Page 35 of Irrevocably

He leans forward, placing his hands on either side of my head once again.

With his carved muscles and his tattoos, and the feral light in his eyes as he looks intently down the length of my body. Lingering on my breasts and then down between my thighs. Then he lifts his gaze to mine, but he says nothing. His eyes are burning blue now, no ice in them. No emptiness. I wonder why he cares enough to give me pain along with pleasure, why it matters to him at all, but then I shove the thought away. All that matters is that he’s here and I want him, and I can’t breathe with how badly I do.

He lifts a hand and cups my breast, my nipple still stinging from the brutal pinch he gave it, and he teases it with the pad of his thumb until I’m trembling and gasping. “More?” he asks.

I nod before I even realise I’m going to and he pinches me again, sending another bolt of pain arrowing through me, and my back arches like I’ve been hit with a defibrillator as sensation lights me up inside.

His hand catches the small of my back, his large warm palm settling there, and then he’s between my spread thighs, the head of his cock pressing against my entrance, and he meets my gaze as he starts to push into me. The eye contact makes everything insanely intimate, and I can’t help the moan that tears from my throat as I feel my pussy stretch around him, sensitive tissues burning.

“Take me,” he whispers, watching my every reaction. “I know you can.”

But he’s big, too big. I can’t possibly do it, and yet he’s pushing deeper, and the room spins as all the air vanishes from my lungs. It feels like an impossibility for him to be inside me, as if he’s invading every part of me and leaving no room for even myself.

But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? I don’t want myself to be here. The struggling, failing good girl who cuts herself in secret. I want to be the woman who kissed a killer, who made him hard, who made him want.

I pant, my eyes wide. His features are drawn even tighter, a half-snarl twisting his mouth as he continues to push. “Does it hurt?” he growls, watching me. “Am I hurting you?”

I’m shaking, because yes, it does hurt, but that hurt joins the storm of sensation going through me, a bright, white heat, and I can’t tell anymore where the pain starts and the pleasure begins. “Yes,” I gasp. “Yes.”

His gaze flares, a dark pleasure of his own burning there. “Good.” Then he lowers his head, his mouth brushing over my cheeks and the side of my face, and I shudder at the contrast of the softness of his kisses and the brutal thrust of his cock. Then his lips find mine and there’s nothing but his taste and his heat and the feel of him inside me, and it feels so good. So good I might die.

I open my mouth to him, kissing him back as his cock settles deep inside me, and when he begins to move, sliding out very slowly before pushing back in, a deep, restless ache begins to build.

His kiss becomes hungrier as he thrusts, and I can’t keep still, shifting restlessly beneath him. His body is so hard, and so hot, and I want to touch him.

He lifts his head, watching me as he moves, his eyes a fathomless midnight sky, glittering with stars. “Promise me, Astrid,” he says softly, roughly. “Promise me that if you crave punishment, you’ll come to me.” He reaches one hand down, gripping the back of my leg behind my knee. Then he lifts it, hooking it around his lean waist, letting him slide deeper inside me, and I groan at the sensation. It feels so good I can’t stand it.

I can’t think, every thought ground into dust by the drive of his hips, crushed by the weight of the pleasure coiling inside me, like a knot pulling tighter and tighter.

He leans down once again, his mouth brushing along my jaw to my ear, his breath warm against my skin. Then he sinks his teeth into my lip, and pain blooms like a flower inside me, twining with the drive of his cock inside me, and I’m on the edge, just on the brink, when he stills, and I’m just about to scream at him to keep going, when I hear it, too: the sound of my dad’s footsteps in the hallway outside my door.

Slowly, Lucien lifts his head, ferocity burning in his eyes, and begins to move again, slower this time, quietening the sounds of the bedsprings. I can’t do anything but stare back as my pleasure intensifies, which it really shouldn’t do with Dad awake. He could open the door, put his head to check on me, the way he used to do when I was little, and that should absolutely kill my desire stone dead. Yet it doesn’t. Somehow the risk of being discovered makes all of this even more forbidden, even more erotic.

Lucien changes his angle, rocking his hips, the thrust of his cock nudging my clit and tearing another moan from me. He puts his hand over my mouth once more. “Quiet,” he whispers. “You don’t want your dad coming in here, do you?”

I shake my head frantically, my breath panting against his palm.

“But you like it, don’t you?” His whisper is hot and rough and velvety, the pressure of his gaze on me relentless. “You like the risk.”

I don’t bother denying it. I don’t bother doing anything but moving my hips with his, chasing more friction, more pressure. My back arches and I want more, I need more.

“Lucien.” My voice is muffled against his palm. “Please, oh please…” I don’t know what I’m asking for, but he does. Because he shifts again, his fingers down between us, stroking my clit as he thrusts. “Promise me,” he growls like a beast in my ear. “Promise me and then you can come.”

“Yes, yes … I promise…” I babble as the knot inside me pulls impossibly tight before bursting apart, the climax exploding like a bomb inside me. I scream against his hand, my back arching like a bow as my pussy convulses around his cock, the wave of pleasure annihilating me.

I’m dimly aware of him moving hard and fast, as if a leash has been let off him, and he drives into me before turning his face against my neck, muffling the roar of his own climax against my skin as it takes him, too.

Chapter Eighteen

LUCIEN

I lie like a dead man on top of her, crushing her into the mattress, everything in my head gone. All thought, Lazarus, Enzo, my mission, everything. There’s nothing in there except quiet. And then reality begins to assert itself.

I fucked a woman I shouldn’t have. A target. A virgin target. Yes, I wanted to take something for myself, do something because I wanted to, and for pleasure alone. I never do anything for pleasure alone. And maybe that’s all it would have been if I hadn’t seen the scars on her thighs as I put her down on the mattress, and if she hadn’t covered them with her hands as if she was ashamed.

They were still fresh, those scars, and beneath them were the faint lines of other cuts, traces of old scars and a lot of them. She’s been doing this for a long time, and it should not have mattered to me. I shouldn’t have given a shit about her scars, not when I have plenty of my own.

But when I looked into her face and I saw her shame, something shifted in me. She wanted me. I might have come for her, but she was the one who kissed me. She was the one who begged me. Not any other man, but me.