Page 118 of Vow to Claim You

This is what I’ve been provoking with every lifted chin and every bitten retort and every deliberate refusal to bend.

This.

And I want more of him.

“I’m not done with you.” His voice doesn’t sound like his. It sounds low and shredded and utterly unrecognizable from the measured, frost-laced tone I’ve grown accustomed to hearing. This voice belongs to a different man. One he’s kept locked away. One I’ve just set loose.

Before I can respond—before my brain can even begin to assemble words from the wreckage he’s made of my nervous system—his hands close around my thighs, and he lifts me off the vanity like I’m nothing. My legs wrap around him on instinct, arms looping his neck, and I feel him against my stomach, already hard again, the thick, rigid length of him pressing into my skin like a brand. And then the mattress meets my back, soft and cool against my overheated skin.

He stands at the edge of the bed and looks at me. And the way he does it makes my skin tighten, makes heat flood places that are already swollen, sensitive, and aching. His gaze roams over me the way his hands did minutes ago—thorough and possessive. From my face to my throat, to my breasts still rising and falling too fast, to the dip of my waist, to the space between my thighs where I’m still wet from him.

“Did you think”—his voice drops even lower—“that I’d be satisfied with one taste of you after weeks of lying beside you imagining every filthy thing I wanted to do to this body?”

My thighs press together on instinct because the ache between them has turned into a hollowed-out need that his words are making worse with every syllable. His eyes track the movement, and something shifts in his expression—darker, hungrier, a wolf sighting the precise weakness it was waiting for.

“Spread your legs,” he growls.

I do as he says, holding his gaze the entire time, because if I’m going to surrender, I’m going to make damn sure he knows it’s a choice and not compliance.

His exhale is barely controlled. I watch his chest expand, and the effort it takes him not to move is visible in every taut line of his body.

“Wider.”

My teeth sink into my bottom lip, and I obey—spreading myself open for him, exposed and slick and still trembling, and the look on his face when he sees what he’s done to me is worth every ounce of vulnerability it costs.

“Fuck,” he breathes, and the profanity sounds like worship coming from his mouth. Like a prayer stripped of its holiness. His hand drags down his face, fingers scraping over his jaw, and he stares at me like he’s run out of reasons not to take what he wants. “You have no idea what you look like right now.”

“Then show me,” I whisper, and something behind his eyes ignites.

He climbs onto the bed. One knee, then the other, hands pressing into the mattress on either side of my hips as he prowls up the length of my body. The muscles in his arms flex with the movement, ink shifting across his skin like living things, and his cock hangs heavy between us. I feel my core clench at the sight of it—an involuntary pulse of want that I couldn’t suppress if I tried.

He lowers his mouth to my ear. His breath scorches across my neck, and when he speaks, each word burns into my skin.

“I’m going to fuck you again.” His tongue traces the shell of my ear, and my back arches off the mattress before I can stop it. “Harder this time. Deeper. I’m going to fill you until there’s no room left for anything but me.” His mouth drags down the side of my throat, open and wet, tongue and teeth working the sensitive skin until I’m gasping. “And tomorrow, when you can barely walk, when you’re sore in places you didn’t know could ache, you’ll sit across from me at breakfast, pretending to be composed, and remember exactly what I did to you. You’ll feel me leaking down your thighs, and you’ll have to smile and pretend you’re not desperate for more.” His teeth sink into the curve of my neck. “That’s what I want, Ayanna. I want you ruined and aching and mine,” he rasps.

A raw moan rips out of me.

“Do you understand me?” he murmurs against my collarbone, the words vibrating through my bones.

“Yes.” It comes out breathless and desperate. I don’t even recognize my own voice.

“Yes, what?”

I swallow. Because this man. This insufferable, cold, devastatingly controlled man who speaks three words a day, apparently saves the rest for moments like this.

“Yes, Aric.”

The sound of his name in my mouth does something to him. I feel it in the full-body shudder that runs through him, the way his hands clench in the sheets beside my hips, the guttural groan that escapes his throat before he can catch it. As if hearing me say his name while I’m pinned beneath him, naked and open and wanting, is the thing that finally tears through whatever was left of his composure.

He kisses me, deep, demanding, his tongue sliding against mine with a possessiveness that steals the breath from my lungs. His hand finds my breast, palm rough against the peak, thumb rolling my nipple until I whimper into his mouth. The sound seems to feed something in him because he does it again—harder—and I arch into his hand like my body is no longer mine but his, responding to his touch the way an instrument responds to the hands of someone who knows exactly how to play it. His mouth follows where his hand leads. Down my throat. Across my collarbone. His tongue traces a circle around my nipple before his lips close over it and suck, and the sensation shoots straight from my breast to my core like a wire pulled taut between the two. I cry out, fingers flying to his hair, gripping hard, and his groan vibrates against my skin.

“I’ve spent weeks watching you walk through my house,” he says against my breast, his voice wrecked. “Watching you argue with me across my own table. Watching you lift that chin like you’d rather die than bend.” His tongue drags across the valley between my breasts, and my hips roll upward without permission. “And every night I’d go to my office and think about this. About you. About what you’d sound like underneath me.”

“And?” I manage, because apparently even in the middle of being dismantled, my mouth refuses to stop provoking him. “Does reality live up to the fantasy?”

He lifts his head. Those blown-out eyes find mine, and the smirk that crosses his face is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen on him.

“Reality,” he says, positioning himself at my entrance, the thick head of his cock pressing against my slick heat, “is going to ruin every fantasy I ever had.”