Chapter 18
Lauren woke up with Santi’s arm around her, feeling well rested, content, at peace, hopeful; then her memories came flooding back.
Ma Mable was in Shrouded Lake, and she’d left Lauren’s father.
When Lauren had left Lina’s, she thought she would spiral into a deep and angry depression, but instead, the mass of pain that had formed against her heart since she’d learned of her family’s betrayal no longer filled her with the bitter, twisted rage she survived on since arriving in Shrouded Lake.
She stroked the heavy arm welded across her waist. Felt the strength of Santiago curled around her and this moment exposed a truth she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge.
She hadn’t loved Derrick as deeply as she wanted to.
Otherwise, she wouldn’t feel this level of connection with a man she hadn’t even known for a whole month.
Santiago’s hand stroked her stomach, skin to skin, and her pulse kicked into overdrive.
The slow caress, the heat pooling between her thighs, the tremor spreading through her body…
His hand movement was sensual, possessive, certain.
It reached up and cupped her breast, squeezed as if testing for ripeness, and played with her nipple.
Her hips bucked as the pressure on her nipple became almost painful. The jerking action brought her ass in full contact with the massive erection behind her, and she moaned…she wanted.
“You feel feverish, little wren, and look how you’re shaking. It feels like you’re coming down with something?”
Though the morning was overcast, Lauren felt like the force of the sun was shining directly on her she was so hot.
Maybe I am coming down with something, maybe I—
He ground his erection against the seam of her ass and all she wanted—all she’d ever wanted—was to be naked, to have him inside her, to feel...more. To feel all of him. She reached back to grip his hip, to move him just a little lower so she could—
“You’re naked,” she said.
“I don’t usually sleep in clothes.”
“Me either, but I made the effort, Santi,” she said as she grazed her hand over the round head of his dick, gripped it, and squeezed.
“Effort fucking wasted,” he growled, quickly maneuvering her onto her back. He straddled her thighs and stripped her of her tank top and pajama shorts.
And now they were both naked. Both stripped bare. Both vulnerable.
His gaze was hungry, devouring her, but he remained still, like an animal waiting on the command to attack.
“Do your best, or your worst, Stillwater, but whatever you do, be nasty about it.”
He grinned, dragging his hands from her knees, up her thighs, and bringing them together to cover her pubic area. His fingers played in her slick arousal, saturating her engorged clit, causing her hips to buck with each contact.
“If this was all I had to do to keep you silent, I would’ve done it a long time ago.”
She narrowed her gaze, ready to say something out-of-pocket, but he plunged three fingers deep inside of her.
She cried out in shock, then groaned.
Pulling one hand from her body, he braced it beside her head.
His other thumb worked over her clit as his fingers stroked in and out of her at a chaotic tempo that drove her hips off the bed in a rhythm he ruthlessly controlled.
She came violently. His fingers broke something inside her.
Tears streamed from the corners of her eyes.
She tried to wipe them away, burning with embarrassment.
Santi pulled his fingers from her body and pinned her wrists beside her head.
Lowering his body on top of hers, wedging his thighs between her legs, his dick between her outer lips; he kissed her until she was breathless, licking the salty tear tracks from her face.
“Now sing for me, little wren.”
“Wha...what?”
“Sing.”
He thrust inside of her and her eyes rolled to the back of her head as if possessed, her spine arching off the bed.
Santiago fucked her like he didn’t care about her, like he didn’t care about anything but her screams and incoherent mutterings. Grunting, he gathered her legs until her knees were beside her ears and…
“Santi!” she screamed as she broke again. He was too deep, she had to tell him…
“Sing for me, little wren.”
He thrusts became wild and chaotic.
“Oh God!” she cried desperately. She couldn’t take… He was too deep.
“Santi, Santi, Santi….” An invocation, a benediction. She clawed at his back, his ass.
He shouted, breaking inside her. She felt the heat of his eruption and her body shattered all over again, her pussy greedily sucking him deep into her core.
Her hips sporadically jerked with aftershocks and when they calmed, she slipped out of consciousness, for how long she didn’t know, but when she woke up again she was on her stomach spread eagle.
She didn’t immediately sense Santiago but when the bathroom door opened, she cocked her head around to see him walk out with a box of condoms before he turned out the bathroom light and the bedroom became deeply shadowed again.
