“You’re healing.”
“Already healed.”
“You’re still fucking traumatised, Lynn.”
“So are you. Next.”
He laughed, then groaned, flattening the smile from his mouth. “Fucking smartass.”
“I can take it, Cobra.” I waited until he met my eyes, until we both knew I wasn’t talking about simply making out. “Ineedit.”
A rough breath punched from his chest and he dug the pads of his thumbs into his eyes. “I don’t like the idea of making it worse. Your mental state. If I mess you up, Lynn—”
“I’m telling you I can handle it. I’m a grown ass woman, and I know what I want.”
His still looked torn, but he held eye contact, reading me. “And what do you want?”
“You, inside me.”
He groaned, tipped his head back. “That is banned. You can’t tell me shit like that?”
“Why? It’s true.” I shrugged. “It has been for some time. I don’t think I did a good job hiding it. Neither did you. Your towel’s tenting, by the way.”
“Because you kiss like you’re trying to devour me whole,” he muttered.
“And you love it,” I guessed.
He scratched his nails over his skull, left red marks. “Yes, I fucking love it. I love your wildness and your fire. But it makes me want totameyou, Lynn. It makes me want to see you completely on fire so I can smother the flames.”
My heart tripped, then resumed even faster. The thing he kept completely overlooking was my trust. ItrustedCobra, which would make this completely different than anything that happened on that horror show of a farm. “You don’t scare me, Cobra.”
He dragged his teeth over his bottom lip, bit it into his mouth. “You should be scared.”
I took another step closer, forced him to meet my eyes. “Thenmake mescared.”
Cobra’s breathing scattered, venom-green eyes swallowed by shadow. My stomach burst with a flutter of butterfly wings when his hand enclosed my throat, gripping hard enough to warn me he meant business. I froze when he caught my bottom lipbetween his teeth. Hissed when he bit down hard enough to draw a pearl of blood.
“Pick a safe word, Lynn.”
17
Lynn
His eyes never left mine. Not as he retrieved a box from under his bed, not as he produced a black rope to secure my hands to the headboard, not as his inked fingers curled around the dark handle of a knife and ran the razor edge along the waistband of my leggings, setting my heartbeat rioting. He only broke eye contact when the knife pricked my skin just below my hips, his stare fixating on the tiny sliver of blood.
A violent pounding began between my legs when Cobra lowered his head, his mouth finding the broken skin, tongue dragging a broad stroke along my skin, close enough that my clit ached. I barely even noticed the sting.
He stabbed the knife into his mattress hard enough to make me jump, a shriek leaving me as my heart clattered into my ribs.
“You just ruined your own mattress,” I pointed out breathlessly.
“Don’t give a fuck,” he growled, moving so quickly there was no warning before his tongue lashed my clit with relentless flicks, making me strain against the ropes. It wasn’t the first pleasure I’d felt since before that nightmare place—I was hesitant to admit I’d returned to my room after some of our bickering arguments to desperately touch myself—but it was the first I’d been given by another person.
I went completely breathless. I’d expected pain and torture, and I was unprepared for it to feel so good so soon.
A near-feral growl came from him. Ruthless hands spread me wide, dimpling my skin, leaving bruises behind as he ate me like a man possessed. That growl shivered over my skin, vibrated into all my nerve endings, and the climax hit me so suddenly, so brutally, that my whole body locked.
By the time I floated back to Earth, my muscles had slackened, an unfamiliar lightness to my chest, and all the anxiety I carried around with me like heavy baggage had been swept away.
