Page 15 of Silver Lining (The Diamond Trilogy 3)
There’s none left.
It’s gone.
“I’ll die without this,” she says again, and I believe her.
7
Holly
I don’t think Elijah knows how hard his fist is punching into the flimsy cot.
He doesn’t know, he can’t know, what he looks like right now—like all of him is barely contained in his body. I’m witnessing a one-man brawl. I caused a one-man brawl.
I needed it.
Still do.
He doesn’t know what he looks like but I know what I must look like. Needy. Wild with it. Hungry for all the dirty things that you’re not supposed to want out of a man.
I admit it. I am needy. I need for him to look this way, with his glittering eyes and gritted teeth. I need for him to see me as a woman and not some wounded creature to be pitied and tended and soothed. Not some pathetic person to be spoken to with extreme patience at all times.
I need him to fuck me.
More. Again. Despite everything. If I’m going to be trapped forever in a medieval basement with Elijah then I want something out of it, damn it, I want him.
My last painkillers are wearing off. They burn away into a clarity that reminds me of a sunrise over water. It paints everything in vivid colors and sharp detail.
His eyes. His hands. The hitched rise and fall of his breath.
Elijah’s standing there in a tangle of pants, so hard his cock is leaking at the tip, and he finally looks like he’s supposed to.
Like he’ll ruin me all over again. I’m the one with a fist in his hair but he’s the one with all the power. He could take himself away from me right now, and I believe what I said—if he doesn’t fuck me, I’ll die. Maybe I’ll die anyway. That’s the way the world works, isn’t it? Sometimes you get kidnapped outside an airport.
Sometimes you get shot. Sometimes you do the shooting.
Every day you wake up and roll the dice.
His green eyes narrow. Something flashes through them, bright like gunfire, and he curses under his breath. I see the moment his self-control dissolves. It’s the same moment his muscles bunch and he leans down to drag his teeth along my naked collarbone. It’s a different kind of pain, sexy and glancing, and it makes me arch up toward him again.
This time Elijah doesn’t deny me.
The cot is low, low enough for him to spread my legs with his big hands. He looks down between them to where I’m completely exposed. His eyes are a match, and I’m kindling. I’m ready to burn into a massive flame.
I need more.
Elijah takes himself in his fist and gives himself two absent strokes, jaw working. A flash of fear caresses the back of my neck. He really could hurt me.
He was honest about that.
A vicious fucking might actually damage me beyond repair.
But I’m already damaged beyond repair by him. I can’t go back to the life I had before—not really. The last six months are proof. All those colorless days in my apartment and with my agent and doing all the mundane things from my mundane life tumble through my mind while I grit through this final wait. A lifetime of ordinary boredom when I could be doing this.
I can’t take it, I can’t take it—
The words are on my tongue when Elijah thrusts into me, all at once.
It’s pure pain and pure pleasure, meeting each other like opposite storm fronts. He means to shield me from the worst of him like this, he tries his best, but it’s not enough—this isn’t enough. Not for him, and not for me. Three deep thrusts and he’s crawling up over me, onto the cot, fucking so hard it takes the air from my lungs.
It hurts. It hurts bad enough that I moan in agony.
It’s perfect.
Every time his hips meet mine there’s an answering jolt of pain in the wound. The pain is nothing compared to how good it feels to be taken. Elijah’s body is all tension and take. Mine is all give. This is how it’s supposed to be, this, this, this.
Pleasure coils tight at the place he’s using me now. He lets his head fall forward, his face in my neck. Lips on my skin. If he hadn’t already stolen my breath with his body I’d lose it now. Every shallow tug on my lungs is supercharged with him. On fire with him.
I want him to burn me alive.
Being burned by him, being fucked and used and taken by him, is a thousand times better than lying here waiting for the pain to pass. Who does that?
Who just lays down and lets things happen to them?
Not me.
I didn’t do it when I got kidnapped. I didn’t do it when London found me. I don’t know what I was thinking, trying to fit myself back into my old life when I’ll never fit there again. The only place I fit is here, with Elijah, no matter how many times he tells me I won’t.
