches from my lips. ‘And that’s final.’
‘I’m not tattooing your name on my arse,’ I snarl.
His lips capture mine and drown the rest as he starts moving hard and fast before I can weaponise another unnecessary remark – completely unmoved by the fact that there is a counter, a curtain and an entire town of nosy people on the other side of it.
Whatever protest remained on my tongue dissolves into a soft gasp against his mouth.
His hand slides up to cradle the back of my head and keeps me there, sealed to him.
Every thrust punches the air from my lungs, but he doesn’t let the sounds of my pleasure escape – he traps them between our lips until he claims them as his own.
Then he stops abruptly, still deep inside me.
‘Don’t stop,’ I complain, my hand coming to thread through his beard as I pull him into me again and take his tongue.
‘Not a name,’ he murmurs ponderously and pulls halfway out of me. ‘Something else then,’ he agrees. ‘Something mine.’
He pushes into me and a muffled cry lodges between my teeth.
‘A name is too small,’ he breathes, ‘and I have two.’ Rocking into me with a slow, devious pressure, he makes the wall disappear behind my back. ‘I don’t want letters on you.’
I make a sound of protest, but it simply comes out too breathless.
‘Something,’ he groans as he pushes in, eyes opening to witness what he’s doing to me, ‘that says the past reached for you and lost its hand.’
His eyes close as the words leave him, his forehead lowering to mine, and then he begins undulating deeply and possessively, lost between violence and worship.
My core clenches around the pressure, thighs tightening as each deep pass pulls another helpless shudder through me.
‘You’ll let me mark you, Leah.’ He slows. Stops, still inside me. And pulls my chin up as he looks down at me with an expression so grave it raises alarms in the back of my mind. ‘Just like you marked me.’
‘Wh—’ I start, but his kiss cuts me off.
The answer moves through me with every slow, devastating sway of his hips.
Mark.
Somehow, it doesn’t throw me back into every warning I have spent months building around his name.
This isn’t Ron who made a promise he had no intention of keeping. This isn’t the hand of a mysterious woman reaching through the past to torment Elias.
This is him and this is me, remaking each other with breath and rhythm.
His mouth slips from mine; his beard is rough against me, and though I can’t see it, I can feel the streak of ink beneath his sleeve when his arm tightens around me: ‘The wound is the place where the light enters you’.
My words. His skin.
My mark.
His forehead presses to mine as recognition floods me.
I breathe his name into the narrow space, and it breaks something open in him.
He moves deeper, faster, lost inside me as I’m lost in him. As if all sensation is gone save for the friction between us, my hands on his shoulders, and his hands on my thighs.
I’m taking all his demons. He’s taking mine.
Maybe that is the mark neither of us can see but can definitely feel.
Or maybe the truth is far worse.
Maybe I am standing at the mouth of darkness, holding out my hand, and realising I have been throwing pieces of myself there since the moment I met him – only now realising I never wanted them back.