Addicted (Tempting Book 4)

by Alex Lucian

  After staring up at the statue for a minute, I found a space to sit on the steps and opened my pamphlet. I was sitting in Dam Square, which was indeed a square surrounded by a road and then buildings. All the architecture reminded me of something from Pinocchio, or some other movie with European history.

  The pamphlet explained that the statue was a World War II monument, and the urns that were contained within the wall behind the pillar contained soil from World War II execution grounds and war ceremonies in the Dutch provinces.

  Near the front two corners of the square were lion statues, where people had wrapped their bicycles to rest. There was so much activity across the square, which surprised me for a monument dedicated to the lives lost in a devastating war. But as I sat there, and saw all the life that moved around the square, I thought it a fitting contrast to the sadness of loss. It seemed less lonely somehow, that this stark white cone sitting on a corner wasn’t behind rope or barriers. That people walked by it every day, ate their lunches here and took their children to play on the steps.

  After I’d sat there for an hour, people-watching, I made my way back to the hotel with a stomach growling for food and hands itching to touch Elias.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A couple hours after I’d left Ruby, wishing fucking desperately that I didn’t have to, I let myself back into the hotel room as quietly as I could. If she’d managed to fall asleep, I didn’t want to be the one to wake her.

  Except when I shut the door with soft snick and turned, she was sitting on the bed with her back against the headboard.

  “Did you get a good nap?”

  She shook her head, but was smiling at me. “I couldn’t sleep. Knowing that there were all these amazing things outside was keeping me awake. I decided to do the tourist thing instead of lay here pretending to sleep.”

  The disappointment that I felt was so swift and so acute that I walked into the bathroom so she wouldn’t see it on my face. The entire time I’d been shooting and getting to know some of the event organizers and documenting the setup for one of the headliners, I was making a mental list of the places I wanted to bring Ruby.

  Witnessing her experience Amsterdam, witnessing a different country for the first time, made me excited in a way that I wasn’t really prepared for. I wanted to be able to see her face the first time she tried bitterballen, which was one of my favorite things to eat when I was here. What a fucking pussy I was, staring at myself in the mirror and trying to be okay with the fact that she was okay with the fact that I hadn’t been with her the first time she ventured out.

  “What did you see?” I asked, still bracing my hands on the bathroom sink.

  “I walked to the National Monument and did some people watching.”

  “What’d you think?” I walked out of the bathroom and pulled my camera bag off my shoulder, setting it down on the floor of the small closet. Her eyes were bright, but she looked tired. Join the club, I thought. Nothing sounded better than falling into the bed and not moving for about thirteen hours.

  Maybe another blowjob, but it was a toss-up of what I’d take first.

  “Busier than I thought. But beautiful. I could’ve sat there all day and watched people.”

  I tapped her hip, motioning for her to move over, and she did. With a groan, I stretched out beside her and buried my face into one of the starkly white pillows. It smelled clean, but sterile, and immediately, I wanted to bury my face into Ruby instead; mask the antiseptic scent with her spicy, warm one.

  She was smiling down at me when I turned to my side and looked up at her. “Did you see anything else?”

  “No. I wanted to be back here when you were done.”

  Too fucking right. My eyes swept down her body, taking stock of her wicked curves underneath the simple clothes that she’d traveled in. The black leggings were soft against my hand when I felt a path from her knee to her thigh. When the tips of my fingers hit the hem of her grey t-shirt, I didn’t stop, pushing up underneath the cotton so I could feel the smooth skin of her stomach.

  “You know what’s a good way to make yourself fall asleep on time the first night in a foreign country?” My voice was dark and rumbling, and her eyes looked heavy when I spoke.

  “What?”

  “Orgasms. Lots and lots of orgasms.”

  Ruby smiled, a full one that showed all of her straight, white teeth. She was stingy with those kinds of smiles, normally giving me close-lipped ones that were full of teasing and mystery. But she was happy.

