“Wait,” she whispered, pulling away. She shifted against him and then lifted shaky hands to his shoulders to push his shirt off, so that when she pressed back against him they were skin to skin.
Yes. So hot. So soft. So perfect.
He was delirious. He wanted more. And then still more.
Growing impatient, he swung her around and then rolled her under him in a swift, simple move. She blinked up at him, her chocolate-brown eyes molten with passion, her generous mouth faintly damp from his.
“You are not letting me take control of this,” she scolded him through lips swollen from his kisses, her breasts full against his chest, the taut peaks sending pinpricks of desire shooting through him, straight to his hardness.
“No,” he agreed, his voice rough with desire. “I am not.”
He propped himself up on one elbow, then traced a lazy pattern down her torso with his hand, stopping to worship each breast in turn. He continued on to her navel, testing that shallow valley, before he reached the waistband of her jeans. He had them unbuttoned and unzipped in a heartbeat, and she let out a shaky laugh.
He tested the upper edge of her lacy panties, pulling slightly on the elastic that held them in place. She let out a slight moan, her legs moving restlessly against the coverlet. He looked down at her, smiled—then slid his hand beneath the lace, to hold her wet heat in his hand.
She gasped and shuddered, bucking her hips against his palm, her eyes drifting closed. She was so wet, so soft, deliciously, meltingly hot. She burned into him, making him sweat. Yearn. Need.
Soon, he told himself. So very soon.
“Are you sure?” he taunted her gently, his fingers learning her most intimate secrets, stroking her silken folds, then pressing inside. “I know you had some doubts, did you not?”
She made an incoherent noise, her head moving against the bed linens, her hips meeting his hand, matching him stroke for delicious stroke.
He wanted more. God help her, he wanted everything. He’d forgotten why. He only wanted.
“I want you to come,” he whispered, his mouth against her ear, delighting in her long, slow shudder, the way her hand speared into his hair, holding him as he held her.
He used one hand deep in her heat, his fingers moving to an age-old rhythm within her, and his mouth bold and demanding against her breast. One breath, another. Her head tossed back and forth against the pillows while her body tightened, her back arching and her hands curling into fists.
“Now, Grace,” he whispered, moving to her other breast and circling the nipple with his tongue. “Now.”
One tug on her nipple with his mouth, one hard rocking motion against her molten femininity with the palm of his hand, and she convulsed around him, shattering into pieces, her face flooding red and her mouth parting on a long, high sob.
She was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. His.
And he was only getting started.
CHAPTER NINE
GRACE barely had time to breathe, and no time to compose herself, before Lucas sat up and stripped her boots, jeans and panties from her body with more of that consummate skill that should have worried her deeply, but instead made her thighs clench against another thrilling wave of desire.
He removed the rest of his own clothes as quickly and then moved back over her as she lay, shattered, on the bed. Her heart was still pounding too hard, her breath still uneven.
She was supposed to be the one in control! She was supposed to be the one leaving him this undone!
“Lucas,” she began, not knowing what she might say. Not knowing where or how to begin. Not even recognizing the sound of her own voice.
“Shh,” he replied, and then he moved down the length of her body to rest between her legs. He slid his strong arms beneath her hips, and before she had time to react, to take back the lead and use it, he lifted her and settled his mouth against the hot core of her.
Passion exploded inside of her, a white-hot, searing heat that blanked out her plans, her fears. He licked her, teased her, took her—his mouth more wicked, more clever, more confident.
She arched against him, into him, as he kept her anchored beneath him, his mouth glued to her heat. She heard her own voice, moaning wordless sounds of desire, of pleasure, of ecstasy, as if from far away. Her breath came in hard, shallow pants, and she could not quite catch it, she could not calm down. And still he built that fire, stoking the flames with every swirl of his tongue, pushing her higher and higher until she toppled over the edge and dissolved all around him.
When she came back to herself, he was braced above her, surrounding her, his wide shoulders blocking out the world. She felt turned inside out, exposed, made more vulnerable than she had ever been before. She did not know if she wanted to burst into tears—or kiss him.
“Pay attention, Grace,” he murmured, amusement and passion in his low voice, bringing himself down against her chest, his skin like hot satin over steel, rubbing against her taut breasts, making her sigh as the aftershocks still rolled through her.
And then he thrust inside of her.
Grace felt the leftover pleasure from her last climax coalesce and shiver through her, kicking into her as he began to move, slow and sure, building her up again when she would have thought she was more than sated.
Lucas rolled over, keeping himself deep inside of her, but bringing her on top of him. Dazed, Grace could only stare down at him for a moment.
“I thought you wanted control,” he said, pressing kisses to her jaw, the corner of her mouth, her neck. “By all means, take it.”
“Your concept of control is a bit more elastic than I’d intended,” she said, amazed that she could speak at all—astounded that she could hang words together, no matter how breathless her voice sounded.
He laughed, and she felt it inside of her, as deep as he was. She felt it radiate through her, pleasure coursing outward from where they were joined, lighting her up from within.
