Chapter Six
I DON’T EVEN THINK twice. I’m already slamming the door, and to heck to whoever hears this—or rather, I try to slam the door, and fail, because Arkane easily uses just one hand to keep it from hitting his face, and now it’s his strength against mine.
Grr.
I lose, of course, because he’s not even pushing. He’s just holding, and that’s enough. The door stops halfway, and I’m forced to back away as he steadily moves forward until he’s inside my room, and he’s quietly closing the door behind him.
“We don’t want to wake everyone, do we?”
I glare at him. “Don’t we?”
His expression turns thoughtful, and as he studies me, I’m studying him back, and my mind is back at it again.
No no no no no no no no.
Because I’ve just realized the most terrifying thing.
“What do you have against me, Tiara?”
And it’s not just how my skin still isn’t crawling—
“You don’t even know me, and yet I’ve seemed to earn your distrust.”
But how it’s so much worse.
Because right now, my skin is doing the opposite, with how every inch of me is aware of him.
The cut of his jaw in the dim bedside light. The way his shirt is open at the collar in a way it wasn’t at dinnertime, and the way he’s standing in the middle of my bedroom like he has every right to be there—
My fingers curl at my sides.
I’ve never wanted to touch someone so badly in my life.
Which is terrifying.
“I think you should go.” I point to the door even as I can feel my skin heating in the most painfully mortifying way.
“Not until you tell me the truth.” And to demonstrate, he actually takes a step closer, and I’m forced to take a step back.
“Why do you seem to hate me?”
Because you’re beautiful.
And my dad was beautiful.
And if he could leave Mom and me without a second thought, then why should I think you wouldn’t leave me, too?
The words sit on my tongue. So close to the surface I can taste them. And they’re the truest thing I’ve thought in years, and also the thing I’ve never told a single person, not even Icelle, because saying it out loud would mean admitting I’ve been carrying it around this whole time.
“Tiara?”
Oh, if only I had it in me to tell him the truth.
But since that’s going to open another can of worms when the first one isn’t even halfway to being empty—
Just run away, Ti!
That’s exactly what I try to do. I try running away—try being the operative word—because the moment I turn, he’s also on the move, and I don’t even get to take a half-step.
He captures me in a flash, whirling me around, and when I open my mouth to cry out, it’s like he’s reading my mind, knowing my every move before I make it, and no sound comes out.
How can it?
When he’s already kissed me into silence.
No. No. No.
But it’s too late.
The moment his mouth possesses mine, it’s all over.
My whole body surrenders before my brain even gets a vote, and I’m kissing him back, my hands clutching the front of his shirt the way they did on the jet, because my hands, it turns out, are traitors.
His kiss deepens, and a whimper slips out of me that I will be dying of humiliation about later, but later is a version of me that doesn’t exist yet, and the version of me that does exist right now has her arms around his neck, and her back against the wall, and she’s tilting her head up the way his hand beneath her jaw is asking her to.
Oh.
Oh.
He takes his time.
That’s what kills me. He’s not rushing. He’s not fumbling. He’s kissing me the way a man kisses a woman when he’s already decided he’s going to get every single inch of her eventually, and tonight is just the first installment.
And somewhere in the middle of that slow, patient possession, my traitor hands remember they have more they want to do.
My fingers slide up from the front of his shirt. Past the open collar. Up along the line of his throat where I can feel his pulse, strong and steady, nothing like mine, which is currently doing something that would get a cardiologist’s attention. My hands keep going. Into his hair.
It’s as soft as it looked.
I don’t know what I expected. Something coarser, maybe, to match the rest of him. But his hair is fine and thick and when my fingers tangle in it, he makes a sound against my mouth.
A small sound. Barely a sound.
But it’s his.
And I did it.
I did it, me, with my traitor hands that apparently know what they’re doing even though the rest of me is nineteen years old and terrified.
I do it again.
I pull him closer, both hands in his hair now, and I feel the exact moment his restraint—whatever restraint had been keeping him patient, keeping him gentle, keeping him the man who took his time at the jet this afternoon—breaks.
Because the next thing I know, his kiss isn’t patient anymore.
The next thing I know, his hand is no longer at my jaw. It’s moved. Slid lower. Settled at my waist, at my hip, at the small of my back, pulling me flush against him, and I can feel all of him now, every hard line of him, and the space between us has ceased to exist.
A growl rumbles low in his throat.
