by Maria Luis
His breath hitches, and mine expands to fill my chest.
“Feet thundering down the stairs, the way you roared my name. You came for me, and I heard you every step of the way.”
“What exactly are you trying to say?”
Gruff. Rigid. If I could tease my fingers across his face now, he would be stiff as stone. A man holding on, a god preparing to fall. “You followed me,” I murmur with a softness that I know will unravel him, “and you chased me. Not for Saxon or Isla Quinn or the Crown, but for me. For a man not willing to be cut down at the knees, Damien, you sure are—”
A gasp flies from my mouth when he grips my waist and abruptly spins me around. Like a sacrifice, I’m flattened against the altar. Hardness digging into my pelvis, my arms flailing for purchase. I strike something solid, and iron grates against marble, a shrill shriek in the otherwise silent chapel. Damien’s palm goes to the base of my spine, holding me still, and then he leans over to—
The candles.
Oh, fuck. The candles.
“Damien.” Trapped between earthen hardness and human steel, I squirm to no avail. Desperation brings my foot down on top of his, anything to stop him from realizing that—
“The wick is still warm.”
Saliva pools in my mouth. “Someone must have come down here.” I came down here. While Damien sought out Holly Village to kill me, I sat in this chapel and lit a candle for him. Ridiculous. Pathetic. Feeling the hounds of hell on my heels, I blurt, “Gregory is religious.”
The incriminating silence stretches on, and on, until, “Religious?” Without waiting for an answer, the firm hand at the small of my back slips under my robe and scorches my skin. “What made him come down here tonight? What prayers”—the pitch of Damien’s timbre roughens—“do you think he whispered when he thought no one could hear him?”
“Forgiveness.” Tasting the truth through the lens of a lie, I run my tongue over the back of my teeth. “Gregory wanted forgiveness.”
A small pause. “For?”
On a rasp, I answer, “For killing you.”
The iron candle rack clatters to the marble, abandoned.
The hand under my robe slips back out, taking with it my sanity, then begins its upward ascent. It skims my waist and follows every curve. It avoids each wound and cut as though the landscape of my body is one that’s already been intimately learned. Except that Damien wouldn’t . . . he couldn’t—
Oh, my God.
He knows.
He knows because he’s already seen me.
Naked.
Vulnerable.
At his mercy.
A sound rises in my throat, and my hands ball into fists on the marble, and then the softest pair of lips known to mankind are on my pulse, right below my jawline. Testing me, stripping away every layer of armor before I even have the chance to don another. “Don’t tell me that you’re nervous now,” comes that silken voice, the mocking words resonating against my skin like a venerable prayer.
A throwback to that day in the cell when he found me locked away with Alfie Barker. When he cuffed my wrists and started us down a road that has no other destination but perdition. “I’m not nervous,” I whisper back, succumbing to the memory, to the rapid beat of my heart pumping loud enough to wake the dead. “You don’t make me nervous.”
“Your pulse would argue otherwise, Miss Carrigan.”
I feel him smile. Predatory, victorious. Wicked. And then the hand that had paused now edges north, past my shoulder, to collar the back of my neck. A whimper catches in my throat, and I strain backward with my spine arched, fingers stretching across the altar.
I breathe his name.
He drapes his chest over my back, so that I’m tucked beneath him completely, the outside world narrowed down to only this room, only this altar, only our flushed bodies. I’m bound, not by metal or pain, but by brawny muscles and the scent of cloves and the knowledge that whatever comes next, I want it. Deep down, in a place known to no one but me, I crave this.
“Do you know what I think, Rowena?” Damien husks, his thumb caressing my throat. When I give a tiny shake of my head, a dark chuckle reverberates against my back. “I think you lit the candle. I bet you kneeled real pretty for me. So solemn, so very somber. Did you pray for my forgiveness?”
Fire sparks in my veins. “I wished you entry to Hell.”
