“And besides, maybe I want to go and try to kiss one of those strangers we were talking about,” I tease.
Shocking the hell out of me, he reaches over and flicks back a corner of the curtain. “Pick one.”
I instantly slam my body against his chest, eyes wide as I look out the corner of the revealed window, at the people we pass on the street. “Slade,” I hiss.
“Don’t worry, they can’t see you. Not unless you want them to.”
There must be something wicked about me, because my blood heats.
His hand tucks the bottom corner of the curtain into the notch in the window frame, keeping it folded back that sliver of an inch. “I’m going to fuck you in this carriage, Goldfinch.”
A full-body shiver takes over, my hands pinned to the slope of his shoulders. “There are people outside,” I say breathlessly, even now, turning to look through the curtain. “I shouldn’t have even let you do what you already did. What if someone sees? Hears?”
“Yes, what if?”
I didn’t think he could be any more scandalous than he already was, but Slade does nothing by halves. And when it comes to the heat between us? He always magnifies it, always catches me off guard with the way he can make my mind swim with lust and my body bend to hunger.
“We’re in the busiest part of the city. These streets are packed with people. Yet here you were, on my lap, writhing when I fingered your wet pussy.”
My hands tighten around the hard tones of his muscles. “Slade.”
He grinds up into me, his rigid length hitting my sensitive spot and making me jolt. Simply the thought of him sinking into me makes my pulse race. The thought of him doing that while just a thin carriage wall separates us from everyone else. Even now, I can hear an ensemble of unintelligible shouts and speech, of hooves and creaks, doors slamming open, dozens of feet shuffling against the paths.
It makes my heart gallop.
As if he can read my mind, one side of his mouth tips up. “You want to experience things, so let’s experience them. We’ll start with seeing if your pussy gets wetter with a hint of exhibitionism.”
He grinds up again, shakes an exhale from the recesses of my chest.
“And if you want to experience someone else? Then you say the word, and I’ll take you to the nearest brothel and you can take your pick.”
His fingers knot into my waist, sliding me back and forth over his cock. Again. And again. And again. It doesn’t matter that I just had an orgasm, because with the way he plucks at my body and strums me into a cadence of lust, I’m once again growing hot, growing wet.
My entire face feels like I’m hovering over a steaming bowl, leaving me with a flushed sheen. “How can you just say things like that?” I ask, my voice jagged with the pulls of my hips.
“There’s no shame between us. Especially not sexually.”
To prove his point, he somehow spins me around until the curve of my ass is caught deep against his groin. He clips his thighs beneath mine and spreads them wide, spreading me wide. The waist of my undone pants gapes, too big and too loose to do anything but sag around my hips like the envelope of an invitation already ripped open.
“Fae are carnal. Sensual.” His hands come down, easily slipping right back where they’d left. All four fingers glide up and down over my mound, pressing down hard, a firm drag of slow burn friction. “Your desires are not to be staunched or controlled. I am not intimidated by your curiosities, because they’re natural—and because you have been restrained for far too long. I’m never going to clip your wings, Goldfinch.”
His dark words wrap around me, and I tip back against his chest, let my spine move with his breath. Though my eyes still dart to that wedge of window, at the bodies moving just outside. Everyone out there makes everything he’s doing in here that much more tantalizing.
Slade uses a hand to turn my cheek, to lock our gazes together. “When I say you’re mine, it’s not cheap ownership. I don’t see you as a figure to lock to my arm like a toy to keep away from all others.”
That was the only mine I knew.
“So what are you saying exactly?” I ask with a faltered breath.
“I mean you’re mine to please. To pleasure.” The motive in his eyes matches with the drag of his hand, the curl of his palm as he presses against my throbbing clit and makes me see sparks of light behind my eyes. “You’re mine to protect. To adore. To hear. To see. To experience. To love.”
A pitted lump burns in my throat.
“You’re mine, Auren. As wholly as I am yours. If there’s something you crave, if there’s some freedom you want to try the taste of, then you will do it, and I will be right there with you. Watching you devour your wants. And then I will devour you.”
I turn to face him more, to take in the sharp lines of his jaw, the sincerity in his eye. “You’d really go anywhere with me, do anything? Even stand back if I wanted to kiss someone other than you?”
“Make no mistake. I will watch you with hunger and feast on the scene of your thrill. But after you’ve had your fill, I’ll be there, driving my cock into your sweet cunt, purging all others from your skin as I take you. Over and over again. Until you remember that I’m the one you crave the most. The one who will always give you what you need. Until you remember that you’re mine all over again.”
Great Divine.
“So what will it be, Goldfinch?” he purrs into my ear. “What will it be?”
Innocent words. Wicked meaning.
My chest slings with gasps, my body a million prickles all over. My thoughts spinning.
What will it be?
I slowly lift up from his lap, turn. And with the shaft of light feeding in from that peeking window, I kneel. Right there on the cramped floorboards between the stretch of his open thighs.
And I look at him, eye to eye, truth to truth, and say, “I choose you.”
His eyes flare. Hands tighten into fists at his sides as if it’s the only way to keep from snatching me up. Because he knows what I’m saying. And from the intensity surging through his expression, he also knows that I mean it.
It’s always going to be him.
Poised between his legs, I undo the ties at his pants, slipping the cords out of their loops. I look up at him, and with his gaze searing into me, I tug. His hips lift just enough for me to draw them down, just enough for me to see an inch of dark hair.
When I peek up at him, he nods. “Go on, Goldfinch. Slip your fingers down to my cock and claim what’s yours.”
A rush goes through me as I reach up and tug at the front of his pants. I delve beneath the gap and grip his length, pulling it free.
He groans. Kicks his hips up slightly in the sexiest position shift I’ve ever seen.
Still watching him, I fist his cock and squeeze, pumping him slowly. Once. Twice. Three times.
“The fact that you’re not threatened by any of those things I told you, the fact that you’d support any of my decisions and wants...I have to admit, it’s a huge turn-on,” I tell him.
“Yeah?” Slade asks, as he reaches down and grips my chin. “Show me.”
A new current charges through me in a rush, igniting me all the way to my core. When he’s like this, when he shows me this dominant lust, it spreads through me like a wildfire, and all I want to do is burn.
And I want him to burn with me.
I lower my head, flick my tongue out at the beaded drop collected just at his tip. My tastebuds curl around the taste of his musk, my tongue a tease as I swirl around the head. Lapping at it. Wetting it. Provoking it until it jumps in my hand.
“Mmm, you want to play?”
In answer, and maybe just to catch him off guard, I suddenly part my lips and suck in the head of his cock. An inhale grits through clenched teeth as I dip my head, trying to go lower, trying to take him as deep as I can go.
But he’s thick. Long. And so incredibly hard. My jaw acclimates, loosening as I move up and down over him, trying to go a little bit deeper every time.
“What a perfectly indecent mouth you have,” he says, just as his hands come down to thread through my hair, delving into my braid, fingers jabbing through.