  Here with me, she was happy.

  Giving the slope of her belly button one more touch with my fingertip, I rolled off the bed until I was standing and pulled at my belt while I toed off my shoes. Ruby sat forward and in one lithe movement, slid the shirt from her body. The simple nude bra that she wore underneath did things to her tits that almost made me fall to my knees prostrate before her.

  I may not believe in a higher power directing the universe, but the sight of Ruby’s curves made me feel fucking worshipful. Her dark hair spilled around the flawless, olive-toned skin of her slim shoulders. With only silence stretching between us, we undressed, letting each piece of clothing fall to the floor without a single word.

  For the first time since I walked into the room, I noticed the handful of condoms on the nightstand. I smirked, handing her one. “Put it on.”

  Before she did, Ruby held her hair with one hand and kneeled over so she could place a slick, open mouthed kiss on the tip of my cock. Then she pinched the tip of the condom and rolled it down my length. When it was on, she skated her hands over my abs, tracing the underside of my pecs, taking extra time to follow the line of my tattoos over my shoulders and down my biceps.

  “You’re a work of art,” she told me in a husky voice.

  Through clenched teeth, I said, “Lay down on your side, angle your legs toward the window.”

  “Bossy.”

  “Horny,” I corrected.

  Before she complied, Ruby placed a sharp bite on the meat of my shoulder. When she was laid out, her toned back and ass on display for me, I kneeled on the bed and gently pulled the arm that she was laying on and stretched it up toward the headboard. With reverent hands, I swept my palms over the gentle slope of her waist, the plump lines of her tits.

  Her head was arched to the side so she could watch me and I wanted to fall into her sinfully dark eyes. Without another word between us, I slid a knee in between her legs so I was straddling the bottom one. The leg that was on top was draped across my thigh. When I fisted my cock and braced my free hand on her lower leg, we both took a deep breath.

  Without testing her wetness first, I slid into her in one long, smooth thrust, only stopping when I bottomed out. Her back arched at the deep angle, and I breathed heavily from the way she gripped me. I pulled out and slammed back in.

  “Oh my god,” she said on an exhale. “You’re so deep.”

  “And you’re so fucking tight. So wet, baby.”

  Her chin tilted up when I thrust again, but the way we were positioned, she couldn’t really move. She could only lay there, let me feel her, let me fuck her, let me do whatever the hell I wanted to her. I pulled back until only the tip of my dick was still in her scalding heat.

  “Please,” she whispered.

  I braced my hands on the bed on either side of her. “When you beg like that, it makes me goddamn insane.”

  I hooked my hips, bottoming out so sharply that my balls slapped against her. My pace stayed smooth after that, and from the way I was over her, I could pinch her nipples, press my thumb against the tight pucker of muscle of her ass. Ruby groaned and turned her face into the bed when I did that.

  Pushing off the bed, I straightened again, gripping her tits so roughly that she’d probably see marks in the morning.

  “What do you need, baby?”

  “Harder, Elias, oh god, harder.”

  Quite fucking happily, I complied, ramming into her with such force that she cried out. With my thumb, I
pressed tight circles against the hard nub of her clit and her chest heaved with sobbing breaths.

  “Hard enough?” I punctuated it with a punching thrust, our skin slapping together so loudly that there was no way the people next to us wouldn’t be able to hear.

  Her eyes snapped open and trained onto me. “Harder.”

  “Fucking hell, Ruby,” I rasped out and fucking went at her. My chest was coated with sweat, and I swear to God, I saw tears in her eyes when I lifted her top leg and hit a spot so deep inside of her that she screamed.

  “Yes, yes, oh my god, yes.” And she exploded around me, almost causing me to black the fuck out. I roared, the pleasure was so bright and intense, so sharp that it probably tested the limits of how much the condom could hold.

