Page 97 of Salt Kiss
“I know you don’t think you are,” she continues. “I know you think you’re corrupted and stained, but youaregood, Tristan, and when I’m near you, I feel like I can be good too. I feel like I can be brave. And I want to protect you. Take care of you.”
Two days ago, I had her pinned to the floor,slapping her, and she wants to protect me?
But her eyes are completely serious, even if they’re still spilling slow, heavy tears.
I stare at her, feeling the curse blooming inside my chest, twining and thickening its roots. A wave comes, an abrupt pitch of the boat with a heavy spray surging up from the water and showering us both. We ignore it, our eyes locked.
“I don’t love you,” she whispers.
My lips move against her fingertips as I speak. “You don’t have to.”
And then she’s leaning in, I’m leaning in, and she drags her fingers from my mouth and replaces them with her warm, wet lips.
I can’t taste the difference between her tears and the sea.
Thirty-Two
Salt isbright and light on my tongue as I brush my lips over hers.
Her hand finds my shirt, fists in the fabric, and holds me close—as if I’m going anywhere. As if I’d ever fucking leave.
Her lips are soft enough to stop a person’s heart. And then they part and allow me inside.
I lick once, twice, seeking her tongue and grunting when I find it. It’s slick, velvet and sliding, and then my hands come up to sift through the silky ends of her hair. It spills over my fingers like water, and I can’t get enough. I have to push my hands into her hair and feel it on my palms, my wrists. I have to grab and pull just enough so that she gasps into my mouth.
A sharp, raw thrill stabs right down to my cock at that noise. Is this what Mark feels? When he’s controlling someone? Like every whimper and moan is wired straight to his system? I don’t know how he can stand it, how he can think straight when he’s got someone under his mouth and their head in his hands.
And Isolde just...lets me. She lets me twist my fingers in her hair and slide my tongue over hers. She lets me trace her teeth and rub against the roof of her mouth, and she lets me steal every pant, every breath.
There are no words for what that’s like.
I slide my hands from her hair to her neck, my thumbs pressed against her jaw and tilting her face farther up to mine.
“You’re beautiful,” I say roughly. “You make me—” I don’t finish because that’s the whole sentence.She makes me.
She makes me mean and brutal in my hunger; she makes me a different Tristan, a new Tristan. It’s fucking exhilarating. With Mark, it was like floating, like breathing, but this—this is likeburning.
This isn’t the thrill of danger; this is the thrill of being dangerous.
“Tristan,” she breathes as I break from her mouth to nip at her chin and then her throat. “Oh God. I’ve wanted this since the moment I saw you.”
Satisfaction, fierce and amoral, floods through me.
“I wanted you too,” I rasp, licking back up to her mouth, which is already open for me.
Who am I? Who is this animal that has already given his heart to another? She said I was good—I want to be good—but all of that is hazed over now. I’m gone. I’m feral. My only comfort is that she’s strong enough to withstand the flurry of gripping fingers and relentless teeth.
I reach for her dress, search through the taffeta to find a lithe sweep of thigh. I slide my hand up farther and she widens her knees. She does it instinctively, and I shudder out a pleased breath. I did the same for Mark and would again in a heartbeat...and here I am with someone else doing it for me, and I don’t know how to make sense of it. How can I be both Tristans in equal measure? But I am, and God, her thigh is so warm, so smooth, like nothing I’ve ever felt, and then I reach the place where her leg joins her body. I pause, dropping my forehead against hers.
“I want to touch it so bad,” I mumble. “Let me touch you. Please.”
She is breathing hard against my mouth. “Until my wedding day, I’m yours to touch.”
I move my thumb first, my fingers still on the inside of her thigh. Her underwear isn’t lacy or silky, but it still feels expensive. Like her. Like her cunt, a cunt so costly that Mark is paying his whole kingdom for it.
She shivers at each pass of my thumb, and then has to grab on to my shirt with her other hand when I press my palm to her.
“Oh God,” she moans. And when I rewrap my hand around her throat to hold her still as my fingers slide into the top of her underwear, she starts inhaling so quickly that she’s almost hyperventilating.
