by Angel Payne
My hand lifted to the dark edge where his hair met his temple. “I know.”
Okay, fine. I’d just been vowing to get the hell out of here, but the turmoil in his gaze was too wrenching to resist. My touch seemed to ease it a little. He exhaled softly, let his lips part in that sultry combination of question and assertion before grating, “You do?”
“I felt it,” I confessed. “Somehow. Even in the darkness.” Contemplative smile. “Maybe because of the darkness.” I wandered my fingers into his hair. “Was that you…singing to me?”
His thick lashes lifted again. “Only because you sang first.”
I giggled. “I did?”
He nodded. “I copied the tune you hummed but made up my own words.”
I didn’t hide my perplexity. “I’ve never sung in my sleep before.” Before yesterday, I hadn’t nearly died before, either.
“Well, that was after you talked.”
He glanced away before finishing the assertion. Hmm. Evasion, party of one. “Oh?”
“Hmm. Yes. You said, ‘Evrest, you mighty stud, come here and be my big thunder’.”
I pushed him off in order to fall back to the pillow, giggles bursting into laughter. He followed, grinning down at me with cocky triumph. I conceded at least the moment to him, grateful to do so. The tightrope of sexual tension we always walked—could we get through another second without mauling each other?—was especially taut now, and the humor let us tumble to a safety net.
For all of ten seconds.
We were both prone now. Separated only by the bedclothes. Waist up, he was naked. Waist down, so was I—and the moistening folds there let me know it, drop by excruciating drop.
The safety net was gone again. And the tightrope was twenty feet higher.
But Evrest was so much closer. Bigger. Harder. Everywhere I looked, everywhere I breathed, like—
“Thunder.”
On the tremble of my rasp, it was no longer a joke. It was the statement of my spirit, the declaration of the soul he’d captivated since our eyes had first locked…and the heart he now possessed like a thunderhead did the sky—powerful, dark, magnificent.
So…what was that I kept blabbering about, about leaving ASAP?
You’re too late. You’re too far under.
Getting my body out of here wouldn’t do a damn thing for where my heart decided to stay.
And now, you’re too screwed.
Tears burned as the full truth of it sank in. Evrest gazed at me, into me, already seeing it…his face transforming because of it, forehead crumpling, lips parting on harsh breaths. He dipped toward me, swiping a thumb across my cheek as if compelling himself to look deeper, demand more. I winced, longing to look away; he wanted depths I couldn’t possibly have let alone give…
But he found them. Then without compunction, took them. “Lightning,” he grated. And just like that, turned all of the magic around, giving it back to me. “My Camellia. My lightning.”
So many things in his voice. Potency. Possession. Passion. But all I heard was the desperation. And all I knew was the desire to banish it—using whatever means I had.
Without a word, I twisted a hand into his hair again. Yanked hard, crushing his mouth down to mine.
Hot. Wet. Primal. Animal. We devoured each other, taking with abandon, feeling without care. Why had I tried to fight this, to pretend we could make it go away simply by ignoring it? Why had I tried tricking fate into tipping the scales for us, turning it into a blessing instead of a punishment?
This—us—wasn’t either.
I was the lightning to his thunder, the shore to his tide—not a gift or a curse, a right or a wrong, but something bigger than those ideas. Something that simply was. Like a wolf scenting a deer, he needed to hunt, slay, consume.
And I needed to fall, surrender…perish.
The wind rushed past the tent, bringing new energy to every touch we exchanged while evoking the impression we were caught in a vortex all our own, wild and fierce as the ocean crashing so close. Nothing we’d done in the crypt or inside the cave had been like this. As Evrest slid his mouth to my neck and bit down, I let my sigh join the wind. As he ripped at my shirt—his shirt—exposing my nudity in one tear, I arched. As buttons pinged off the lamps and tent poles, his gaze flared at my puckered nipples.
“Bezelle.” He lowered his lips to one. “So beautiful.” He glided to the other—and sucked in hard.
“Yes.” I practically fisted his hair as he pulled my aching tip between his teeth. Bite it. Use it. Feast on me. “Yessss!”
