Chapter 26 #2
She writhed, and I groaned as the movement rubbed her further against my shaft.
“You’re never getting away from me,” I vowed. “You wanted into my battered heart. You got there. Now you deal with the consequences.”
I seared my lips to hers. There wasn’t an ounce of finesse in me, lost as I was to the throes of primal desire to own her.
I didn’t coax. I took. When she didn’t open for me, I tweaked her nipples.
When she gasped, I took advantage. The first flick of her tongue against mine was like coming home after a long drive to nowhere.
All the poisoning tension released. The ache burrowed beneath my rib cage dissipated until only the need remained.
The scent of her arousal galvanized me to press for more.
I nibbled down her jaw to her neck, and when her top got in my way, I ripped it straight down the middle.
Those delicious tits bounced out, round and firm. All mine. I lapped at them over the lacy bra and lightly bit her nipples.
“Cillian.” She moaned and tossed her head back.
I groped the round, pillowy globes of her ass. She climbed me and wrapped her legs around my hips. The warmth of her soaked panties rocked over my groin. Over and over. Every touch burned red hot with electric connection.
“Yes,” she groaned, shoving herself down onto me with every thrust of my hips. “S’il te plait. Cillian. Touch me.”
My cock wept precum in anticipation, but my hands stuttered along her thighs. There was a reason we shouldn’t, that we couldn’t, but I was finding it dead difficult to care when she shivered in my arms and demanded more.
A door in the next room over slammed shut and pulled my senses together.
“Fuck.” I ripped myself away and banged a fist against a locker. “Fuuuck.” I panted with a garbled groan and squeezed my throbbing, aching erection through my pants. “We…we can’t.”
“Yes, we can.” She cupped my face and leaned in to kiss me again.
“No, we can’t,” I insisted, prying her hands off me.
She gave an indignant huff. “You chased me down this hallway to kiss me like that, only to reject me? Again? You couldn’t just let me go?”
“There are things you don’t know about me. About my family.”
“And whose fault is that?” she snarled.
“Will you just goddamn listen, woman?”
Her gaze anchored into mine and sank its angry claws in, and I suddenly felt like a goddamn gobshite for what needed to be said.
I cleared my throat, then licked my lips and cracked my neck.
“Well?” she prompted.
“I don’t…I can’t…”—these words sounded so ridiculous to say out loud—“I can’t be with the same woman more than once.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Do you understand how silly that sounds?”
“I swear it’s not.”
“Are you mocking me?”
“No.”
“Is this a virility thing? You need to prove you’re the big, strong man, still able to sow his wild oats?”
“No. That’s not—”
“Monogamy too good for you?”
“No. There’s—”
“Is it…is it me?” Her voice broke. “Am I that repulsive to you?”
“Feck, no. I—”
“If you’re going to say things like that, there was no need to chase—”
“Enough!” The pressure burst out of me like steam from a pipe. “Goddamn it. I can’t even get two words in with you.”
“Look at that. You just did.”
My hand barreled through her hair and clasped her nape. “You are the most enraging, headstrong, overconfident woman I have ever met.”
I crushed my mouth against hers and poured all my frustration into the hard press of my lips on hers, into the dominating tangle of our tongues, and into the squeeze of my fingers in her hair.
She tore her lips away, chest heaving. “That wasn’t the kiss of a man who doesn’t want me.”
“Because I do, but I won’t risk your life.”
She let out a sardonic laugh. “I think that’s the best and worst rejection I’ve ever received.”
“Alice…”
“You said you don’t have sex with women more than once, but we have.”
“I’m not talking about the number of times I fucked you that night.”
“Neither am I.”
I blinked.
“The night when you soothed me in your car and then took me to bed wasn’t the first time I welcomed you inside me.”
“What?” I must have heard her wrong.
“Twelve years ago, at a masquerade gala, in New York.”
My brows furrowed, unsure what she was getting at.
“You reassured a young woman wearing a dark silver-and-gold mask in a satin off-the-shoulder dress of the same color.”
My jaw very slowly slacked.
“She confessed to you that she was responsible for the death of a friend. You advised her to either make the best of the circumstances handed to her and rise above hardship or let it crush her beneath its weight until there was nothing left of her but pulp. The choice was hers.”
“How do you know this?”
“And if she was interested in free-falling into the unknown with both arms wide open, you would make it worth her while. You could help take her pain away.”
Those words rang warning bells, but it wasn’t possible. That woman had been blonde.
“You escorted her to an office upstairs. You bent her over a desk, lifted her dress over her hips, and spanked her. You whispered to her that she needed to learn to turn her pain into pleasure. And when her butt burned, you buried your face between her thighs and made her see stars. All that before you took my virginity.”
My head shook on its own, detached from the rest of me, cast into stone. “That woman, she didn’t have a French accent.”
“You mean she spoke like this?” Alice’s French accent vanished, her voice twisting into the flat tones that matched a speaker from the West Coast. “It takes effort, and it’s exhausting, but I can do it with enough motivation.”
A sudden heaviness chilled me from head to toe and cleaved me in place. “Can’t be.”
No matter how I delved through those memories for any lies, I kept coming up empty.
“Tell me that’s a lie. Right now!”
She glared at me, nonplussed. I gripped her face and put her forehead to mine.
“Tell me that’s not true. Tell me it wasn’t you.”
“It was, and you know it.”
“No,” I muttered.
I grappled onto the top of the locker and bit into my fist, my chest heaving. The floor spun. The truth minced my insides to bits, then seared the leftovers with the acid raging through my bloodstream.
Everything was tight and suffocating.
“Talk to me,” she whispered. Her nails skittered up and down my nape.
I jerked out of her touch.
“There are rules for a reason,” I seethed. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”