“You don’t have to answer, Greer. Your pussy just answered for me.”
I press my face into the bed, humiliated, shaking, on the precipice of orgasm. The finger leaves, replaced by his tongue again, but this time he doesn’t stop at licking. This time he pushes the tip of his tongue into the pleated rosebud, sending a frisson of filthy electricity straight to my clit.
The pleasure is undeniable and immediate, but so is the shame, the reflexive resistance. My hands fly back instinctively to push him away, my legs trying to close, and that earns me an angry growl. Ash wrestles my wrists away from myself and kicks my legs back open with a grunt.
“I could fuck you like this,” he hisses. “Holding you down. Is that what you want?”
My answering moan fills the room.
His arm wraps around my waist like an iron bar and then I’m lifted bodily from my feet and tossed onto the bed, as if I weighed nothing more than a sack of flour. “On your stomach. Show me your face.”
Moving my limbs takes a strange kind of effort, as if the leashed-up orgasm inside my body is weighing me down, but I manage, and there’s a moment of unfiltered tenderness when I feel Ash’s fingers gently brushing my hair away from my forehead, sweeping it over my head so it won’t tickle my face. He drops a light kiss onto my jaw. “Doing okay?”
“I’d do better if you’d fuck me.”
He laughs. “I love it when you get desperate. What’s your safe word?”
“Maxen.”
“Keep it close at hand. We’re going to try something new.”
He straightens up, and from my vantage, I see his strong and certain fingers as they work his belt open and slide it from the loops. I swallow as I watch him double up the belt and run it through his palm.
My mouth parts, protests rise to my lips. I’ve never been belted before, never had anything more intense than a hairbrush, but before I can run through my options, before I can rationalize this or ask him to stop or to pause, he lets fly with the belt and a leather stripe of pain hits my upper thighs.
It’s agony. It’s unbearable. The breath leaves my body as I arch backwards and my mind goes blank. There’s nothing but pain, nothing but the sparking static of it, and when I finally draw in a breath, it comes in and back out as a choked sob.
Maxen.
For the first time ever, my safe word is there on my tongue, ready to be spoken.
“Too much?”
He asks right as a shot of endorphins hits my bloodstream, right as a pulse of swollen arousal hits my cunt.
“Don’t you dare stop.”
The belt flies again, slicing through the air with a whistle, higher up on my thighs this time, on the crease between my legs and ass. A real sob comes out, an actual cry, and I’m writhing and burying my face in the bed.
“Angel.”
I sense rather than see his arm pull back, and I know—I just know—this one will be on my ass, on the skin already inflamed and welted from his hand. The moment hangs in the air like the belt, and as I draw in another shuddering breath, I realize this is my chance to say his name. My chance to end this.
But I won’t.
I press my lips closed, sucking in my crying breaths through my nose. The belt falls, and my lips open right back up in a scream.
All across my ass there’s fire, not just where the belt’s hit, but everywhere, as if the skin ignited under the leather and the flames spread instantly everywhere else. My scream dies into a sobbing groan, the blanket underneath my face is wet with tears, and I’m rubbing my face against it without even knowing it.
I hear the belt drop to the floor. “Oh, Greer.”
His voice is as broken as I feel, as flayed raw.
“My little princess,” he murmurs, crawling onto the bed over me. His hand slides between my stomach and the bed, and then I’m turned over as gently as child so that I’m on my back. “Such a good angel. Such a sweet, obedient princess.”
Through my tears, I see his eyes like green fires in the dark.
“Ash,” I choke out.
His head bows and then his mouth is at my cunt, eating me like a man possessed. Wildly, with noises coming from his throat as he tastes me, with the passion of worship. And somehow, magically, my orgasm is fusing itself back together, ten thousand times stronger for all the pain, as if all the nerve endings singing along my skin had now all joined together to sing in pleasure.
My groans turn into moans, moans into whimpers, and I hear Ash say with his lips against my clit, “Come on, angel, take it. Take it from me.”
