17. More Torture
MORE TORTURE
When Guin next opened her eyes, the darkness was of the gray-blue kind that coalesces in the early morning hours just before dawn. That meant she’d slept through the day and the night and right into the next day.
She stretched, feeling better than she had, except… Memory was coming back to her. She’d asked Bran to stay and watch her bathe, she’d asked him to join her in bed. And if she were really quiet and held her breath… Yes… she could hear the steady inhalations and exhalations of a deeply sleeping man.
He was still here.
Gently, she turned around, and there he was, curved on his side, facing her, one arm under his head, the other stretched out toward her.
He lay on the very edge of the bed, as far from her as possible, wearing only his trousers and untucked shirt.
He’d been fully dressed when he’d climbed in bed with her.
He must have undressed after she’d fallen asleep, then rejoined her.
She inched closer so their knees, both bent toward the center of the bed, almost touched.
He was entirely himself in the dark—black hair and lashes, slashing white scars and large, veined hands.
One was turned palm up, and she pressed her finger gently into its padded center.
Then she traced one line striking across the top of it, another that slanted toward his wrist, and there she paused, circling her thumb lightly around his pulse before traveling up his corded tendons to the bulk of forearms mostly hidden by his shirtsleeves.
His cheeks were rough with dark stubble, his generous lips slightly parted, and she took her explorations to them, testing the stubble beneath her fingertips, outlining the curve of his lower lip.
She’d never seen him like this—quiet and still and vulnerable.
She’d woken up like this after the fight in the alley, when she’d discovered his deception, but she’d been too angry to discover him, too, the real him she was only now coming to know.
Not simply a guard with a single name. Not a duke with a hidden visage and high ideals.
A man who straddled light and dark, who was neither and both at the same time.
She explored the sleekness of the scar slashing down one side of his face. It cut a path through his stubble, resisting it. He’d come to her with that scar. Perhaps she’d ask him one day how he’d gotten it.
So many secrets. He’d kept them from her. She’d kept them from him. Her parents… they too had kept information in family mausoleums. They were all locked in little boxes, alone, clutching their keys tightly so no one else could get in.
She didn’t have to give away her key, just… slip into another’s box now and then.
As she reached for a lock of hair that had fallen over Bran’s temple, his eyes opened.
He didn’t flinch to find her watching him.
He merely laid there, barely breathing, letting her fingertips touch their fill.
When she drew her fingertip down his nose and tapped the tip of it, the corner of his lips bounced upward, shaping his mouth into the smallest smile she’d ever seen on his beautiful, scared face.
Downward, she kept going, over the bump of his lips, the cliff of his chin, and down the strong length of his neck.
The chest exposed by the open V of his shirt was hard and dusted with dark hair, and she avoided it, rounding to draw a line over his upper shoulder and down his arm, back to his palm where she rested, pressing her own palm—smaller, paler—against his.
He moved without anything in his eyes hinting that he would, closing his hand over hers and lifting it to his mouth.
He kissed her fingertips. He kissed her knuckles.
He flipped her hand and kissed the center of her palm, and it felt like he’d found a lever to press to open her box so he could step inside.
But he only kept scattering kisses across her hand, his tongue darting out for the briefest taste of her increasingly erratic pulse.
Surprising her voice sounded so steady as it drifted through the quiet between them.
“I want you to—” What? Make love to her?
There would be none of that. Sleep with her?
That too tame. She’d slept who knew how many hours, and now she needed action.
Coitus—too clinical. Fucking? Yes, she supposed that was the right way to say it.
What she wanted was raw and passionate, a meeting of bodies she’d never be able to have with another man.
She could have it with Bran, though. Because he’d betrayed her.
She could never love him. That made him safe.
“I want you to fuck me. I want you to make me forget everything except for the places our bodies join.”
His hand banded around her wrist, and he yanked her against him, her arms caught between them, her palms flattened against his massive chest. He was a rock, but his heart was a horse, running breathless to a place she couldn’t see.
He dipped his head to kiss her, and she turned, his lips hitting her cheek instead. This was not about kisses. She would show him what this was about.
She tangled her hand in his shirt and tugged as she pushed to her knees. He sat, muscles flexing, and she pulled his shirt off over his head, sent it floating off into the air.
Now she couldn’t breathe because there was so much skin and even more muscle and it was ordered into little lines down his torso that made her want to touch and taste, that made her hot and willing between her legs.
But even more arousing than the sight of him was knowing that he knew well how to use all that muscle, that he possessed a deadly grace that he exerted for her.
He was a well-made machine, and his cogs and mechanisms were tuned to her protection.
She shivered.
She needed to see more.
Trailing fingertips down his torso, she stopped at his trousers, undid a few buttons and felt how instantly his every muscle clenched beneath her touch, in anticipation of her intentions.
He speared his hands in her hair, cradling the back of her neck, jaw twitching as his gaze fixated on her mouth. He clenched his hands for a moment, then he released her and stood on the bed, letting his trousers drop and pool around his feet. Quickly, he kicked them away.
And she found herself occupied, unaccountably with those feet—long and somehow vulnerable. She dragged the pad of her thumb up the inside arch of one, up the ankle, the movement towing her gaze upward past a well-defined calf and thighs heavy with hard muscle and dusted with dark hair.
His shaft was long and thick and hard, an elixir that switched her brain off and turned her body on.
