HIS FOR A PRICE

by Caitlin Crews

  “Be certain,” he told her, still crouched over her, his mouth a scant inch above that sweet, hot core of hers he longed to taste again. But he didn’t care what she did or what she said, what she let him do at the moment or what she held in reserve, as long as she didn’t stop. Please don’t stop. “This is one among many things you can’t take back.”

  Did he imagine her eyes darkened then? But it didn’t matter, because she was moving, rising to her knees to take off the bra he’d only shoved out of the way, then wiggling out of her panties, as well.

  “I don’t want to take anything back,” she said huskily, her eyes never leaving his.

  And he believed her. God help him, but he believed her.

  He reached out and tugged her closer, so they were kneeling together in the center of the bed he’d always imagined would be theirs one day. She kissed him with a passion and a wonder that echoed in him, making him that much wilder, that much closer to losing control.

  He sank his hands into her hair and held her where he wanted her, where he could plunder her mouth while her hands worked between them, pulling open his trousers and freeing him. When her hands closed around him, he groaned, resting his forehead against hers. He was too hard. It had been too long. It had been forever.

  Still, he let her test the length of him in her palms. Once. Twice. But at that third slide of rough silk and all that ferocious, impossible hunger, he pulled her hands away.

  “But I want—”

  “You already told me what you want,” he told her, gruff and dark, “and you won’t get it if you keep that up.”

  And perhaps he’d gone completely delusional, after all, but the smile she gave him seemed to fill the whole room. And him, too, kicking through the shadows that lurked inside him and letting light into the darkest places—

  This was the real danger, he knew. It always had been. He wanted to believe.

  Nicodemus stretched out on his back, kicking his trousers off as he went, and pulled her down beside him. Then he pulled one of those long legs of hers up over his hip and took her mouth again, feasting on her as his hands roamed. One anchored in that thick, sweet-smelling hair of hers. The other moved lower, making its way to her core.

  Where she was molten hot, wet and soft, and there was no doubt at all that she wanted him. That this was real. That whatever she might be lying about still, and he was sure she was because she always was, it wasn’t this.

  This was real. This was true.

  This was finally happening.

  Nicodemus stroked his way into her, finding her shockingly tight and incandescent all around his gentle entry. She shuddered against him, and he tried another finger beside the first, twisting his hand so that every time he rocked into her, he pressed hard against that jutting center of her need.

  And Mattie went wild.

  She thrust against him. Her hips were like lightning and he didn’t want to contain it—he wanted to glory in the storm. He held her mouth to his as she moaned, holding her when she would have pulled back, feeling her tighten everywhere as she melted into his hand. Feeling her shudder and twist, hearing her make the wildest, sweetest noises imaginable, until she choked out something that sounded like his name and catapulted straight over the side of the world—consumed in all that glorious fire while he watched, fierce male satisfaction and that terrible need pouring through him, setting him aflame.

  “You are mine, agapi mou,” he told her then, pulling his hand from her clenching heat and shifting her over to her back even as she shook and cried out in his arms. “You have always been mine.”

  And then, at last, he slammed his way into her, hard.

  He felt the tightness, then the tear as she gave way. Felt her go rigid even as she cried out, and no longer in anything like passion.

  Impossible, he thought.

  But the sound she’d made was sheer pain, threaded through with shock. Her eyes were dark and glassy, and her hands came up to slam against his chest, and he didn’t think she knew she hit him, much less that hard—

  She was a virgin.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IT HURT.

  Mattie only realized, as that strange, overstretched fullness went on, as the burning part felt like it might drown her and her thighs felt like someone else’s, with so much of him hard and prodding and huge between them and in her, that she’d convinced herself it wouldn’t. Not after all this time.

  Not with him.

  Dimly, she realized that he was much too still. That it could only mean that her fantasy of him not even noticing had failed to come true. That he had, indeed, noticed.

  And worse, stopped.

  “It’s okay,” she said in a bright sort of voice that even she could hear sounded strained and awful and much too loud. “It can only get better. Right?”

  She gave an experimental roll of her hips and had to suck in a breath, because it wasn’t better. It was...pierced and heavy and full. Much too full, and so much more physical than she’d imagined.

  “Even here, you find a new way to lie to me,” he gritted out, his voice a scrape of sound and painful to her ears. “When I’d have told you it was impossible.”

  He did not sound remotely lighthearted or amused, or darkly thrilled, all of which she’d imagined as alternate scenarios to him simply failing to register it at all.

  And it still hurt.

  “I didn’t lie,” she told him, surprised that she could speak when so many things were happening to her, in her, far too many to process—and yet none that looked anything like what she’d seen online and in all those movies. She even managed to sound faintly offended. “You never asked me if I was a virgin.”

  He was still holding himself motionless, stretched there above her, every inch of him managing to bristle somehow, as if she’d betrayed him. She didn’t like the tiny little tremor that moved through her, like something in her agreed.

  “How?” He bit it off in a dark voice so filled with storms that Mattie shivered again, and hated that he was right there. That he saw it. The way he saw everything.

