by Olivia Gates
He opened his mouth to her urgency, let her show him how much she needed everything he had as her hands roamed his formidable body, convulsed in his too-short-for-her-liking wealth of hair and her molten core rode the daunting rock of his manhood through their clothes.
“I want you, Richard...I’ve gone mad wanting you.”
At her feverish moan he took over, his lips stopping her uncoordinated efforts to posses them. Sighing raggedly, she luxuriated in his domination, what he’d so maddeningly interrupted before.
His hands roved her, melting clothes off her burning body with the same virtuosity that had always made her breathless. His every move was loaded with the precise ruthlessness of a starving predator unleashed on a prey long kept out of reach.
Breaking the kiss, he drew back, his pupils flaring, blackness engulfing the silvered steel as he spilled her breasts into his palms. His homage was brief but devastating before he swept her around, had her sitting on the couch and kneeled before her. After dragging her panties off in one sweep, he lunged, buried his lips in her flowing readiness. She shrieked at the long-yearned-for feel of his tongue and teeth, her thighs spreading wider to give him fuller access to her intimate flesh, which had always been his.
Hours ago she’d been going about her new life, certain she’d never see him again. Now he was here, pleasuring her as only he had ever done.
Was she dreaming all this?
He nipped her bud, and the slam of pleasure was too jarring to be anything but real. One more sweep or suckle or graze would finish her. And she didn’t want release.
She wanted him.
“Richard...you...” she gasped. “I need you...inside me...please...”
Growling, he heaved up, caught her plea in his savage mouth, letting her taste herself on his tongue as he rose, lifting her in his arms. Then the world moved in hurried thuds before it stopped abruptly with her steaming back against cool glass.
The idea that Richard was about to take her against a window overlooking the city almost made her come right then.
Plastering her to the glass with his bulk, he locked her feet around his buttocks, thrilling her with his effortless strength. Then he leaned back, freeing his erection.
The potency that had possessed her during so many long, hard rides had her mouth watering, her core gushing. And that was before the intimidating weight and length of it thudded against her swollen flesh, squeezing another plea from her depths. He only glided his incredible heat and hardness through the molten lips of her core, sending a million arrows of pleasure to her womb, until she writhed.
He didn’t penetrate her until she wailed, “Fill me.”
Only then did he ram inside her.
The savagery and abruptness of his invasion, the unbearable expansion around his too-thick girth, was a shock so acute the world flickered, darkened.
Her senses sparked again to him growling, “Too long...too damned long...” as his teeth sank into her shoulder like a lion tethering his mate for a jarring ride. Then he withdrew.
It felt as if he was dragging her life force out with him. Her arms tightened around his back, her hands clawing it, begging his return. He complied with a harder, deeper plunge, blacking out her senses again with the beyond-limits fullness. After a few thrusts forced her flesh to yield fully to him, he quickened his tempo.
Every withdrawal brought maddening loss, every plunge excruciating ecstasy. Her cries blurred and her muttered name on his lips became a litany, each thrust accentuated by the carnal sounds of their flesh slapping together. The scents of sex and abandon intensified, the glide and burn of his hard flesh inside her stoked her until she felt she’d combust.
She needed...needed... Please...please...please...
He’d always known what she needed, when and how hard and fast. He gave it to her now, hammering his hips between her splayed thighs, his erection pounding inside her with the cadence and force to unleash everything inside her, until he breached her womb and shattered the wound-up coil of need.
Her body detonated from where he was buried deepest outward, currents of release crashing through her, squeezing her around him, choking her shrieks.
Roaring her name, he exploded in his own climax, jetting the fuel of his pleasure over hers, filling her to overflowing, sharpening the throes of release until he wrung her of the last spark of sensation her body was capable of.
She felt him pulse the last of his seed into her depths, and a long-forgotten smile of satisfaction curved her lips as her head slumped in contentment over his chest...
A rumble beneath her ear jogged her back to consciousness. “Not enough, Isabella...never enough...”
Feeling boneless, her head spun as he strode away from the window, still buried within her depths. Knowing he’d carry her to his bedroom now, she drifted off again, wanting to rest so she’d be ready for round two...
She jerked out of her sensual stupor as he laid her down. His scent rose from dark cotton sheets to cloak her in its hot delight, compensating her for his loss as he left her body to rid himself of his clothes. Her clamoring senses needed him back on top of her, inside her. She held out unsteady arms, begged for him again.
This time he didn’t let her beg long. He lunged back over her, had her skidding on the sheets with the force of his impact. Spreading her quivering thighs, he pushed her knees up to her chest, hooking his arms behind them, opening her fully. Then, lowering himself over her to thrust his tongue inside her panting mouth, he reentered her in a long, burning plunge.
A shriek tore out of her as he forged inside her swollen flesh, undulating against her, inside her, churning soreness and ecstasy into an excruciating mixture as he took her in even more primal possession than the first time. He translated every liberty he was taking with her body into raw, explicit words that intensified the pleasure of his every move inside her beyond endurance. She climaxed all over him again, then again, eight years of deprivation exploding into torrents of sensation, each fiercer than the previous one.