Her mouth was dry, her skin tingling, her nipples tightening, and he stroked himself with one hand, standing tall on the bed like a deity.
He dropped to his knees, forcing her gaze to his.
And he kept hold of himself as he lifted his other hand to her neck, hooking a finger under the edge of her dressing gown and pulled it down over her shoulder.
Already loosened from sleep, the gown fell off entirely, leaving her naked to the waist, and leaving him hungry eyed.
Exactly how she felt.
His hands coasted down her body, spanning her waist, and releasing the rest of her dressing gown. He moved forward with one knee as the silk fell to the bed, pressing his thigh against her core, his shaft against her belly.
His hands were strong on her jaw, tilting her head back, and she knew he would descend for a kiss.
She pressed her fingers into his chest and pushed. He fell backward, something naughty sparking in his eyes, and she fell atop him, grasping his wrists and pinning them to the bed before he could touch her.
“Guin,” he groaned, rolling his hips against her, still smiling. Smiling more than she’d seen him, as duke or guard. “More torture?”
She released one wrist and smoothed her hand down his torso, wrapped it around his shaft. “Perhaps.”
He chuckled. “Torture from you is better than any pleasure.”
She inhaled a ragged breath, and when he tried to grasp her thigh, she swatted his hand away. “You do not have to stay still, but no hands.”
He curled them into the blankets beneath them, closing his eyes, and she…
well, she squeezed. And he hissed, and wasn’t that delightful.
Another experiment necessary—so she swiped her thumb over the head of his shaft.
Another hiss. Almost a conclusive study.
She straddled his thighs and curled over him, licked him, and his hips bucked as he moaned her name.
Yes, she could say conclusively, he liked being touched there. And she liked touching him there, but there were so many other places to explore, his body a feast laid out only for her.
First those ridges of muscle marching up his belly.
Less a belly and more a slab of metal, as unlike her own soft, curved middle as possible.
She liked how his chest muscle flexed when she traced it and how the hollow of his throat smelled more like him than other places she’d explored, as if it stored a concentration of his scent.
She might put a half drop of it into her love potion to drive the women of London wild.
She liked the bulge of his bicep because she could not see it bunch without thinking of it beneath black linen as he pulled a blade from thin air and tossed it at an attacker. That bicep had saved her life on more than one occasion. She kissed it, thanked it.
He curled up, hands still clutching the blankets, to kiss the top of her head, and she reared back, coasted back down his body to find his thighs and sigh over them.
More than once. The next time he stomped through a puddle or pressed the heel of his boot to an attacker’s temple, she’d know exactly what the muscle controlling the action looked like—sublime.
That word did not describe her, though. She was too achy, too breathless, too needy. She wanted his hands on her.
“No more,” she whispered, falling against him. “Please, Bran.”
He shifted, and she was falling onto the mattress, her head cradled by his hard arm as the rest of his body closed in on her—his leg chaining her legs to the bed, his hand smoothing over her belly and up her ribs.
He dipped to kiss her.
But she turned her head.
And when she peeked up at him, she saw he finally understood. The merry fever in his green eyes had gone, replaced by steely determination.
“Where, oh Lady Guin, may I touch you?” he asked, drawing a hot line between her breasts with his thumb.
“Stop! There!” The words seemed to choke her, the need too much.
“That’s exactly where I want to be, lass,” he whispered against her ear.
She shivered, but not for long. When his hand engulfed her breast, her body became heat itself, a growing, gasping flame kindled to life by the hot coal of his hand.
He rolled her nipple to a pebbled point and lowered his head to the other breast, taking a long slow lick around it.
She tangled her hands in his hair, her back arching off the bed as he nipped and sucked.
Almost, she didn’t notice that the attention of his hand had wandered down her body, away from her breast and had begun to circle round her navel.
And when had that become an epicenter of sensation?
He dipped his thumb in and dragged it out, ventured lower, sifting through her curls to find her sex.
He inched a finger into her, and she clung more tightly to him—arms around neck, face against chest, the scent of him driving her higher.
He added another as he circled his thumb round and round her clitoris, moving closer and closer until she was swollen and writhing.
“Bran,” she breathed.
“Yes, lass,” he mumbled against her skin.
“Bran…” She could not get past that one syllable, that small collection of sounds as he wound her body tighter.
“Yes, lass?” His voice raspy as he set his lips against the skin of her chest, the scruff of his cheeks roughing against the top of her breast. When she didn’t answer, he nipped at her skin, held her tight, and said, “Anything, Guin. I’ll give you any damn thing you desire.”
He couldn’t do that.
But oh, how perfect to let him try. “More.” The only word she could manage to say.
But he must have known exactly what she meant because he slipped another finger inside her as he pressed on her clit, and her body wound all the way up, every muscle tightening to its tautest point before she exploded into a thousand falling stars.
He spoke slowly as he dragged hands and lips and body up her body, stopping at her throat where strange sounds vibrated—purrs and moans that increased as he kissed her neck, her chin, her—
She turned her head.
A thaw settled between them, and he backed away. She felt the lift of the mattress as he left the bed.
“No.” Her voice was weak, and the hand she lifted, reaching for him, was heavy and limp. “Don’t go. I want…”
“Anything, lass. Tell me.”
“More. And…” He set his knee on the bed again, reversed his retreat. “Take me however you want me.” Her arm dropped, her grin was barely there, but when his body covered hers once more, she exhaled. Nothing had ever felt so right.