Exposed (Madame X, #2)

He wiggles his finger, and I groan loudly. “This? You like this? My dirty girl likes it when I touch her asshole.”

I moan in equal parts mortification and desire. I do. Oh god, I do. I like it so much. It feels so good. “Yes, Logan. I like it. I’m your dirty girl, and I like it.” Did that sound stupid? It did, to me. It sounded idiotic. Cheesy.

But Logan moans against my core and his finger throbs in and out of me in shallow pulsing thrusts and I’m whimpering and grinding against his mouth and taking more of his finger and I feel fire blossoming now. Perhaps it only sounded stupid to me, because I feel so self-conscious, despite how incredible this is.

Whatever I’d felt before, any other time in my life, any orgasm I’ve ever experienced, it was but a shadow of what is about to occur.

I shatter.

I scream. My scream deafens even me.

There are no words to capture the intensity of my orgasm. It is fire. Wildfire, sunfire, angelfire. All the stars in the galaxy going nova in my core all at once. Volcanoes erupting, earthquakes wracking the tectonic plates of my being.

“Logan!” I scream.

I am left breathless, shaking, trembling, shivering, and I can’t help crying. I am so limp, so utterly wrecked that I can only reach for Logan and cling to him and shake, and try to breathe. After I don’t even know how long, the shivers and shakes subside, and I can breathe. And Logan is still painfully erect, prodding into my belly.

I shift, and I’m on top of him. The tip of his cock presses against my opening, and his eyes are hot and wild, yet tainted by some stain of conflict.

“What, Logan?” I ask, and settle onto his stomach, rather than pushing him into me. “What’s wrong? I see it in your eyes.”

He shifts me off him, and we lie on our sides, facing each other. “Not yet, Isabel.”

I blink. “Not yet?” My throat is tight. “Why not?”

“I want to, so bad. I know you do, too. But I don’t think we should, yet.”

“Why not?” I feel desperate.

And angry. Unreasonably angry, feral with unsated need. I feel rejected, denied. Spurned. Confused. My chest tightens and my eyes sting, hot.

His thumb wipes at my eyes. “Don’t cry, Isabel. Please.” His voice is low, quiet, careful. “It’s all so hard to explain.”

“You can put your mouth on me, and let me suck you, and you can put your finger in—in my . . .” It’s hard to say out loud, but I force myself to speak my mind, bluntly and without filter. “You can put your finger in my asshole. You can come on my breasts. You can lick my *. But you can’t have sex with me?” I feel proud of myself for saying those words, for speaking so daringly.

It’s not my way. Or rather, it wasn’t Madame X’s way, but perhaps it is how Isabel talks.

He closes his eyes, squeezes them tight, breathes out a harsh sigh. “Isabel—”

“I don’t understand, Logan. I’m trying, but I don’t.”

“Everything up until now, it’s been amazing. You are amazing. You’re a dream. You’re so much—so much more, in every way, than anyone I’ve ever known. You overwhelm me.” He touches my cheekbone with his thumb. “I feel like I’m drowning, sometimes, like you’re an ocean and I’m just trying to stay afloat. And . . . the thing is . . . I want to drown in you. I like the way it feels. To lose myself in you. I feel like—god, it’s hard to put in words. Like there’s nothing else, no one else, like the world doesn’t exist. I feel like in this moment I could just be with you and make love to you and touch you and make you feel good, and there would be nothing but us forever. I could sink into you, and we’d disappear into each other. It’d just be us.”

“Me too, Logan. I am drowning. I’ve drowned. I can’t breathe without you. I’ve tried. I don’t know anything else. I just want this. I want you. I want us. Please, Logan.” My voice shakes on the last two words.

His eyes waver, flick from my eyes to my mouth, back to my eyes. “There’s more than just us, Isabel. I can’t ignore that. I want to, but I can’t. There’s so much that’s gone before this moment, and we both know it. There’s just . . . so much.” He breathes, long deep breaths, as if girding himself to speak unpleasant truth. “I want you, Isabel.”

“You have me, Logan.”

“Let me say this, okay? First, you have to understand that I’m not rejecting you. I want you. I want this. I want us. And this is honestly the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Saying no, it’s harder than anything I’ve ever had to do, and I mean that. I see that it hurts you, and I hate it more than anything.”

I draw a breath. “You told me you’d rather have an unpleasant truth than a good-sounding lie. Well, so would I, Logan.” I sit up, bringing the sheet over my chest and facing him. “So give me the truth.”

He sits up, too. Drapes the sheet over his lap. His brows furrow. His hair is tangled, and his mouth flattens in a hard line. “If Caleb showed up right now, what would you say to him?”

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