by Luis, Maria
It’s lewd.
Brutal.
And the stuff my dreams are made of.
“I can hear you,” he grits out, his thumb sweeping up to my jaw. “How wet you are around your fingers.”
I curl them, my head falling back into his hand to let him cradle the weight. Then I turn, slightly, and bite the tip of his thumb, never taking my eyes off the show before me. I want him to come across my chest—or in my mouth. I’ve never swallowed before, but I would for him. Gladly. Eagerly. “Saxon. Saxon, I want you to—”
His guttural voice breaks me off: “Would you be that wet around me?”
“Yes.”
He doesn’t need further encouragement.
His hands fit under my armpits to lift me up, but as I feel him turning me around, I stay him with a palm to his chest. Over the feathered scars that speak to so much horror. I meet his hot gaze. “Don’t hide from me. I want to see you.”
“Christ.”
But he doesn’t say no.
Hauling me off the sofa, he links his hands under my thighs and props me up on the hard back. My legs wrap around his waist, hands landing on his shoulders. I graze my thumb over the water-colored edge of his tattoo.
Brows drawn together, he mutters, “You’ll regret this.”
I won’t regret him—ever. Me and Saxon, we were never meant to be, but that doesn’t stop me from soaking him up and breathing him in.
“Take me,” I whisper, reaching between us to line up his cock with my core. “And I’ll let you know what I regret or not.”
Jaw cinched tight, he searches my eyes, as if looking for any lingering doubt. Then finds the crease of my hips to hold me steady—and drives himself home. I cry out, my head falling back. I feel him move, his hips pistoning sharply, his mouth landing on the underside of my jawline. His grip never loosens. Faster. Harder. He thrusts into me like he has a point to prove—or maybe like he’s determined to make me regret nothing at all.
Either way, my skin burns and my lungs squeeze and I glance down to watch his thick length fuck me, again and again. No condom. I should panic at the realization, but I’m too far gone to care.
I cling to Saxon’s broad frame. Accept his hard, punishing thrusts like they’re my due. Each one belongs to me, each one catapults me higher, until I’m quivering and moaning and cupping the side of his face and forcing him to look at me.
There’s nothing cold about this man.
He’s stripped down.
Stripped bare.
Groaning deep in his chest. Hips churning faster and faster, hitting me in just the right spot that I feel the drag of him against my clit on every forward stroke. Scarred mouth parted and gasping for air.
Welcome to the fire, Saxon Priest.
“Please.”
It’s all I say, all I ask, and his broad shoulders tense while his thrusting hips slow to an excruciatingly devastating pace. His unholy gaze fixes on my mouth, and I see the want there, the craving for what I’m offering him.
“Steal it,” I whisper, running my eyes over his stiff, uncertain features. “I breathe, you inhale, and we both go up in flames. Remember?”
Something in him implodes then.
I feel it in the way his arms bind around my back, securing me to him. In the way his mouth curls, but instead of snarling—or clamping his mouth shut before storming away—he confesses, “You’re my first, Isla Quinn. And, more than likely, my only.”
Then his mouth, ragged scar and all, crashes down on mine.
And I was wrong. So very wrong.
The rest of him may be taking me ruthlessly, as savagely as I once perceived him, but his mouth is the sweetest torture I’ve ever felt. He sips from my lips, drawing out a swallowed gasp from me, before taking full advantage of my surprise. His tongue plunges into my mouth to tangle with mine, and I feel myself squeeze around his length.
We both groan.
I frame his face with my hands, holding him still.
Show him with my lips how to segue the kiss from passionate to teasing to all-destroying. Because that’s what this is: something more than sex, more than casual shagging. We’re burning together, willingly, and chasing the flames with everything that we are.
He cants my head to the side. Presses deeper.
I open my eyes, only to find green already blazing a trail of heat. He’s watching me. Studying me. Devouring me with his gaze and his mouth on mine and his cock that’s hitting me just right, just so, until I feel the familiar spark of fire tingling in my belly.
