Chapter 18 #2
One thick finger teases my entrance, barely breaching. I draw in a sharp breath. “But it ain’t complicated if you can be patient. It’s about noticin’ the tension, the sound.”
He pushes in slow—inch by torturous inch—until I’m stretched around him, clenching desperately. My hips jerk; a broken moan spills out of me.
All of his attention is on me, watching and listening like a predator in the brush as the broad, calloused pad drags across a hidden ridge. He crooks his finger just right, finding that secret place inside that makes stars burst behind my eyes.
“There,” he rasps, satisfaction raw in his voice. He presses again, grinding that place until I buck helplessly. “Knew you carried a soft spot for me.”
A second finger slides in beside the first, stretching me wider. My body tightens, every beat pounding against him. His thumb torments my pearl—light, then firmer, never steady.
He withdraws sudden, leaving me empty. Lifting his hand, slick and gleaming, he slides his fingers into his mouth. “Christ above,” he groans, slowly sucking them clean. “You’re sweet as honey on my tongue. I could savor you to kingdom come.”
What a sinful, wicked man.
I cannot look away.
Every pull of his lips sends a fresh pulse between my legs, as if he’s still touching me, and yet I ache for his touch to return.
He runs his wet fingers over my lower lip, painting my mouth with my taste, then claims it in a deep, hungry kiss as his hand hovers teasingly between my legs, not quite touching where I need him.
Then two fingers plunge deep, merciless against that hidden place, his thumb circling harder, and the pressure builds fierce, unbearable.
I thrash in his lap as he presses, curls, grinds all at once, and the tension tears me apart.
It is as though I’m set aflame, every thought and breath bursting into a white flare that tears through me.
“Kodiak.” His name spills from my lips, wave after wave crashing through me. My thighs quake, my body wrung out in his lap, daylight blazing over every shameless sound. Kodiak steadies me through it, his breathing ragged against my skin.
“That’s right, call for me. I’m only warmin’ you up. I ain’t even started.”
His fingers ease, gentling me down, until I slump against his chest, trembling.
He gathers me as though I weigh nothing, the robe discarded. In the morning sun I’m laid bare before him, stretched across the bed. For a long moment he doesn’t move. He stands over me, mapping every inch of exposed skin like a beast lingering over captured prey, choosing its first indulgence.
He has claimed me.
He is mine and I am his. It’s time I surrender to it.
He undresses like a man who knows I’m watching, who wants me to watch. Waistcoat falls open, suspenders slip free from his shoulders, shirt peels back to reveal a broad, scarred torso. He shrugs it off, leaving only trousers clinging low on his hips.
I can’t breathe for looking at him—the hard cut of muscle, the trail of hair vanishing beneath the cloth, the raw power in his movements. My breath falters as he pushes his trousers lower and frees himself, thick and flushed, heavy in his grip.
He stands over me, smoldering. “Open your thighs for me,” he says, voice low.
Although steeped in disgrace, my longing wins and my body obeys, knees sinfully parting.
He slides down, his calloused hands spreading my thighs wider, pinning them to the sheets.
His breath is hot against my skin. The morning light catches the sheen of my own wetness, and his eyes darken.
“Goddamn, you’re pretty everywhere ain’t you,” he growls, parting me with his thumbs, an outlaw’s hunger lacing every word.
His mouth descends, lips brushing my tender flesh, and I gasp, my hips jerking at the first flick of his tongue.
He’s relentless, licking slow and deliberate.
My fingers twist in the sheets, nails biting into the fabric as his tongue circles, teasing, drawing a moan I can’t hold back.
My body arches, bound to him, entrapped by his spell.
The room spins, the sunlight too bright, exposing every shameful shudder.
Just as I feel the wave about to break, he pulls back, his lips glistening, fierce with hunger. “You ready for me, lamb?” He rises, positioning himself between my thighs, his thick length nudging at my entrance, searing and unyielding.
I know I shouldn’t, that this is an unholy weakness of the flesh, yet instead of ending this madness, I utter, “I need to feel you inside me.”
A wicked grin spreads across his face as he lowers himself, then murmurs at my cheek. “I’m gonna make sure you feel all of me. And I’m gonna take you slow.” He pushes, and the burn makes my nails bite into his shoulders.
Glancing down at where our bodies meet, his eyes flutter. “Christ almighty, look at you, takin’ me so sweet.”
