Corroded

by Karina Cooper

  His tongue swirled about the pink tip, and then his teeth bit a harsh line that caused me to jerk against the restriction of his improvised bonds. Pain lit a burning fire that melded with an arousal so sharp, it was nearly agony.

  From breast to belly, he kissed and licked, and when I realized his intent, when my knees went soft with abject fear and breathless anticipation, his arms tightened into rigid muscle, held me in place with no help from my own efforts.

  His tongue slid into the auburn curls between my legs and this time, I did scream. The first drag of his mouth against a bit of highly sensitive flesh had me writhing against his hold, wrenching at the straining shirt. He was merciless. Thorough. Licking at me as if I were the most delicious of delicacies and he a tiger starved for it, Hawke feasted at my flesh, nipped gently and sucked hard until the coiled spring winding inside me let go.

  My release flooded me with sensation so blinding, I could not breathe, lit the darkness behind my eyelids to shimmering fairy lights and forced a high, wild keening from me.

  Hawke did not let up, lapping at me throughout, his face buried between my legs as if he would never stop.

  I came back to myself with such startling clarity that even my own breath sounded overloud. I panted with effort, struggled to find my footing, but Hawke was not done.

  “This time,” he rasped against my thigh, his skin flushed and eyes sparking with dangerous hunger, “I will not play the gentleman.”

  “Are you capable of gentlemanly behavior?”

  My words. My voice, shuddering with the aftershocks of a release so profound, I could not imagine doing it again. Yet there I stood, braced against the wall, bared to Hawke’s ravenous stare, goading him. Encouraging him.

  The unholy light in his eye warned me that my words had scored their mark.

  He stood, caught me effortlessly when I would have slid to the floor and carried me to the single bed—fine enough of make, but narrower than the one I’d woken in before. He set me down.

  “I believe you to be untried.” He did not look away, even when his words caused a fierce blush to stain my cheeks. “Is this true?”

  I briefly considered taking him to task for daring to ask, but it was superficial at best. “Yes,” I whispered. I found it embarrassing to speak of it aloud, more so with a man who was personally—or would be soon—invested in the subject. It was a truth he’d soon learn for himself. “But I am not ignorant.”

  Hawke said nothing, yet the hungry edges of his face tightened. It was almost as if he fought himself, struggled with some internal concern I could not understand.

  Whatever it was he fought, it did not slow him. I stared as he pulled his shirt tails from his trousers. I could not help myself. As the sweat cooled on my skin, as my heartbeat hammered like the bells of Westminster, I watched him reveal himself bit by bit. It exposed the lean athleticism of his chest, the muscles flexing with every move he made. He was no lumbering dock man, but I was seized with a vicious need to sink my fingers into all that beautiful flesh. Feel the tensile strength of that lean body beneath my hands.

  Hear him growl for me.

  The edge of my thumb slipped between my teeth as I drank in the beauty unfolding before me.

  Halfway through the buttons, his eyes caught on mine. The sound he made fixed in his chest, and he stripped the shirt over his head entirely, buttons forsaken.

  I was left with an impression of taut strength, lethal tension. Those muscles carved over his belly drew my gaze lower, to a stern ridge thrust against the confinement of the trousers he made no effort to touch.

  Once more, I felt that pulse within me. That needy ache. I knew what that bulge signified, what it would mean. I was no stranger to anatomy, or the working elements of a physical consummation, yet...

  I bit my thumb harder.

  The shirt fell from his fingers. He approached me, not wholly nude, and I could not decide if I felt the loss or the relief of it more.

  I wanted to see what lay beyond that flap in his trousers. Wanted to look at it, feel it, dear God, I wanted to know it. Just as much as I wanted to cover my face and hide the uncertainty that seized me now.

  That, my pride would not allow.

  Seizing my courage in both hands, I reached for his waist.

  Hawke froze. The taut expanse of his belly sucked in as my fingertips skimmed beneath the fabric’s edge.

  I could not believe my own temerity, but I would do it. I would unbutton his trousers and roll them down his muscled thighs. I would kneel on the narrow bed and stare, wide-eyed with wonder, as his shaft sprang free of the confined fabric, as swarthy in color as the rest of his skin, deeply red at the tip and glistening with fluid.

  I would, and I did, shocked at my boldness, breathless with wonder and fear and a need that would not loosen its grasp.

  Hawke stood because he allowed it. Because I think it pleased him to wonder what I would do, faced with such an unknown.

  Perhaps he expected me to take that part of him into my mouth, as I knew that doxies and skilled women of the craft would do.

  I could not. Not yet. I had not the courage nor the finer understanding, and a part of me bristled with fury at the possibility of being compared to other women, other acts, other nights Hawke had no doubt entertained.

  But because I could not help myself, either, I wrapped one hand around his shaft and measured its width.

