Page 161 of Twisting Beauty

“Ownership isn’t trust,” I hissed into his mouth as I ground against him.

He pulled back half an inch, his eyes almost all black, his breath coming hard.

“Then what is it going to take, Gray?” The question landed like a demand as he cupped my breast and rubbed my nipple through my top with his thumb. “What is it going to take for you to trust me?”

The answer was sitting in my throat even as he stole moans from me.

Choose me over your father.

Fuck. I couldn’t say it. If I asked him for the choice and he didn’t give me the answer, I’d never come back from that. I wasn’t strong enough to bear his hesitation.

He kissed me again, like he was trying to pull the answer out of me with his mouth.

I yanked his belt open. His hand pushed up under my skirt, finding me bare from this morning. His fingers slid through me. I was already wet, already arched into his palm.

“Christ. Gray.”

I didn’t answer with my mouth. I unzipped him and freed his cock and wrapped my hand around the heat of it, making his eyes roll back into his head.

He hauled me up against the tree. My legs came up around his waist. The bark scraped my back where my clothes had ridden up, biting into my skin in lines I’d carry tomorrow. I wanted to carry them. I wanted the proof of this on my body.

“Wait.” He tore his mouth away from mine. “Condom.”

“Implant. Clean.”

“Fuck. Me, too.” He thrust into me roughly, all the way.

I cried out and he caught the sound in his mouth as he fucked me against the tree.

It didn’t answer anything. It only gave us both something to do with the pain.

Lorcan’s broken-symphony violins, raw and ragged at the edges, crescendoed with every thrust.

God, I was coming apart already.

His hands hard on my hips. His mouth on my neck, my throat, my breast. His teeth in the meat of my shoulder, on my bottom lip, hard on my nipple.

And under all of it—the taste of cognac. Faint, bitter, still there.

I tried to swallow it down under Lorcan’s whiskey, to drown it in the heat of him.

But the cognac stayed.

I swore I saw movement at the edge of my vision. A figure, dark against the trees. Watching.

Lorcan’s hand came up to my throat and turned my face back to his, his eyes hard and the figure was lost to the trees.

“You’re mine.” He thrust deeper, harder, claiming me. “Say it, Gray.”

Pleasure tore through me as I came, feeling like surrender and betrayal at the same time.

My head fell into his neck.

“Yours,” I whispered.

Unsure which man I was talking to.

The stone corridors of Ravenwood narrowed with every passing second as Lorcan and Deargán turned them into hunting grounds.