by Lauren Dane
When she started to squirm, needing more, he spread her wide, exposing the pink folds of her pussy to his mouth and hands.
He slid his tongue through her, briefly dipping into her gate and moaning at her taste. She thrust back against him and he gripped her tight, wanting her where he wanted her.
He lapped at her, suckling her clit softly, abrading it with his chin because it made her gasp so prettily. He slid his thumb back and forth over the pucker of her ass, a new curiosity in him after she’d played with his.
Roman had fucked a few women that way in his time, mainly to mix things up and keep from getting bored, but he’d never engaged in any ass play himself. Her fingers on him earlier had felt unbelievably good, and more than that, he liked the level of trust it represented. At his age, there weren’t many first times left sexwise, and he liked that she would be the first he tried it with.
Needy whimpers floated through the air as he ate her cunt. Gods, she tasted fine and right. The heat of the water made her soft, pliant, and all he wanted was to rub himself all over her, licking every inch.
He recognized the catch in her moan, the hitch in her breath, and she came in a scalding rush.
Before she’d even opened her eyes he’d picked her up and impaled her down on his cock, driving her into another orgasm. She braced her hands against the wall in front of where he’d knelt, one foot in the tub, the other on the edge, and held on as he fucked into her body. Her fingers curled against the smooth, cool tile on the wall.
“When my mouth is on your pussy, all I can think of is ramming my cock into you over and over,” he said at her back. “Your cunt welcomes me every time.”
She nodded eagerly. Oh yes, she wanted him buried in her as much as he wanted to be there.
Her ass partially rested on one of his thighs and she felt the flex and play of his muscles as he thrust.
Abbie was relaxed and open for him. The way he’d licked her to orgasm, coupled with the warm air and water, the lovely meal and the glass of wine, had transformed her into a woman primed to receive pleasure, to open up and let a man take from her all he could in return.
The angle of his thrusts brushed the head of his cock across her sweet spot deep within her, over and over with exquisite, torturous sensation. She smelled his body as the scent rose on the heat buffeting her back. The wiry hair on his thighs abraded her skin just enough to add to the experience, to remind her it was a man back there working. In a society that featured more smooth men than those with body hair, his mat of chest hair and the hair on his legs made him even sexier to her eyes.
“I love to take you this way. Pinning you while I fuck you so hard your tits jiggle.” He leaned in and nipped her shoulder, hard enough to sting, and then laved over it. Shivers erupted in the wake of that small violence and tenderness.
He swiveled a bit, circling his hips, creating friction against her clit. Gods, she was going to come again. She leaned her head back against his shoulder and let it happen, let it take her, pull her under. Her orgasm was deep, warm, rolling waves of pleasure, over and over.
He groaned, and within her she felt the telltale jerk and jump of his cock as he came, filling her up.
She stood there while he rinsed her off, drained out the water and poured more over her, keeping her warm. The heat was nearly as luxurious as three orgasms in a row in a giant bathing tub the size of her office.
“Now, let’s dry you off and I think a nap is in order. What do you think?”
She dragged her eyes open as he wrapped a towel around her and he laughed.
“I think that’s my answer. We don’t have to be anywhere or do anything for some time. Come and sleep with me in my bed.”
She let him lead her into the master suite. She wasn’t that surprised that his bed was gargantuan, but the softness of the bedding and the weight of the blankets were a nice greeting as she slid in.
He settled in right behind her, his arm over her waist. Right before she dropped off she admonished herself to not get used to it. He was a fleeting luxury, a gift from the universe, but she couldn’t keep him and it wouldn’t do to get attached.
Chapter 20
He awoke to the sound of ice against the glass. The room faced the water and he realized it was snowing. The soft tink of icy snow drifted into the heavy silence of big, white flakes.
He lay there for some time just watching. The moons above were enough to see, even through the clouds, and the snow began to reflect the light back, giving that beautifully muffled glow only a snowy evening could provide.
Abbie stretched and opened her eyes, following his gaze. Roman wasn’t sure he could describe the joy in his heart at the sight of wonder on her face. She threw the blankets back and scampered to the window to look out.
“Snow!”
As he had when he’d taken her from behind and the other times they’d been naked long enough for him to see all of her, he noted the scars on her shoulder and back. Anger rose in him, bitter and ugly, and he wanted to do violence to anyone who’d mar her physically and, he could guess, emotionally, too.
But when she turned back to him, the light in her eyes dancing with her pleasure at seeing the snow, the anger faded.
“I have warm wraps.” He got out of bed and went to his wardrobe to hand her one. She hummed her pleasure as she put it on. “How about a fire and something warm to drink? And then sex. Yes, more sex.”
She burst out laughing and tossed her hair behind her shoulder. He caught her upraised brow and knew she’d done it for his benefit.
“Let’s go, then.”
He wrapped an arm around her, happy he could touch her as much as he wanted while they were there. “Sit on the couch. The blanket on the back there is nice and warm if you need it.”
She watched while he made a fire, her eyes occasionally wandering to the wall of windows where she took in the falling snow.