He suckled into the valley between my mounds. “My naughty little sevette. You like that…letting me take from you, even if it hurts.”
“Yes,” I managed. “Take more…please.”
He lifted his head, nipping his way up to my neck. With his long fingers splayed along my jaw, he shoved my head to the side, exposing my neck for a more brutal assault of his tongue, teeth, and lips. “Everything I have for you? Anything?”
I didn’t give him an exact answer, figuring the question more than rhetorical. When he kicked off the covers to fit his thighs between mine, words spilled, anyway. “Oh,” I moaned. “Ohhhh, yes. Anything!”
His hand hooked into my hair, pulling me up for another kiss. Every pore of my nudity turned into shivering expectancy. My breasts scraped against his chest, zinging with higher arousal. My thighs rubbed against the cotton encasing his legs, making me officially declare a love/hate relationship with the fabric. I skated hands up the burnished crests of his shoulders, cherishing every ripple I encountered along the way, until digging fingers into the perfect sinew of his back. I kept them there even as he pulled away, hovering his face inches above mine, mingling our heavy breaths.
“What about my cock?”
I bit my lip, flashing a coquette’s smirk. “Especially that.” A thought barged in. I peered around. “Errr, do you have a stash of lube here?”
Evrest, meet enigma—resulting in Cam, meet confusion. He was really, utterly unreadable. Strange but…awesome. The quivers in my sex turned my brain into a ping pong match between what-the-hell and let’s-not-argue-a-good-thing.
Just before I conceded to the latter, he hitched down his sweats enough to set his erection loose. His tip slid easily against my most sensitive nub—before kissing the entrance of my shivering vagina.
“I do not think we shall need any, sevette.”
Huh?
“Huh?”
He captured my mouth beneath his again. Twined his hand deeper into my hair…while bracing himself above me, as if he longed to stay there for a while.
“I want to be inside you, Camellia…just like this. Taking you as I am meant to. Fucking you with everything I am.”
“But—”
“Ssshh, ssshh.” He cut me off with a gentle kiss. “I know what I am saying. What I am doing.” Once more, his entire face compressed with that painful crunch of emotion. “I also know what I felt, when I thought you might die yesterday. The first time, I pushed it off as the result of adrenalin and stress. But the second time, when you were unconscious in my arms, I knew…” His whole body shook—and I knew at once that lust wasn’t the only cause. “I may have to move on from this, from us…but nobody else will be my true bride.”
Inner scream. Outer sob. Until the boulder in my throat made even that impossible. I managed to choke, “Evrest…”
“It is you, Camellia. Only you.”
Don’t say it. Please don’t say it. Thank God the inner scream was still functional. If you say it, this will become the best and worst night of my life. I can’t bear that now, dammit. I can’t!
“Just for tonight…be my one and only bride. Make me forget what my life will be, has to be. Make me forget it all, and fill it up…with you.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
‡
He might as well have said it. The blow hit just as violently in my heart, a head-on collision with the blood, guts, and trauma to match. My soul was
wreckage I no longer recognized, my body a fiery twist of need, my resistance his helpless casualty.
He was going to make me take it. All of it. His body. His virginity. His passion. His completion. And God help me, I’d eagerly accept every moment—and wouldn’t regret one. Would know, as I pulled these memories out of my life’s treasure chest in the years to come, that they’d be the lovingly hidden gems at the bottom, taken out only in those moments when I longed for him the most…
So, all the damn time.
It hurt. Bad. In truth, it had hurt from the beginning—but I’d been able to control the pain by simply slamming it out of my thoughts. Didn’t work that way now. The ache was stitched into my heart…and the incisions still bled. I wondered if they would…or if I’d want them to.
I framed Evrest’s face with my hands. Dug my fingertips into his thick stubble. Adoring him. Always. Yes, now I knew…always.
“I never asked for this.” The words sounded like defense. They felt like it, too. I guess, for some crazy reason, I needed him to know.
His forehead pressed to mine. “I know, sevette. I know.”
“You’ve changed me.”
“As you have changed me.”
“I’m a damn mess!”
“Then let me help.”