He slides a finger into my vagina, and then another, and then a third probes at the tight hole underneath, and I explode. Into a tornado of misery and shame and pain and sensation, into a storm of bliss and pleasure so raw and fierce that my womb cramps hard as it contracts. I think I’m screaming again, and I’m definitely crying as this climax tears through me, punches a hole straight through me like a hammer through sheetrock. I can barely see, barely hear, it’s just feel, feel, feel, as I come with my skin on fire and my muscles sizzling.
I’m not finished orgasming when Ash moves up over me, one hand working his fly open. He doesn’t bother to undress all the way, just yanks his pants down far enough to expose his cock and then finds my still-clenching hole and presses his tip to it. I’m so wet that he’s able to notch himself at my entrance with no effort, and then he pushes into my swollen pussy with a grunt that curls my toes.
Or maybe it’s his giant cock curling my toes. It’s hard to tell.
He pulls back and shoves back in—it’s a tight, tight fit—and I whimper at the stretching feeling as he buries himself to the hilt.
“Fuck, I’m so hard for this,” he pants. “Feel how hard I am. Feel how big.”
I can, I do. I’m impaled on his bigness, speared on eight throbbing inches, and I might as well be a virgin again. It’s the same kind of perfect discomfort that I felt with Embry, a pain that seems to scratch a deep, deep itch on the inside of my body, the kind of pain that draws me towards pleasure almost against my will because it’s so very, very right.
He’s still wearing his sweater over a button-down shirt, and the fabric brushes against my erect nipples every time he thrusts and moves over me, reminding me that I’m naked and he’s not, I’m vulnerable and he’s in control. Sex with Embry was wildfire, uncontrollable lust, two storm fronts colliding in an eruption of electricity and noise. But sex with Ash is different—harder and deeper, more intense and more controlled and more spiritual and more everything else possible, and it feels as though he’s everywhere inside of me, all over me. His hard body covers mine, his marks burn my ass and thighs, his mouth is hot and biting at my neck and jaw and breasts as his cock possesses me from the inside out.
“Am I bigger than him?” he rasps in my ear. “Do I make you come harder than him?”
I forget for a minute that he doesn’t know it’s Embry, that to my Sir, him is just a mysterious male-shaped silhouette from my past, and I’m nodding. I’m gasping yes. Yes, yes, it’s all true, because in this moment, there’s no man bigger or harder than Ash. There is no man other than Ash, and he makes me feel like there’s no other woman, as if his entire life and purpose is to hold me down and fuck the life out of me.
He keeps talking; he tells me how beautiful I am, how precious, how good I make him feel. How tight my sweet cunt is, how it squeezes him, how much he likes making my tits move with each shove of his hips, how he’s going to fill me up so full that I’m dripping for days.
I reach for him, for his sweater or for his hips, but my hands are wrestled back down over my head, and Ash pins both forearms there with one hand. The submissive pose unleashes something dark in him, some animal intent on ravaging and marking, a monster that saws its perfect dick in and out of me so fast and so hard that a stream of words escape my mouth, nonsense words mixed with uncontrolled noises and grunts, yes and no and oh oh oh and please more please Sir please please.
I’m being hammered, I’
m completely at his mercy, and he’s so big, it hurts, it hurts. Even I can’t tell if the whine from my throat is pain or pleasure, and then he changes the angle of his hips, and the entire world flips over. Suddenly, like before but even stronger, the pain joins forces with the building orgasm, rendering me senseless. Speechless. I’m nothing, I’m everything, I’m the light and the dark and the air and the void. Strong force, weak force, gravity, electricity, magnetism are all pinning me underneath this violent, tragic soldier, and as he fucks the literal breath out of me and as I see stars and as I squirm in abject pleasure, I know everything is true. String theory, magic, multiple lives, miracles, God, parallel universes, it’s all true and it’s all real and it’s all happening inside me right now at this very instant as my climax detonates like a dying star inside me.