Once the fire crackled on the hearth he turned back to her, loving the way she looked, her feet tucked beneath her, totally relaxed. Roman would wager this wasn’t a side of Abbie she allowed herself to show very often. So busy and active, his woman.
He moved to sit next to her, reaching out to caress her thigh because he could. “So, tell me about yourself. What made you decide to be a barrister?”
She looked at him for a very long time without speaking. So long he began to get uncomfortable, but he let her work through whatever internal war he saw raging on her features.
Finally she took a deep breath. “It’s a long story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
Ah, she was ready to tell him then. He nodded. “I want to know about you. All of it.”
“Do you have alcohol?”
“I was just going to suggest either something warm or a glass of something that would warm us up.”
“Oh, very nice.”
He kissed her forehead as he made to get up. “You know, you don’t have to tell me if it’s too painful. I want you to share with me but I don’t want you to hurt.”
She rested her hand against his chest, over his breastbone. She didn’t speak, but he sensed the upswell of emotion within her. She simply kissed him right over his heart. “It’s a memory, it happened a long time ago. The hurt is mostly gone.”
He kissed her again and went into the kitchen to grab a very fine bottle of mash liquor his cousin made in small batches on Borran, one of the ’Verses House Lyons held. He also brought a bowl of candied nuts his sister was partial to, so they were always on hand.
“Oh, I do love these,” she said after she took a bracing few sips of the mash and spied the bowl of nuts.
He wondered if she’d changed her mind, she was quiet so long but finally she looked from the scene outside back to him.
“When I was nearly fifteen, we came back to the capital. The heat was very hard on my mother and Nyna and finally Daniel told our father that it was either we all come back or Daniel would simply bring us back and my father would be alone.” She sighed. “My fa
ther—he’s not a bad person, Roman. But he’s stunted. He’s not—complete. He totally lacks any real ability to self-reflect or accept responsibility for the basic things in life. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t care about my mother, but that he cared about his students so much we were an afterthought really.
“Anyway, we came back and he got a job fairly quickly, teaching again, in the fourth circle. My mother’s health had gotten pretty bad at that point and she couldn’t work, so we lived pretty much where the students were. It wasn’t a pretty place to live. It was hard, so far from the vents. People out there live very difficult lives. In the outback, it’s rural. People farm, they work the land, but the poverty there is just different than in an urban environment.”
She looked at him and blushed. “I’m giving you the long version. I should just give you the notes.” Her laugh was forced and he took her hand, kissing it.
“You should tell me the whole story. Let it go. Let me share your burden.”
She swallowed hard and he hated the hesitancy on her face.
“To help out, I took a job cleaning the tram station and some of the local government office space. It was decent pay and I made friends and started thinking about the future, what I’d do my apprenticeship in once I turned eighteen. But there was one man who”—she wet her lips—“was very interested in me. It wasn’t right. I knew it and I stayed away from him as much as I could. But he found out where I lived and began to show up on our street. He’d follow me, try to get me alone.”
Her hands shook as she took three more swallows and drained the glass. He refilled it.
“I got out. I began to travel to the second ring for some classes, legal history classes, as it happened. My teacher was a senior barrister who’d come up from the fourth ring. He gave me a job filing his papers, organizing his schedule. The credits were better than my cleaning job and it enabled me to latch on to a possible future and to get the seven hells away from him.”
“But he didn’t like that.” Roman said it flatly.
She shook her head. “I didn’t know at first. It was after about a year I realized he’d still been looking around for me, had come by our home. My mother had sent him off but he’d begun threatening to evict them.”
“He’s Ranked.” Most building owners and landlords were Ranked.
She nodded. “So I was walking home from the tram when he and several of his friends stopped me. There was this abandoned field, it’s got a housing block there now. Anyway, they circled me. He—” Her voice caught but she shook her head, hard, when Roman began to move to her.
“He told me I could just fuck him and get it over with or he’d toss my family out. His friends would also get a turn, of course. I’m ashamed to say I considered it. He had this metal hook, the kind they use in the factories out there. He kept swinging it at me. I thought if I just let him fuck me, I could get away. The hook—I thought he’d kill me. But I took too long, apparently, and they all set on me like wild beasts. Tore my clothes. He—he used that hook to hold me, used it on my back. Impaled me on it like a fish or a piece of meat.” Her jaw was clenched and she put her glass down.
Roman took her hands, wanting to kill the bastard who’d harmed her. The file had been purged, even for him, of the identities of her attackers. He knew enough to understand it had to be someone Ranked. No one else would have the ability to scrub the record.
“You don’t have to say any more.” He tried very hard to keep his voice even, to keep his emotion from bleeding into it. He didn’t want her to feel shame or to make herself responsible for how he felt just then.
“I do! Damn it! They raped me in that field. I screamed and screamed and no one came. He used a hook on me, tore my back open so severely that they didn’t think I’d be able to use my left arm again. But someone did finally come. Daniel. Daniel had a pipe and he nearly killed two of them. The polis finally arrived and they took me to a med center. They didn’t arrest Daniel but he was in trouble for harming a Family member.”
“Who was it, Abbie?”
“Bentan Kerrigan.”
