Текст книги "Fable of happiness book two"

Автор книги: Pepper winters

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

I snapped.

I didn’t think.

I didn’t second-guess.

I merely acted on all the feelings swooping, colliding, and crying inside me.

Snatching his ankles, I pulled with all my strength.

His legs snapped down, his calves slapping against the carpet as the cage he’d formed around his body was dismantled. His eyes flared as his mouth parted with a curse, but I was too fast.

He needed this.

He needed one moment where another person gave him kindness without expecting anything in return. No strings attached. No threats given. This was a gift, and I didn’t care what people would think of me because no one would ever know.

“What are you—?” His eyes flared as I straddled him.

I pressed my left hand on his shoulder for balance and reached for his hot erection with my right.

And then, I gave him salvation in the only way I could.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“HOLY FUCKING—” I THREW my head back as her fingers latched around me, drowning out words with raw feelings.

Desperate, dangerous, demented feelings.

Gemma’s touch set off a ricochet inside me, a domino effect that collided through my walls, my locks, my carefully constructed dungeon of nightmares.

But instead of being smothered by them, instead of reliving every grotesque thing and cringing against the sickness inside me, the force field between us kept them away.

I was...free.

Blessedly, deliciously free as she spread her legs and sank down on me.

Not slowly.

Not teasingly.

She sheathed me inside her as quickly as I’d taken her before.

“Ah, Christ.” The aftershocks of being back inside her exquisite body made my blood race and heart chug and eyes see stars.

Her thighs kissed my hipbones as she adjusted herself to take me deeper. Her skin so pretty and pure. Her scent so captivating and crisp.

And I’d thought taking her on the clifftop was the best sex I’d ever had.

That paled in comparison to this.

Everything paled in comparison to her.

God, her.

She was giving me something entirely necessary for my existence. The only medicine that had the power to delete my atrocities and soothe away my scars.

I grunted as she rocked up.

She sank down again, crying out as my hard length hit her inner obstruction.

I tried to be quiet but failed, turning wild with growls and curses, pleas and sorrows.

I wanted so many things.

To grab her. Kiss her. Take her.

But I couldn’t move.

It was as if my body had a new master now, and she hadn’t given me permission to touch hers in return. I belonged to her. It’d happened in an instant, and I didn’t regret it. I welcomed it. She would be good to me, kind.

Fuck, if she wanted my body to play with for the rest of her life, it was hers. My cock was hers to use. My heart was hers to toy with. But I wasn’t worthy of touching her in return. I’d get her too dirty. I’d drag her too deep into the dark. I—

No.

This wasn’t right.

I didn’t deserve this.

“Stop,” I groaned, drowning under blistering pleasure.

“It’s okay,” she murmured, rocking over me once, twice. “Just let go.”

My mind flickered with sentences I should speak and actions I should do. She shouldn’t be doing this. Not after what I’d done.

Yet I couldn’t stop her.

I was hers.

Entirely, totally, permanently.

My jaw went slack as her wet heat grew hotter around me. My eyes snapped closed, and the electricity that’d existed between us since the moment she found me detonated outward.

It was in everything. In our breath, our blood, our bond.

I couldn’t understand how she could touch me after what I’d done. Couldn’t fathom how she was wet and willing and holy Christ, so, so wonderfully mine.

My cock swelled even harder inside her, filling her until there was no space between us. Not a single crack where our pasts or futures could find us.

We were just this.

Two people joined in the deepest way possible.

She slid up me then sank back down, grinding her clit on my base.

I choked and gasped for breath.

Devilish things roared through me. I wanted to grab her hips and hold her firm. I wanted to thrust up and mate. I wanted to hurt her, mark her, but I also wanted to run.

I didn’t want to hurt her again, yet she was forcing me to.

I wanted to do the right thing, but how the fuck was I supposed to do that when she sat on my lap with my cock twitching inside her.

I gulped, struggling to hold on to my last shred of humanity. “Please...stop.”

“It’s okay, Kas.” Her fingers locked into my shoulders, bracing herself to push up and sink down.

“Jesus, Gemma.” My chin fell onto my chest as she rocked up to my tip, allowing cool air to lick around my wet cock, showing me how lonely, how barren the world was without her in it, before sinking down, down until I made a noise that wasn’t a grunt or a growl. It was a tangled roar that pebbled her nipples and sent lightning crackling through my veins.

Powerful lightning.