It’s not a gratification, this orgasm, it’s gospel. It’s good news. It’s revelation and apocalypse. It’s joy and judgment and the answer to every question I’ve ever asked. Everything in my life has led to this one moment, this one exchange, this one feeling of my body shuddering uncontrollably under Ash’s.
“Take it,” he’s saying into my ear. “Take your pleasure. Take me.” And I do, I do, I take my pleasure and I take him and I take me, and then like the most poignant sacrifice, like the most tender death, Ash pulls me close, and his body rigid and frozen over mine, erupts inside me. He’s got one hand cradling my head and the other holding my hip down, and his mouth hovers above my mouth, so every soft grunt and needy pant is warm against my lips. I feel every throb and every pulse, every hot spurt of him, and there’s so much that he’s spilling out of me.
He keeps himself buried to the hilt until he’s finished, and then he kneels up without pulling out, stroking himself slowly with his tip still inside me, eyes locked on mine.
The act is so biological, so possessive, that my cunt gives an involuntary clench, ready to come again. He shakes his head at that and pulls out, leaning down to give my pussy a reverent kiss before he climbs off the bed.
And then…and then I’m not sure what happens. He turns on a light and somehow he ends up undressed and in bed cuddling me and crooning to me, stroking my arms and hair and back, and murmuring words of gratitude and pleasure—he’s pleased with me, I think somewhere deep inside myself and the thought makes me happy. But I can’t speak. My hearing feels fuzzy, like I’m hearing everything through earmuffs, and my thoughts are nonexistent. Like I’m floating, blank and warm, but I’m also shaking, trembling like a leaf in the wind.
Bit by bit, layer by layer, I swim up towards consciousness.
“You,” I murmur to Ash. It was supposed to be I love you, but the words are so fleeting and so hard to form.
“You,” he says back to me in a voice so filled with love that I ache. He wraps his body more securely around me and pulls the blankets tighter around us. My shivering slowly, slowly stills, but I become aware of the wet pillow underneath me, my cheeks cool against the air, and realize I’ve been crying.
Ash holds me as my tears leak out, like a slow, dripping rain. “I love you,” he whispers over and over again. “I love you.”
Eventually, after a few minutes or a few hours, my tears stop and I feel warm again. I roll over so that I can nestle into him, and he lets out a satisfied growl, as if it made him happy that I sought his comfort. “My princess,” he says, holding me tight. My world is this. My world is him. “My angel.”
I nuzzle my face against his chest. “Will you hold me for a while longer?”
He kisses my hair. “As long as you want. I could hold you for the rest of my life.” He lets out a small laugh. “And anyway, I’ve never seen someone drop that far and that hard into subspace before. I’m not letting you out of my sight until you’ve got both feet back here on planet Earth.”
Subspace. It’s happened a few times after Ash and I have scened together at the Residence, but never like this. Never like a waking blackout, never to where I cry and shiver without feeling either.
But as my mind returns to my body, it also returns to my worries from earlier.
Namely to Embry.
I should have told Ash as he was proposing, before we had sex. I should have told him six weeks ago. I should have told him that day at St. Thomas Beckett. I should tell him now.
“Ash,” I say, keeping my face away from his. “There’s something I need to say.”
“Yes?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Try me.”
I have no choice. It has to be done. “You know the man who I slept with before? My first time?”
He stiffens around me. “Yes.”
“It was Embry.”
The world seems to freeze, time ticking on as everything waits in bated stillness. And then Ash says in a wooden voice, “I know.”
He knows.
He knows.
Shit.
Fuck.
He kicks the blankets off his legs to climb out of bed. I feel his warmth pull away from me, watch his naked form as he pads into the ensuite bathroom and flips on the light. I hear the sink running.
Panic squeezes my throat like a sadist, choking off enough air that I feel dizzy, but keeping me conscious enough to witness the almost-certain end of my relationship with Ash.
Ash comes back out of the bathroom with a glass of cold water, which he hands to me. “Drink.”