  I was so fucking spent that I couldn’t even milk the remnants of our simultaneous orgasms. With one arm around her waist, I fell onto the bed next to her, only barely remembering to pull out of her. There was a dark part of me that flared with pride at the wet gush between her legs when I did. I’d made Ruby come so hard that she’d made a mess herself.

  She laughed under her breath and laid her hand on my arm. “Wow.”

  “Yeah.” I buried my nose in her hair and sucked in a lungful of her scent. “God, woman, you are fucking potent.”

  Staying underneath the weight of my arm, Ruby turned until she was facing me. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes glowing. “Me? Elias, I’m pretty sure you just hit a spot that made me see another planet.”

  “That so?” I growled, dropping my mouth for a sucking kiss against her porn-star lips. “I can try to hit again if you give me like ten minutes.”

  Ruby laughed, dropping her forehead onto my chest. “Maybe tomorrow. I think you’ve put my pussy into a pleasure-coma.”

  “Well that’s a new one,” I said dryly. “Want me to order some room service before we try to sleep?”

  When I asked, her eyes were already half-closed. “I’m okay. I think I’ll just sleep right here.”

  I smoothed an arm up her back and she hummed. “We should talk about what we want to do the rest of the week.”

  “I don’t care,” she said sleepily. “I’ll go wherever you want to take me.”

  With that, she was out. For a long time, I didn’t move, just laid with my arm around her and our legs intertwined on top of the comforter. After I pulled carefully from her embrace, I lifted her enough to tuck her under the blanket. She sighed, tucking her arms under a pillow. I didn’t join her right away once I’d cleaned up, just sat in the chair next to the bed and watched her sleep, feeling like something in my chest had just been ripped completely open.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Our second full day in Amsterdam, Elias decided to make it more low-key. After spending our first full day in Geithoorn, a tiny village that was a three hour train ride from Amsterdam, we were both so travel-weary that low-key was just what we needed.

  After inhaling espresso in the restaurant attached to the hotel, Elias had the reception desk hail a taxi for us.

  “Where are we going?” I asked him as we waited on the brick-paved sidewalk.

  Elias gave me a small smile, but turned to the driver. “Oude Kerk, please.”

  I looked at him curiously, but he just smiled, patting my knee.

  The driver pulled a block away from what looked to be a very large, old stone church set near the edge of a canal. It had many gables, with large arched windows reaching near to the top.

  “Oude Kerk,” the driver said and Elias paid him before ushering me out of the car. As I stood on the sidewalk and looked up at it, I tried to imagine just how old it was. The large windows had intricate leading in the tops of the arches, making it look positively medieval.

  “Old Church.”

  I turned to Elias who stood beside me. “Oude Kerk means Old Church?”

  “Exactly.”

  There had to have been hundreds of windows covering the massive structure, but my eyes went immediately to the bright white steeple. The look of the church said gothic, and the juxtaposition of this dark, old church against the bright light of the day was almost eerie.

  “Ready for the tour?” Elias asked.

  Nodding, I took his offered hand and followed him in to the visitor center, where he paid for our entrance fee with cash.

  I was surprised by how barren it seemed in the church, and commented on it to Elias. “Originally,” he said, looking through the brochure in his hands, “it was a Catholic church, but after the religious wars, the Protestants began removing the more showy Catholic sculptures.” He pointed to the floor, where names and dates were etched into stone. “The floor consists entirely of twenty-five hundred gravestones. See?”

  The idea was incredible to me, and only heightened the eerie feeling I had before I had even stepped into the church. “We’re walking across the graves of twenty-five hundred people,” I said, feeling the need to keep my voice hushed.

  “Actually, there are ten-thousand Amsterdam citizens buried under this church. Even Rembrandt’s wife is buried here.”

  “Rembrandt’s wife?” I asked. “How old is this church?”

  “Eight-hundred years.”

  I pressed a hand to my stomach as I absorbed that. “Eight-hundred,” I said in an awed whisper. “That’s…” I shook my head. I was at a loss for words as I tried to take it all in.