Addictive lightning.

Lightning that had the power to incinerate all the darkness and all my past until we were nothing more than two people grinding together, writhing together, swept up and drowning on a forgotten mansion’s floor.

My arms ached to wrap around her. My fingers almost bled for the pleasure of touching her.

But I forbade any method of control.

She’d taken me.

She could have me.

I wouldn’t dominate her.

I wouldn’t direct or demand.

I was hers and completely at her mercy.

I grunted as she rode up, stealing my mind one piece at a time, claiming my heart until every broken fragment was hers.

I couldn’t catch a breath, groaning as she fucked me, stroke by stroke, replacing all the pain of sex with all the pleasure of it.

When she’d hugged me before, it’d overwhelmed me. The sensation of her giving me something so innocent and meaningful had tipped me over an alarming edge.

But this?

This was more than any sex or kiss or touch I’d ever experienced. Not because I’d been a plaything and treated like trash, but because this was her. This was us. This was raw and elemental—the joining of two bodies long after two souls had met, acknowledged, and intertwined.

She rocked up again, and I came apart beneath her.

The tingle I’d been chasing and lost thundered back with a vengeance, catapulting down my spine and shooting between my legs.

Christ, it felt good.

Too good.

I was losing my goddamn mind.

“Give in,” she murmured, her voice adding kindling to the already hissing fire in my belly. Unlike the fire that’d burned me alive before, this one lived inside me. She’d conjured it and nursed it, turning a tiny spark into an uncontrollable inferno, glowing so bright it illuminated corners of my soul that were rotten and torn, granting sunshine into places where perpetual night once reigned.

After decades of agony, she granted me peace, and I struggled.

I didn’t know how to be.

How to be the man she deserved.

I raised my hands to push her away, but she moaned under her breath and rode me harder.

And I didn’t stand a goddamn chance.

The tingle morphed to outright annihilation.

I wanted to come so fucking badly.

I wanted to come in her.

Fireworks shot through my cock as my entire body bunched and my forehead furrowed with greed. She vibrated above me, a living angel knowing full well how enraptured I was by her touch. How desperate I was for friendship. How afraid I was of reaching for something that might not exist.

She sank deeper.

And that was it.

I threw my head back, my skull clunking against the wall. “Shit—”

I came.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

HE DIDN’T JUST COME.

He broke apart.

Wave after crippling wave, he gave in to me.

His belly rippled with shockwaves, his cock spurted over and over inside me, his breaths haggard, and grunts loud and animalistic. He didn’t speak. He was beyond speech. But each savage noise he uttered gave me all the thanks I needed. Every groan throbbed with gratefulness and manic desire.

I let him pump into me, vicious and needy as he suddenly wrapped his arms around me, trapping me over his lap, holding me down all while he purged every drop of evil into me.

“Goddammit—” he grunted, spearing deep, ensuring I would always know what it felt like to be taken by this lonely creature.

I didn’t think it would take him long to come. He’d been on the knife-edge the moment I’d sank over him, but watching him combust, hearing him gasp with bliss and knowing I granted that pleasure made my core clench in need.

There was something between us.

Something that hissed and licked and sparked.

And I wanted to feel what he did. I wanted to explode in his arms.

Like all the secrets of tonight, I had another. One I would bury deep, deep down because I would never admit that taking him this way had turned me on. While I’d ridden him, he’d worshiped me. I’d been his everything. I’d felt invincible as he’d forbidden himself from touching me until the very end, allowing me to rock and coax, greedily taking every inch of what he offered.

That was a heady thing indeed, having control over a man who’d only moments ago attacked me.

He’d gifted himself to me entirely, wholeheartedly.

Not as a slave who believed he didn’t have a choice but as a man who’d only just remembered how to live.

I gasped as the truth of that crowded my mind.

Kas was rough and wild and unstable, but perhaps that was the healing process for someone who’d only just come back to life? He’d spent a decade just existing, turning off his humanity, willingly slipping into silent loneliness and endless monotony.

Maybe I didn’t continually hurt him like I believed, but maybe, just maybe, I was making him come alive again. Maybe he’d begun the journey back to being healthy, to being whole.

Maybe this is the turning point, and everything will be better now.

He jerked one last time with a soft grunt, then his arms fell away, and his head tilted to the side. If shame had a color, he’d be painted in it from head to toe. He gulped. His hips shifted beneath mine, trying to disengage.

