Gazing into his eyes, I could see the sincerity etched within, but he could never be sure. I wouldn’t know which was my last moment with him until after he was gone.
His attention dipped to my mouth, but instead of kissing me, he retreated. “Rest,” he said and disappeared.
I sleptin fits and starts, even my dreams punctuated with blood and death. I startled awake sometime in the early morning when a weight depressed the mattress. Lucas sat beside me, barely visible in the dark. He still wore his Hunter black fatigues withthe scarlet patch where the American flag should have been. I glared at that patch for a long moment while he stared into space.
When he made no move to leave or come closer, I sat up. His head turned slowly, and the second he met my eyes, I knew he’d returned to me from something terrible. His bare expression was a pale smear in the surrounding blackness, but he looked…fractured. Whatever he’d just done would haunt him, whether it was lives he’d taken or humans he’d imprisoned. They would live in his psyche forever.
I wanted to tell him it was okay, that he was only doing what he had to, but none of this was okay, and he didn’t have to do any of it. He could choose death. He would’ve already chosen death, if not for me. I was at fault here too. I wanted him alive, and in order to stay that way, this was the price.
“Lucas,” I whispered, setting a hand on his shoulder to cover the scarlet.
“Sophia,” he said, voice like gravel in the darkness.
His kiss took me by surprise, harsh and quick as it was, and I sucked in a gasp. He cupped my neck and kissed me like everything would reset if only he could melt into me instead. The kisses were long and hard and drugging, tasting of the same herbal peppermint as usual—the taste of his anxiety, the show of weakness that only I could see.
Perhaps it was the trauma of the mission or the culmination of days of self-deprivation, but something had unleashed him, and I could tell just by the strength of his grip on my neck that he wasn’t stopping this time. He needed an outlet, and I was happy to give it to him. I surrendered to his hands as they tugged me closer, melting into his touch. In a blink, I was on my back, his body a cage above me.
Thrills of pleasure shot down my spine as his hungry gaze swept my face.
“Say what you want,” he said. “Out loud.”
“You.”
He seemed to like that word, or perhaps the needy way I said it, because his breath caught and he dipped closer until his mouth touched mine. “What do you want from me? Tonight? Right now?”
Heat flooded my insides, turning everything molten, and I hooked my good leg around him so he wouldn’t gain a sudden conscience and try to retreat again. “You know what I want, Lucas.”
“I need you to say the words.” He kissed a trail across my jaw to that sensitive place beneath my ear. The tingles were almost enough to distract me from his words.
What exactly had he witnessed this evening that had him begging for my consent?
“Lucas,” I grabbed his face, forcing him to look me in the eye. “I want you to fuck me.”
The aquamarine studied me closely, every hint of my expression and crevice around my eyes, but he made no attempt to comply. Heart pounding, I counted twelve beats before he finally moved. He dove under my loose T-shirt, hands greedy when they met my skin to slide the fabric up and away. My obedient arms lifted as he stripped it from my body. I lay beneath him in nothing but a pair of his boxers, while he remained fully dressed in Hunter fatigues.
I attacked the buttons of his evil shirt, wanting to tear that scarlet patch from his shoulder. He distracted me with a kiss to the notch beneath my throat, then climbed the slope of my breast and took the peak into his mouth. Pleasure arced, and I gave up on his buttons to thread my fingers into his waves.
He groaned when my fingernails raked over his scalp—the sound of a man starved for affection. He palmed my other breast, and my hips bucked into him, seeking friction. Desperatefor more, I tugged harder at his shirt, but he ignored me. His mouth released me, dipping to nibble the edge of my ribs and trail his tongue to my belly button and below.
Air whooshed from my lungs as I realized what he intended to do. My subconscious had woven fantasies of this into the muscle fibers of my heart, but I’d barely allowed it purchase on my reality. Now, fire scalded every surface of my skin as his fingers hooked around the elastic band and peeled it down my legs, careful of the healed wound. Open-mouthed kisses trailed up the inside of my thigh as he spread my good leg wide and tugged me right to the edge of the bed.
As his knees hit the floor, I found myself whispering—prayers, wishes, encouragements, all wrapped in his name. Moonlight shimmered over the raven waves of his hair, and I was hypnotized by the beauty of it, by the sight of his head between my thighs, by the naked desire in his ocean eyes when they traveled up to meet mine.
The tiniest quirk at the edge of his mouth spoke of a dark knowledge, like he knew exactly where he was about to take me while I wasn’t sure whether we were climbing to paradise or descending to the most wicked circle of the underworld.
With a single teasing swipe of his tongue, my whole body shuddered in pleasure, and a terrible, wonderful truth dropped a curtain over my reality: I couldn’t tell the difference between heaven and hell. This was torture and ecstasy. Fire and rapture. He made me want to open wider and shut down forever.
But he gave me no choice. He subdued my body the same way he had for months—with deft proficiency. Lucas Scott was a master at getting what he wanted from me, and when the euphoria climbed my spine and escaped my mouth in a cry shaped like his name, he didn’t stop. He kept up the soft rhythm until a second, stronger wave crashed over me.
Heart fluttering, lungs breathless, every thought scattered in the wake of the pleasure. I was barely aware of his heat retreating, but I reacted on instinct to keep him close. Still tingling in every nerve ending, I jerked to sitting and gripped his shirt. Standing between my spread legs, he relented to my wild kiss. He still tasted of peppermint, but now he also tasted of me, and that lit a new flame deep inside.
This time, my fingers worked the buttons of his shirt without fumbling, and I ripped it from his body. He stood tall while I pressed my palms to every ripple of muscle, every jagged scar, and finally the hard ridge still hidden by his clothes.
I loosened his belt. Unbuttoned his pants. Tugged them away until he stood before me in nothing but his tented boxers. Tipping forward to kiss his chiseled abdomen, I coaxed him closer. Fingers tangled in my hair as I pulled him free of the cotton, my hand gripping him at the base.
I glanced up, but I was unprepared for the open hunger, the raw adoration on his face. Deep in my belly, the flame blazed, and a new, insistent throb woke between my legs. His fingers trailed down the turn of my jaw, thumb brushing over my lips before exerting pressure on my chin to open my mouth.
Obediently, I leaned forward to lick a bead of liquid from his tip, and the hand in my hair tightened. I allowed myself a small smile as I took him into my mouth, slow and deep, letting him suffer the same as he had done to me. I relished possessing this power over his pleasure. So often, he held the upper hand, but with this, Iownedhim.