His hand flexes on the back of my neck like he’s not sure whether to laugh at my impertinence or fold me over his lap and take a palm to my arse. Instead, he yanks all the oxygen from the room with a gravel-pitched drawl that leaves me wrecked: “No, it wouldn’t be like you to want forgiveness. Not then, when you thought you were doing the right thing. Not even now.”
I swallow, hard. “Damien, I—”
“You mourned for me.”
23
Rowena
My chest heaves with a harsh breath. “I don’t. I didn’t. You and I, we’re nothing more than—”
“You mourned,” Damien growls in my ear, “for what I could never give you if I was dead. And what you wanted most is me.” His fingers slip from my nape to gently clasp my throat. With nothing more than that tangible hold to tether us, he pulls me away from the altar. I’m encased in shadow, his hand my only anchor, until the hard planes of his chest cushion the back of my head and I’m embraced. “Am I right, Rowena? Am I what you want?”
Yes, yes, yes.
My nails bite into the forearm clamped across my breasts.
“A shared glance from across the room.” Damien touches his fingers to my chin then angles my head to the right. Warm breath mists over my lips, and a shudder of want slips down my spine as realization hits: I’m the center of his attention, the sole focus of blue eyes the color of crystal waters.
A shared glance, even if it is one-sided.
“A brush of fingers when no one is looking”—the hand at my throat tightens imperceptibly, his thumb drawing lazy circles on my collarbone—“and a whisper in her ear when she wavers to do the right thing.”
He demolishes the remaining distance between us with the slightest shift of his hips—and oh, my God. Oh, my God. Air drives into my lungs and my hold on his arm turns brutal, wild, when he deliberately rolls the hard ridge of his denim-sheathed cock against my back. Once, twice. It’s a goddamn siege of sensuality. The pressure. The heat of him. A moan wrenches from my throat.
“Do you feel me?” he rasps against the shell of my ear with another roll of his hips. “Do you feel how hard I am for you?”
I give a feeble jerk of my head.
“Say the words, Rowena. Give them to me.”
Fuck.
I’m swaying and swallowing fistfuls of air like that’ll do me a world of good when it’s so incredibly obvious that I’m two seconds from collapsing at the foot of the altar. Burning from within, I press my knees together. Flex my toes against paved stone. Claw at Damien’s forearm. Only . . . I’m not clawing him at all but kneading the corded muscles like a cat preening for affection. Another second of this and my pride will be demolished beneath the sole of his heavy boot.
In the end, all I manage is a hoarse, “I’m going to die.”
Damien clicks his tongue like I’m some naughty schoolgirl who’s displeased him.
The fingers clasping my chin let go. A moment later they circle the nip of my waist, beneath my bent arms, to find the knotted sash of my robe. He pauses for only a moment then tugs sharply. The bow unravels, the silk over my shoulders loosening and rippling down to expose my upper shoulders. “Give me your hands.”
I swallow roughly. “You’ll tie me up?”
“I chased you to the ends of the earth and you brought us here,” he murmurs, already hooking the sash around one wrist while he reaches for the other. With deft movements, my hands are pressed together, the silk knotted tight. “Far be it from me that I should sin and keep you from being a proper sacrifice.”
I Samuel 12:23.
Only Damien Priest.
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nbsp; Only this man would bastardize a verse from the Bible, in a chapel, while binding me like some pagan princess. I would laugh, if it weren’t for the fact that his nimble fingers are untying the knot of my pajama bottoms and destroying every last train of thought.
I glance down and see nothing.
But I imagine the dark hair dusting his forearms, his thick wrists. I imagine my tied hands pressed to the altar, where he placed them, and those strong fingers teasing my hipbone with tantalizing back and forth caresses.
And then I imagine nothing more because the elastic waistband is being eased down.
Down over the width of my hips, down over the curve of my arse, down far enough that I’m completely bare, save for a pair of knickers. His hands glide south and then his tall frame sinks down too. Soft lips find my nape then claim the spot between my shoulder blades. He lifts the back of my robe, and the shirt beneath, exposing healing skin to his perusal. And then comes another soft-as-silk brush of his lips to the devastated flesh.