“We didn’t use a condom,” she muttered, already slipping back into the arms of sleep. She didn’t believe she could ever trust another person when she came here but she’d trusted him with her unprotected self.
“I told you, wren; the only thing you’re going to contract from me is the triple S.”
She snorted. Santiago Stillwater Syndrome. How could she forget?
He tossed the condoms on the end table.
“I’m too old and tired to risk fatherhood again.”
“Not something you have to worry about with me. I had a hysterectomy years ago. Now, that reality of childlessness is a freedom I’d be hard pressed to give up; too used to living life on my terms.”
Maybe that’s why Derrick had unprotected sex with Lahn, maybe that was his fucked-up roundabout way of telling her that he did in fact want children.
Either way he’d made his choice, and she’d made hers.
Something metal clicked, then she noticed the cold weight around her left wrist. Santiago lifted her right wrist above her head, and she felt the second cuff click shut.
When she tried to bring her arms down, there was little slack before the cuffs met resistance.
He’d handcuffed her to the metal headboard.
“I’ve been wanting to do this since the first day I laid eyes on you,” he said, climbing on the bed and straddling her hips.
She could feel his balls, his erection, her trepidation.
She had never been handcuffed. Her heart raced as she tried to pull her wrists free. He chuckled so fucking evilly, bent down, and pulled a handful of her hair braids into his hand and fisted it. Pulling her head back he bit into the side of her neck, hard.
His teeth released her flesh.
“Now it’s time for me to be nasty about it.”
Even if the sun wasn’t shining, the sun was shining.
Even if the birds weren’t singing, birds were singing.
Yet none of them compared to the song of his little wren.
Even if the world wasn’t warm and peaceful, in this moment it was.
Because last night he slept. No night sweats, no night terrors, no nightmares.
No dead people living through his dreams.
Opening his eyes, the reality was that the sun wasn’t shining, birds were indeed singing, and his bed was warm and peaceful despite Lauren’s soft snores. Her thigh covered his groin and her arm lay across his chest.
He turned his head and pressed it against the top of her bonnetless crown. She sighed, pressing tighter against his side, her quieting breaths meant she was awakening.
They laid together quietly, touching as if the waking world were the dream they didn’t want to leave.
“You’re off work today?” she asked cautiously.
“All day.”
“So...we don’t have to leave the bed if we don’t want to?”
“We don’t.”
After all the exertion of the night, he knew she could handle hard and rough but this morning, he wanted to treat her like she was a wild bird that was finally willing to trust him enough to feed her from his hand.
“I have to go pee,” she said, not moving.
“Please don’t do it in my bed.”
She sat up and looked at him as if he’d grown a second head.
“You better pray I don’t do it on you!”
She attempted to scramble away from him but he wasn’t ready to let her go. He wrapped his arms around her back and hooked his feet around her thighs. She eventually stopped struggling and rested her head against his chest.
“So, you do have a kink. Maybe a golden river instead of a golden shower?”
He smacked her ass and released her. “Get out of my bed.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, flipping her braids over her shoulder. He tucked his hands behind his head and watched the buoyancy of her ass until the door closed behind her.
Getting out of bed, Santiago walked to the French doors, pulled them open, and stepped out onto the balcony
He frowned. The lake waters were choppy. Billowy gray clouds floated above him, but above the distant mountain, the sky looked dark and turbulent.
He smelled the rain in the air. A storm.
Just a storm, he told himself. Not a portent. At least that’s what he wanted to believe.
A draft floated across his back when the bathroom door opened, and moments later soft flesh pressed against him from behind, arms circled his waist.
“Can I tell you something that might surprise you?” he asked.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Most men like when a woman yields to them.”
She snorted. “Not a revelation.”
“That’s the thing; that right there, that fire spirit inside you only seems to fuel me.
I have a feeling it would incinerate a weaker person.
At the crash site that first day…if I wasn’t the sheriff I would have been fired.
But that fire, I couldn’t help but try to hold on to it.
Something more powerful than sense wanted me to know what it would be like to just take hold of you. ”
He turned into her hold and wrapped his arms around her. “So I threw you over my shoulder and did exactly that.”
“Then smacked me on the ass.”
“Every damn time I see you it’s all I want to do.”