  “And look up,” Elias said, pointing to the ceiling, which was covered in wooden planks. “This roof is the largest medieval wooden vault in Europe. The planks are Estonian and date back to the thirteen-hundreds.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to imagine what it must have been like to attend services here. The wooden ceilings would have provided incredible acoustics.

  “Have you heard of the Miracle of Amsterdam?”

  The name rang a bell from one of my classes as an undergraduate. “It’s familiar, but I don’t recall the exact story.”

  “In the year 1345, a dying man vomited the Host after taking communion.”

  “Yes,” I said, as it began coming back to me. “They threw his vomit into a fire, but the Host remained intact and the event was proclaimed a miracle.”

  Elias nodded, “After, they put the Host in a chest and tucked it away, but it disappeared during the Protestant Reformation.”

  “That would make sense, since the Protestants typically enclose very few artifacts within a church.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But the Catholics certainly like their religious paraphernalia.”

  He laughed and said, “That we do.”

  Elias led me over to where the stained glass windows were, their reds and blues so bright with the incoming sun. “It’s so beautiful,” I said, my voice low as people stepped around us.

  “It is.” He seemed to be in deep thought as we stared at the stained glass, and I wondered at what was going through his head.

  “You know what I think about when I’m in places like this?” I asked him.

  “What’s that?”

  I slid my arm into his and leaned in, my head on his shoulder. “About the people who were so deeply inspired by their beliefs to help construct a place for them to worship. I mean, this is eight-hundred years old. They didn’t have forklifts or nail guns or anything a modern contractor would use to build something this size.” My hand slid down his sleeve to clasp his hand. “But back then, it was literal back-breaking labor. Just imagine the number of generations of people who have worked to keep this building from crumbling.” Elias ran his fingers over mine as I spoke, and it felt so soothing that I kept talking. “And we’re standing here, where probably thousands of people have stood at some point in their lives. On the bricks laid by people who have been dead for hundreds of years. Isn’t that incredible?”

  Elias cleared his throat. “It is.”

  “And when you think, that this building has been standing longer than some of the most historic crises of Europe, it’s even more thought-provoking.”
<
br />   “Tell me,” he said.

  Warmed by his interest, I thought of my many studies. “Well, take the Black Death, for example, in the mid-1300s. Right around the time of the Miracle of Amsterdam, in fact. This church was built before then, and as the pandemic spread up from the Mediterranean, it wiped out entire families. Children were orphaned.” That gave me pause, but I continued. “The effects created a series of social and religious upheavals, which ultimately affected European history in a significant way. You’re talking thirty-to-sixty percent of Europe’s total population, gone. Can you imagine?”

  “I can’t,” he said honestly. He waited a beat before looking at me. “I’ve experienced loss.”

  I immediately thought of his sister, and what he’d told me when we’d met. “I don’t think you can make it through life without suffering at least one tremendous loss,” I told him, though I didn’t think it sounded particularly comforting.

  “I agree with that,” he said, and didn’t seem offended by how unaffected I had sounded. As an orphan, I was no stranger to losing myself. But that wasn’t what defined my religious beliefs. “I feel the empty space that my sister once filled every Goddamn day. But,” he paused and nodded gently, “death is inevitable. I haven’t experienced it on the scale of thirty-to-sixty percent of the people I know, being wiped out.”

  “I don’t think most people have.”

  “Very few, I hope.” He let out a breath, like he was putting aside the heaviness of the moment. “Tell me, what happened to Europe after?”

  “Well,” I began, as Elias led me from the stained glass to the other gravestones marked on the floors. “The healers of that era couldn’t explain the cause, so people lost their minds—and attacked everyone they could think of. In many parts of Europe, Jews, the homeless, lepers—anyone that looked like a vagrant—were executed. Even people with acne were singled out. Some citizens in a town in Germany murdered some two-thousand Jews.”