by July Hall
“I don’t want you to touch me,” she repeated. “I don’t even want you to move. Your behavior’s been escalating, Charles.” She took hold of his cock and began lazily rubbing her sopping wet flesh over it. “We’ve got to stop that.”
“Es—” He dug his hands into the sheets. “Escalating?”
“The way you grab me,” she said. “It’s not hot when you’re angry. You could really hurt me, you know. Do you want to hurt me?”
He couldn’t be faking that shock. She made sure to keep squeezing and rubbing on him, in case he got too turned off. “No!” he said.
“How do you want to treat me?” Maybe asking something more specific than what do you want? would make it easier for him to answer.
To her satisfaction, he managed, “I want to—I mean, I’m fucking terrible at it, obviously, but—I want to protect you.” Then he winced, as if he expected her to laugh.
She didn’t. “Protect me from what?”
“All that’s bad,” he whispered. “All that’s vile. Nothing like that should touch you.”
The blood on Richard Zhou’s nose made more sense now. “That’s all you want?” she asked. “To protect me? Doesn’t sound like much.”
“No, it is. It’s everything. I am…” He swallowed hard. “I am a Magister. And you might not really believe this, but Magisters protect and cherish what we love. It’s part of who we are.”
Cherish. Love. It still seemed impossible. More than anything, Sandra wanted to wrap herself up in those words and let them lull her into the sweetest dreams she’d ever known. But she couldn’t, not yet. They were still only dreams.
“And furthermore,” Charles began.
If he was able to say furthermore in bed, then she needed to act fast. Sandra raised herself up and held his cock steady at her entrance.
“Protect me from yourself,” she said. “Don’t move.”
She slid down on him, and this time, she didn’t close her eyes. It was easy to do that when he was inside her—she abandoned herself to the sensations. But tonight she looked right into his eyes. Wow, why hadn’t she been doing that all along? He looked back at her, his pupils huge, his face going red again.
“There,” she whispered when she came to rest. “Ah. How’s that?”
“Good,” he managed, the desperate rasp back in his voice. “It’s—” She watched him dig his fingers into the sheets again. “It’s good.”
So much for furthermore. “Not ‘heaven’?” she asked. “Not ‘silk’?” She rocked her hips gently. His eyes closed. “I know you can do better than ‘good.’ Unless…” She stopped moving. “You’re not all that interested.”
“No,” he said at once. “I’m—interested. It’s…” She watched him look up at the ceiling while he searched for words. “It’s, ah…” She squeezed him. “Oh!” She did it again. He shuddered beneath her. “Oh God.”
“It is, huh?” Sweat was running down her back. He was so hot, so hard inside her. She almost didn’t want to do this.
But she wanted to do it even more. She raised up again and slid off him. He groaned in protest and reached out to touch her hip.
Sandra pressed his hand back down against the mattress. Her cunt throbbed from being empty. She ignored it and lay down next to him, sliding one leg over both of his and working his slick cock with her hand.
Then she tried to think of something smart to say, but she couldn’t. She only wanted to kiss him. So she did, again and again, until his hips were arching into her hand and he was gasping, “Close. I’m close.”
She let him go immediately and kissed him once more as a reward. “You’ve been close for a while,” she murmured. “Don’t you want to come?”
His throat bobbed. He licked his lips and kept his eyes closed. “No.”
Her eyes widened. Was this like before, when “no” hadn’t meant no? She couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice when she said, “Really?”
“Not like this,” he said through his teeth.
Oh. That made more sense. “Okay,” she said. “I don’t need to ask how.” She bent down to his chest and licked one of his nipples again. When he groaned, she kissed her way over to the other one, and did the same thing.
“You’re killing me!” he gasped.
She had to take a moment to compose herself before she broke and told him he could move, hold her, do whatever he wanted. Instead, she cleared her throat and whispered, “What’s it like? Having to be still?”