“Damien.” Trembling, wrists kissing, I clutch the altar. “Damien, what are you—?”
“Finding the wreckage that you promised me.”
“The wreckage?” I ask breathlessly.
“Do you see any angels here?” One big hand sweeps over the place where my thigh and bum meet, his fingers pressing deep into skin untouched by fire. “There are none,” he answers gruffly, “just me. There’s only me.”
The angel dead on the floor, defeated. The devil on his shoulder.
A memory flashes—my cheek against the window, his body a shield behind me, these same words tripping off my tongue in a bold attempt to catch him off guard. He remembered everything that I whispered in the dark, and now . . . Oh, my God. And now—
“You have me on my knees, Rowena.” I suck in my stomach when I feel his calloused palm graze the inside of my knee. “A man brought down,” he adds, sliding his hand up, up, up, until it’s snug between the apex of my thighs and cupping my core. “A man fully prepared to do the wrong thing and enjoy every fucking second of it.”
“Damien—”
“Tell me what you want.”
I’m crumbling, unraveling, the fragile mosaic of my reconstructed being coming apart at the seams. This is not . . . this is so much more than I could have ever thought possible. But when I try to speak, only another moan comes.
“Beg for me.”
At the roughened command, I tumble headfirst into the darkness. “A kiss,” I utter, my voice sounding thoroughly strangled. “Please, Damien. I want . . . a kiss.”
His hand turns sideways, shoving my legs apart at the same time that he tears my pajamas down to my ankles. “Where.”
There’s no hope in surviving this, no hope for much of anything besides praying that I’ll still be left standing when he’s had his fill of me. He is my ruin. My complete and utter devastation. I turn my head, just enough to pretend that I can see him there on his knees, as he promised, and give him what he’s demanded of me on a breathy whimper: “My cunt.”
He purrs, this guttural, masculine sound that bloody well kills me.
And then I’m being forced to lean over the altar, arms splayed, wrists bound like the sacrifice that he’s made of me. He crooks a finger under the seam of my knickers and yanks the cotton to the side, baring me completely to his gaze. I feel the heat of him, the warmth of him, and then his tongue. Oh, God, his tongue.
There, at the hood my sex.
Noise shatters the room, and it’s only when I claw my fingers over cool marble that it registers that the broken sobs belong to me. My head falls forward, hanging between my hunched shoulders. Fuck, fuck. I’m mewling, circling my hips against his face, unable to stop when the sensation of him is so completely blasphemous.
So utterly unholy.
Firmly gripping the outside of my thigh, Damien angles my hips to thrust my arse out. He nips my right cheek, his teeth offering a sharp, unexpected bite of pain against sensitive, untested flesh. Then the blade of his nose nudges my core. His tongue flicks my clit, over and over, alternating between tiny swirls that bring me up onto my toes and flat, barely-there licks that drop me back onto my heels like an addict whose only thought is give me more.
Uninhibited, I bend my knees and follow the retreat of his mouth.
He doesn’t let me.
With an audible crack! Damien claps a hand down on my arse then smooths the sting away with a circle of his palm. My knees tremble before turning weak when he gives the cheek a second smack. Heat spears my core and I let out a sharp cry.
I’m going to fall. I’m going to fall right now, and it’ll all be over before—
My elbows skid across marble as he forces me back upright.
Ruthless. Merciless. A man who demands that I take it all—and submit.
Like a pagan god intent on enjoying his offering, Damien drags his knuckles over my slit. A delicious, long stroke followed by the tease of his fingertips at my entrance. Never slipping inside, only ever tracing. Back and forth, back and forth, gathering wetness that he uses to slicken my clit on every other pass.
It’s deliberate, exquisite torture.
Then he sucks on my clit and the rhythmic pressure is like liquid heat in my veins.
My forehead unceremoniously hits the altar.
“I can’t,” I whimper, panting hard. “Damien, I’ve never—”
Come.