  “The usual way,” she said, shifting beneath him, trying to find a comfortable way to lie there with a man inside her. “Which mostly involved never doing this.”

  She could feel his gaze boring into her, burning her, accusing her.

  “You are twenty-eight years old. Twenty-eight. I would sooner expect to see the face of God appear on the side of a dinner plate than a twenty-eight-year-old virgin.”

  “It’s not like there’s a law that everyone has to lose their virginity at a certain age.”

  “No.” His voice then could have stripped paint. “But there is something called reality. To say nothing of your very public relationships, all conducted in the glare of a thousand cameras.”

  “What happens in front of the cameras is theater and misdirection, Nicodemus,” she said hurriedly. “A game. You know that.”

  “You mean lies.”

  “That’s not the word I’d use.”

  His fingers tapped at her chin, which was when Mattie realized she’d been frowning at the center of his neck this whole time.

  And when she finally saw his face, she almost gave in to that hectic heat that threatened to spill over from her eyes. He looked drawn and furious at once. Something like wounded, and haunted around the eyes.

  She had done that to him, she knew, though she shoved that aside and concentrated on the fact that once again, Nicodemus was not like other men. He wasn’t like anyone else she’d ever known, and she hated that acknowledging it made her feel that much more raw.

  “How?” he asked again, his voice far more clipped.

  It occurred to Mattie then that she hadn’t thought this through—mostly because she’d assumed that she was so old that none of the usual virginity concerns would apply. She certainly hadn’t anticipated having to defend something she’d hardly dared admit to herself had even been happening all these years, that seemed that much more silly and pointless now, when it h
urt and he was looking at her like she’d done something to him.

  “Why am I not surprised?” she flared at him. “Give the man a blow job and he has an extended temper tantrum. Give the man virginity—which I believe some women sell for astronomical prices on the internet, by the way, so prized is it in this modern age—and he acts like it’s some kind of communicable disease. My God, Nicodemus. What’s the matter with you?”

  “You are an idiot,” he retorted, in a tone she’d never heard him use before. “I begin to believe it is entirely on purpose. A willful and deliberate course of action you choose to cause the most harm.”

  “I’m not an idiot,” she retorted, stung, which only made her feel like one.

  “Did you want me to hurt you, Mattie?” he gritted out. “Is that was this was—a carefully orchestrated scene to make certain I would feel nothing but guilt and regret and make you my victim, at last? Congratulations. You have succeeded admirably.”

  He moved then, and she realized he was about to roll off her. About to end this whole strange experience—and that shot through her like a bullet, clearing out that terrifying rawness that hovered within her like a fragile thing and leaving only a desperate flare of fury in its wake.

  “Don’t you dare!” She,tightened her legs around him as if that could keep him where he was, that or her sheer panic that if she let him go, she’d lose him forever. She opted not to consider why that would bother her so much. “If you stop now, all it will ever be is this. Painful and weird.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he told her bitterly, though he didn’t pull out of her. He’d stopped moving away, just as she’d asked. And she felt a deep relief she hadn’t earned, and wasn’t certain she even understood. “As you have demonstrated, going so far as to hurt yourself in the process.”

  She realized her hands were on his chest, balled into fists, and she opened them, spreading her fingers wide and soaking in the heat of his skin, that chiseled perfection that was only Nicodemus. She felt his heart thundering there, under one palm, and became aware, then, of the way he breathed. Harsh. Like this hurt him, too. Experimentally, she moved her hips against his.

  She couldn’t claim it felt good. But it didn’t make her want to cry, either.

  “Make it better,” she ordered him, and his dark eyes widened slightly, in a kind of shock he hid almost as soon as she saw it. And then, behind that, she saw that heat she recognized.

  Male. Primitive. Fire and need.

  She wanted that back.

  “What makes you think I can?” he asked, but there was less of that grimness in his voice, she thought. Less of that impenetrable darkness. And she clung to it.

  “Because you’ve already proved that you can.”

  Mattie didn’t know why she was whispering. She knew only this. Him, still and strong above her, holding himself off her with his fists dug into the mattress. She wanted him lower. Closer. She wanted him to do something with this strange yearning inside her, somehow physical and emotional at once. Twined and nonsensical, but all his fault.

  Deep inside her, she felt him twitch, and it made her break out in goose bumps, all the way down her arms. She shuddered.

  His dark eyes narrowed.

  “And if I do this,” he said then, as if he was choosing his words carefully, “what do I get in return?”

  Mattie frowned at him. “An orgasm, presumably. Unless something goes horribly wrong. Isn’t that what you usually get out of it?”

  She thought she saw a glimpse of that dark, honeyed gleam, that amusement that she thought was only hers, and it made that fullness in her—that quivering stretching place inside her that he still claimed—seem to shudder, too. It wasn’t quite heat, but it didn’t hurt. Not as much as before.

  And then, when he shifted against her—once and then again, in a lazy sort of almost rhythm that made her freeze, then relax, then let out her breath in a rush—she realized that he really did know what he was doing in ways she couldn’t possibly have imagined.

