Fable of Happiness Book Two

by Pepper Winters

  I didn’t reply, allowing his growing animosity to fade even as sparks of lust continued to dance in the air between us. His fingers around my wrist sent fire through my blood. The quick inhale as he jerked away and let me go sent confused desire and foolhardy attraction spearing into my belly.

  I sucked in a breath.

  He shook out his hand as if he couldn’t stop the tingles of heat our skin had conjured. He wasn’t the only one affected by our closeness; not the only one frustrated by our quick fuck on the floor.

  I hadn’t wanted it.

  He hadn’t either.

  Yet it’d happened, and it still hovered around us, unfinished and expectant.

  He winced as his hips rocked upward, ignoring his denials. He grunted and looked at me like a hunted thing. “Get away from me. You’re only making this worse.”

  “I’m not afraid of you, Kas.”

  “You should be.”

  “You can trust me,” I murmured.

  He looked at the ceiling, rolling his eyes. “Trust?” He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe my stupidity. I expected him to yell. Instead, he whispered, “You fool, it’s you who can’t trust me.”

  Goosebumps sprang over my skin as his eyes caught mine, simmering with need that reached out with violent fingers and caressed every inch of me. “I’m not asking you to get away for my benefit.” His voice lowered until it hummed with carnality. “The real reason is...” He swallowed hard as if it cost him to be so honest. “Is so I don’t repeat what I just did. I mean it. Don’t give me a chance to hurt you again. Because I will. I’m seconds away from snapping. I’m hungry and hard and the horniest I’ve ever been in my entire life, and you...you—” He laughed coldly. “You continue to touch me. You continue to give me comfort when you’re the one who deserves it. I can’t stand it. I can’t bear being this close to you and not being inside you. It’s driven me mad for the past week. It’s all I’ve fucking thought about. I’ve spent seven days in a state of unbearable need, and now that I’ve tasted you again. Christ—!” He pinched the bridge of his nose, slamming his lips together.

  I froze.

  My mouth parted with a soft puff of air.

  He rubbed his face with his palms. “It hurts. I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. Every piece of me feels like it’s tangled and throbbing. It’s fucking killing me. You’re killing me. I’m seconds away from snatching you. Moments away from sinking back inside you. Permission or no permission and that terrifies me because if I do—if I fuck you again after raping you only minutes ago, then I might as well admit I’m exactly like the guests who visited this place.” His hands balled, wedging his knuckles into his eyes as if he could eradicate everything he’d seen happen here. “At least, I have the excuse of a nightmare for the first time.” His head tipped down, his eyes blazing into mine as he dropped his shaking hands. “This time, I wouldn’t have that. I’d have to come face-to-face with the truth that for all the changes inside me, all the attempts at being good, all my wishes to be better, I’m just as sick and evil as all those other cunts, and I—”

  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.

  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, K
as.” 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.

  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.”