He couldn’t look at me.

His cock still rippled inside me.

But the longer we stayed joined, the more he withdrew until goosebumps scattered down my spine.

My heart pinched, and I couldn’t stand the feeling of him distancing himself from me, not after everything that’d just happened.

Shifting on my knees, I pushed upward.

His body slipped from mine, and I winced with frustration as I stepped away.

My own arousal still hummed in my blood, unsatisfied. A part of me wanted to be selfish and return to him. To find an equal completion.

But if I did that, then I would be as bad as the guests who’d used him. Whatever the reason he’d just pulled away, I had to accept it and not push. To push was to get hurt. I was sure of it.

Wrapping my arms around myself, I shivered with ice, becoming suddenly, horribly unsure.

Had I done the right thing? Had we reached a turning point, or had I just made things a hundred times worse?

I shivered again, fear rising as my mind raced for my own safety.

I should run before he snapped again.

I should—

Enough.

I gritted my teeth and stopped my unraveling thoughts.

This wasn’t about me.

It’d never been about me.

Even when he’d thrashed in his nightmare and pinned me to the floor. Even when he’d bound me in a chain and thrown me in a basement...none of this was about me.

Everything was about him.

God, how had I not seen it? How had I not understood the only way to earn my freedom was to give Kas his, entirely and completely—to teach him that he could leave. That no one would hurt him. No one would chase him. Whatever prison this valley had become had a door that only he could open.

He hissed under his breath, his haunted, color-shadowed eyes latching onto the trail of white as it oozed down my inner leg. He’d marked me. Come in me. Stark evidence that I’d given myself to him and he’d given himself to me.

He watched his release roll all the way to my knee before his face twisted, and once again, he came apart.

His legs shot up, his arms wrapped around his knees, his head bowed into the cage as if he couldn’t cope without a prison. “Leave,” he whispered, sounding wretched and wrung out.

I had so many things to say. Things he needed to hear. To listen to and believe.

He hadn’t forced me.

I’d done this.

I’d willingly chosen to let him climax inside me.

I’d done it so he could rest. So he could fall asleep later tonight and not be terrified of his nightmares.

“Kas...I—”

“Leave!” he thundered. His shoulders rolled, and he shook his head, never raising his eyes from his knees. “Please...”

“But...I don’t understand.”

He swallowed a snarl, shame once again dripping off him. “Look at what I did to you.”

I glanced at the wetness on my inner thigh, remembering how he’d told me that the bastards who’d brought him here had taken away his right to bear children. They’d stolen so much from him. They’d reduced him to nothing.

Yet here I was trying to teach him he was worthy, unable to understand why he couldn’t accept my one token of kindness.

“I think we should talk about this,” I whispered. “We need—”

His head snapped up, self-hatred glowing in his eyes. “I can’t be around you. I can’t look at you and not despise myself for what I did.”

“I agree that tonight started off badly, but it didn’t end that way. We really should talk—”

“There’s nothing to talk about.” His jaw clenched as he arched his chin at the trail by my knee. I hurt you. I did something unforgivable. It makes me fucking sick to know I found pleasure when all you found was pain.”

“But that’s wrong.” I stepped toward him. “I wanted you. I still—”

“Lies,” he hissed. “How could you want someone who raped you.” He shook his head, long hair tangling on his shoulders. “I need you to get away from me, Gemma. Before I do something even worse.”

“But you didn’t—”

“Leave!”

“But I—”

“Go.” He grabbed his hair and fisted handfuls of knots. “Fucking go!”

True fear spiraled again.

He looked on the verge of snapping.

Despair shot through me, slapping me with reality that this wasn’t some storybook where the heroine managed to free the monster in one try. This was reality. And the reality was, Kas was severely damaged and far out of my realm of capabilities in which to heal.

“Go...please go,” he murmured, curling into himself as if he could trap all the wickedness inside him.

Even though it felt like the hardest thing in the world.

Even though instincts told me I should argue, fight, and stay...

I did what he asked.

And I left.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

GEMMA ASHFORD WAS THE only person to ever successfully break me.

I’d had so many others try. I’d endured hundreds of punishments and thousands of games, yet I’d always been able to safeguard the inner parts of me. I’d sheltered those pieces for my family. I’d held them tight all while I’d been beaten and used because I knew if I gave up, who would look after them? Who would find a way to kill our masters? Who would sacrifice their own happiness so that one day, those he loved could find theirs?

