The control…but it was wrong.
Every thrust was blurred. Her curves were shifting into broad fucking muscle, her softness hardening into his resistance. My hands weren’t gripping her hips anymore. They were pinning down his thick, tattooed neck, taming the snake trapped beneath my fingers. My body betrayed me like it always had with him.
“Oh fuck, yes. Take it, let me hear you scream for once fucker.”
I pounded into him beneath me. Every fucking nerve screamed with the fantasy I didn’t ask for or want.
I clenched my eyes shut, refusing to open them.
It’s her. It’s Xanthy. Alexandra Harding. Your girlfriend. Fucking. Focus.
But my mind kept playing tricks. His voice continued to overlap hers, his dangerous smirk curved over her mouth, and his defiance melted into moans and whimpers that didn’t exist.
I hated it. I hated him and how much he made me ache.
“Shiloh,” Xanthy whimpered, nails dragging down my spine. “Oh my god, you are wild for me. Yes, Baby Boy. Yes.”
But all I heard was him.
I fucked her harder, punishing myself, and punishing the ghost of him in my fucking head. My teeth found her soft, perfumed throat, but I was sinking them into Carrington’s skin, marking him, forcing him to feel me the way I felt him.
A snake needed a charmer, or they were dangerous even to themselves.
“Fuck! Oh fucking hell, yes. Take my come. Drown in it. You won’t fucking breathe without my goddamn permission. Oh fuck.”
The release came like an ambush of my senses. It was violent and unrelenting. I spilled my come inside her cunt with his face seared behind my eyes. My face smashed forward, and I groaned his name into the pillow, muffling it before it slipped out loud.
I rolled off, lying beside her, my chest heaving, my skin still slick with sweat that had nothing to do with exertion, and everything to do with the betrayal of my own damn mind.
She curled into me, all smiles and satiated sighs.
“You’re trembling,” she whispered, pressing her lips to my shoulder in a soft kiss. “That was…incredible, Baby Boy. Like wow. I’ll definitely avoid my family tomorrow.”
I didn’t answer her. My tongue felt heavy and fucking poisoned. I worried that if I said anything, it would not be what I intended.
She drifted off to sleep quickly, her breathing slowing against my chest, while my come leaked out onto my thighs. She slept peacefully, trusting me to hold her and keep her safe.
I couldn’t relax.
I was wide awake and staring at the fucking ceiling. My body still hummed with aftershocks from the mind-blowing orgasm, but my mind…my mind was a battlefield.
I hadn’t been with her tonight, not really. My cock had been inside her, but everything else, from my betraying fucking thoughts to my intense climax…it didn’t belong to her.
It belonged to him.
The bastard was in my head. His silence back in the showers wasn’t just silence. It was a knife, driven straight into me, twisting deeper with every minute I kept replaying it. He hadn’t even touched me. I should have been grateful that he kept his fucking hands to himself. Hell, he hadn’t even looked at me, yet he still controlled every breath I took in those walls.
I hate him. God, I fucking hate him.
But the harder I tried to hold on to that hatred, the more it slipped and warped into something else. Something I couldn’t name without wanting to tear myself apart.
I was terrified that next time I wouldn’t fight the fantasy…I’d welcome it.
Beside me, Xanthy murmured in her sleep, while reaching blindly for me. I let her cling to my side. She deserved to think she’d saved me from whatever danger threatened us.
But I knew the truth. She hadn’t saved me. She couldn’t.
Because Carrington fucking Harding had me by the throat without even lifting a finger. If I didn’t want to drown in the goddamn storm he created, I had to escape this. Thankfully, I knew just the thing to keep me from being swept away.