Ripping my mouth from his, I pant, “I’m going to come.”
“Not yet. Not until I ruin you more.”
His teeth graze my bottom lip, sucking the sensitive flesh into his mouth. He bites. I claw my fingers down the front of his bare chest, over the scars and the gruesome reminders of his past. He tempts me into another kiss, this one so soul ravaging that I feel the prick of tears. And then there are his fingers, claiming my clit and rubbing in tight circles designed to drive me wild.
I come, just like that.
My mouth claimed by his.
My core throbbing.
My heart—utterly and completely ruined.
He thrusts again, deeper, rougher, his breathing ragged in my ear. When he comes, it’s still him, still Saxon. Not overtly loud or vocal, but he groans deep in his chest, as if he’s being tortured. He pulls out of me, one hand locked around the base of his cock, and releases all over my stomach. White jets of come land on my pelvis, the soft swell of my belly.
Slowly, the seconds tick by.
And then he meets my gaze, a stark vulnerability in those green-yellow depths that wraps around my heart like a knotted rope I have no hope of ever untying.
“I liked it,” he rasps, as if surprised.
Reflexively, my legs tighten around his hips. “The sex?”
“Yes, but no.” A small shake of his head. “Your kiss, Isla. I liked your kiss.”
An altogether different sort of pleasure winds its way through my limbs. Hesitantly, I ask, “Your first?”
His throat works with an audible swallow. “Among other firsts today.”
My stomach flutters at the embarrassment caging his tone and I rewind the clock in my head, moving from moment to moment, getting hot all over again from the eroticism of his touch, his dirty words, his mouth on my—
Oh.
“You’ve never—?”
“No.”
“And you never wanted t-to”—I wave a hand at my lap, desperately searching for a word that won’t make me sound like an idiot—“eat?”
Utter. Failure.
He drags his upper lip behind straight, white teeth. Breathes out a shuttered sigh, and then confesses, “I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted anything the way I crave you.”
It’s not a direct answer but it stills fill in the gaps.
He’s never kissed anyone.
Never gone down on a woman.
Not until me.
“Saxon?”
“Yes?” he hums.
“Do you believe in fate?”
He twists his head up to stare at me, a shadow passing over his face. “No.”
“Well, I do.” I cup his face and sit up tall, so I can brush my mouth over his. “And I think, somewhere deep down, you were waiting for me. For us, whatever this is. So that I could be your first.”
And, more than likely, my only.
Saxon’s lips curl in a smile, a real smile, and if I weren’t already sitting, I suspect I’d be bowled over by his handsomeness.
Saxon Priest will be the death of me, of that I have no doubt.
30
Saxon
Drawing my joggers up the length of my legs, I watch Isla pull her hair out from under her shirt collar. Still damp with sweat, the strands stick to her neck, forcing her to coil them around her fingers and tug the heavy weight into a loose knot atop her head.
I want to fist those strands myself, bend her over my arm, and lay claim to h
er.
My mouth on the underside of her jaw. My mouth brushing the all-too-sensitive flesh behind her ear. My mouth devouring hers . . .
“If you want it, take it.”
Stiffening, I cut my gaze to hers. “What?”
“A kiss.” Those strawberry-blond waves cascade around her shoulders all over again. But with her attention solely trained on me, she seems perfectly content to let them go untamed. “I’m not some gift you’re only allowed to open on special occasions. I promise that I’m just as willing fully clothed as I was naked with you thrusting into me.”
Christ, her tongue.
Bold and beautiful and sweet to the taste.
In this moment, I feel like the fumbling schoolboy that I never was in my youth, mainly because I was never a schoolboy to begin with. I’ve carried the weight of the world on my shoulders for most of my life and have more than my fair share of scars to prove it.
But one woman—this woman—has stripped me raw.
Guy was wrong.
It’s not Isla who ought to be scared of what will come of us—it’s me.
