Chapter 10 Cocktails and Cock Tales #2
“It would appear that Larry is in need of some rescuing, and god gave me two good hands for a reason. We’ll just have us a few cocktails and cock tales.
” With a feral smile, Julian downed his drink and dropped the glass to the ground.
Broken shards ground under his Oxfords as he prowled towards the actor.
Shaking his head, Malachy left the Lumomancers and made his way towards the upstairs flat, to Cora, a need to slake burning in his veins. He’d get to the bottom of the club’s frenzy after his eyes and hands had confirmed she was all right.
A wall of bodies blocked the stairwell. He pushed past them. On each step was a new depravity he did not pause to examine. Amber light and throaty laughter spilled from the doorway above.
Inside was a Bedouin pleasure palace covered in a riot of jewel-toned scarves and the sensuous lassitude of opium smoke. Moroccan lamps tossed starbursts of light on the silk-draped walls. Moaning bodies languished on soft pillows and low couches strewn on a sea of plush rugs.
Across the room, he spotted Sloane sitting on one blonde man’s lap while her lips were locked with another. Three sets of hands disappeared under clothes and into hidden places. Laurence Bellamy had brought his fan club upstairs.
Awareness prickled the back of his neck. Malachy turned.
Music and laughter filtered from the circus of sin around him, but his senses were filled with Cora. She was sheathed in a black dress with a plunging neckline and creeping hem. Lace and silk over supple curves. Reason deserted him.
Their gazes touched. Held. Shock melted into pleasure. Her smile grew along with his, and it made him hope as he had not dared to hope that she not only remembered everything between them but wanted more; that she craved him too.
Need smothered caution. He’d ravish her in front of all the gossips and spies and voyeurs, serenade them all with the rhapsody of her moaning sighs and slick desire.
He was not alone in that sentiment. Cora strode towards him like a predator who had found her quarry.
“Cora—”
“Stop talking.” Palms flat on his chest, she pushed him back onto a velvet settee and straddled his lap. “Kiss me.”
It took all his rapidly dwindling self-control not to obey. “Do you remember us?”
She pulled back and met his gaze. In the dark mirrors of her pupils, he saw himself. Desperate with longing, a breath away from caving into the temptation of sensation, the promise of satisfaction, dark and overpowering.
“I remember everything, Malachy.” Hands tunneled through his hair, cupped the back of his head, drew him nearer. “What happened before Rome, and after, and everything that vile demon in the mirror did in between."
"Thank fuckin' god." Gripping the soft flesh of her hips, he dragged her closer. "I missed you."
"How much?" She nipped his lower lip.
“I'll show you.” Need pounded in his veins, yet reason trickled through. “But what if they try to hurt you again?”
“I want you too badly to care.”
“Oh, Cora.” He cradled her face between his palms. She didn't flinch; she leaned into his touch. His heart soared. “I would wait another hundred years for you.”
Her expression, raw and vulnerable, flayed him to the bone.
“I can’t wait another second.” She fisted his lapels and hauled him against her, swallowing his groan in a possessive kiss.
Malachy surrendered. They sank into each other, mouths fused, tongues feasting.
“Missed you,” she said between fierce kisses. “Desperately. Even with my memories missing, you were always there, on the tip of my tongue. Waiting to be tasted.”
Secrets poured from her like wine from an uncorked bottle, and Malachy drank deep, lost to sensation.
Lips hot on his jaw, his throat. Moans soft as a caress on his skin.
The heat of her core against his hardening length.
His hands found her breasts. Curves that perfectly filled his palms, with peaks he stroked into aching pebbles of need.
“Fit my hand like they were fuckin’ made for it,” he rasped. “Such a sweet, tight little body. All I’ve been able to think about. Every night in Rome, I imagined you a thousand ways.”
“Like how?” Her words melted into a moan as he pinched her nipple.
“Like this. Surrounding me. Moaning for me. Every night, dreaming of how deep I could fill you. How good you would take me. How sweet my name would sound on your lips as you came on my cock.”
In a frenzied tangle of limbs, Cora stripped him of his waistcoat and most of his shirt. Nails raked across his bare chest, down the ridges of his abdomen, lower. She cupped him through his trousers, stroked him. His cock throbbed, straining for more.
He lowered the neckline of her dress, peeling back layers of silk, and pulled a nipple into his warm, wet mouth. A breathy gasp escaped her kiss-swollen lips. Back arched, she—
A man wearing elaborate lingerie stumbled into them on the settee. Malachy turned an accusatory glare on the intruder. The man’s eyes were glassy, his pupils blown wide. As wide as Cora’s. Her pupils had swallowed the ring of hazel and swam in a thin sea of turquoise.
