“I’m yours,” she sobbed. “Fuck. Please—”
Cal finished her off brutally while she screamed into her palm. He yanked her shirt off, cutting her off mid-yelp, and dragged her onto his lap. With her wrists gathered loosely behind her back, he fucked into her, hard and sweet, forcing her to ride him.
“Look at me, Nadine,” he said.
She shook her head wildly, but he touched her cheek, angling her head down.
“Look atus.”
The skin of her lower belly moved with him on the next stroke of his hips, revealing the faintest outline of movement as he bottomed out on a particularly deep thrust that had her arching in what could have been ecstasy or pain. He kissed her again, flicking his tongue into her mouth in time with each rocking motion, tasting every sound that left her lips.
“I said I was a patient hunter.” His voice thickened with the slow throb of his release. “Don’t hide from me now, my exquisite darling. The capture is what I crave the most.”
She bit him. Cal was startled out of his easy rhythm, shocked. Nadine spat, eyes narrowed.
With a low laugh, he gave her breast a tweak and then rolled her onto her back, finishing in a series of knifing thrusts that left him feeling drained.Mine, he thought, closing his eyes againstthe onslaught of pleasure coursing through him in ribbons of light and shadow.All mine.
Nadine sank under his weight, limp. When he pulled out, his cock was slick with their commingled juices; it spilled over her thighs, the sheets. A wicked christening for what they’d done, he thought, draping her body with the embroidered bridal sheet.
The sight of her, felled and supine, plucked at a hunger he didn’t know he possessed.
“This room might have been designed with you in mind, little sparrow,” Cal told her.
When she didn’t respond, he leaned over to pick up his pants from the floor, unbothered by the traces of her slicking his head and shaft. He would wear her all day, like a brand beneath his clothes. “The gilt and the turquoise are both striking against your skin,” he added.
Nadine hugged the sheet to herself and shivered, looking miserable.
After the afternoon they’d shared, her reaction unnerved him. He had given her pleasure and gone out of his way to make this a gentle claiming. She, in return, had given him—well, not quiteeverything, but nearly that. And in this room that had always been reserved for the maidens of this house, she was clutching at the sheets like she’d been defiled instead of sacralized.
Like he hadn’t just saved her from the grasping hand of his family’s legacy.
He gave her a restrained smile as he turned to go to his bedroom, no longer sure of what to say to her. The doors between their rooms were thrown open and when he pushed aside the heavy embroidered tapestry to walk through that small cobwebbed hall into his bedroom, he thought of his great-grandfather taking the reverse path to come to his wife in the middle of the night.
They would have to give her to him now.
He slid his arms into a crimson shirt and began doing up the engraved iron buttons. Discarding his jeans, he put on pressed pants instead, with a black belt to accentuate his slender waist.
Nadine was still in bed when he came back, with her hands laced over her middle. Keeping the sheets pressed to herself, her face was turned towards the window. He stepped deliberately on one of the boards, making it squeak, and she turned to look at him.
“I can’t take you to dinner like that.”
“You want me to eat with your psychotic family?” her voice was dulled.
“I think there’s enough blood in the water already. If I keep you away too much, they’re going to think I’m hiding you.” Odessa had sent over one of her dresses for Nadine to wear and he picked it up from the vanity, giving it a few casual shakes to straighten the rumpled fabric as he scrutinized the cut. “Besides, you’re going to have to keep up your strength to keep up with me, Nadine.”
“Yeah,” she said unhappily. “You might take advantage of me.”
Cal rolled his eyes and lobbed the dress to her in a casual underhand, though the words stung.
She grabbed the dress and turned her back on him to pull it on, seeming to forget the mirror. She and his sister were not the same size, but it wasn’t uncommon for Odessa to buy things without trying them on, more attracted to colors and fabrics than the fit.
He watched her wrestle with the dress, trying to add decency where there was none.
He preferred the none.
Stepping forward unasked, he took the laces from her nervous fingers and began lacing up the corseted bodice, pulling just hard enough to cinch the fabric. After tying off the laces, he ran his knuckles down the exposed skin of her back, which made her shoulders bunch.
The shortness of the garment highlighted the length of her legs, her tapered waist. She took great pains to make herself invisible to the eye and this dress stripped away those defensive layers.