“I need to touch you. It’s fucking torture.”
That hard-on said otherwise. “You are not to be trusted,” she told him, and nibbled at his clavicle. “You said so yourself. But—I do have to make it up to you.” She meant to sound cool, and didn’t, when she added, “For our first time.”
He opened his eyes. “Sandra, I told you…”
“Trust me,” she whispered. She kissed his chin. “I’ll show you. You can trust me.”
“I do,” he said immediately. “For God’s sake, I don’t want you to think—”
“No,” Sandra said. “I don’t want you to think. I just want to be on my back while you’re inside me, feeling so good you can’t even handle it.” Charles gaped at her. She stroked his face. “I’ll make you feel good. Trust me.”
She rolled over on her back, and he followed her before she was even all the way down, settling between her spread legs. He dug his hands into the sheets on either side of her, panting desperately while she reached between them and coaxed him toward her, inside her.
He slid in with a deep, shaking sigh. When he came to rest, he pressed his face against her shoulder, and she stared up at the ceiling, trembling. She had to keep it together. For both their sakes. “N-now,” she managed. “Hold still.”
“Oh, no,” he said, barely audible.
“I’ll listen this time,” she promised. She wrapped her legs around him. He slid deeper inside and cried out. “When you say, ‘Please stop’…I’ll listen.”
He gave a rough, half-hysterical laugh. “Why the hell would I ask you to stop?”
“You don’t have to.” She put her arms around his neck and looked into his eyes. This had to work. Tonight had to work. She didn’t know how she was going to make it if she couldn’t look in his beautiful eyes anymore. “This is for you. If you want…” Then she clenched.
Charles’s hips jerked. He cried out again.
“I’ll do this until you come, if that—” Her voice hitched. “If that’s what you need.”
He froze. “Sandra,” he said hoarsely, “you’re what I need. You’re all I need. Tell me you underst—” She clenched again. “Oh God! Wait. I love you, wait.”
She gasped and closed her eyes. He kept saying that, but how could he mean it? She loved him so much it hurt, but nothing had changed—she still couldn’t do anything for him, she was still young and stupid, and she still kept screwing things up.
Queen Sandra disappeared, and just ordinary Sandra was left behind, as exposed and raw as ever. Well, she could make him feel good, like she’d promised. She’d always been able to do that, at least. She hid her face in his shoulder and clenched on him again.
“Ah,” he groaned in her ear, “ah, darling, wait.” Unbidden, he kissed her temple and then her hair. “Do you understand? Do you—” She squeezed. He gasped. Finally, she got a rhythm going, rocking her hips and working him. “Oh fuck!” He began to grab at the sheets. “Sandra!”
It must feel good. He was starting to thrust his hips as he always did right before he came, when he couldn’t help it anymore. It must feel good—
“Please stop!”
Sandra froze, sure she must have misheard. Then she relaxed at once, and loosened her grip on him both inside and out. He shook against her, panting wildly, and she knew he was fighting his way back from the edge.
She was going to help him. She didn’t move or speak. After a few more moments, he did. He croaked, “Darling.” Then he kissed her temple. “Oh, darling.”
“There,” Sandra managed. “See? I—I promised.”
“Yes, you did.” He kissed her ear and murmured, “Ah, God. Thank you.”
At that, in spite of her own fears, she almost burst out laughing. Of course. Of course he’d work out that once you said please, you ought to say thank you as well. Before she could reply, he said in a low voice, “Please…start again.”
She gasped. And then she did, clenching him once more while he moaned in her ear. He’d asked. He trusted her. He believed her.
“Please stop!” he panted again, after a few moments. She did at once. “Oh God. Oh God, it’s so good. I didn’t know—” He shuddered against her.
“It’s good to ask,” she whispered, kissing his shoulder.