"Tiara."
And then his mouth is on my neck.
Oh.
Oh no.
Oh—
It’s not a kiss, but something closer to a brand.
His mouth is open and hot and he’s moving down the line of my throat with an intent that he didn’t have three seconds ago, and my head falls back against the wall because it has to.
My body is no longer taking instructions from me, and somewhere low in me something unfolds that I didn’t know was a part of me, a pulling kind of ache, like a string that’s been drawn tight and humming—
A whimper escapes me, and the sound is mortifying.
It makes me want to crawl under the floorboards if I could, but with Arkane holding me up, one arm around my waist, the other hand cradling the back of my head, there’s just no way to escape him, and I don’t even know how we get from the wall to the bed.
I don’t know anything about the in-between.
All I know is that one moment he’s at the wall with me, and the next moment I’m on my back on the mattress, and he’s above me, and my clothes are slowly fading away.
This is the part where you should push him away, Ti.
So push him away!
Push! Him! Away!
But it’s like I can’t even hear my own thoughts. Or maybe it’s more like my body has completely disconnected with my mind, and it’s my heart in charge now, and I can’t even make myself feel embarrassed.
All I know is that the way Arkane is looking at me now, the way I’m completely exposed to his gaze, the way he can see all of me—
I can’t even make my hands move to cover myself.
It’s as if I feel that I’ve always been his, that I was meant to be his, and so when his mouth finds me again—
Everything in me simply surrenders as his lips brush against my collarbone before slowly moving lower.
And lower.
And lower.
Until his lips gently close over the tips of my breasts, and the pleasure is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, nothing like I can ever imagine—
"Arkane."
I don’t even know why I’m crying his name out. All I know is that his name has become synonymous to a plea. A claim. And when he responds with a growl, the sound rough and masterful in a way that makes my entire body shiver—
His hands have also started moving at the same time, settling over me, covering me fully, the ache in my body sharpens into something I have no word for, and my body arches up off the mattress to meet him before I can stop it.
“Arkane.”
Whatever his mouth had just started, his hand is now finishing, and the two of them are working in a way I could not have imagined a man’s hands and mouth could work, and I have no thoughts left.
None. Zero. My brain’s shut down, and all I have is sensation, and somewhere in the back of what used to be my mind I realize I’m making sounds I would be absolutely embarrassed to remember later.
His free hand slides up under what’s left of my nightshirt, along the bare skin of my stomach, and even that, even the simple warmth of his hand on my skin feels like too much.
Everything he does, everything he makes me feel—it’s all too, too much, and all I can do is arch into him, chasing him, wanting more of something I can’t name.
"Arkane—"
I say his name again, and this time it breaks.
"Please—”
I don’t even know what I’m asking for. I don’t know what I’m begging him for. I just know that this ache inside me has grown and grown, and something has to happen, something has to give, or I’m going to come apart—
Aaaah.
He does something, his mouth and hands still working in tandem, something that makes him feel more like a conqueror and a patient lover all at once—
It just makes the ache in me build and build and build—
“Tiara.”
And the hoarseness of his voice, I’ve never heard him speak so hoarsely—
“Look at me.”
I don’t want to. I can’t. I’m too close, too exposed, too—
“Look at me, Tiara.”
And because he says my name like that, I do.
His eyes are dark on mine, and they’re asking me something, and I don’t know what he’s asking, but I give it to him anyway, because I don’t know how not to.
Whatever it was, he sees it.
And that’s when he takes me over.
His hand doesn’t stop, his mouth doesn’t stop, his eyes don’t leave mine, and I can feel him watching me come apart, and something in me breaks open, and I hear myself make a sound that is nothing like me and everything like me at the same time.
I shatter.
That’s the only word for it. I shatter under him, with him, and as the wave washes through me I feel tears on my face, actual tears, and I don’t know where they came from or why they’re here, and I can’t stop them.
Oh no.
Oh no, oh no, oh no.
If only he had just taken my virginity.
If only.
Because that I could have survived.
But instead it’s so much worse.
He hasn’t taken my virginity.
He’s taken my heart.
And when he says my name—
“Tiara.”
He says it in a way no one’s ever said my name before, and maybe no one ever will, and the sound of it...
It has my gaze slowly lifting to his, and as soon as our eyes meet—
I can’t remember feeling this scared.
Because in his eyes, I see the truth.
He knows I’m in love with him.