Her energy deflated. She should have known it would be that easy to beat him, even him. That easy to stay behind her walls. “I’ll tell you to stop.” She turned her head away in defeat. Just one word, then, was all it would take, to keep those walls strong. Damn him.
A hard hand released one wrist to take her chin and force it back to face him. His head lowered closer to hers. Not like the promise of a kiss. Like the threat. “What if I cover your mouth with my hand so you can’t?”
Arousal raced back through her, a giddy and disorienting hope. “I’ll bite you.”
His voice grew even rougher, deeper. His body pressed harder. “What if I like it?”
She sneered at him. Sneered at herself. “Then I’ll cry.” As if she would ever cry. That morning on the beach when she had come close had been so bad—that painful, raw feeling of arms holding her at her weakest, of being loved.
But that would definitely stop him, if she cried.
His mouth came so close it nearly brushed her cheek, just under her eye. His voice was not even sound, just a gravel breath: “What if I just lick away the tears?”
Her body jolted against his. That sudden vision of such sweet, carnivorous intimacy.
He pulled back, his teeth sharp. “I need more salt in my diet.”
She stared at him, energy thrumming through her, thrumming and thrumming, as if her whole body was the body of a guitar. She reached up a hand and seized him by the neck as if she wanted to shake him. “You’re going to eat my tears?” she demanded between her teeth.
He shrugged. “If they taste good.”
Her nails sank into his neck, and she yanked his head down to her, yanked herself up into him when he didn’t yield fast enough, and she bit a kiss onto his mouth.
Bit hard. Bit deep. Sank her tongue and her lips into it, gave it fury. There. That will teach you to kiss me like that last night. That will—
Teach you.
He learned fast. Twisting that kiss back around on her, taking her mouth with teeth and tongue until she could barely breathe, and when he lifted his head she sank panting against the wall.
He braced himself on his forearms, his weight heavy against them, barely held off her. He was breathing hard, too, his lips damp and a little swollen. “So how am I supposed to know?” he pressed at her.
She nearly growled at him, her teeth bared. “I’ll scream for the guards! And have you arrested.” Was that good enough? They both knew she would never do that to him.
The way they both knew he would never do anything bad to her.
And yet still she had to fight. She had to. If she could have just walked out from behind those walls, she would have done it long since.
“But what if I do this?” His hand slid fast down to the hem of her skirt and pulled it straight up, pressing his hot palm into her panties.
Anne went very still. She couldn’t even remember what it felt like to have a hot palm pressed between her legs. This wild, burning paralysis that came from it, that swept through her body.
His voice went very low. The heel of his palm nudged insistently. “Then what are you going to do, Anne?”
She shook her head mutely. Her breath grew too shallow, dry, ragged sips of air.
“Nothing?” he murmured, his eyes gentling, even as his body hardened still further. He rubbed her through her panties. “You like that, Anne?” His voice had gone—tender. Possessive. Insistent.
She angled her head away.
His voice dropped nearly beyond sound, just a fierce breath of satisfaction. “Ah, you do.”
No, she didn’t. She couldn’t like something that was driving her crazy.
His voice deepened further, more intimate, caressing, his mouth coming close to her ear. “Would you like it right here?” He kept rubbing so gently and relentlessly, his body closing all around hers now, hiding her in him. His mouth touched her earlobe. His jaw prickled down her throat. “I’ve thought up well over fifty ways to make you my lover.”
“‘Leave,’” she managed, barely a breath. The feelings that were climbing through her from his hand were too strange. Someone else’s hand didn’t give her those feelings. Not ever. “It’s fifty ways to leave your lover.”
“Yeah, I don’t do that leaving shit.” His prickly jaw trailed down her throat. "If you haven’t figured that out about me yet, Anne, you haven’t been paying attention.” His hand rubbed, experimenting, testing pressure to see what made her shiver. Testing rhythm. He bit her shoulder, gently. Her bared shoulder. That’s right, she was stripped down to her bra and ripped-open shirt.