But Gemma.

Christ, Gem.

She was the first to give me something out of the goodness of her heart. No matter how much it cost her. No matter how much she hated me for what I’d done. She’d read my suffering, understood the jagged complexities of my mind, and she’d been so angelically good.

She’d glowed in my arms. She’d had wings of gold and a halo of kindness all as she took my corrupted, unclean soul inside hers.

And how had I repaid her?

By coating her in the same fucking dirt I’d crawled out of.

Seeing my cum trickle down her leg? Seeing the bruises I’d given her while doing something unforgivable? Fuck me, it represented every disgusting thing I’d ever done. All the cum that’d covered me, all the guests who’d claimed me, all the games I’d been forced to play.

She hadn’t deserved to be included in that mess.

She didn’t deserve to be trapped with a man who couldn’t control his own thoughts or keep her safe from the very same urges he’d ignored for eleven years.

She wasn’t safe here.

She wasn’t fucking safe because seeing my release roll down her leg had made me viciously hard again. It wasn’t enough to take her once. I wanted her again and again and again. I wanted her beneath me, on me, in me. I wanted to die with her on my tongue and my body pounding into hers.

I was sick.

I was exhausted.

Living with her had become impossible.

I found it harder and harder just to survive. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t dangerous and cruel. I couldn’t wipe away the blood still coating my hands, or the nightmares just waiting to manipulate me.

I’d raped her because I’d stupidly fallen asleep. Fallen asleep because of a concussion that scrambled my thoughts and an exhaustion borne from her presence.

I never wanted to sleep again.

What if I woke to her dead beneath me?

What if I never woke at all, and I kept her trapped here forever, like me. Hurting her, using her, never able to open my eyes and see just how wonderful she was. How giving, generous, and kind.

I groaned and rested my sweaty forehead on my arms.

I didn’t think I could do this anymore.

I couldn’t keep living with someone who was nice. Who forced me to confront all my dark madness.

And the worst part?

The worst part was not knowing how she’d react. I’d hurt her. Yet instead of hurting me back, she’d given me something that no one else ever had.

She’d given me understanding, calmness. Granted access to her body and gifted me a split second of happiness. She did something no one else would ever have done, and I didn’t know how to handle that.

How was I supposed to keep my walls up, to protect myself from a past that had the power to suffocate me, all while Gemma Ashford broke me into pieces?

For hours, I sat against the wall, sinking into my misery. My stomach snarled with hunger, and my mind...well, that flickered with its familiar concussion and unreliable memory.

My eyes dropped to the chain binding her to me; the very same chain that’d clinked softly as she’d left the room on my request. I would never tell her, but my shitty memory had forgotten where I’d put the key. It wasn’t a good thing for someone like me to know she was close by, especially in my current state.

Just like the key was missing, tiny incidents that made up my life were gone. The blankness came on suddenly with no warning, erasing a few seconds, deleting my attempts at being better.

It was as if I fought an unwinnable battle.

I wanted to be good, but how could I when every part of me was bad?

I wanted to deserve her, but how could I when I’d always be a slave?

God, I was tired.

I felt wrung out and wrong, and something gnawed at me that couldn’t be ignored.

For all my shame of what I’d done to Gemma, she’d never once looked at me as if she cursed me. She’d shown incredible strength and sweetness.

She was so different, so pure, so right.

She was dirty because of me.

She was hurt because of what I’d done.

And I couldn’t sit there another goddamn moment without doing something to fix what I’d soiled.

Hauling myself from the floor, I stumbled a little as I bent for my jeans and stepped into them. My head rushed as I zipped them into place and rearranged the chain under my T-shirt.

Gritting my teeth against my constant headache, I stalked from the library.

I needed to find her.

To apologize.

To wash her clean from my filth.

To be honest and tell her that no one had ever treated me the way she did, and it messed with my defective mind.

I was...falling.

Falling in ways that fucking terrified me.

You sent her away after she gave you a gift.

I slammed to a stop in the foyer.

I winced as my head pounded.

I couldn’t go to her empty-handed.

She deserved the world.

She deserved her freedom.

Both of those things I couldn’t give.

The only thing I could afford to offer was her safety. Safety that came with a time limit and only applied while my eyes were open and nightmares stayed far away.

For as long as I could stay awake tonight, I was hers humbly and completely.