“Help?” I laughed through my tears, unable to process the insanity. “You have a space shuttle parked out on the berm that you haven’t told me about, mister? A way to get us off this rock, to a planet where a whole kingdom isn’t waiting on you to—”
He kissed me harder. Harder still. He shuddered, sweeping even deeper, even as his thighs trembled from the strain of holding his cock in check at my entrance. When he lifted his face, shattering me anew with the peridots of his gaze, he rasped, “Let me take it all away, Camellia…just as you shall for me.”
I writhed, conflicted—but even that little move worked his tip inside me by a fraction. We moaned in tandem. His head was already wet, expanding and surging, begging at the tender gateway to my deepest core. To have him there, joined to me, connected at last…
“Hedrir moi,” he gritted. “Give this to me, Camellia. Fuck, I need this. Need you…”
His face, strained and sensual and beautiful, was my final undoing. I scraped my fingers to his nape, gazing without shame at him now. “As I need you.”
A harsh breath left him. He pushed himself in, just an inch more. “Yes?”
“Yes, Evrest. Yes…”
If I had any more words, he ensured they’d all be forgotten, giving me everything in one carnal, incredible stroke.
I cried out in ecstasy.
He groaned—hopefully in the same. As a litany of Arcadian tumbled out of him, fervent and rasping, I made a leap and assumed the best. And felt even more. The stretch of him inside me…it was more amazing than I’d dreamed. More huge against my walls. More hard. More powerful.
That was before he even began to move again.
As he did, thrusting in time with every breath he took, I gripped his shoulders and gasped against his neck. He bent his head, pressing his lips to the sweet spot beneath my ear as he rolled his hips with increasing force.
Fine. So it was really too late for the protection chat. But the two booty call boys I’d indulged between Harry and now had included raincoats, and Evrest sure as hell hadn’t been playing around, so I decided to wait a few minutes on crossing the second bridge of that concern—especially when he murmured against my skin in a nerve-melting mix of rasp and growl.
“Fuck. Fuck. My Camellia.” Forget the nerves melting. He seared straight through them with the utterance. “Mat paradise. Mat cielle. Mat amkim…”
I didn’t want a translation—because I already battled the echo of the words through every corner of my being, kicking back the English version of everything…all the words I craved to give him in return. Shit. Of all the times I refused to grab for heat-of-the-moment as a perfectly viable excuse, this had to be it. Didn’t make sense, when the man made every moment “the heat”.
And right now, even more.
He trailed his lips to the dip between my breasts once more. At the same time, his hands glided down, too, finally gripping at my hips. His fingers dug in, but after a moment, loosened.
“No.” I practically read the thoughts in his mind. “Don’t be gentle.” He protested with an empirical glare, forcing me to demonstrate. “Mark me, Evrest Cimarron.” I punched my nails into the top of his back then gored my way down to his ass. “Make me remember you.”
Fast learner. And hell, was I grateful. He returned the favor with a gritty sound, seizing my hips, turning me into the pinned vessel for his harsh, hot lunges. Soon, he pushed up a little higher, using the hold to piston my body onto him, round him.
“Push up on your elbows,” he instructed. “I want to see your nipples dance while I fill you.”
Joyously obliged, my king.
From the new angle, I could better see every salacious shadow that crossed his face…every hungry twist of his beautiful lips…even every inch of his dark, dense shaft as it plunged then pulled from my swollen, soaked sex. I was alternately awed and aroused by him. This gift he gave, mine alone, of sharing this occasion with him…it humbled me. At the same time, I had trouble believing it. How had a man with such passion to give, with a body so clearly crafted for sin, nearly gone until his thirtieth birthday without doing this to a woman? It was almost a crime.
But damn, was it my honor to give him the intro to the dark side.
For which he was clearly suited.
“Now reach in and pull on them,” he growled. “Your pink, perfect nipples. Make them red. Squeeze until you want to scream. Mark yourself for me.”