At her fourth peak, he rammed her harder, faster, till he lodged into the gates of her womb, held himself there, roaring his release. Her body convulsed as she clutched his straining mass to her, her oversensitized flesh milking him for every drop of satisfaction for both of them.
At last, he gave her his full weight, which she’d always begged him for after the storm was over, his heartbeat a slow thunder against her decelerating one, completing his domination.
Always able to judge accurately when his weight would turn from necessity to burden, he rose off her, swept her enervated mass over his rock-solid one, dragging a crisp sheet over their cooling bodies.
She wanted to cling to this moment, to savor the descent with him...but everything slipped away...
* * *
Her mind a silent, empty scape, she tried to open lids that felt glued together. How strange. There’d never been peace after Richard...
Richard!
Her lids tore open, almost literally, and there he was. Illuminated by the dim daylight seeping in from the window of what she now realized was a hangar-size bedroom. He was propped up on one elbow beside her, looking down at her, his gaze one of supreme male triumph as he coated the body he’d savagely pleasured in languid caresses.
She was in his bed. She’d begged him to take her—repeatedly. If she could find her voice, she’d do it again right now.
“I didn’t intend to rush your pleasure the first...or subsequent times. I wanted to keep you hovering on the edge of orgasm so long, when I finally gave it to you, I knocked you out on the first try.”
“You did knock me out every single time,” she croaked.
“No. Knocked out as in nothing could wake you up for hours afterward. I did that the last time only.” He pinched and rolled one delightfully sore nipple, glided his hair-roughened leg between hers and pressed his knee to the soaked junction of her legs, dragging a whimper from her depth. “But no harm done. It’s time to savor driving you crazy.�
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Her body clamored for him harder than ever. This addiction hadn’t subsided; it had gotten worse.
She caressed his face, his shoulders, his chest, reveling in the longed-for delight of feeling him this way. “Your efforts would be in vain. I’m already crazy for you.”
“I know. But I want you desperate.”
Before she could protest, his tongue thrust inside her mouth, claiming, conquering. His hands, lips and teeth sought all her secrets, sparked her ever-simmering insanities until he had her writhing, nothing left inside her but the need for him to finish her, annihilate her, leave nothing of her.
Clawing at him, crushing herself against him, she tried to drag him inside her. “Just take me again, Richard.”
He held her filling eyes, as if gauging if she was truly at his required level of desperation. Seemingly satisfied, from the grim twist of his lips and the flare of his nostrils, he rose above her, leveling her beneath him.
Locking her arms above her head, his knees spreading her legs wide-open, he was where she needed him most, penetrating her in one forceful thrust.
This time the expansion of her already swollen and sore tissues around his massive erection sharpened into pleasure so fierce, it was almost unbearable. Darkness danced at the periphery of her vision. She gasped, thrashed, voiceless, breathless. His face clenched with something like agony as she clung to him as she would a raft in a tempestuous sea.
She sobbed into his lips. “I wanted this every minute...”
“Yes. Every. Single. Minute.” His growls filled her lungs even as he refilled her, the head of his shaft sliding against all her internal triggers, setting off a string of discharges that buried her under layers of sensations. It all felt maddeningly familiar, yet totally new.
Then everything compacted into one unendurable moment before detonating outward. She shattered.
Her flesh pulsed around his so forcefully she couldn’t breathe for the first dozen excruciating clenches. He rumbled for her to come all over him, to scream her pleasure at the top of her lungs. His encouragement snapped something inside her, flooded air into her. And she screamed. And screamed and screamed as he pumped her to the last twitches of fulfillment.
Then he rose above her, supernatural in beauty, his muscles bulging, his eyes tempestuous. He threw his head back, roared her name as every muscle in his body locked and surrendered to his own explosive orgasm.
Instead of fainting, she remained fully aware this time throughout the stages of the most blissful aftermath she’d ever experienced with him.
Suddenly he spoke. “I wasn’t satisfied with how things ended with you in the past. It felt...incomplete. And I must have everything wrapped up to my satisfaction.”
For long moments she couldn’t breathe, waiting for a qualification to tell her she’d jumped to the worst conclusions of his words.
He only validated her suspicion. “I got you here to close your case. If I may say so, I reached a spectacular conclusion.”
Feeling as if he’d dumped her into freezing water, she fought to rise to the surface and from his arms.
Without one more word or glance she dragged the sheet off his body, wrapped herself in it and teetered out of the bedroom, looking for the clothes she hadn’t been able to wait for him to tear off her body earlier.
She felt him following her, heading to the open-plan kitchen. Her numbness deepened.
When she was dressed, and as neat as she could get herself after he’d ravaged her, she turned to him.
He raised a mug. “Coffee? Or will you storm out now?”
“You have every right to do this.” Her voice was thick and raw as it always had been when he’d made her scream her heart out in repeated ecstasy. It intensified her shame. “I deserve whatever you say or do. After all you’ve done to me, I disregarded all the injuries you caused me and fell into your arms again.”
“And even now, you’d fall there again if I let you. But I’m no longer interested. I’m done.”