“I don’t much care for boundaries,” he said, pushing her hair back from her face, teasing her lower lip with his teeth. “Unless I set them.”
He was so hot and hard within her, so uncompromisingly male, and Grace felt suddenly restless, urgent. Unbelievably, she felt that tightening, that coiling desire, begin to pull taut inside her all over again. All that mattered was that feeling. She sat back, settling herself against him. Then she rolled her hips into a slow, steady pace and watched his eyes go dark with passion, reveling in the power she had over him just as surely as he could wield it over her.
But she didn’t care about the power. Not anymore. Not after what had just happened between them. She knew she should care about that, but she shoved it aside. She cared only about the pleasure, about the slick slide of their bodies, the thrust and the pull that made her feel wild, insatiable. She forgot about the photos, forgot about the past and the pain, forgot about the lessons she’d decided she’d teach him. The truth was his hard length within her, his wild hands on her flesh. The truth was she wanted him with a desperation that should have terrified her, but instead made her yearning all the more intense. She was more hungry for him than she had ever been for anyone. Than she had ever imagined it was possible to be.
She was too hungry for him to protect herself. Perhaps she had known that from the start.
At a certain point, his hands gripped her hips, and Grace could no longer think, she could only feel. And when she shattered one more time, he spurred her on, his thrusts wild and urgent until he, too, fell over the edge.
She thought he even called her name.
Lucas knew how he was supposed to act. Smoldering, arch, easy. Hadn’t he played the role a thousand times? He knew how to perfect the postcoital scene. He knew how to make a woman who had just bedded him feel like a queen, as if she’d never made a better decision in her life. He knew how to leave them wanting more.
But none of them were Grace.
Outside, the night had long since fallen, casting the room in shadows. Only
the lamp on the antique desk shed any light, and it was the barest halo, yellow against the gloom.
He was still deep inside of her. She was still sprawled over his chest.
He had no idea why he felt a great sense of melancholy when he considered his next move, almost as disconcerting as the unusual sense of well-being that washed over him when he did no more than hold her and breathe.
So much for the exorcism.
She stirred. He had the strangest urge to pretend he was asleep, to keep her there against him, the perfect, soft weight of her holding him down, as if she anchored him to the world, to herself. But instead, he let her move away from him and disposed of the condom as she pulled herself to her feet on the opposite side of the wide bed.
She looked over her shoulder at him, thoroughly disheveled, and he felt a fierce stab of a kind of pride. Her hair was a wild cloud around her face, her lips still slightly swollen, her eyes not entirely focused.
“I am going to shower,” she said, her voice still rough from passion. There was something awkward in the way she held herself, something uneasy. She did not quite meet his gaze, and he knew as she pulled an arm around herself that she felt the heaviness, the weight, that hung there between them.
He was a master at this scene. He should have sorted it out already, made her laugh, flattered her and teased her into pleased satiation. But his happy manners, his notorious charm, seemed to have deserted him completely.
“Grace.” He did not know why he said her name like that, why he felt it reverberate through him, why he wanted to reach for her for no reason at all but to hold her close. To stay in this moment, not to let it go. He did not know why every part of him felt that could be disastrous to move forward, to keep going.
To admit that he was back in Wolfstone, with all that entailed.
He was descending into melodrama, and she was not even looking at him.
“Why don’t you order room service?” she asked lightly, her tone not fooling him at all. But what could he do when he was not even sure what held him in this odd, tight grip around his chest? “We could use some food, I think.”
And then he watched her walk across the room to disappear into the en suite bathroom, naked and more beautiful than any woman ought to be, her head held high and regal, the culmination of fantasies he hadn’t even known he’d had.
He was in trouble. More trouble, he understood, than he had ever been near before.
“You accused me of hiding yesterday,” he said without turning around, not moving from where he stood in front of the big bay window. “In plain sight.”
He had heard the water shut off, had heard the old pipes cease their chattering and clanking. He’d heard her move around in the bathroom, and then emerge. She brought a cloud of fragrance with her, something floral with a faint kick of spice. Her soap, shampoo, perfume. It teased his nose and made him harden again in the jeans he’d thrown back on to answer the porter’s knock when their food had been delivered. Lamb with buttery mashed potatoes and peas. Hearty fare befitting a cold March night—and yet he could not seem to summon up an appetite.
“It was an observation,” she replied in an even tone, closer to him than he’d expected, though he still did not turn. “Not an accusation.”
“It was astute, either way,” he said. “But I cannot seem to do it here.”
He turned to find her just beyond his shoulder, her face carefully blank, her brown eyes noticeably wary, her hair piled haphazardly on the top of her head and curling at the ends. She was wrapped in a thin silk wrapper of a deep royal blue, her skin flushed pink and rosy from her ablutions. Or perhaps from what had happened between them.
She looked like candy, sweet and damp and all too edible. And he could not understand why tasting her again, though he yearned to, was not the urge that drove him. Why something else battled to take him over instead.
It was the ghosts again, he thought darkly. There were too many, especially in Wolfestone. Hadn’t his run-in with Jacob taught him the folly of revisiting the past? And yet here he was, back in this village, as if he’d learned nothing at all. He’d even been the one to suggest coming here, so full of himself, never considering the consequences. The story of his damned life.