One touch of her lips on mine and I feel shaken, down to my core. I’m warm, doused in my need for her, and my heart—the fucking thing won’t quit thudding double-time in my chest. When she finally wriggles into her sweats, then loops the ties into a knot at her waist, I’m forced to acknowledge that I’ve lost my bloody mind.
She’s fully clothed and here I am, heart still racing, cock still hard, my skin on fire.
I want Isla Quinn like I’ve never wanted anything else in my life.
Focus, man. Focus on anything but her.
Feeling like I’ve been dealt an impossible hand, I clench my teeth together and snatch my discarded shirt off the floor. “We need to talk about what happened at your flat.”
“I’d rather we discuss why you’ve gone from kissing me like your life depends on it to skirting around me like I’ve contracted the plague.” She pauses, serving me with a swift once-over. “For what it’s worth, you’ve probably been infected already. Mouth to mouth, you know. I’m sorry to say that you’re doomed.”
Against my better judgment, my lips twitch. “Have you always been so cheeky?”
Her blue eyes skate down my chest, to my stomach, as I lift my arms and draw the shirt down over my head. “How egotistical will I sound if I say yes?” she asks.
“On a scale of one to ten, I’d put you at a healthy twenty.”
A flirtatious smile curves her mouth. “One kiss and the sarcasm is already out to play. Just imagine what a few more might do for your oh-so-charming personality.”
“And here I remember you telling me that I was lacking in that department.”
“I have the right to change my mind at any time, Mr. Priest. It’s a woman’s prerogative—or hadn’t you heard?”
Laughter, unfamiliar but true, reverberates in my chest.
If it were possible for her smile to widen any more, her cheeks might crack in two. “You should do that more often,” she says softly, her gaze guileless as she stares at me. “You’re handsome as it is when you’re snarling and acting like a complete wanker, but your laugh?” She presses a hand to her heart. “It sinks in here, like I can feel your heat even though we aren’t touching.”
Everything in me grows still. “Isla, you don’t need to lie. I know that I’m not . . . that—”
“No. You don’t get to tell me how I should feel.”
The laughter dies as I swallow past the sudden boulder in my throat. Awkwardness—that damned fumbling schoolboy syndrome—returns swiftly, like a punch to the gut. I’ve torn apart families, I’ve put my body on the line of duty more times than I can count. Savage, they call me. But in this, with Isla, I don’t feel like Saxon Priest, Holyrood spy.
I’m a Godwin again, grasping hope with both hands and feeding it life, even if it leaves me completely exposed.
Gruffly, I ask, “And how do you feel?”
She approaches me on silent feet cushioned by the carpet, her hand already outstretched to settle on my hip the second she steps in close. Her face tips back, so much trust lighting her expression that my mouth turns dry. Quietly, she confesses, “Like if you tucked me into a dark room, I’d always be able to find you. Deep, raspy. Magnetic. And I’d follow that sound, tethered to it like a string that can’t be snipped, to a man whose heart beats in time to a rhythm meant only for me.”
I don’t wait.
Don’t hesitate.
I take it—her.
My fingers sink into her thick, still-damp hair, cradling her to me, and then I brush my lips over hers. A second kiss that feels like the first all over again. Or maybe that’s how it’s meant to be with the woman who’s singlehandedly battering down every one of my walls. Where it could be the hundredth kiss or the thousandth, but still tastes like the first.
I wouldn’t know.
But I lean into this one like it very well might be my last, my only, a kiss meant to carry me for whatever years I have left.
I drag Isla closer, aligning her chest with mine. Breathe in her scent as my tongue flicks out against the seam of her lips to demand entry. A feminine whimper breaks from her, and I bask in the sound. That whimper is for me. Awe coils with desire in my veins, quickening my pulse even as I tug on her hair to tip her head farther back, crushing my mouth down over hers like she’s mine to devour, now, tomorrow, forevermore.
Another small moan. Her fingers dance over my hip. She rocks in my embrace, swaying closer still.
