Don't Let Go (Dark Nights #2)

“Maybe,” I whispered even though it wasn’t true.

“Samantha, love. What makes you think I’d let you leave?”

My eyes fell shut, and the hot tracks down my cheeks didn’t come from the shower. I turned in his arms, blindly, gladly. God. All I’d ever wanted was someone to keep me. To want me, even knowing my faults. Like everything I’d ever sought out myself, with peeling paint and uneven edges and a tendency to fall apart. All I’d ever wanted was to be loved.

I sought his mouth with mine and found it. He responded with aching tenderness, his sigh a caress. He gently bit down on my bottom lip, and I whimpered. His tongue laved the spot. That was how it would be between us, the pain and the comfort. The curse of the past and the hope for a future.

He touched me everywhere; he surrounded me. I felt consumed by him, taken within him instead of a separate being. There was no part of me left sacred, no shame he didn’t chase away with a tender touch and a pinch of pain. He made every part of me his own—his own thing to have and to hold, to kiss and to hurt—and left no room for the doubt that had chased me my whole life.

Large hands stroked my breasts and tugged my nipples while I squirmed. He held me up, serving himself as he bent his head to lick and kiss and bite the sensitized flesh. I danced on my tiptoes, groaning at the onslaught and holding onto his shoulders to stay afloat.

He ran his fingertips down my belly to the bare skin of my sex.

“God, sweetheart,” he said hoarsely. “You’re so soft here. So sweet.”

And then proceeded to prove his point. He pushed me flush against the wall and knelt before me. I cried out at the cold tile on my back but subsided at the first touch of his lips to my cunt. He crowned the plump outer lips with chaste, tender kisses before nudging my legs apart, before slipping his tongue in the slick space between. His tongue flicked my clit in an age-old rhythm that my body knew by heart.

My hips found the beat and rocked into him in time, seeking release without my consent. My fingers scrabbled at the slippery shower wall behind me, trying to hold me up and failing. I fell in a long, slow slide down the faintly ridged tile wall, held up only by the hot pressure of his mouth and the two fingers he slipped inside me.

He draped one of my legs over his shoulder, and I opened to him. With easier access, he pushed deeper inside me, he assaulted my clit with the lash of his tongue. I couldn’t even try to hold myself up like this. I could only wait, wedged between the tile and his body, between a rock and a hard place, and plead wordlessly, with desperate sounds and hungry gasps until I broke. I shattered into pieces with the final clash of him at my core. I splintered and flew in every direction, lost in the mindless pleasure and abject devotion, open and defenseless against the care he was determined to give me, and found myself drenched and boneless on the ceramic floor.

He’d laid me down gently, but now he stood above me. He looked down upon me, and I wanted to revel in his gaze like a night flower beneath the moon. He set his foot on my belly, his toes just beneath my breasts, the slight pressure only a fraction of the force he could inflict. This was payback for the kitchen and so much more as he moved his foot higher. As he curled his toes over my nipple and caught it like a bear trap, pinching me, while I jerked and shuddered on the bathtub floor.

Placing his feet on either side of my head, he straddled my shoulders, looking down. He seemed impossibly fierce this way, dominating me with his cock, slick and heavy. Water sluiced down his shoulders and over his muscled chest. It formed a waterfall around his cock and splashed down onto me, miming the climax still to come. With water. Only clean, fresh water, and what I craved was only what he could give me.

I bent my head to the side so that I could kiss his ankle. I moved to the arch of his foot, praising him with my kisses, worshipping him. I kissed his toes too, while he stared down at me with dark dominion, silently approving. I knew what to do because he’d shown me. Hadn’t he taught me? Hadn’t he trained me? I knew how he wanted my mouth on his foot because he’d done the same to me. When I had found every inch of skin with my mouth, I switched feet. I curled up on my side, my arms wrapped around his leg, debasing myself and exalting. Kissing his skin and reveling in the pleasure it gave him.