“I don’t know what this is,” he muttered. “If it is you—or this damned place. It brings back far too many memories. None of them good.”
Her wary eyes searched his face, and he saw her swallow, as if fighting for calm. Oddly, that small sign of discomfort eased him. It made him realize that this woman—who knew something about hiding herself in plain sight just as he did—could understand. That he wanted her to understand.
“What happened to you here?” she asked in a soft voice, as if she feared he would not like the question.
He looked at her for a long moment, and then back out the window. The night was dark and blustery, with no hint of moon or stars. He could see only the wind-tossed branches of the trees across the lane, and the impenetrable country blackness beyond. But he still knew precisely where he was. He still knew that the Wolfe estate began just on the other side of the deceptively bucolic river that wound through the town, that the manor house hunkered out there in the dark, empty and brooding and marked, as far as he was concerned—forever marked as soulless and evil as its former owner had been.
What had he been thinking, to return here?
“I had the misfortune to be born William Wolfe’s son,” he said, a hollow laugh escaping him. “That is what happened to me. Do not let the tales of his fame, his great charisma and cult of personality fool you, Grace.” He shook his head. “I’ve managed to put him from my mind for vast swathes of my life—but that does not work here, apparently. The things he did and the kind of man he was hang in the air in this village like smoke.”
She was quiet for a long moment, and Lucas felt that ache inside of him expand. As if he had never known loneliness, not really, until this moment. But then she brushed past him, and sat down on the couch just beside the window and faced him, tucking her long, bare legs beneath her. She tilted her face toward him, and he saw … nothing. No judgment. No arch, inside knowledge she might use against him. Nothing but her warm, steady gaze.
“He was a monster,” Lucas said baldly. He felt his mouth twist and turned away, staring out the window once again, though what he saw was the past. He shrugged, as if he could will it away.
“And …” Her voice was hesitant. “Your mother?”
“I never knew who she was,” Lucas said, on a sigh. Funny that the truth could still sting, when he should have long since ceased caring about a relatively meaningless fact like that one. “He told me only that she could not stand the sight of me, and that was why she’d left me on his doorstep.” He smirked a little bit then, ignoring the small noise she made. “I grew up rather amazed that what people saw when they looked at me was this remarkable face I’d been awarded in the genetic lottery, when I knew the truth about how ugly I was. So ugly it repulsed my own mother, who was never heard from again. So ugly it made my father hate me. Quite a dichotomy.”
“And you had only your father’s word on that?”
Grace asked, and it was the lack of pity, the simple calm in her voice that made it all right, somehow, that he was telling her all of this. No matter that he still did not know why.
Lucas remembered then, unwillingly, the night he’d confronted William in his study with the birth certificate he’d found after hours of searching. He’d been a mere teenager then, angry and bitter that all of his siblings knew their parents—even Rafael, the other bastard son who lived in the village yet out of William’s view, had the comfort of his mother’s presence to ease William’s rejection of him. But Lucas had nothing. Only William’s lifelong loathing and a birth certificate with the mother’s name blanked out.
William had reacted predictably when Lucas had waved the document in front of him, and Lucas had still been too emotional, too small yet to fight back as he might have done later. It was on
ly when William had him pinned to the wall that he’d relented at all—in true William Wolfe fashion.
“Your mother is a difficult woman to forget,” he had said, in a vicious sort of tone, designed to wound, confuse.
He had thrown a photo album at Lucas’s feet, sneered at the nose he’d bloodied with his own big fist and left Lucas to page through photographs of his uncle Richard’s wedding—to a woman who had Lucas’s own unusual green eyes. If what he had seen was true, it meant William had slept with his own sister-in-law. Lucas had been sick right there on the study floor.
The subject of Lucas’s mother had never been raised again.
“Yes,” Lucas said now. “I never discovered who she was. Not really.” He could not believe how much William’s behavior could still get under his skin, even all these years later. When it could not matter to anyone, not even to him. When the man had been dead for nearly twenty years. “Not for certain.”
“My father disappeared before I was born,” Grace said matter-of-factly, wrapping her arms around her knees. “There are any number of John Benisons in the world, and none of them were interested in claiming me. I don’t even have his name.” She looked at him, her dark eyes intent on his. “There is no shame in being an accident, Lucas. There are only parents who are not up to the challenge.”
“William was not up to any kind of parental challenge,” Lucas said. “He was not what I would call a parent at all, aside from his biological contribution.”
He looked at her then, taking in the way she gazed at him, his own near-overpowering urge to touch her, to hold her, to pull her close to him again and make him feel that fleeting sensation he’d felt in the bed, that he’d never felt before. He was afraid to name it.
“I told you before that there are ghosts here, Grace,” he said quietly, but in that moment he did not know if he meant in Wolfestone or in himself.
She smiled slightly, seemingly unperturbed by his warning.
“Will they rattle their chains and scare the guests away with all their moaning?” she asked.
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