Who the hell had I been kidding? Me, induct him to the dark side? The man had invented the place. Nothing told me that clearer than the points I tugged and pinched for him, commanding the blood to swell both nipples until I clenched my teeth against shrieking from my self-induced torment. But every moment was worth it. As the pain charged my blood, Evrest’s stare fired over my body, greedy and hungry, open and lusting, adding heat to my stings and arousal to my agony.
I watched his breaths and purposely matched my own to them, needing him as part of me in any way…in all the ways. My senses keened backward then forward, down then back up. My only equilibrium was him. His cock, burrowing deeper with every moment. His arms, flexed and straining. His thighs, powerful and taut.
“Does it hurt, sevette?”
“Yes,” I rasped.
“Make it hurt more.”
I abided, my brow furrowing and my lips parting on a long, harsh hiss. Evrest’s exultant grunt was my perfect reward.
“You like it like this,” he gritted. “Tell me that you do.”
My head fell back just before I whispered, “I like it like this. Yes, yes; I do.”
“When I make you hurt?”
“Yes, Evrest.”
“When I fuck you hard?”
“Yes, Evrest!”
“Then hedrir moi hertout, my Camellia. Give it all to me now.”
“Yes. Yes.” His flesh pounded a spell over mine. His voice wound the same magic through my senses. “Tell me how.”
Anything you want.
Everything you want.
“Spread your legs wider. I want to see how much you like it. How wet my cock has made your sweet little cunt.”
I opened for him, rejoicing in the look on his face as he fixated on the juncture of our bodies. “Parmel,” he growled. “Bezelle. So pink and wet…needing me right here.”
“Yes.” I must’ve sounded like a lousy GIF on repeat but it was the only word that made sense, the symbol of the surrender he craved. “Need…you…yes…ahhh!”
I cried out as he brought his hands in from my hips, bracing them to my upper thighs—and shoving them farther apart. With his fingers spread up to my abdomen, he used his thumbs on the lips of my sex, opening me fully—including the strip of my most sensitive nerves.
&nb
sp; “Here you are.” His murmur carried deep male satisfaction. It braided with the thrum from my bloodstream, louder and louder, as he teased toward my clit with tiny circles of his thumbs. Dear God and all the angels, he was good at that. Joined with the rhythm of his lunges, I was a sitting duck, waiting to be annihilated by the bullet of his prowess.
“Evrest! Shit!” My arms went limp, making me plummet back to the pillows. Wonderful madness as Evrest followed, pressing to me, stabbing inside me, rocking my damn world like no other lover ever did—or likely would again.
He was the wind over the canvas, power and magnificence.
He was the waves against the rocks, force and beauty.
He was the night itself, dark and perfect, plumbing every shadow inside me…and conquering it.
Making me his virgin as much as he was mine.
“Fuck. Camellia.” He groaned and kissed me with soft desperation. “What you do to me…”
I smiled and scratched back up his spine. “Is that a bad thing?”
“It is when I long to come inside you.”
The moment the words left his lips, a decision snapped into place. Unfaltering. Undeniable. Irrevocable. “Yes.” It wasn’t the GIF on repeat. It was the desire of my heart. “That’s what I want, too.” When his mouth opened, I threw two fingers over it. “Shut it, Your Majesty. As a wise man told me in this very bed, I know what I’m saying. What I’m doing.”
It didn’t earn me even a snort of snark in return. Instead, a low, tormented growl prowled up his chest. “And if there is a ch—”
“If there is, then I’ll handle it.” Whoa. Back pedal stat, girl, before he glare-skewers you into next year. “Okay, we’ll handle it. My condo has a second bedroom. It’d convert nicely to a nursery. You can come visit. We’ll dress you up in funny disguises then go visit the ‘magical mouse’ up the street.”
He didn’t capitulate. But he wasn’t glare-skewering me anymore. A good sign? His new kiss, dragging at me with longing and hunger, sure said so. But when he concluded with a ragged moan, still holding himself away, I had to tamp a frustrated groan.
“You want to take me the way you were meant to?” I charged instead. “Then do it, Evrest.” I ran my hands back down, pushing his pants so I could cup the firm, tight muscles of his ass. “Let me take you in. Squeeze every inch of you. Feel the scalding cream, exploding from your cock, deep ins—”