Changing direction, I headed toward the kitchen and the door toward the garden. The chain around my waist was long enough to step outside into the moonlight despite catching on furniture and tracking through the house. I walked toward the ancient claw-foot iron bathtub that I’d painstakingly dragged from one of the downstairs bathrooms a few years ago.

I’d remodeled that bathroom from the lighting to the fixtures. And by remodeled, I meant smashed to smithereens and left to rot.

In truth, I’d had a night of utter desolation and couldn’t stomach the sameness, the stagnantly empty silence any longer. I’d taken an ax to the tiles and a hammer to the sink and only stopped myself from destroying the bath because of a stupid idea from a book I’d read that week.

The characters in the book had found satisfaction by soaking in hot water beneath the stars. They’d laughed and unwound, fucked and fell in love.

And I’d been beyond myself with jealousy.

It’d taken a full day to drag the heavy bathtub through Fables, into the garden, and find a way to dig a hearth and stack wood beneath its belly.

That first night, when I’d laid in hot water and pruned my skin for hours, was the first night I’d slept without a nightmare. No sleepwalking. No panic attacks. Just blissful, blank rest.

After that, an outdoor soak had become a drug to me, especially in winter when snow fell, and I ambled from room to room with my breath creating clouds before me. Stoking a fire and slipping into a hot bath was sometimes the only true warmth I found all winter.

It was my favorite thing to do at night—the only way I could relax in this valley after darkness had fallen.

And I wanted to share it with her.

I wanted to give her a piece of myself, just as she’d given me something of her.

I need her to know she’s safe, even after what I did.

Marching toward last year’s depleted firewood pile, I stacked kindling and sticks, and prepared to apologize to the girl who’d crippled me.

* * * * *

I found her in the conservatory.

Curled up beneath silver blankets that she’d raided from a guest room. Why she insisted on sleeping in a glass box was beyond me. Sure, it was fine at the moment with the nights still warm and days still sunny but come winter, she’d freeze.

Winter...

My heart suddenly stopped.

Unlike all the other times I’d thought about the change of seasons and how much preparation I still had to do, I was struck with the absolute glorious knowledge that I wouldn’t be alone.

She’ll be here.

The reality of that sucker punched me. I tripped to the side as my eyes stayed locked on Gemma in her nest of bedding. It hadn’t hit me before. I hadn’t stopped to truly understand that I wouldn’t have to hibernate in an empty house with nothing and no one.

Thanks to her, I’d have company on those eternally boring days. I’d have someone to talk to, someone to touch and kiss and—

You should let her go.

I froze as moonlight danced behind clouds and shone through the glass roof, casting everything in quicksilver.

After what she’d done for me tonight—after what I’d done—the only way to truly show her how much she meant to me was to let her go. To find the key and unlock the chain and willingly walk her to the cliff to say goodbye.

Shit.

My heart spasmed painfully. I raised a hand and massaged my chest, gasping at the agony of even contemplating watching her climb out of my valley.

It’s the right thing to do.

The only thing.

The only way to keep her safe.

Gritting my teeth, I did my best to stay quiet as Gemma slept. She’d been so selfless in her kindness tonight. She’d given me more than just her body...she’d given me something intangible, something far, far too fragile and priceless not to deserve the biggest reward in return.

Therefore, I should have the same strength to free her, right? So what did that say about me that I couldn’t?

That I physically wouldn’t be able to survive if she left. Dramatic? Probably. The truth? Absolutely.

She can’t leave.

Even knowing what I did of my unraveling mind and tendencies of harming her. Her imprisonment was for life, purely because my reasoning for trapping her kept evolving: from physical needs and believing I could take from her whenever I damn well wanted to now acknowledging that I’d started to feel. Started to fall. Started to slip and slide, dive and drown each and every moment I was with her.

Rubbing my throbbing heart, I glared at the chain binding us as it glittered in the moonlight. Even if I physically could release her, I’d lost the key.

It was a poor excuse, but my damaged mind latched onto it with claws.

I couldn’t free her because I had no way of doing so. Therefore, keeping her was understandable, logical...necessary.

Accepting my sins, I ducked beside her and reached for her shoulder. My shadow fell over her. A sinister shape looming over an innocent, beautiful girl.

I shivered in fear. Fear of myself. Fear of my mind, my intentions, my past.

I hesitated, hovering my fingers over her delicate body.

I should let her rest. I should leave.