A House affiliated with his. Lindy’s cousin. He’d been sent to the Edge for several years. Had a substance abuse problem. Drank too much and liked to hurt women. Roman would make sure he never did again. “All right.”
She looked at him and he waited to see if she’d tell him to leave Bentan alone. She didn’t and he liked her even more for it.
“So getting back to why I became a barrister. I was in a coma for several weeks. I had swelling on my brain and internal bleeding. They used nanites on me to help the healing process. At the time they were still fairly experimental, but I’m alive today because of them. Daniel stayed at my side the entire time but like I said, he was in trouble. My mentor made a deal for Daniel to go into the corps early, to do an extra two standard years and avoid lockup and charges. And he offered me an apprenticeship. I agreed and never looked back.”
She poured herself another drink and he wanted to laugh at how intoxicated she’d be in a few more minutes.
“So there you have it. I became a barrister first and foremost because it gave me a vocation and a way out of the fourth ring and shitty little rental flat like the ones I lived in growing up. It’s not noble, Roman. But I also do good work. I help people, and when Josef, my mentor, heard the defense agency was looking for entry-level barristers six years ago, he told me and I jumped at the chance.”
“Because you were so honest with me, I’ll be that way with you, too. I knew. About the attack. Not all the details but some. Not who, or that it was the catalyst for you to become a barrister. Oh gods, I’m fucking this all up. I just didn’t want any secrets between us.”
She snorted. “I should have known you’d poke around. You’re not a man who likes not knowing things. Does it make a difference?” The shy way she asked twisted his gut.
“Only in that I think you’re amazing. Well, more amazing. Thank you for trusting me with that story. You’ve survived a lot. You’re very strong.”
“I still have to take pills sometimes, to sleep without nightmares. And stupid stuff triggers me and I start to get panicked. I’m not that strong.”
He remembered the panic on her face when Saul Kerrigan attacked her in that hallway and wanted to smash his fist into his former father-in-law’s face.
“You nearly died, Abbie. Having to take a pill sometimes seems to me a small thing in comparison to that.”
Her eyes drooped a bit and she sort of went sideways, leaning into him. “And you’re going to be very drunk shortly. That mash is very strong.”
“Mmm. Yes. I think so.”
He held her as she dozed there in his arms. He didn’t want her to wake and he certainly didn’t want to let go of her.
Several things were completely clear to him. First, that he loved Abbie Haws fiercely. Second, that he couldn’t have her. That made his chest constrict and his gut burn at the unfairness of it. He was rethinking the idea of having a mistress, of simply never remarrying and keeping her that way, but he knew she wanted children, knew she would never want to be merely a mistress. And he couldn’t have children with her if they didn’t share the same legal status as Deimos and Corrin did. Sure he’d officially recognize any children she bore as heirs, but the system allowed it at the whim of the Family member and he knew she wouldn’t want that sort of dependence on anyone.
He’d take all he could get and be with her until he couldn’t be any longer. He’d take care of her and she would not complain or refuse, and that would start with a flat in a building closer to the vent so she could be warm the entire cold season, and one with a higher water capacity so she could shower and bathe to her heart’s content without a fine.
He disliked her father severely. He disliked how she made excuses for him, too, but Roman knew all about messed-up fathers and making excuses for them, so who was he to judge? He would take care of Bentan when he returned, as well as Saul, who, as the leader of House Kerrigan, would have
to have known about the attack when he manhandled her in that hallway.
As she slept, he planned and watched the snow.
Chapter 21
Abbie loved the snow. Because the core of the capital sat on steam vents, she didn’t see much snow sticking in the first circle and never in the outback where it was all high temperatures and unrelenting sunshine. But out here they were away from the heat of the capital’s inner core and there weren’t a lot of buildings and houses to raise the overall temp. Really, Abbie thought this place was absolutely perfect. The house was nice and warm, heated from the hot springs. Plus, she had Roman all to herself.
Here she could play to her heart’s content and no one cared. She didn’t have to be at work. The snow wasn’t dirty and she wasn’t freezing like the old days in the fourth circle. No, she had a good, warm coat, fuzzy mittens and a hat. The perfect tools for packing snowballs and hurling them toward Roman, who clearly had enough experience tossing snowballs himself.
“Hey!” he yelped when she managed to score a direct hit to his head, knocking his hat askew.
“Don’t be a crybaby!” She laughed as she dodged his return volley.
“If I promise to make you come a few times, can we go inside? I’m hungry!”
She sent him a theatrical sigh and then nodded his way. “All right then. You’re very demanding.”
He laughed as he caught up to her, picking her up and spinning in a circle as he dropped a kiss on her lips. Abbie liked this side of Roman. Carefree, affectionate, not laden down with being the face of House Lyons.
“So,” he said as he dried his hands after slicing up some fruit, “what do you think you’ll be saying to the vids next week?” The carefree Roman had gone, replaced with the face of House Lyons.
She sighed. “I thought we were having sex. I don’t want to talk business.”
“We can’t avoid it. Anyway, we can fuck later.” She slid a piece of fruit between his lips and he groaned.