I taste her on my tongue, feel her around my cock and in my bloodstream. I’ll never get her out now. And I don’t want to.
She’s right here—pressed against me, warm and soft and real. Even so, it’s not enough.
It’ll never be enough.
I need more. More of her skin, her sounds, her surrender. I want to be inside her mind, her fears, her soul.
She’s in my blood now, burning through every vein, rewiring everything I am. And I don’t care what I have to break to keep her.
She’s not a want.
She’s a need.
Chapter 22
Laurette Devereux
No man I’veever loved has made me come the way a stranger did last night.
Light spills through the bamboo-woven shades before the alarm can scream, brushing over tangled sheets and skin still flushed from his touch. My body hums with satisfaction. Every nerve still tingles from the memory of him.
I stretch, sinking deeper into the mattress, into the scent of him still clinging to the cotton, soaked with sweat and cum, the heat of everything he left inside me.
A smile curves lazily across my lips.
“Bastien,” I whisper. His name tastes like a secret on my tongue.
Hearing it for the first time, whispered against my temple, snapped something open inside me. It’s a piece of the puzzle, a glimpse into the man who took me apart with surgical precision.
And those eyes.
Brown but not dark or dull. They burned golden in the candlelight. His eyes pinned me to the bed more than his hands ever could. Those eyes saw the real me. And despite everything—his mask and secrecy—I want more.
God help me, I want more.
Sleep-deprived and still aching, I roll out of bed. The space beside me is empty, sheets cooling and the impression fading, but the ache under my ribs? That’s all him. A slow, delicious throb that says he was real, and he was here.
I woke more than once in the night. He was still there each time I checked, breath slow and even. His arm remained wrapped around me, his body a shield between mine and everything else. I think I fell asleep to the sound of his heartbeat.
He wore the mask when he came inside me and even when he held me afterward. At one point—somewhere between sleep and morning—I was tempted to tug it up. Just a little. Just to glimpse the man who shattered me.
But I didn’t. So the mystery continues.
He slipped away right before dawn, quietly and untraceable.
I try to focus on the day ahead, but he lingers in every nerve.
In the shower, hot water runs over my skin, but it can’t rinse away the evidence he left behind.
Not the new bloom of a second hickey on my neck.
Not the dusky smudges where his fingers claimed my hips.
Not the phantom pressure still ghosting along my throat, where his hand held me firm.
By the time I’m dressed, I catch my reflection in the mirror—and there he is. Not his face or body. But his presence.
It lingers in the flush that stains my skin and the way I stand. I’m marked from the inside out.