I’ve never come, never orgasmed. Not in all those years, so long ago, and not in all the years since. My body was a weapon used against others until it became a weapon that I no longer wanted to wield, even for myself. No touch could rid me of the grit, no embrace was hot enough to eviscerate the memory of what came before. I lived in skin that I couldn’t remove, was stuck with a past that I didn’t want to remember, and now . . . and now—
Damien releases out a throaty groan.
A furious blush crests my cheekbones.
With a dominance that leaves me aching, he snags the waistband of my knickers and pulls the material down the length of my legs to leave in a discarded pile along with my pajamas. Then both hands claim my arse and spread my cheeks wide.
I’m completely exposed.
Devoured in a way that I thought existed only in fantasies.
He licks at me with unrepentant strokes then uses his fore and middle fingers to hold my folds open. His opposite hand snakes between my spread legs, and, in a simultaneous move that shatters me completely, he circles two fingers over my clit and plunges his tongue inside my pussy.
I die.
Right then, right there.
Limbs shaking, mouth gaping.
“Damien,” I cry, “oh, God, Damien.”
He thrusts his tongue, mimicking exactly what he plans to do with his cock, and I come. For the first time in my life, I come. It’s glorious and terrifying and beautiful. It’s everything I never knew it would be and yet everything I could have ever hoped for and more. A splintering of the soul, a loss of control. It’s trust placed in another’s hands and also the most inherently selfish feeling that I’ve ever experienced, and God, I want to be tangled in its grip again.
The hands on my arse smooth upward to grip my hips, and then I hear Damien’s knees pop as he rises from the floor. Still naked from the waist down, I push up from the altar so that I’m no longer resting on my elbows. Turn my head, lick my lips, and—
“When you ripped off that bandage, you asked me what I saw.” Damien grasps my chin, and I smell the fragrance of sex off his fingers. Spiced. Feminine. Sweet. “Do you remember?”
I remember cool stone beneath me, much like it is now. I remember a tremor in my limbs and a searing weight of despair carving out a place in my chest, where my heart ought to be. And I remember fire—the fire that ravaged my skin and the fire that ravaged my soul until I would have clawed my way out of that cell, had I only been able to rise to my feet.
“Yes.” The word is torn from my chest. “Yes.”
“Ask me now what I saw
when I looked at you then.”
“Now?”
He ducks his head to hover his mouth over mine, not so much a kiss as it is consuming my very essence. “Now.”
My throat constricts.
Turning around in his embrace, with my restrained hands lowered between us, I lean my arse against the altar for balance. Pretending that the shape of him is there, just waiting for me to blink and watch him appear before me, I drop my head back. “What did you see?”
“Me,” he growls. “I looked at you and saw only me. Every blade of rage that scrapes at my being, every shard of hope that begs to be seen. I saw madness and I saw destruction, and I knew then that it’d be best for the both of us if I walked away for good.”
It’s an unexpected punch to the gut that leaves me gasping.
Raw. Vulnerable. Humbled.
Despite my silk restraints, I fumble for his hand. “Damien—”
“I’m not going to walk away, Rowena,” he says, the devil on his tongue, “and I’m not going to do what’s best for either of us. I’m going to strip you naked and fuck you so hard that you’ll be old and gray and still remember that it was me who made you feel this way. And if you have a problem with that, then you better say so right now because in five seconds, it’s going to be too bloody late.”
If he hadn’t offered a choice, I may have walked away.
But Damien Priest isn’t content with dragging me into hell, kicking and screaming, with shackles locked around my wrists. No, the blasted man wants me stumbling into the devil’s lair right alongside him. He wants my submission in the same breath that he wants my iron spine, and any chance of me telling him no died the second that he chased me down the halls of this mansion.
Earlier, even, when he put the revolver to my temple and refused to let me sink into the abyss. Own the darkness or it’ll own you, he’d said. I’m not sure that he intended sex with him to be my first foray in harnessing the restlessness that bleeds beneath my skin but fuck it, there’s no time like the present.