I should stay the hell away so I don’t—

“Kas?” Her eyes flew wide, locking onto my hand inches away from touching her.

I snatched it back, rocking on the balls of my feet as a crush of imbalance made me wobble.

Sitting upright, the silver blankets fell from her body, revealing she’d slept in the same shirt she’d worn all day. The same one she’d unbuttoned in the river when I’d dragged her in behind me. The same one she’d pilfered and wore so elegantly as she’d brandished a knife in my face—was it just this morning?—before dropping it by my feet in the conservatory.

My memory flickered, delivering a partial recollection.

“The moment I kiss you back, Kassen Sands, you’ll be at my mercy, not the other way around. Take me against my will, and I won’t just take your body in return. I will take your heart. I will unearth all the love that you’ve suppressed so, so deep inside you, and I will make you curse the very day you decided to trap me. Take me against my will, and I will show you what heartbreak can do to a man like you.”

I gasped, swooping to my feet with a grunt.

Fuck, was that what’d happened?

I’d taken her against her will. I’d hurt her—made her fight with fear and tears. Yet she’d somehow had the strength to touch me afterward. To forgive me. She’d ridden me as if she felt something for me. She’d let me come inside her. She’d kissed my cheek and sent lightning bolts through my blood.

That lightning had struck my heart.

It was still smoking, still charred, and entirely lost because of what she’d made me feel.

But...how true was it?

Was this her plan all along?

Was this the path she’d warned me about? That she’d not slept with me out of kindness but manipulation? That she fully intended to rip out the very same heart she’d woken up inside me and prove, once and for all, that monsters did bleed. That they could cry. That they could die from wretched heartbreak.

No.

I tripped backward.

She stood, her bare legs flashing with moonlight as she came toward me. Her hands came up as if to catch me. Her eyes glowed with the same sympathy and softness that’d completely annihilated me in the library. “Are you okay? You look like you’re about to be sick.”

I shook my head, too fast, too fierce, sending plants and moonlight swirling. “I-I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“I’m fine,” I growled, gagging on more than just the thought of her leaving but the thought of her still hating me. Worse than hating me—being such a mastermind and flawless actress that she could hide her true feelings and be gentle.

To give me the one thing I’d never had. The one thing I was fucking desperate for. The one thing I would happily die for.

Could she do that?

Could she be worse than all the guests combined? Could she carry off a performance of kindness and affection, coaxing me under her spell, all while driving the very same knife she’d thrown at me feet into my back?

Christ, I—

That would make her crueler than Storymaker, Levin, Willby...it would make her more diabolical than all of them put together because not one of them had been able to mask their true desires, their real natures.

But Gemma?

She could be my greatest enemy, all while she made me fall in love with her.

Ah, fuck.

She was right.

I was going to be sick.

I spun and stumbled for the wall. Slamming both hands on the glass, I sucked in a tainted breath, wincing against the pain in my broken arm. Air was tainted because she was there. Her scent. Her beauty. Her very fucking presence.

And then, her hand rubbed softly between my shoulder blades, and her voice lowered to a coo that I’d never, not once, been privileged to hear. “It’s okay. If you’re still upset about what you did...don’t. It’s in the past.” She paused before murmuring, “It’s two a.m., Kas. That was yesterday. Today is fresh. We can start anew.”

I groaned from the sheer pain of her comfort. Did she know her empathy was the worst weapon against me? Did she understand my bones crumbled to dust and my blood turned to mud and I couldn’t fucking think straight all because of her benevolence?

But it could be faked.

She could be playing you for a fool—

I snapped upright.

My nausea vanished.

So what?

So what if she did? So what if I stumbled right into her game?

At least, I could find some smidgen of happiness along the way. I could enjoy a few soft touches, a couple of calm moments from the shitstorm of my mind.

I suddenly didn’t care.

So what if it was all a sham? So what if this was her delivering the worst agony of my life? By the time she twisted the knife in so deep I finally figured out her intention, it would be too late.

It was already too late.

Turning slowly, I caught her wrist as her hand fell away from my back. Not looking up, I focused on her elegant fingers as I twined them with mine. I did something as innocent as hold her hand, yet it gave me a deeper satisfaction than driving hard inside her.

She gasped as I brought her knuckles to my lips and kissed the delicate skin covering them. She shivered as I grazed my mouth over each, worshiping, memorizing, angling her hand until her fingers went taut.

I slowly inserted her middle one into my mouth.