“Yes. Please. Again,” he panted. She did. Start and stop, over and over, and sometimes he moved and sometimes he stayed still, but either way, she started to melt. His pleasure coaxed her out of her shell, until she was moaning too. He stopped sometimes for kisses, he nibbled at her neck, he whispered praise into her ear. Every hushed word, every brush of his lips made her quiver.
“Do you know how beautiful you are?” he murmured. “How tempting? You’re everything.” He kissed her beneath her ear, and his voice dropped into a growl that actually made her throb. “And I want everything.”
She whimpered. Yes, thank God. They were making sense again. Everything felt right again. Everything felt amazing.
In fact, everything felt so incredible that when Charles next begged, “Please stop,” she ran into a slight problem.
* * *
How long could this last? How long could a man stay on the edge of climax without actually dying? Sandra seemed determined to help him find out. Finally, his fox was with him again, whimpering in delight while they enjoyed each other.
She was all he needed. She must understand. Surely she understood, if they were making love like this, in such perfect harmony. All he’d needed to do was ask.
Once more. He could survive it just once more. By now, it felt like he’d been born with this erection. Once more. “Please stop,” Charles husked.
“Um,” Sandra said. She kept quivering around him. Charles groaned. Every movement sent him higher. “Um, I’m—” Her fingernails dug into his back. Why wasn’t she stopping? “I’m t-trying…I…oh no, oh no!”
Oh yes. He gasped when he realized what was happening. Sandra’s legs clamped around him in desperate reflex as she climaxed, and this time she was anything but controlled or controlling. She tossed her head back and cried out, “Charles!”
He couldn’t even manage her name. He could only move. Days of furious, pent-up desire wracked him as he fucked into her and came.
He shouted—he didn’t even know what—and let go. With her, into her. For endless white-hot heartbeats, everything was her. It wasn’t pleasure, it was too much for that. It seized every single part of him and wouldn’t let go. It was just this side of pain.
Oh God, let it never stop. Let him stay here forever, spending between her thighs while she called his name.
Eventually, by aching degrees, it ended. Slowly, his heart rate began to climb back down. His lungs started taking in more oxygen. He could hear something other than the ringing in his ears. He became aware—a little—of his surroundings beyond Sandra’s arms.
Still not enough.
Even as they came down together, shuddering, he thought, not enough.
It was all he could do to keep his weight on his elbows so he didn’t crush her. After a moment, she gulped for air and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
The hell with that. “You get a pass,” Charles mumbled into her throat.
“Oh God.” She was quivering beneath him. “Are you…”
She trailed off. He wouldn’t have had any idea how to answer her, anyway. Was he okay? No. Not yet. He needed more. Not sex—that really would kill him. But he needed more of this, more of her, and this time he didn’t even know how to frame the question.
Instead of answering her, he kissed both of her cheeks and slid out of her carefully. “Are you?” he asked her. “Okay?” She lay beneath him like some angel who’d just decided to pole-vault out of heaven and cavort with a mortal, totally debauched and exhausted.
She opened her glazed blue eyes and smiled at him.
“I’m great,” she said, and burst into tears.
* * *
Charles must really like her, because he got her some tissues, and held her close while she cried even though she probably looked like a huge mess.
What was wrong with her? The sex had been great. He’d done everything she’d asked, even when it had obviously driven him crazy. He’d been honest with her, trusted her, said he loved her, and now she was having some kind of insane meltdown right in his bed.
“I hate crying,” she sobbed into a tissue. “It’s awful.” He didn’t reply, just ran his fingers through her hair. “I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m not sad. I’m sorry. I’ll be fine.”
He tucked her closer to him, and that just made her cry harder. Then he said matter-of-factly, “You’ve had a very trying night.”
That shocked her out of it with a sharp, painful laugh. “No shit.” She took another tissue, sniffled, and glared at him. “Don’t look at me while I blow my nose.”
He politely looked away, but just to be on the safe side, she turned her head and blew as discreetly as she could manage under the circumstances. “You even blow your nose like a lady,” he said.
