Stone fell back a step. And I struck his cheek.
For a second, the room stopped spinning.
Twelve inches separated us as we stared at one another.
Chests heaving, teeth grinding, breathing labored.
We were two enemies desperate for something.
Change. To turn back and start over. A different story.
My vision was blurred, my self-control swayed.
His eyes were hooded, his tenacity bruised.
“You’re a Heathen!” I spat in disgust.
His sin-shaped lips set in a harsh line.
His head shook. “And the irony is that I wasn’t accursed until I met you.”
“Stone,” I cried, my voice losing substance. “You’re a fucking Heathen.”
“No, Adora,” he scraped out, gutted, squinting an eye and pointing at me. “No, I’m fucking yours.”
Another tear fell from the corner of my eye and raced down my cheek.
He stepped aside, gesturing at the door. “You have two seconds to wake your bore of a fiancé and bring him here to kill me,” he said, his voice rising with a blue vein popping in his neck. “If those two seconds pass, and you’re still standing there looking like you’re mine, I will throw you againsthiswall, rip off your clothes, and claim you in ways your deprived little mind, body, and soul could not even imagine.” His chest was heaving, and my eyes were darting from him to the door. “The only restraints I have right now are respect and decorum, Adora, and both are two seconds from being abandoned.”
My mind was utter fog. “You wouldn’t dare.”
Another second passed.
Stone dropped his arm. “Time’s up.”
Then he grabbed me by the hips and threw me back against the wall.
His body chased me, crashing into mine.
His hands came down on my face, and his lips came down on my mouth, painfully and punishingly. I tried to fight him off, but he was smashed against me, as if he wished to bind us together and never part.
I pushed my mouth into his, hard, until my teeth cut into his lip, and he inched his head back.
When I opened my eyes, his were drenched in despair and longing. He looked at me like I was a girl who’d stepped off a page in his sketchbook, and he wasn’t about to let me go. He looked at me like I was a girl who belonged only to him. He looked at me like he loved me.
I grabbed the back of his neck and stood on my toes, no longer pushing him away but pulling him closer. My lips parted, our tongues collided. We moaned, we melted.
Tingling and dizzy, I sank against the wall and grabbed his waist, hauling him closer until the heat of him surrounded me like a warm blanket. Until there was nothing between us. Not space. Not air. Not sea. Not a covenant. Not a given name.
I felt his heartbeat slam against my breasts.
I felt his cock through his jeans press between my hips.
Stone pushed his fingers through my hair, the tips dragging across my scalp as he deepened the kiss. The kiss that required everything of him. The kiss that took my breath away. And this kiss crawled into my blood, raked my heart, and whispered sweet nothings between the bones of my ribcage. At last, the glass had broken, and we were French kissing in the dangerous pile of it—cut open and bleeding.
“You’ve hurt me repeatedly,” he confessed, his words spilling onto my lips as he pinned my wrists behind my back in one of his hands. “You’ve hurt me, you’ve lied to me, and you’ve let me go, and it’s pathetic how I spend every waking moment thinking of you.” With the other, he wasted not a second more and lifted my hips off the wall, popped the button on my jeans, unzipped the fly of my jeans, and slid his palm inside my panties, down the front of my jeans.
Stone’s tongue dragged along mine when his long fingers stroked my soaked slit. We both moaned at the feel of it, and I couldn’t get close enough, whimpering and climbing to my toes to inhale his lips. Stone lowered, kissing me deeply, fingertips teasing my clit and slick opening.
