“Ronan?” Her voice is small.
“Trust me, baby.” I press a kiss to the inside of her knee. “Relax your body. Release the tension. I’m going to make you feel good.”
“I don’t under?—”
“You don’t have to understand. I’m the boss, remember?”
Her thighs part by inches, trembling with the effort.
I lower my mouth.
The first taste of her pussy is like ambrosia on my tongue. Sweet, warm, musky, and so achingly delicious that my hands grip her hips hard enough to leave pink imprints. This woman, her taste, ignites a base instinct I didn’t even know I possessed. I feel feral.
I think I’m in trouble.
I work her with deliberate strokes, and she fights herself—I read the battle beneath my mouth. Her muscles lock, obeying the programming, while her hips twitch in an involuntary roll she immediately suppresses. Her breathing has gone ragged, each inhale hitching at the top.
I flatten my tongue and press harder. A long, slow drag. Her spine arches a half-inch off the mattress before she forces it down.
“Enjoy it, Prudence. Let me make you feel good, baby.”
A whimper escapes her—wrecked and tiny, the sound of a woman pitting years of conditioning against the strongest force in the human body.
Then her hand flies to my head and her fingers thread through my hair.
She grips. Not pushing me away. Holding on. Her thighs clamp around my head with a desperate pressure that tells me everything her mouth can’t say. A sound tears from her throat—stunned, raw, a noise that I’d venture to guess she’s never made before.
She’s fighting herself. Every lesson of purity, piety, and sin versus the pleasure I’m forcing from her as she fists my hair and arches into my mouth.
Underneath her fear and backwards programming, her body does what it was designed by nature to do.
I grip her tighter, seal my mouth over her clit, and refuse to let go.
I’m definitely in trouble. Deep, irreversible, catastrophic trouble.
Chapter 9
Prudence
His mouth moves against me, and my body betrays everything I have been taught.
You will not derive pleasure. Pleasure is damnation.
Housemother Ruth’s voice loops through my skull—flat, certain, immutable—while Ronan’s tongue slides through my most intimate place with a slow, deliberate pressure that makes my hips buck off the mattress before I can stop them.
I force my spine flat. I clench my jaw. I recite:The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not?—
His lips seal over a place I have no name for, a swollen knot of nerve endings that sends a bolt of white heat from my core to the tips of my fingers, and the psalm evaporates from my mind as though it were never there.
What is happening to me?
There is heat. Gathering, pooling, tightening into a coil deep inside me that winds itself tighter with every stroke of his tongue. I do not have words for what is building. I have never been told it exists. Housemother prepared me for pain—dull, dutiful, righteous pain—not this mounting, spiraling pressure that is pulling me toward something I cannot see.
My fingers are in his hair. I do not remember putting them there. I grip harder, and a sound escapes Ronan—a low groan that vibrates against my flesh and sends a fresh wave of sensation crashing through me.
I try to suppress it. I press my lips together. I dig my nails into my own palm with the hand that isn’t fisted in his hair. My thighs tremble, locked against the sides of his head, and I cannot tell if I am trying to push him away or pull him closer.
The coil tightens. And tightens. And tightens.
