What the hell had just happened?
I’d discovered that my host kept a sex dungeon in his castle. That was strange enough, but the rest of it—my body’s response, the images that had rushed through me when I saw the cross, and how I’d looked at Kiernan when he stood inches away from me, close enough to touch—was worse.
I couldn’t explain it or even reconcile it in my own mind. My words echoed. “Yes, sir,” I’d said. Why? And why had it felt so right?
I shoved away from the wall, needing to get as far from this wing as I could.
I needed Ophelia.The thought crystallized with sudden clarity. Her warmth. Her steadiness. The familiar comfort of wanting someone I understood how to want. To touch her and be touched.
I reached our suite and walked over to her door. Raising my fist to knock before I lost my nerve.
Every second stretched into an eternity as I waited for it to open. When it did, Ophelia stood before me in a silk nightgown that skimmed her thighs. Her eyes widened with surprise.
“Oliver? What’s wrong?”
I stepped forward and fell into her arms when she opened them to me. I buried my face in her neck and breathed in her scent. When her arms came around me, some of the chaos quieted.
Then, desire flared again. I found her mouth with mine and kissed her. It was gentle, then desperate and devouring. I poured all the confusion and terror and want of the past hour into it. She gasped against my lips, and I swallowed the sound, pressing forward, walking us farther into her room.
“Oliver—”
“I need you. Please, Phee.”
She searched my face in the darkness. I didn’t know what she saw there, but whatever it was made her pull me down for another kiss. This time, her urgency matched mine. Her fingers fisted in my hair, and she pressed her body to mine with an abandon that set my blood on fire.
I pushed her against the wall and slid my hands beneath the silk of her nightgown.
We tore at each other. Her fingers yanked at my shirt, and her nails scraped across my chest. My mouth found her throat, her collarbone, her breast, biting, then soothing. She gasped and writhed, and her leg hooked around my hip to pull me closer.
The kiss turned almost angry. Months of denial, and now this—this raw collision of want and confusion and need. I hiked her nightgown higher. Her thighs were bare beneath my palms when my hand slid between her legs.
She was wet. Slick and hot and ready, and the moan that escaped her throat was raw with need. I groaned into her mouth and slid my fingers through her folds, feeling her body welcome me.
“Yes.” She gasped. “Oliver, yes?—”
We were lost in the taste of each other. Her hands were everywhere, and I couldn’t get close enough, couldn’t touch enough of her, couldn’t?—
The door opened behind us.
We froze, then turned. Kiernan stood in the doorway, his eyes dark and his voice low and absolute.
“Did I tell you to stop?”
7
KIERNAN
Sleep was impossible.
I stood at my bedroom window, staring out at the darkness beyond. The grounds of Greymarch stretched below me, invisible in the moonless night. Somewhere out there, the loch lapped against the shore, the wind rustled through the pines, and the world went on as if nothing had changed.
Except everything had.
Oliver’s face kept surfacing in my mind. The shock when he’d turned to find me in the doorway. The flush on his cheeks. The unmistakable bulge in his trousers as he stood before my cabinet of collars, his palm flattened on the glass like he wanted to reach through and touch them.
He’d stood in my playroom, surrounded by implements of control and surrender, visibly aroused.
Then he’d said it. Two words that had almost destroyed me.Yes, sir.