“Mack. I just—” She turned her head into his neck, closing her eyes. “It’s just—please, I—” Had she said please? She didn’t beg.
“Do you want me to tell you some of them?” That deep, rough voice rubbed itself against her throat as it somehow managed to vibrate all the way down the core of her body and stroke between her legs.
She tried to hold still, because she didn’t know how to let what was happening to her be seen. The blurring, trembling heat coming up from his hand through her body.
“That table,” Mack said. “Right there. That heavy, old table with its wood all worn to silk, that you like to run your hands over. I’ve thought about pushing you back on it and spreading your legs while you say no and putting my mouth to you until you say yes.”
Her body liquified, and that liquid crept out through her panties and bragged about itself.
“Ah, you like that one.” That rub of his hand was a rub of approval. “And then eventually you beg, in that one. You grab at me, while you say, ‘Fuck me, fuck me, Mack, please.’”
God. Her hands dug their way up his arms, begging for support.
“That’s a good one,” he said. “I have that one a lot. And then there’s the one where you look at me over your shoulder, trying to freeze me. Only I have the magic power, of course, and I just snap my fingers, and all your clothes melt away. And there you are, still looking at me. But you’re all naked, Anne. Your back, your butt. And I can just walk up to you and stroke my hands wherever I want, all over you, until—once again—you’re begging, and twisting, and just incoherent with want. I don’t think you can even manage to say fuck in that one. It depends on the night.”
Her skin felt tight, need and desire tightening and tightening in her, drawn into his hand, until everything, everything about her entire being depended on that rhythm. That sound of his voice, reverberating through every intimate part of her body.
“And then there’s this one,” he murmured.
Her head sank onto his shoulder, her mind hazy, full of words and images and the rub of his hand.
“This one right here.” His voice sank through her. His hand rubbed.
“The one that starts just…like…this.” His thumb twisted where his palm had rubbed, and she arched into him suddenly, her nails digging, the heat exploding into her, up from his hand. This surprise assault. A series of explosions that kept coming, that one big shocker, and then more and more little ones, as if the attack would never end.
Pleasure bombarded her and wouldn’t stop. So much pleasure it made her want to collapse before it and just weep from it. But there were too many shocks of pleasure to leave time for tears.
She hid her face in his shoulder while he rode them, while he kept his hand gentle and persistent until he’d milked the last one from her and then they all slowly faded away. Even after her body finally calmed, she still kept her face hidden in his shoulder, no idea what expression to put on it when she lifted it.
He picked her up, pulling her thighs apart around his hips, pressing his own jean-clad arousal into her wet panties. “And then,” he said. “Then there are the fifty or so with the bed.”
Chapter 9
He tossed her on the bed like his spoils from a war. She bounced on the antique white linens and scrambled to get up on her elbows, even as he landed in a sitting position on the edge of the bed beside her and thrust his arm between her legs s
o they couldn’t close against him.
“A.L.W.” With his other hand, he traced the monogram she’d had added to those old linens and showed his teeth again, in that fierce, hungry victory. “I’m glad you told me whose bed this was, Anne, so there wouldn’t be any confusion about whose territory I’m taking over. You want me to give you some new sheets that say M.A.C.?”
Just the thought both shot arousal through her again and made her want to strangle him for his gloating, subdue him under her. Teach him who was queen here.
And yet his forces were already well inside her walls.
“Mack.” She grabbed for verbal weapons. “I don’t have any—there’s nothing in my nightstand, you know.”
“Anne.” He braced his hand against the great oak headboard behind her. Victorian. She’d painted it white herself. White on white everywhere here. Untouchable. Aloof. “I haven’t had sex with anyone but you in a long, long, long time.”
“You haven’t been having sex with me either!”
“It’s been vicarious.” He pulled a packet out of his back pocket. “But I brought some anyway. In case you felt fastidious.” He waved the foil packet at her and gave that little, mean, I’m-beating-you grin. “Make you mad?”
That he had come assuming he would win? Yes. She pressed her lips together and glared at him.
He leaned forward until he pressed his hands to the mattress to either side of her face, his thigh sliding up between her legs. “Enough to say Fuck you?”
“F—” She caught herself and tightened her lips again.
“I brought three,” he taunted, pressing his thigh right up between her thighs and rubbing it there. “Go on, Anne. Say it.”
Again the provocation nearly brought the words out. She fought them back.
“God, you’re so mean,” he said and lowered his hips enough to drag the fastening of his jeans between her spread legs, a masculine, rough invasion between her thighs that was nothing like anything she could ever give herself. “Me, too.”
She gave a little hitch of breath as he rocked his hips just an inch or two back and forth, dragging the thick placket of his jeans against her.
“You can either say that or fuck me,” he told her. My way or…my other way.
“Or you could say it,” she shot back, even as her hips rocked up into him for more of that maddening, invasive masculinity.
“Oh, yeah, sure.” He pulled down her panties, his fingers sliding in against her sex as if they had an incontestable right to do whatever the hell they wanted with her. “Fuck me, Anne. Fuck me out of my mind.” Two fingers drove straight into her sex.
Into.
Her sex.
Into her.
He was in her.
And he liked it. His face was fierce, gleeful, triumphant.
“Now, see,” he said. His fingers moved deeper. “Now I can say I’ve fucked you. Whatever else happens, I’ll have fucked you with my fingers, Anne.” His fingers eased up. Plunged back in deeper. “I’ve gotten in.”
“You bastard.” Her inner muscles tightened around him, and she barely even knew she had inner muscles. She used them for pelvic exercises. That was all. She did them the same way she had microdermabrasion done from time to time and always made sure to use her facial creams. To stay perfect, in health, beat age, not find herself wearing a diaper thirty years from now. She didn’t use them for sex.
But now she did. Tightening on him, grabbing for those fingers slipping out. Lifting up to seek more of them, until he gave that victorious, smug, damn fierce grin and drove them right back in.
He bent his other arm, bringing his weight onto his forearm, his body just above hers, pinning her, as he kept up the motion. “Want to be fucked with anything else?” he whispered, tauntingly.
Yes. Damn him.
Damn him for her hero. Mack Corey, you goddamn conquering warrior king. Why didn’t you attack years ago?
But then again, why hadn’t she thrown him a rose down from her tower or something? Or just opened the damn gates and let him in?
Maybe she’d needed to be dragged out of her castle into someone else’s prison to shake her up, to give her the guts or the temper. The struggling, kicking, screaming, panicked courage.
“Or do you want to fuck me?” he whispered into her ear.
“It’s the same thing,” she managed, even as her hips bucked.
He shook his head. “It’s a completely different perspective.” Just like that, he rolled them so that she was astride him.
She gasped at the exposure and vulnerability, her skirt bunched up all around her, the panels of her shirt flapping. Involuntarily, she tightened her stomach muscles. What she looked like from this perspective hadn’t been an issue since…well, since she had been young enough that it also hadn’t been an issue. Even when she was fighting her stomach muscles back into shape after Kurt’s birth, she’d only been twenty-one, so those muscles and skin had still cooperated then with her drive for perfection.
She had no idea what she looked like from Mack’s point of view, but she knew what he looked like from hers.
At her mercy.
The man who had come to attack her castle had been captured by its queen.
Oh, yeah. She could get used to this.
She pinned his wrists.
That was ridiculous, her fingers only half closed around them. But his eyes glittered up at her, as if she had him trapped. His hips bucked up against hers.
Now she rubbed him—rocking her pelvis forward and back, dragging her sex against his jeans.
Mack’s breath came in harshly. “They unzip, you know.”
“Maybe you should beg,” she retorted, her chin up loftily, her heart pounding. Her whole body pounding. With him. With that want for him. For so much more than her life held.
His eyes glittered, willing victim. It was a trap. He was luring her in. No way Mack would be willing to lose. He arched his head back, exposing that strong, tan throat. “Fuck me, Anne,” he pleaded in a whisper, as if his throat was all parched, as if he was desperate in her prison. “Come on. Fuck me.” His hips pressed up again.
She pulled her torn shirt off, because it was getting the hell in her way, and threw it onto the floor. A long breath moved through his body, his eyes brilliant blue. The light fell through her pale, transparent curtains, onto him. Breeze stirred over them, that cooling September wind off the sea.
“Do it.” His hips pressed more insistently. “Come on, Anne. Take at least one piece of my goddamn clothing off.”
She considered him for a long moment, enjoying the way she could torment him just by barely twisting her hips. Torment herself. Then, still astride him, she leaned over to her nightstand drawer and pulled out her tiny embroidery scissors. Mack’s eyes widened at the sight of them, and he held very still, as if he might be genuinely afraid her instincts for torture were going to come out. As if he felt genuinely caught at the mercy of a dangerous queen.
She smiled at him, in sweet, mean reassurance, writhed her pelvis down hard against his as she leaned in, and brought the tiny lethal scissors right up to his throat. His lips pressed tight together as he held his breath.
She opened the scissors with a little snip, holding his eyes. His flinched a little and then locked hard with hers. He pressed his fists on the mattress where she had left them, as if she’d locked them there, not grabbing her wrist or knocking those scissors away from his throat.
Very carefully, she cut through the hem of his T-shirt’s neckline. His breath left him in a little gasp. Then she set the scissors back on the nightstand, grabbed either side of that cut, and ripped the panels in half.
“Holy shit.” Mack’s breathing had gone ragged. “Oh, shit, fuck, that’s hot. Anne. Anne, honey. Come on.” His hips bucked again.
She drove her own pelvis back down onto him with all her force, trying to master his hips with hers. But of course, his just fought back, both of them driving against each other in this contest of grinding strength that m
ade his cheeks flush and his chest lift and fall harder and harder.
She pushed the panels of his shirt fully aside and studied that chest as its muscles flexed with his breaths.
Damn, he had a nice body. Those broad shoulders, tanned from all those ocean swims, and that hard chest. Fifty-three years of confidence, experience, work. His body knew damn well who he was and what he could do about it.
She ran her hands over it, suddenly, utterly—delighted. Happy. Not afraid. Not fighting. This heat under her hands, this strength—
She didn’t even know she had the word wow in her vocabulary.
And yet it was—Wow.
Incredible, spectacular, delicious. All that under his T-shirts when he walked beside her on the beach, all this time?
It was hers to touch now?
It was so warm.
Like touching some sun-wolf or something. She bent down and pressed her lips there in that hollow of muscle where his shoulder turned into his chest.
Then she sat right back up and raked her nails, delicate and dangerous, over the spot.
Mine. See what happens when you try to attack my castle?
His eyes gleamed up at her as if he knew now exactly the error of his ways. But, bizarrely, he didn’t seem afraid.
He seemed pretty damn full of himself, to be honest.
His hands went of their own accord to the button of his jeans.
She let them. She liked the way his knuckles bumped and ground against her sex while he fought with the button. She even twisted her hips to put that bump and grind into just the spots she wanted it.
“Come on,” he begged again for mercy. “Come on, Anne, let me get my—” He managed to slide the zip down, so that his penis sprang up against her, blocked only by soft cotton briefs.
She smiled, a smile that felt slow and mean and silky, and very deliberately, very gently, rubbed herself against that penis, dampening that cotton, making it cling to him. And to her. She wanted to thrust herself onto him just like that. Just grab him, cotton and all, and wedge him inside her.
But when she reached for him—well, it was so much simpler to thrust that underwear out of the way.
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