“Kristen sounds like a foghorn,” Sandra mumbled, looking around for the wastebasket. “Ugh.”
Charles reached down over his side of the bed, picked up the wastebasket, and passed it to her. “Thank you,” Sandra said. She dropped in the used tissues, sniffled, and coughed.
“Do you want some water?”
Her mouth felt like a cotton ball. She’d kill for a glass of water. But she needed something else even more, so she said, “No, thank you. Um…” She sniffled again and said wretchedly, “I know I look awful, but would you hold me a little?”
His arms were around her before she finished speaking. They lay back down together, and she cuddled close and pressed her face to his chest. He kissed the top of her head. His fingertips stroked over the nape of her neck and the rise of her spine. His other hand rubbed soothing circles over her back.
Eventually, she calmed down enough to joke, “You’re good at this.”
“You’ve taught me that I’m better when I keep my mouth shut.”
“Oh, jeez.” She rubbed her hand over her forehead. “You’re great all the time.”
“Not all the time,” he said firmly. “Please don’t let the afterglow go to your head. We’ve—ah—worked off some of the tension…” Sandra huffed in unwilling laughter. “And when you’re ready, I think we should talk.”
This time, the words didn’t make her go cold with panic. In the ballroom, she’d been positive he was about to dump her for Josephine. Now she was pretty sure that wasn’t the case. But we should talk was still a red flag for things getting serious.
He was right, though. “Yeah.” She took a deep breath and smacked her dry lips. “Um…would you mind…?”
Without further prompting, he went to the bathroom and returned with two glasses of water. She smiled gratefully at him and struggled not to gulp it all down. She wanted to, though. She wanted to drain the glass, get a hot shower, and snuggle down with him for the rest of the night and forget anything unpleasant had ever happened.
As she’d said to him earlier, what you wanted and what you needed weren’t always the same. She sipped at her water, knowing that he watched her the whole time.
When she felt like she was more or less in one piece, she looked at Charles again. He lay propped up against the pillows, holding his own empty water glass against his chest.
“You suppose there’s anybody still at that wedding?” she asked.
“What wedding?”
She snorted. He gave her a wry s
mile and waited.
What did love mean to a man like Charles? What worth could Sandra’s love possibly have to him? So many things were working against them. And if they were ever going to lay eyes on each other again after tonight, those things had to be faced. Decisions had to be made.
She wished she knew what the right decision was.
Sandra took a deep breath and looked into the eyes of the man she loved. “Okay, Charles,” she said. “Let’s talk.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When he was twenty-five, Charles had sat down in a boardroom across from his father, Leon Magister. Surrounded by the other members of the board, he had explained calmly, even coldly, that he was taking over the company. That he had the support he needed and it was a done deal. His father hadn’t believed him at first. Their blood relationship aside, how could he be toppled by a mere boy?
Now he had a glimmer of how his father must have felt. He sat stark naked on his bed while an equally nude Sandra Dane looked at him cautiously, sipped from a glass of water, and held his fate in her hands.
It certainly felt like that, anyway. He had thought—he had hoped—that their lovemaking, mind-blowing in its intensity, would have solved…something. Sandra’s tears had put paid to that idea. They needed to talk. He could only hope to God that she was more merciful than he’d been at her age.
“Right,” she said, looking into her glass. “So now you know you can trust me.”
He sighed. So she was hoping the sex had solved something too. “I trust you to be kind,” he said. “But I worry you’ll be too kind, perhaps.” She blinked at him. “I know you don’t want to hurt me.”
“Of course not!” she said, as if it was supposed to reassure him.
“And therefore, I worry—” Could he say it? It felt like he had a knife in his chest. “That you might not want to tell me something unpleasant. Especially after how I behaved earlier.”
That was an understatement. She’d tried to leave him. He’d nearly snapped. Only her strength had saved them both. If she told him now that she wanted to leave, then he had to let her.