The reason that had deserted Malachy resurfaced in a trickle. Wasn’t there something he ought to be doing?
Any headway he made towards reason backtracked when the beautiful woman on his lap threatened severe bodily injury to the intruder, who retreated with a harried look.
Her threats of violence had a similar effect on his cock as her hand, now recommitted to torturing him through his trousers.
She writhed on his thighs, breath hot on the shell of his ear, stroking him.
Focus, he told himself. He grabbed her wrists and pinned them behind her back.
Public lewdness, no matter how welcome, was not like her.
Cora was acting strange, along with everyone else in the club, including himself.
He made quite the spectacle, sprawled on a settee, hair tousled and shirt open to the waist. A glassy-eyed audience was gathering around them.
Drugs, or another demon?
He lifted Cora until her long legs wrapped around his waist and carried her through a jungle of panting bodies to the nearest bedroom.
Inside, he got an eyeful of the blonde threesome underway.
A petite strawberry blonde woman was on all fours, bookended by a sandy-haired man and a platinum blonde whom she was sucking and fucking, respectively.
Malachy did a double-take. Laurence Bellamy?
Yvonne’s future son-in-law was indeed getting his knob polished by a woman who was not his fiancée.
A woman who looked a lot like Sloane. Laurence was so engrossed in kissing the platinum blonde man—Julian Morro—over the woman between them that he didn’t notice the newcomers.
“I’ll fuck you next, darling,” Julian rasped against Laurence’s lips.
“Everybody fuck off,” Malachy announced to the room at large.
Three blonde heads whipped to the door. Laurence withdrew all his appendages in startled embarrassment. Sloane covered herself with a squeak. Julian glanced over his shoulder and grinned.
“How nice of you to come, Mal,” Julian drawled.
His two-toned eyes raked over Cora, clinging to Malachy like the missing half of his clothes.
His smile widened. “I see Yvonne has been replaced by a younger, and dare I say, superior model. Welcome, welcome. It’ll be a tight fit, but we’ve got holes to spare, haven’t we, sweethearts? ”
“Sod off,” Malachy and Cora said in unison.
They did. Sloane, cheeks aflame and dress askew, fled behind Laurence, who wrapped a shirt around his hips. Julian, fully naked and erect, strolled past them with a leisurely grin.
“If you’d rather it just be the three of us…”
Malachy kicked the door closed on the Yank’s smarmy face and barked a locking enchantment. Through the door he heard Julian call out, “You can’t keep running away from your feelings, Larry! Next time, we don’t need a woman between us. The studio will never know!”
Malachy dropped Cora on the bed. He climbed over her, pinning her wrists.
She squirmed beneath him, canting her hips, rubbing against him.
Her flesh was hot against his. Belatedly, he realized that nimble fingers had unfastened his trousers, unnoticed.
His cock was on full display and at full attention, weeping for want of her.
“Jesus.” A need he struggled to resist roughened his voice. He released her wrists to wrangle himself back into his trousers. Her roving hands found him within moments. She managed one long stroke before he caught her wrists, stretching them overhead.
“Grab the headboard. Don’t let go.”
“Or what?” Her voice was a husky temptation as she rolled her hips against him.
“Or I won’t touch you.”
She grabbed the headboard, back arched, breasts thrust out, nipples pink and wet. “Please, Malachy. I’m so empty I ache.”
The sound of her panting his name… Swallowing thickly, he removed his belt to an excited inhale from her.
He willed himself to focus as he leaned forward and bound her wrists to the headboard.
Weak man that he was, he glanced down. A mistake.
She writhed sweetly and obscenely beneath him, legs spread open like a sacrifice. His aching cock neared her parted lips.
Tonight was a test of his fortitude, and he was a breath away from crumbling.
He couldn’t. Could he?
No. Biting off a groan, he forced himself to sit on the edge of the bed, an argument in every muscle of his body. Everything he wanted was here, now, begging to be taken. But not like this. No matter how his throbbing cock protested.
Beyond the door came a booming crash, followed by screams and panicked footsteps. Reality flooded back. Malachy jumped to his feet.
Demons. Right.
First, he’d stop the insanity. Then he’d finish what he was aching to start with Cora when they had returned to their respective senses.
“I need to deal with whatever the hell is happening out there. I’ll come right back.”
“And then inside of me?” she asked hopefully.
“Sweet merciful Jesus.” His eyes shot heavenward, beseeching.
Adjusting the tent of his trousers, he made himself leave before any more blood rushed southward. He needed his wits about him when he faced whatever awaited beyond the door.