In film, couples always seem to keep their eyes closed during a kiss like it’s some rudimentary rule that to taste fully, you need to be blanketed in darkness. But I’ve spent a lifetime in hiding—within Holyrood and London, with women who’d rather fuck a lamppost than an ugly son of a bitch like me—and I won’t do it here, not with Isla.
So, I watch.
I watch her lids flutter when I graze my teeth over her bottom lip, nipping sharply at the sensitive flesh, and I watch her forehead crease when I delve deeper, raking my mouth over hers and thrusting my tongue into her mouth with all-out possession. Her hands jump to my chest, clutching the fabric of my shirt, and there’s a moment—brief, paralyzing—when I’m convinced that I’ve been too rough, too demanding, too me.
Only, she doesn’t push me away.
No, she stands on her toes and pulls me closer and moans deep in her throat, needy, appreciative.
Yes. Yes.
I skate one hand south, to the space between her shoulder blades. Keep her locked against me, for better or worse. Our tongues tangle, dueling for control, neither of us willing to concede defeat. My fingers drift down, down, down, until I’m cradling the curve of her ass in one palm and groaning at the feel of her in my arms. And when she reaches up to cup my face—sweet, so fucking sweet—I growl my approval into her mouth and feel her smile against my lips.
An honest-to-God smile.
I don’t know whether to kiss her harder, just to erase it from existence, or smile back because, for the first time in my life, my chest feels light. Airy. Like I’m actually living instead of simply existing from one mission to the next, always ready for the anvil to drop and trouble, ever present, to sink its claws into my flesh.
Wrenching my mouth away, I press my forehead to hers. Words bubble up, too many of them, all at once. Words of affection and words of frustration, for not being able to sort my emotions properly and pluck out the good ones, the words another man might have no difficulty saying. Any man who isn’t me. Scarred. Broken. Cold.
“If I have a heart at all,” I husk out, feeling my face heat, “it’s only because you’ve put it there.”
Her fingers on my face flex. And then they smooth down, down even more, until her palm is on my chest, resting against the organ that has no business beating for her, a woman opposite me in this war.
“Sometimes we only amount to what we’ve always been destined to become,” she whispers, and the words are familiar, so familiar that
I strain my memory to remember who said them, but then she kills the effort completely by leaning forward to kiss my chest. My heart. Christ. She holds still, as though soaking me in, and then pulls back long enough to murmur, “You could steal every piece of me, Saxon Priest, and it still wouldn’t change a thing.”
My breath catches, even as my stomach drops at the negative implication. It shouldn’t matter. I’ve known what I am for years, and I’ve never once cared. Never once tried to do better. And still . . . “No?”
She nods, then lifts onto her toes to kiss me. Soft, a promise of more. Against my lips, she breathes, “You’ve had a heart all along. If I’ve done anything, it’s just to show you that it’s okay to melt every once and a while and be you.”
Fuck.
I’m trembling. Shaking. Whatever the hell word you want to use because it’s all the same in the end. I open my mouth, wanting to say something—anything to express the range of foreign emotions sweeping through me—only for banging to start on the door. Loud, insistent.
And then, “Isla! Isla!”
Blue eyes dart up to my face. “Peter. I don’t . . .” She fists my shirt, dropping her forehead to my chest. “I’m sorry.”
I tuck one finger under her chin, lifting. When our eyes meet, I touch my mouth to her temple. “Don’t apologize for wanting to look out for him.”
“I distinctly recall you telling me that he was old enough to handle himself.”
There’s a teasing edge to her voice, so I return the favor tenfold. “I did, and I distinctly recall you telling me that I’m a coldhearted ass.”
“Not so much in those exact words.”
I grin, crooked but genuine. “We can argue about it later. But don’t forget that we really do need to discuss what happened at your flat. We can’t put it off, not for any longer than we already have.”
Except, when Isla opens the door to let her brother inside, the look on his face tells me that trouble has risen its ugly head yet again. A fact he confirms a second later when he rushes for the television and turns it on. The screen shimmers, pixels recalibrating as he switches channels, and then a newscaster’s voice fills the room, each word more damning than the last:
