by Nadia Aidan
His pleasure would not come until afterward.
A groan was wrenched from her lips when he dipped his head to take her clit within his mouth again. It was as if he waged a war upon her body, the onslaught of pleasure was so intense, so mind numbing.
The room was cool, but sweat dotted her skin as the musk of her arousal and climax hovered in the air, heavy and thick. She drew it in, savouring it. Her pleasure—a testament to Adonis’ mastery.
Adonis sucked her harder, and the pressure sent a spike of heat racing down her spine. A hot blush crept over her and she closed her eyes and parted her lips, but no intelligible sound came out. Only a whispery, ragged moan of completion as an explosion of blinding pleasure went off inside her.
Fireworks exploded behind her lids as she came again and again, one orgasm blending into the next, until she was spent and boneless.
Only then did she command him to stop.
Adonis lifted his head from between Selena’s thighs, his eyes trained on her.
She was beautiful—ethereal.
Spread before him, revelling in her pleasure, ensnared by the trappings of her lust. No other man had touched her since him, and yet she’d blossomed into her sexuality, awakened into full womanhood.
She was exquisite.
He knelt before her and remained there as she climbed off the bed and crossed the room. She bent down and plucked something from the floor, and his heart stuttered when the moonlight reflected off the object in her hand.
Hard, black and unyielding, fashioned out of pure marble and stained a rich onyx.
His cock hardened despite himself.
The object in her hand was smaller than the nine inches he wielded, but it would bring pleasure just as easily as it could engender pain.
He did not speak as he watched her open a jar atop his dresser and dip the full length of the dildo into the liquid, coating it fully. She’d found the dildo in his closet. She’d apparently found the lubricant as well. There were many objects of pleasure and tools of pain locked within its confines. They were from a time long ago when he’d been a legend among both men and women—a master of pleasure and seduction, his prowess in bed bringing him untold wealth. The riches he still possessed, but he was none of those other things anymore—only a broken man still tormented by his past, still tormented by what he’d done to her.
Adonis had not used any of the sexual toys in his closet in a very long time, yet he’d kept them as a reminder of what he’d once been. In his arrogance, he’d been full of himself, full of pride at the fantasies he could so easily fulfil with just the crook of his finger, the slip of his tongue, the whisper of his breath against warm skin. Now he was repulsed by it all. It had been because of who he was and what he did that he’d been chosen to violate Selena—and he never wanted to forget.
He was so deeply lost in his memories of the past that he did not realise Selena now stood within a hair’s breadth of him until he felt the soft, wet kiss of her lips against his neck, his shoulder, his scarred back.
He jerked away.
“Do not,” he warned. But his warning was futile. Her hands tangled in his hair, urging him close.
“This is my revenge, slave. And I desire to kiss you.”
He gritted his teeth, biting back his protest along with a vile curse.
She was seducing him, before she inflicted pain—just as he’d once done. She’d begged him not to strip her of her virginity, but her cries had fallen on deaf ears as he’d kissed every inch of her silken skin until she was pliable, biddable, begging him not to stop.
Tonight she would coax his body until he welcomed the pain she was determined to inflict, until he begged for the pleasure only she could give him.
Despite that knowledge, his body relaxed beneath her lips and tongue, as she kissed his flesh, damaged by lash and fire. She kissed his back as if it was not hideously scarred and he stretched out flat across the bed, a sigh escaping him.
His eyes slipped shut as she kissed a wet trail across his ass, down the backs of his thighs to the crevices behind his knees. She even licked his ankles and the arches of his feet.
He fisted his hands into the bed covers, his eyes clenched shut. A warm ball of need burst in the pit of his stomach, a mixture of agony and longing. With his burgeoning cock trapped between the weight of his body and the mattress beneath him, he experienced a twinge of discomfort.
Adonis welcomed it. He welcomed the pain, along with the pleasure of her hands, her lips, even the slight tickling of her breath against his skin.
Sixteen years…and now nine hours…since he’d last been with a woman— her. His body ached for whatever succour she chose to bestow upon his ravaged flesh, whatever pleasure she chose to appease his raw need.
A groan threatened to escape, but he held it back, trapping it in his chest when her finger, tentative at first, pushed against the puckered hole of his anus. His heart pounded faster. His swelling cock pulsed.
Her finger was wet, as if she’d sucked it into her mouth before probing his hole. She pushed it deeper, to the knuckle, and this time he could not hold back his pleasure as he gasped.
His hips jerked against the bed, then lifted, sending her finger tunnelling deeper. She fingered him with her digit, stretching his unyielding flesh. He stiffened when her lips kissed his buttocks, her finger setting a lazy rhythm. Adonis soon relaxed, savouring the pleasure worming its way through him, the heat stirring in his belly.
She worked her finger inside him harder and faster, going deeper as her tongue teased his flesh. He called her name in desire, in desperation. “Selena…”
The wet slide of her tongue against his hole stilled him and he twisted around, his hand wrapping around her neck. “What are you doing?” he demanded, his chest heaving, his voice harsh.
She did not flinch. Fear did not darken her eyes. Instead, she narrowed her gaze, studying him, searching deep. For the first time that night, she began to peel away the layers he’d buried himself under, the shield he’d hidden behind to protect himself from her.
“What are you so afraid of? I have barely begun and yet at the first flare of desire you recoil from me.” Her hands were gentle against his arm, coaxing him to relax his hold until he released her neck.
She held his stare, her fingers delicately tracing a path up and down his arm, across his chest, the length of his abdomen. When her fist curled around his cock, pumping slowly, he groaned, a strangled sound even to his own ears.
He did not want to experience pleasure, but she was determined that he would—he could see that now. She was determined to make him enjoy this, as he’d made her enjoy it. She was determined to make him cry out, as he’d made her cry out in pleasure, fulfilment…completion.
He turned back over onto his stomach and this time, when she parted the cheeks of his ass and probed his anus with her tongue, he did not resist. He welcomed the pulsing, throbbing desire that inched its way through his body, making him rock hard with need.
So many years he’d pleasured others, attending to their needs, their wants and desires, but none had attended to him as she was doing now. None had ever sought to give him pleasure, even as they’d gifted him with their own. He was weak beneath her roaming hands and her probing tongue. The only woman who’d ever had the power to hurt him threatened to shatter him with her tenderness.
She licked and tongued him until he was on the verge of exploding. He did not believe his pleasure could become more intense…yet it did.
“Roll over,” she breathed. “I want to taste you.”
His eyes snapped open, and he shook his head, but she ignored the protest forming on his lips as she nudged him onto his back.
A tiny droplet of pre-cum beaded at the tip, and she swiped it with her tongue. Before he could stop her, she took his cock into her hands, before taking it inside her warm, wet mouth.
“Selena,” he rasped, gripping the blankets of the bed so that he would not grip her hair or the back of her head, forc
ing her mouth to take him deeper…or push her away and force her to stop.
Her head bobbed up and down, his shaft disappearing inside her mouth over and over again as she took him down her throat, deep and hard.
The blood in his veins ran hot and molten. His toes curled from the pleasure of her lips around him, sucking him. He thought he would die, maybe even blackout from the myriad intense sensations she invoked within him when she took him deeper than he’d ever been inside another’s mouth before. All the way to the back of her throat, she swallowed his cock and that’s when he felt it.
Pain. Just a tiny twinge arced through him like a small lightning bolt—from his stretching rectum all the way up his spine to the base of his skull.
She sucked his cock deeper into her mouth.
Pleasure.
His body hovered somewhere between pain and pleasure as she deep-throated his cock in one moment while she stretched his rectum with the dildo in the next.
The dual sensations—at war with one another, blending into one another—raked through him. His insides were on fire, his body throbbing with hot, pulsing pleasure.
She pumped the fake cock inside him slowly at first, gently, until his body relaxed around the invading object. Then she went deeper, harder, faster. Her mouth echoed the same drumming rhythm—taking him deeper, harder, faster.
Frissons of fire and ice raced up his spine. Every cell within his body sizzled. The wave cresting within him threatened to drown him with its intensity. The hurling force of his impending climax was impossible to stop.
He called her name in warning, his hands pushing against her shoulders.
She held fast, her lips clamping around him hard as she shoved the solid dildo all the way inside him on one violent thrust.
Pain raked through him, clawing at his chest.
Pleasure raked through him, clawing at his belly.
He came, his voice a hoarse, tight shout as he shot stream after stream of his milky white seed into her mouth, down her throat. The heavy sacs beneath his cock drew tight against his body as if they were emptying every drop of semen into her, inside the velvety warmth of her waiting mouth.
It had been so long, too long, since he’d experienced pleasure in another’s arms. His orgasm seemed endless, the pleasure of his climax practically wrenched from his body until he was boneless, satiated and forced to beg her to stop.
Selena tasted the essence of Adonis on her lips, her tongue. Leaning back on her haunches, she rested her hands atop his thighs, her body still within the spread V of his legs.
His cock was soft once again, his golden skin flushed red. His eyes were hooded as he stared up at her. His brow furrowed into a frown. She was not certain if he was unhappy because he’d begged her to stop, because she’d done just that, or because she’d driven him to such a mindless state of pleasure that every vestige of control he’d possessed had been lost beneath her touch. She suspected it was all of those things.
With blinding speed, he shot up off the bed and was across the room within the blink of an eye.
His hand curled around her gun, and she stood slowly, carefully, her gaze wary. He returned to where she stood, facing her, and pressed the cold metal of the gun into her palm, with the barrel to his chest.
“You came here to kill me,” he said in answer to the question in her eyes. “So do it.”
She jerked her hand away, forcing him to hold the gun. His eyes were wild, desperate, and she sensed that what they’d just shared had ignited something within him, something long buried and long denied.
There was genuine fear in his amber gaze. He was afraid—not of any physical threat, but of an emotional one. In his eyes she saw it, what he feared.
She’d touched a part of him that he’d wanted to remain untouched. She’d opened a wound he’d thought long healed.
“When I am ready to use that gun, I will, but I am not ready.” Selena inched towards him, but stopped when he backed away. “What is it? What has changed between us that has made you so wary, so afraid?”
She’d hoped to placate him, but, if anything, her words had ignited his anger. Before she could take her next breath, her gun was once again in her hand, her back against the wall with his hand clamped around her throat.
“Now you shall use your gun.”
She would have laughed at the blatant provocation that was no more threatening than the gentle breeze just beyond the window, but the fear in his eyes truly made her ache for him.
“Why should I use my gun? Because your hand is at my throat?” A hand that gripped her so loosely, she needed to only turn her head to be free. “Because you have my back against a wall?” He did not even hold her securely.
“You’re a fool if you do not fear me.”
“Then I’m a fool,” Selena shot back.
Anger stole across his face, along with despair and pain. His eyes closed as he leaned his forehead against hers.
“I will not survive this night if you continue to treat me as you do.”
Selena curled her hand around his, the one that still held her throat. One by one, she pulled his fingers away as she palmed his cheek with her other hand.
“And how is it that I treat you?”
“With care, with tenderness.” He opened his eyes. “I hurt you.”
“You did.”
“And yet you nurture my desires, you seek to please me as no other has done before.”
He spoke of not surviving this night, but she was worried about her own survival. She despaired that her heart, her very soul, would not remain intact when they were done. As she stared into his eyes, she did not see the man she’d hated and blamed all these years. Instead, she saw one whose body had been used and brutalised, whose heart had been battered, his soul stripped from him when he’d been far too young.
Adonis.
His face, his beauty, his body had made him a legend. The pleasure he wielded, the desire he ignited had made him a god.
And yet, no one had ever sought to please him, to fulfil his desires. Not once had he ever abandoned himself to the pleasure of his lover’s arms. She’d met Adonis when she’d been too young to love, and they’d been set to marry. In her arms, he would have abandoned himself. But he’d hurt her. On the day they were to announce their engagement, he’d ruined her and for all these years she could see he’d been tormented by it—by what he’d done and what he’d lost.
She cupped his face between her hands, but he resisted when she tried to pull him close.
“No.”
“Kiss me,” she whispered.
“I do not want this.”
She forced back a sob at the despair in his eyes that said he was not worthy of her touch.
“But you need this.” She tipped her head back and tugged on him firmly. “Kiss me, please,” she begged.
The last word had barely left her lips before he crushed his mouth to hers in a desperate, searching kiss, full of pain and need.
Her arms twisted behind his neck.
He set the gun aside then clamped his hands around her hips, his fingers biting into her flesh. She ignored the pain. All she felt was the pleasure of him, his lips, his tongue stroking inside her mouth, twining with hers.
She drew his breath deep into her lungs, inside her body, until every pore, every cell was full of him. He seduced her with hot, deep glides of his tongue, his kiss igniting a toe-curling fire that spread throughout her blood, shaking her entire being.
Her hands found their way into his hair, digging into his scalp, holding him locked to her. In that moment, imprisoned within his embrace, she accepted that if he was desperate to abandon himself to the pleasurable arms of a lover, then so was she. As their tongues twisted together, their bodies melding and meshing, something shifted between them—something small, almost imperceptible, but their need for physical companionship brought them together, bonding them.
Adonis—the man, the god.
Could she still hate him when this was all ov
er? That question reverberated to her very core.
From a distance, locked away in the convent—when he’d been the seemingly immortal, impenetrable, untouchable godlike being—she’d loathed him.
But locked in his arms, experiencing his passion, his raw need, his soul-stirring pain…
When she touched him—he was simply a man.
A mortal man just as desperate for love as she.
A knock at the door forced them apart, and they released one another, their eyes wide, their chests heaving.
Shocked silence hovered between them as if neither one could discern what had just transpired.
Adonis was the first to recover.
“What is it?” he bit out, his voice deep and gravelly and not at all steady.
“It’s Ares,” boomed a deep voice full of authority from the other side of the door. “I need to speak with you and the woman. There has been a fire at Épicurien.”
Selena froze, ice water settling in her veins.
Serena.
Her sister.
She was in danger.
Chapter Four
Selena entered the living room with Adonis at her side to greet Ares—the dark god—whose countenance was stark against the smooth, white marble of the fireplace. As the flames in the fireplace leapt behind him, he seemed every bit as darkly sensual as his reputation proclaimed.
Darkly sensual and dangerous.
“You said there has been a fire at my sister’s bordello. Has she been harmed?”
“No,” Ares said flatly. He raked his gaze over her and her back stiffened beneath the weight of his probing stare. He knew. Though she wore fresh, clean clothes, and every hair on her head was in place, she might as well have been dishevelled from the knowing glimmer in his eyes. He knew she and Adonis had made love, and he did not approve. She lifted her chin, her eyes defiant, and the gesture did not go unnoticed by him, but she refused to cower, or feel shame. Ares may not approve, but he did not have to.