Even though we just had the raunchiest, roughest sex imaginable, I still cover my body with a sheet as I sit up. I drink and he sits on the side of the bed, watching me with his President eyes, the ones that miss nothing. His war eyes. I can’t read his face.
I finish drinking and move to set the glass down on the end table, but he reaches forward and takes it from me. For a moment, he looks at the imprint of my lips on the rim of the glass, a muscle ticking in his jaw.
“You know?” I finally ask, my fingers knotting in the sheet.
“I guessed,” Ash admits softly.
“How did you guess?”
He pulls his lower lip into his mouth and then releases it. “Let’s start at the beginning and work our way up to that. When?”
“Chicago,” I answer.
He nods, as if this is confirmation for something he already knows. Maybe it is. Maybe Embry did tell Ash about us, and I just didn’t know about it. He rotates the glass in his hands a few times and then sets it down on the table himself.
“It didn’t mean anything,” I start, but he holds up a hand.
“Don’t lie to me. Please.”
His tone is guarded, but there’s something starkly exposed in his words. As if he wants to beg me for something, but doesn’t know how or what or even why he needs it.
I take a deep breath and start over. “It meant something to me. How could it not? It was my first time, and it was so good—” I stop and pivot, realizing Ash probably doesn’t want to hear about how good that night was. “—But Ash, he never even called me after. I left my number and everything, and I heard nothing for years, not until you sent him to me. It must have been the worst lay of his life,” I try to joke.
The joke falls flat because Ash is already frowning. “It wasn’t.”
“Well, that’s kind of you to say—”
“I’m not being kind,” he snaps. “I know it for a fact.”
I stare at him. “How?”
He runs a hand through his raven hair. “Embry called me that morning, wanted to grab coffee. He wanted to tell me all about this…angel…he had in his bed. He thought he was in love, even though it’d only been one night. If I had known that his angel was my angel, that it was you, I would have thrown myself in front of a train.”
“But you didn’t know?”
He presses his palms together, fingertips pointing down to the floor, and stares at his hands. “Before he could tell me about his night, I told him about mine. About how this girl I’d met four years before had shown back up in my life. About how I’d been too much of a coward to tell her about Jenny ri
ght away, and then she’d discovered it in the worst way possible. I told Embry that this was Email Girl, that those letters I’d kept in my breast pocket all those years in Carpathia had been from her, the letters he caught me reading time and time again. I told him this girl’s name.”
My mind spins. Embry had known my name too. Which meant…
“And after I finished, and tried to be a good friend and ask him about his angel, he changed the subject. And he never mentioned that night again.”
“That’s why he didn’t call, didn’t try to find me…” I trail off.
“How selfless of him.”
“Back to you guessing. How? We’ve never…we haven’t done anything other than what you wanted us to do that night of the State Dinner. We haven’t kissed, haven’t even hugged.”
“I know,” Ash says. He crawls forward on the bed and slowly pulls the sheet down, baring my breasts to him. My nipples harden the minute they touch the cool air. “It was that night that helped me see it. He was obviously attracted to you, but…well, there was something else there. Something deeper. And after that, you two were so careful around each other. Never getting too close, never talking too long. Never alone. That’s what people do when they’re in love with someone they shouldn’t be, Greer.”
“I’m not in love with Embry.”
“I told you not to lie to me.” The sheet is all the way pulled down now, and then his hand slides up my sternum to circle my throat. He doesn’t squeeze or press, but he makes a collar of his fingers, a collar not of leather or metal, but flesh and blood. You’re mine, the hand says. You’re mine and not his.
I’m fiddling with my new engagement ring without realizing it, and then his other hand comes down on top of both of mine. “Stop,” he says. “You’re not giving that back to me. You’re not taking it off. As long as you still want it, I will be your husband.”
“Yes, Sir,” I say, relief pricking at my eyelids. He doesn’t hate me now, he doesn’t want to end our relationship. If nothing else, I can live with that.
His hand presses at my throat, forcing me to lie back.
“How did he do it?”
Modern Fairy Tale: Twelve Books of Breathtaking Romance Page 44