  “This isn’t about orgasms, Mattie,” he said softly, with an undercurrent of pure, male confidence. “Orgasms are what happen when chemistry and skill unite. That isn’t in question here.”

  “That,” Mattie said very seriously, “is not at all what I’ve read.”

  His mouth curved then, and she felt it everywhere. In the places where their bodies clung together. In the core of her, where his quiet little movements were making her feel soft again, and warm. In that raw heat that was too much for her eyes to hold, she was sure of it, and might at any moment overflow and betray her.

  “You are killing me,” he whispered. “And I may kill you yet myself. But first, I see I must show you the difference between reading and living.”

  He bent his head and licked one of her nipples, and she could feel his smile against her skin when it responded to him at once, pulling taut in a way that drew a rippling sort of line directly from his mouth to her core. A line and with it, a kind of fire.

  “You will enjoy the lesson.” He used the edge of his teeth on her other breast, and she found she was shifting against him again, around that relentless hardness inside her, and it felt a whole lot better. “Then, princess, we will talk.”

  He rolled his hips on hers, somehow hitting her right in that needy little button that only he had ever managed to find, much less use to such effect, and she suddenly realized why. Why it was all connected. Why she felt him everywhere. Why they were built like this, so oddly and so perfectly, so obviously for each other.

  Nicodemus pulled out, then thrust back in, slow and steady, and it all made a glorious kind of sense.

  “Keep doing that,” she whispered, amazed to find her voice was shaky, “and we can talk all you want.”

  He laughed then, long and low, and that, too, was its own blaze inside her.

  Mattie didn’t know when it all changed. One moment she was counting all the things that weren’t painful—and then the next, she couldn’t count, because it was all too much. It was fire and glory. It was beautiful and wild. It was a perfect storm of pure insanity, and Nicodemus was orchestrating it all.

  His hands, his mouth. That lazy and yet somehow demanding rhythm he chose, rocking them both closer and closer to something huge. Mattie had had an orgasm before. She’d even had more than one with him. But she understood, somehow, that the place they were headed together was different. Immense and life-altering. Too intense to survive—

  “Nicodemus—” But she didn’t sound like herself, and he laughed again, as if this was all part of his plan. “I can’t—”

  “You will,” he said, his mouth at her ear, and then he really began to move.

  And Mattie felt it everywhere. She felt it curl up from some dark and wondrous place inside her she’d never known was there, spreading out like a brushfire until there was nothing but him, nothing but the way he moved and the way she met each thrust. Nothing but this beautiful light they made together.

  Nothing but love.

  An alarm rang in her then, but she ignored it, too far gone to care.

  “I can’t,” she said again, but this time her voice was a sob and she hardly knew what she said.

  “You must,” he told her, so dark and so sure. And she believed him. “Now.”

  And then he reached down between them and pressed down hard just above her entrance, never stopping that delicious rhythm of his, and Mattie exploded. Shattered into nothing but slivers of that same great light, cast out to the heavens.

  Shattered into nothingness, but not before she heard him shout her name, and follow.

  * * *

  It was not until the night fell again outside that Nicodemus finally left her, and even then, it very nearly proved impossible.

  She was so warm. Pliant and perfect as she lay against him, her face in his neck and her breathing solid and even. A perfect fit, even now.

  But he made himself do it. He pulled away and sat up on the edge of the bed, almost wishin
g she would wake as she’d done so many times before, tempting him back to her side so he wouldn’t have to think. Wouldn’t have to consider what to do next. Wouldn’t have to accept what he already knew he would have to do.

  It had been a long day.

  A very long day, and all of it moved in him, slow and sweet, making him want her anew when he’d have thought it impossible. He’d finally explored every inch of her delectable body. He’d taken her again and again, even after he’d thought she must surely have had enough—but all she had to do was whisper that she wanted more in his ear and his self-control deserted him.

  He knew how she tasted now, everywhere. He knew what sounds she made when she was close and what cries she let out when she was feeling frustrated and deliciously greedy. He knew how she threw back her head, how she went liquid and wild then burst into flame.

  And he was the only man who knew. The only man who had ever touched her like this, had her, claimed her—and Nicodemus knew he was every inch of him caveman enough to revel in that. His possessiveness roared in him, almost drowning everything else out.

  Almost.

  “Is this the talking part?” she asked from behind him, her voice husky in the shadows.

  He could have said no. He could have simply turned, swept her into his arms again, lost himself in her the way he wanted to do. He could have put this off for the night, for the rest of their time here. Forever.

  But he didn’t. He couldn’t.

  “You are a liar,” he said, and this time, it wasn’t that same accusation. It was a simple statement of fact, and he heard her shift against the sheets behind him.

  “Does this qualify as pillow talk?” she asked. “Because if so, I think you suck at it.”

  Delivered in that way of hers that made him want to laugh, and he understood that this was why she was so dangerous. Even more dangerous than he’d thought she was when he’d only longed for her from afar. Unlike Arista, who had only ever been what he’d projected on her, Nicodemus liked Mattie.