My breasts were close to his chest, my nipples, cold and hard, barely touched the warmth of his smooth skin—if I closed my eyes, I could almost hear the beating of his heart, see the organ race, race, race at the mere thought of the chase for mine.
“Tell me,” he ordered, and once again, he slowly slid out, then came back more ravenous than before.
“I-REMEMBER!”
“You were so young,” he said, giving me a chance to catch my breath. “You bled me with your sharp thorns, Scarlett Rose Fausti. I wanted you to bleed for me too. What I wanted to do to you…when we were here. All alone. What I had imagined doing to you for so long.”
Words whispered hoarsely came from my mouth, but I didn’t recognize the tone or what they meant. Still, my mouth moved toward his, our eyes lost to the connection, our souls already so tangled, there was no finding either of us but one. We came together at the same time, kissing until we physically had to stop.
“Tellme,” I finally got out when he started to roam lower with his mouth. I could feel the wicked grin as it spread on his face.
My head fell backwards from the rush of pleasure, the ivory and moss the only saving grace from the hardness of the weathered wood.
He followed the path his tongue had taken back up, the line of it glistening in reflection to the moon. As he rose to his full height, his eyes became solid on mine, silently communicating the threat he posed. Leaning in, his breath washed over my skin like a warm, peaceful breeze before he whispered in my ear all of the things he’d wanted to do to methen.
When he said he wanted me to bleed for him—he meant it. And I had, but he hadn’t been as ruthless with me my first time as he described wanting to be. Wanting to fuck me untilmyblood was inside ofhim.
Wild noises came from my mouth, and I clawed his back, highly aware of the dangerous current passing between us.
Somewhere in the dimness of my fogged mind, I wondered if someone like me, someone peculiar, could see the charge between us?
Between us, it didn’t feel like a mere charge, but a fire. The words he spoke in my ear made the ember start in my toes and rush up to my hair in a blaze of glory. Those witches they burnt at the stake hundreds of years ago had nothing on me. I was sure of it.
How could I have not felt this years ago? When we were here—alone?
I’d taken him here to get away from the world, to work things out between us. This is where we—no, no,hehad decided to give intome. To make what we had official. Put a label on it, though there was no label to truly describe what we’d found in each other.
Still, years later, we were nameless, only answering to the secret names we had for each other.
The truth of the matter was that he was right. I didn’t have the capacity to take him full throttle back then. He was lightyears ahead of me in terms of maturity. It was only in that moment that I felt how much he loved methen, how my love had been reckless and his responsible—but in the moment we were in, we were both reckless, because he found a place in me where he could be.
At the thought of that time, when we’d both been discovering each other, another shiver shot through me, as though the power in his kiss alone sent a streak of lightning through my blood.
Yet…yet, I had been the more daring one when it came to commitment and what it meant. I always had that to give—or perhaps it was never mine to give. Because it had always been his. He was too hesitant to take it, to accept it. Wary of the intensity of the love I had clung to in the moment out in the snow.
The connection humming in my blood—almost boiling—gave me no choice.
Physically, he had been more mature. Emotionally? I had offered myself up long before he ever could.
Since I could take him on fully? It still didn't stop me from wondering if the intensity of him,his love, would stop my heart someday.
Everything in moderation, or so healthy people claim. Not Brando Piero Fausti. One touch became all-consuming. It seemed cliché to compare him to a potent drug, but it was hard to find anything else to compare it to. Highly addicting and always two-fold: a heaven and a hell, my saving grace and my most lethal vice, one to ease the pain and one to cause it.
I knew the worth of my own power in his world, too.
If I tightened, clenched around him like a tight grip, I had the power to make him almost touch insanity. He could spread me like a rag doll, as flexible as I was, and I wouldn’t flinch, but could make him sweat and work for more, until the growl that erupted in his throat sounded like a feral animal finally allowed his feast.
This man, who rarely lost control, lost it in my name and at my touch. I could spur him to violence, a mad loss of the barriers that stripped him of the man and left him nothing but beast.
His eyes were closed, head tilted back, neck exposed, his throat quivering with the animalistic noises, muscles tense and straining, veins rising above the skin, sweat glistening and running in rivulets over the hard beat of his heart… I had become the self-sacrificed—the woman who gave up her own lifeblood for the lifeblood of the one she loved.
His pace had reached unforgiving.
His hold could break bone, and a bit more pressure…I’d snap like a bird in the powerful fist of a predator.
His kisses bruised and kept the wounds open.
His skin was hot against the coolness of mine, almost scalding.
