A twitching mess. Boneless with pleasure. Stained with come and teeth and bruises and pink, flushed cheeks. My ankles were hooked and locked at his lower back, and me, with absolutely no memory of howthatmight have happened.
“Thank you,” he murmured, filling my vision with eyes utterly void even the slightest hint of color, except for the reflection of gold. Looming, broad shoulders shielding me from the pounding fall of water beginning to go cold.
All I could muster was a blink. The tiniest flutter of questioning confusion that I didn’t bother to voice, for he was in my blood. He felt the tendrils of shame and self-loathing as I tried to put myself back together, even with his cock still twitching and buried to the hilt.
“For today,” he whispered, and cupped my cheek as he elaborated. “For not intentionally getting us killed.” Trembling fingers pushed a mat of tangled, sodden hair back from my face, and for a moment, just a split instant, there was a shred of something… vulnerable allowed to slip through his legendary control. “It’s going to be good between us, Mila,” he said. “Easy. Like this, all the time—”
A tentative knock at the bathroom door made him jerk, hunching over me like a wild thing refusing to give up its kill.
There was someone was in his room.
11
“Captain Rawlings, sir?” It was a female voice. Tentative, but bracketed by a firm knock. One I recognized, even in my delirium. Alicia. The traitor with green eyes and high, elegant cheekbones. “My apologies, sir, but—”
“Alicia,” the captain drawled, and reached one hand up. Twisting without looking, he turned the faucet off and ended our shower somehow dirtier than we’d begun it. “Come in.”
I squeaked. Vision still blurry at the edges, limbs a mess of twitching, uncoordinated flesh and bone. “What—she can’t—”
Asher frowned at me, as if genuinely unaware why I might protest. That I might not want to be seen in my current state, soaking wet and dripping inside and out. Nailed to the floor of a shower stall by the thick cock of my enemy, my pussy stretched around him tight enough to force him still as I fluttered and clenched, still lost in the throes of an unnatural orgasm.
But it was Alicia who demurred. “It’s Carina, sir,” she called from behind the door. “It would seem the Lieutenant General Hastings mentioned that you’ve been cleared. She’s… uh… in the parlor.”
The captain cursed then pulled out in a rush of salty heat that gushed from swollen lips, before he scooped me up from where I was puddled on the shower floor. “Tell her I’m indisposed,” he snarled, and dragged a towel into the stall. A towel that was already damp and musty, cold against my skin as he wrapped it tight about my shoulders—and let me drip until my thighs were tacky and wet.
“She’s”—Alicia cleared her throat—“rather insistent, sir. Marco can only distract her for so long.”
A line of strong white teeth flashed at me in the dim lighting, and Asher’s impotent fury crackled through my blood an instant before he let go a held breath. “Fine,” he snapped, and guided me to sit on the toilet seat, checking to ensure I was steady before he turned. Wrenching the en suit door open, stark naked, he murmured something I couldn’t hear beneath his breath, then closed the door in Alicia’s face once more. Doing his best to block her sight.
Like a gentleman.
I watched him from my perch. Leery of the jarring shift in reality. Hair dripping where it lay in tangled snarls over my shoulders, hanging down my back in cold, dead silver-blonde serpents. Trying to gauge his mood, to see how receptive he might be to grant a favor, I took a ragged breath. “Asher,” I began, licking my lips.
Another knock, and this time, Alicia opened the door herself. Just a crack. Just enough to slip one slender arm through the gap and pass the captain a bundle of dark fabric rimmed in gold.
He took it without a word of thanks, and said, “We’ll be out in a moment.”
I swallowed, and tried again. Calves quaking where I was braced on tiptoe, perched atop his toilet seat, clutching the musty towel high at the base of my throat. “I… I need to shower.”
One dark brow lifted, but that was all.
“I’m… You…”
Dark flames crackled in that inky gaze, wicked amusement that traced a long, slow smirk at the corner of his lips and chased off his foul mood. “Spit it out.”
“I…” I shook my head, blushing from the roots of my hair, all the way down my throat and into the towel clutched at my breast. “You came in me,” I whispered, mortified. Fragile and brittle.
He growled low in his chest. Menacing, a deep rumble that preceded a storm of unstable want that flooded through him into me. “Fuck, that’s hot,” he rasped. Stalking closer. “My little virgin with a pussy full of come.”
Heat flashed through my cheeks. But electricity sang through my nerves. Through everything that was still tender and clenching, my voice stolen as my blood rushed in my ears.
“No,” he drawled, and peeled a tiny scrap of fabric off the top of the bundle Alicia had given him. “I think I prefer you like this. Dripping in my come, cheeks stained pink as you can’t help but think about every spilled drop… Hoping no one notices…” Openly grinning now, he knelt before me. Hand gentle on my knee as he traced the length of my calf to my ankle, then lifted my foot from the floor. “It suits you.”
“No,” I retorted, watching him slip my foot through a hole in silky black panties. “It suitsyou.”
His gaze flicked up, meeting my eye with sinister mirth dancing in inky pitch. And he shrugged. “Semantics.”
“The general is dead,” I said, trying a different angle when he moved on to my opposite foot, appealing to reason where emotion had failed me, time and again. “Who else would be bold enough to flaunt your Caledonian laws of ownership? Who else might try to touch me? To take me from you?” I swallowed, throat dry enough that it clicked in the quiet hanging heavy between us. “No one else can match the power you wield. Not now. And I’m not likely to soon forget what happened today. I don’t need the reminder, or to r-reek of sour, used p-pussy. Asher, please,” I breathed, and wound my fingers tighter into the fabric of the towel.
