66. Brand Me From the Inside Out
brAND ME FROM THE INSIDE OUT
brIGHTON
I stand in my oversized shower.
This old house has been a work in progress.
Mostly, it’s just in progress with very little work.
It has good bones, and the property it sits on is worth the investment it will take to get it up to speed.
A three-acre tract is private and tree-lined.
The old white farmhouse has a wide wrap-around porch and country charm.
I gutted the master suite before I moved in. The bathroom was the priority. I needed a decent shower and place to get ready. I spend too much time around animal gunk, fluids, and feces to not have a fabulous shower when I get home.
Multiple heads greet me as steam fills the room. Jade green herringbone tiles line the floor of the bright white bathroom. I love this room. There’s something primal here—a basic function in the least basic way.
Few things about me are bougie, but this shower definitely is. My hair and body products are too. I can handle dust, dirt and mud. I can handle shit, blood, and open wounds. I live in denim and boots, and my hands are rougher than most women I know.
But my hair is lush, and my skin is pampered.
I turn off the overhead rain nozzle and keep the jets massaging my back as I rub a conditioning mask through my hair, massaging it into my scalp. When I turn to face the nozzles, knowing the jets will hit my sensitive nipples, I see Eli, standing in the open doorway, leaning on the jamb.
“What the fuck, Elias?” My hands fly up to cover myself.
“I missed you and wanted to see you. Didn’t expect it to be like this, though.” He gestures to the shower, but his eyes roam from my face to my feet and back again, with a long pause at my breasts.
“And you’ve decided you can let yourself in anytime you want?”
“I decided to make sure you were okay when you didn’t answer the door.”
“I’m fine. You can go.”
“I’d rather come.” He waggles his brows and loosens the tie around his neck. “Mind if I join you?”
“What kind of line is that?” My voice is rising.
“It’s not a line. Seeing you here, thinking about your face as I made you come. Remembering your body in the throes of pleasure. Just shooting my shot.” He yanks his tie free, undoing the top button of his shirt and takes two steps into the bathroom. “Was it good for you, Brighton?”
I uncover myself and embrace a boldness I’ve never had with a man. “It was fine.”
He says nothing, but his eyes go wide, and he unbuttons his cuffs.
“Fine? Oh, I did it all wrong then. I should try again and make sure it isn’t fine.”
I shrug, turning into the sprayers and rubbing the soap from my body.
He shucks his pants and boxers and stalks to the shower, fire in his eyes. Just like last time, he falls on my mouth, tugging my wet body flush to his. His arms wind tight at my lower back, and I arch around them.
“Fuck, you’re gorgeous,” he says as he kisses his way down to my ear, one hand sliding to grab my ass.
“Eli.” It comes out as a moan though I never intended it that way as his mouth takes a nipple and sucks me deep. I reach for him, pulling him tighter, sliding our bodies closer. Without my permission, my leg lifts to wrap around his thigh.
“You drive me fucking crazy, Bright.” He nips before laving and sucking my other breast.
My nipples pucker, and wetness forms between my legs… and not from the shower.
My clit throbs and desire pools low in my belly. The need to come is so strong I snake a hand between us to my center, hoping to relieve the building pressure deep in my core and the throbbing between my legs.
“Oh, no, you don’t.” He pulls both my hands into his big palm above my ass and uses his thumb to draw circles just above the cleft of my ass.
I wish I could stop my hips from undulating under his touch. I so wish I could quell the rising tide in me that needs to explode.
His pale green eyes hold my gaze as he trails his other hand excruciatingly slowly down my neck, between my breasts, over my mound, and to the heart of me.
He circles my clit, teasing me, not providing any reprieve.
He uses one thick finger to stroke me from center to that bud, but never touches it to give me any relief.
The pressure builds and builds as he plays and torments me.
I wrestle my wrists to free them when he stills, pulling me flush to him, his hot length throbbing between our bellies.
“I want to touch you.” It comes out as a ragged whisper, the power in my voice gone with my desperation.
“And I want you to take, Brighton. Take what I give you, take your pleasure, but only when I give it.”
“Well, then, get on with it.” My sass is unmistakable.
“Oh, no, baby. This is going to take some time. For years, you’ve flaunted everything you have—everything you are—in front of me, making me hard, leaving me wanting. I’m not rushing this.”
He leans down to trail kisses to my nipple while allowing his hand not holding my wrists to move between my legs. I open for him, desperate for his touch, desperate for relief. His fingers trail up one thigh, only to mock me by disappearing and returning inside my other to move in the same way.
His palm above my ass soothes me and entices me at the same time.
“Eli,” I whimper.
“Love hearing you say my name, baby.” His voice sounds over the rushing water and the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears. “Wonder how many times I can get you to shout it tonight.”
“None at this rate,” I deadpan and drop my chin, staring into his eyes, keeping mine hard. But the “Oh” that comes from my lips is unavoidable as he keeps my gaze.
