Page 23 of Scorched
Both wrists above my head. I'm on my back on the forge floor and my wrists are immobile and he's looking at me with golden eyes and a bloody lip and an expression that has nothing amused in it anymore.
I drive my knees up. He lets me—sits back enough to give me the room and I go for leverage and he rides it, shifts his weightforward, my hips cant up from the movement and his thighs press between mine. Through the soaked ruin of my nightdress I feel him. The heat of him. The ridges of his cock, each one distinct, each one radiating fire magic in slow pulses against my cunt.
My entire body locks.
Fourteen drills for wrist-pin escapes. I'm running through them in sequence and my hips are rolling without my permission—slow, helpless circles that drag the soaked fabric against the ridges and every pass sends fire magic through the cloth and the heat inside me surges and breaks and surges again and the drills aren't helping.
"Let go of my wrists."
He releases them.
I hit him. Open palm, full force, across the face. The sound cracks through the forge. My palm stings. His head turns.
Then I grab the back of his neck and drag his mouth to mine.
It isn't a kiss. My teeth find his lower lip and bite until I taste his blood—fire-bright, hot—and his whole body shudders. His hands fist in my nightdress. He tears it. Not from the hem. Across the chest, one pull, and the fabric falls away and I'm bare on the hot stone and his hands are on my shoulders and I'm rolling, getting my knee up, trying to get on top.
He lets me get to my hands and knees.
His hand closes on the back of my neck.
Fingers spreading from the nape downward, pressing forward—not to the floor, just enough that my arms buckle. My chest drops. My arse rises. I'm on the forge floor in the dark and I'm exposed and the tip of his thumb is against the top of my spine and I can't think past it.
I throw an elbow back. He catches it.
I dig my knees into the stone and shove backward and he doesn't move. Eighteen drills for getting out of a rear hold. Noneof them account for the alpha in rut behind me with fire magic pouring off him in waves that hit my bare skin like standing too close to a furnace—like standing inside one.
"Let go?—"
"No."
I hear him strip behind me. One-handed.
I should be afraid. The operative assessment is: you are pinned, prone, unarmed, compromised. The operative assessment has been irrelevant since I walked through this door. What I am is furious and wet and shaking and some part of me—older than the operative, older than my grandmother's training, older than the mission—is pushing back against his hand instead of away from it.
He pushes two fingers inside me from behind.
The scream I make goes to the vaulted ceiling and comes back. His fingers are fire-magic-hot inside me—not body heat, not friction, actual fire magic pulsing through them and hitting the Bloodwork frequency in my blood, two things that should not exist in the same body colliding at full force. My arms give out. Forehead on the stone. Hips pushing back.
He pulls his fingers out.
The sound I make isn't from training.
I hear his hand on his cock. I grip the stone in front of me.
He presses against me from behind. The head of it. Hot. Fire magic in the contact radiating inward from the first point of pressure and I'm not prepared. I wasn't prepared for any of this and I was especially not prepared for this—my cunt, the first ridge, the fire magic pulsing through it into my inner walls.
My whole body locks.
"Breathe," he says.
"Go to hell," I say.
He pushes forward. Just the head. Just past the first ridge.
The fire magic hits me from the inside.
I don't have a word for it. Not pain. Not pleasure. A category of sensation that neither of those words reaches—the ridge pressing heat into my inner walls and the heat spreading outward through tissue I've never thought about, radiating to my belly and my thighs and the base of my spine. The brands on my skin answer it. The sigil over my heart blazes. All of it one fact: more.