Gritting her teeth against the pain digging its talons inside her, she said, “Then, I can look forward to never seeing you again for real this time. And no matter what you’d like to tell yourself you can get me to do, I’m beyond done.”
“Yes, you are. That’s the other thing I got you here to do. To tell you that.”
She frowned. “What the hell do you mean by that?”
“You’re done here. You will tell your new partners you’ve changed your mind about the partnership. You will terminate your lease, pay whatever early termination penalty your contract states, then pack your bags and leave this city, preferably the States. And this time, you will never return.”
Four
In her first twenty-four years, Isabella had suffered so many brutal blows, had endured and survived them all, she’d believed nothing would shake her or knock her down again.
Then Richard had happened to her. Every second with him, and because of him, had been a succession of earthquakes and knockouts. After he’d exited her life, it had been a constant struggle not to fall facedown and stay there. But it hadn’t been an option to give up. She’d had no choice but to forge on. But she’d thought even if she saw him again, whatever madness he’d induced in her, her own ability to experience towering passions, had been expended.
Then he’d reappeared and just by dangling himself in front of her, he’d made her relinquish all sanity and beg for his destruction.
Now there he stood, barefoot, in only pants, leaning indolently on the counter of his futuristic kitchen, looking like the god of malice that he was. He sipped painfully aromatic coffee in utmost serenity, clearly savoring its taste and her upheaval.
But what else did she think would happen after she’d committed that act of madness? Hadn’t she already known she’d regret it? Or had she been that pathetic she’d hoped it wouldn’t end horribly? That she’d have the ecstasy she’d hankered for without the agony that she’d learned would come with it? Had she even thought of the consequences as she’d grabbed for the appeasement only he could provide?
But this... What he’d ordered her to do wasn’t only horrific, it was...incomprehensible.
The numbness of humiliation and self-abuse splintered under the blow of indignation. “Just who the hell do you think you are? How dare you presume to tell me what to do?”
Almost groaning at how clichéd and cornered she sounded, she watched in dismay as he gave her a glance she was certain had hardened criminals quaking in their shoes.
“Trust me, you don’t want to know who I really am.”
“Oh, I know enough to extrapolate the absolute worst.”
Another tranquil sip. “From your defiant response I actually gather the worst you can imagine is nothing approaching the truth. But your misconception might be the result of my own faux pas. If I gave you the impression that this is a negotiation, I sincerely apologize. I also apologize for previously stating you always have a choice. You never do with me. Of course, there are always catastrophic mistakes, still categorized as choices, open to you. In this situation, the wrong choice is to stall. I strongly advise you don’t exercise it.”
Even now, his delivery of this load of bullying was so sexy and sophisticated his every enunciation reverberated in her reawakened senses like a shock wave.
Loathing her unwilling response, she gave him a baleful glance. “I assure you I won’t stall. I will ignore you and your deranged demands altogether.”
“In that case my only choice is to force you. So you’re now down to one catastrophic choice, and it’s how hard you decide to make this for yourself.”
“Give it your best shot. Hard is my middle name.”
As she kicked herself for how lame and how reeking of innuendo that had come out, his lips twitched his enjoyment of her slipup.
Out loud, he only said, “I can assure you, you wouldn’t like it if I resorted to extreme measures.”
“What extreme measures? Are you threatening to off me?”
/> His eyes turned to slits opening into thunderclouds. “Don’t be daft.”
It again seemed to insult him she’d suggest he’d physically harm her. But she wasn’t falling yet again into the trap of seeing any measure of light in his darkness.
She twisted the strap of her purse around her hand until her fingers went numb. “I guess you don’t off people if you could at all help it. You don’t put people out of their misery. You didn’t even kill Burton, just consigned him to a worse hell than even I hoped for him.”
“Are you extrapolating what I did to him?”
“No, I know.” His eyebrows rose in astonishment-tinged curiosity, and she hugged herself against a shudder that took her by surprise. “I wasn’t a kingpin’s trophy wife for four years without cultivating methods and sources to navigate his world and to execute an escape plan when necessary.”
Heat entered his gaze again, this time tinged with...admiration? “Indeed. The way you wiped your history was a work of art. We must discuss said methods and sources at length sometime. It could be mutually beneficial to exchange notes on how we execute our deceptions.”
She watched his mesmerizing face, wondering how he made anything he said so...appealing to her on her most fundamental levels, logic, self-respect and even survival be damned.
The only explanation was that she was sick. She’d contracted a disease called Richard Graves. And it was either incurable or would have to be cured at the cost of her life.
She huffed in resignation. “Nothing I developed could be of use to you. Next to yours, my abilities are like an ape’s IQ to Einstein’s. And I use fraud only to survive. It’s a fundamental part of your career, of your character. Deceit is a preference to you, a pleasure. But you are right.”
He raised an eyebrow. “In my advice not to stall?”
“In supposing I’m extrapolating Burton’s fate at your hands. I know where you sent him, what that place is. But what is being done to him there?” She shook her head, the nausea she’d felt since he’d told her he was done intensifying. “Even after all I’ve seen in my life, my imagination isn’t twisted enough to conceive what your warped mind could devise, or what you’re capable of.”