“Challenge accepted, Miss Ranger.” The grin that breaks across his face is impossible not to reciprocate.
“Do your worst, Mr. Finchley.”
He drops to his knees, throwing my leg over his shoulder, and feasts on my pussy. He holds me to him as if I could disappear into thin air if he doesn’t have a solid grasp on my ass.
“I’m going to… I… Fuck. Eli!” The shout the rips from my chest mirrors the pleasure rippling from my core.
It echoes off the tiles and glass walls and, like my orgasm, seems to echo and extend.
My leg wants to give out, and I give him more of my weight.
Even after I come, he doesn’t stop. His fingers enter me, searching for that most sensitive spot inside as he nips and presses his tongue to my center.
When he sucks hard again, I’m done for. He catches me as I fall, but it isn’t my legs buckling that worries me.
I’m falling—definitely falling—and it isn’t physical.
“Fuck. Your mouth is amazing.”
“You liked that? Seems your pussy loves my mouth. That’s twice you’ve come on my tongue.”
“Can’t argue that.” I stand, extending a hand to him. He accepts, and we stand under the jets, water spraying everywhere, creating a mist around us.
I pull the handheld off the wall and switch the flow on, washing the conditioner from my hair before running it over my body to rinse off what’s left of the soap and hair mask.
Eli extends a hand. “May I?”
I extend the wand to him, and he turns me, my back to his front, as he continues to pour the water over me. He parts my folds, exposing my sex, and rinses me there, but I’m so sensitive, I moan when the water hits me.
The iron band of his arm locks under my breasts, and he continues the pulsing shower head as I twitch and move from the pressure on my sensitive body.
“You torture me, Brighton.” I can feel the heat of his breath at my ear.
“For more than a decade. Hell, maybe longer than that. You’re fucking gorgeous.
For years you’ve paraded it in front of me.
The hair, the tits, the ass.” He slides his erection against the top of my cheeks for emphasis.
“Absolute fucking torture. There are days I wonder if you know just how beautiful you are. Because it’s not the hair and the tits and the ass. ”
I stiffen. Here we go. Here comes the rejection I’ve braced for.
“It’s the freckles on your chest and the curve of your smile.
” He nips my earlobe as his fingers play under the swell of my breast. “It’s the twinkle in your eye when you’re up to no good.
You’re absolutely fucking brilliant, Brighton.
You can’t know how much that turns me on.
” He presses his erection at my lower back up and down. “Or maybe you do.”
“But your attitude. And, fuck me, the look on your face when you come… when I make you come. That will be my undoing. I don’t think that I can ever get that image unseared from my brain.
And I know I don’t want to. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking of your hooded eyes, your mouth open in ecstasy, the look of pleasure and trust on your face as I give you that. ”
He lets the shower head fall from my throbbing clit and cups my sex as he continues whispering in my ear, “Mine. This is mine. You are mine. I want every one of your orgasms for the rest of time. No one touches you but me.”
What the fuck?
“All due respect, Eli.” I stiffen. Quite frankly, the ‘due respect’ part was me buying time. He doesn’t get to say any of this shit. “It’s not yours to take. It’s mine to give.”
“Then give it to me, baby.”
I shake my head. It’s too much, too soon.
It’s exhaustion and coming twice.
It’s knowing how desperate I was for him…
…and how brutally he rejected me.
It’s sex twice this week, but seventeen years of unrequited desire.
No.
Fuck that.
Fuck him.
“I can’t do that, Eli. I can’t give you what you want.”
He spins me around and takes my mouth, his hands going to my hips, lifting me to wrap my legs around his waist.
When his hot cock probes at my entrance, I do what I know I shouldn’t—I sink down on his hot length, taking him, swallowing him in body, stretching around him as he fills me so deeply. I torture my mind wanting what I can’t have, what I’ll never have.
I torture my body by allowing pure fucking ecstasy to brand me from the inside out, knowing it could never be this good with anyone else.
I roll my hips, holding that perfect pale green gaze and clench around his cock, seeing the bliss roll across his features.
“This. This is what I want.” He bounces me on his cock, pushing me up against the tile wall. I hiss when he does and slice my eyes to slits because the tile’s hard at my back. “You’re what I want, Bright.”
I check out, ignoring his words. I ignore how they gut me and heal me at the same time.
I ignore the way his eyes caress over my face.
I ignore this act that could make me feel anything.
And I take his cock, take my pleasure, allow it to singe me in a way I’m branded forever by Elias Finchley, doomed to be ruined forever for any other man.
“Baby?” He stops moving, and I’m fully impaled on his thick cock. “Brighton?”
“Don’t stop.” I try to lift off him to move, but he holds me down on him.
He searches my eyes. “Baby, what is it?”
“Nothing. Eli, you need to move. I need to move. I want to come again. I need to come again.”
“No.” The look on his face stops me dead in my tracks. “Bright, why are you crying?”
Fuck my life.