He swallows my gasp with a kiss, holding me wide, easing in inch by torturous inch. The furnace of him fills me, shocking, tearing through the last of my virtue until it burns out in the fire of my hunger.
When he’s buried to the root, every inch of him stretching me to a brutal fullness that borders on pain, he shudders with a faint whimper. His jaw locks tight, eyes squeezed shut, veins bulging along his neck as he fights for control.
“I’m gonna give you what you prayed for, little lamb.”
He begins to move.
Slow at first, hips rolling, the drag of him stoking fire through me.
Each thrust is steady, claiming, deliberate, his voice rough with filthy praise.
His lips find my breast, drawing hard. The glide of him aches, friction mounting with every push.
The bed groans, protesting the force of our vigor.
Each stroke deeper, harder. I cry out, loud and vulgar. Thin walls be damned.
He grips my throat, letting me feel his power, his restraint, thumb brushing my jaw as though to tether me even in the roughness.
Perhaps I should be frightened. This brute capable of the most gruesome of crimes holds my life in his hands.
But there’s something in that powerlessness that sets me free, and surrendering to it, being raptured by it, I’m beyond salvation.
He shifts, guiding himself carefully, all his senses attuned to me the way he’d watched before. As he settles deeper, the violent flare of pleasure makes me wail.
“There,” he says, moving again, each push wracking my body, each devastating swing precise. The rhythm builds until I’m writhing, vision flaring white.
I break, body seizing tight around him.
He bears into me harder until another wave rips me open, and another. My sobs tumble over themselves, raw, near-hysteric, as he carries me through one shiver after the next.
“Goddamn, Alice.”
His thrusts turn ragged, urgent. For all his power, he’s ensnared in me.
Just as defenseless against me as I am from him.
He groans like a man in pain given mercy.
Pulling free, he spends hot across my belly, my thighs, his cry tearing from him raw and guttural.
He collapses to his forearms above me, trembling, sweat dripping onto my skin.
Catching his breath, a dazzling smile emerges as his head rolls back. “Christ almighty.”
His mouth presses rough to my hair, my forehead, my cheek, as if he’s overcome with affection.
“Stay put, sweetheart. I ain’t done taking care of you.
” He rises, his Herculean silhouette striking against the morning light as he steps away in his bare skin.
How can something so delicious—so beautiful—be wrong?
Every fear, every anxious whisper shutters itself away, leaving only the quiet, steady hum of my body remembering his.
He returns with a damp towel, kneeling beside me and gliding the cloth over my skin, erasing his mark with a tenderness that feels like worship.
“You’re so damn beautiful,” he whispers, his voice thick with devotion.
“And all mine.” His touch lingers, fingertips tracing the paths he’s cleaned, as if re-mapping me as his own.
He pulls me into his chest, his arms a fortress around me, and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, his touch both gentle and possessive. “I’ll keep you close, Alice. Not just tonight, but every damn night. No one else gets to hold you like this.”
We settle together, the soft roar of voices and train cars outside like quiet music.
“Reckon you’ll go pray now,” he teases. “Beg forgiveness for wantin’ me and call it a mistake.” Though his tone is playful, there’s tenderness underneath.
Regret blooms in my chest for having been so desperately repentant after our first intimacy, as if he were a stain on me. Perhaps that was cruel.
“I hadn’t meant it that way. You mustn’t believe it was you. A lady is meant to protect her virtue, and yet when I’m with you…I’m powerless against my desire.”
He nuzzles closer, the mattress dipping beneath his weight. “Yeah, but powerless ain’t a sin. Just means there ain’t no say in it. Same as I had no say the first time I laid eyes on you.”
Something deep and long-quiet inside me stirs to life.
“No say in it,” he echoes. “You and me. Always was.”
The earnestness in his expression undoes me, my heart swelling with a sudden aching affection for him. Perhaps I had named it sin out of fear, but fear is not faith. Faith is trust in the path laid before me. And if that path runs through his arms, perhaps I was wrong about virtue all along.
Our union occupies more of the morning than I would confess aloud.
Once my body can endure no further indulgence, we are spent and compelled at last to seek some other pursuit.
Kodiak proposes a breath of fresh air before his mysterious business visit.
We promenade along the levee, the Mississippi rolling slow and brown beside us, steamboat whistles splitting the heat.