  The organ leapt against my palm.

  Hawke’s breath hissed through his teeth.

  “‘Tis smooth,” I observed, astonished. I stroked both hands over him, gentle as I dared. “Like warm silk, until here.” Where the raspy, faintly wiry black hair began at the base.

  “Cherry.” A gritted word, my name.

  I looked up, into eyes smoldering with such controlled intensity, and could not stop the impish desire no matter how hard I tried. Leaning forward, I pressed my lips to the head of his shaft. A kiss, no more, and a dare of my own making.

  I underestimated what it would do to the man.

  He moved so quickly, I had no opportunity to truly analyze the taste of him—salty, a little bit musky—before he lifted me bodily, wrenching me away from his flesh and higher on the bed. His skin had darkened, his eyes blazing with something wholly different—something I could not read, had no rules to tell me how.

  Suddenly, I was upon my back, my legs splayed and held so beneath his hands. He knelt between them. His shaft thrust proudly between his thighs, trousers bunched at his knees. That muscle leapt in his jaw, a tic that spoke as to the level of restraint echoed in the hard sting of his fingers on my softer flesh.

  That I was exposed, my most intimate flesh laid bare for him, was a concern only partly entertained. He had seen me before, after all, and I confess to being swept away by the moment. Raw aggression and poignant need; every note of pain merged with pleasure, every rough touch with a gasp.

  My body was too hot, my senses wrapped up too tightly.

  I knew what it was I wanted, but I had never asked before, and I would not beg.

  I closed my eyes. It did not please him.

  “Look at me,” he demanded.

  I would not.

  His nails dug into my thighs, earning a shuddering exhale. “You will look at me when I take you.”

  I cried out, a mewling sound that frothed with need and shame combined, but I did look at him. The satisfaction this carved into his taut features stripped me of that shame—in his approval, I found a kind of serenity.

  He bent, looming over me with such abject grace that I wanted to weep; he truly was beautiful. Even with the appalling scars crossing his back, with the devilish eyes that did not match, even the cruel shape of his mouth—he was a man sculpted of such strength and beauty.

  The hot skin stretched tight over his shaft tapped my most intimate flesh, and I jerked in surprise. In apprehension.

  In aching, wild craving.

  “Beg me.” His voice rubbed against places inside me no voice should have t
he measure of, dark and decadent and so unyielding.

  I fisted my hands into the sheets before I gave in to the urge to touch him. My lashes lowered, hid whatever I feared he could read within my gaze. “No.”

  “Beg me, Countess.”

  A streak of pain no fleshly wound could match. A rise of anger that only fed my wicked need. I opened my eyes to glare into his. “No!”

  He shifted, and that hot skin brushed mine once more. A gasp tore from my throat, my hips rose of their own accord and I watched his dark lashes flare as my wet flesh found his, dragged so deliciously that my gasp turned to a moan.

  A hand came down by my temple, clenched in the bedclothes so tightly that the knuckles gleamed white.

  He lowered his head, sealed the distance between us until my hips cradled his, my breasts cushioned his hard chest, and I was suddenly, deeply aware of him in every way. His heat, his physique. His fragrance.

  Every way, that is, but that which I craved.

  “Do it,” I demanded between clenched teeth.

  Hawke’s mouth turned lazily crooked.

  Angry, he was intimidating. Challenging and effortlessly in charge, he was appealing.

  This? This laconic smile devastated.

  And when he dragged himself across my wet, empty flesh, when he stroked the length of his hard shaft over that most sensitive part between my legs, I groaned with the deliciousness of it. And with the ache that he refused to fill.

  “Hawke!”

  “Beg me,” he said again, a low growl. “Beg me to defile you, Countess.”

  “Why?” I managed, eyes closing tightly despite his earlier demand. “Why, damn you?”

  “I would have this truth, at least, between us.” The head of him nudged against my opening, and I thought I might tear my own skin off with the want of it. He pushed, just a little. Just enough that the sensation spread out through my body like a wild flame.

  Not enough. Not nearly close to enough.

  “Beg me, Cherry.”

  No shame could hold me. “Please!” It wrenched from me, wild and wanton. “Please, Hawke, please.” I pulled at the coverlet beneath me, tried to twist my hips but he pinned them too neatly. I inhaled a juddering breath. “I want you to take me. Defile me.” To my unwitting horror, tears burned behind my closed eyes.

  Harsh fingers seized my chin, and my lashes flew wide to see the fraying remains of his control snap taut. “Watch me,” he gritted out from between clenched teeth.

  I clenched his wrist in both of my hands, nails digging into his flesh. “Make me forget.”

  He groaned tightly and pushed himself within my body. I braced for pain on some level, uncertain exactly what it was I expected, but all I felt was the fullness of it, the tightness as my flesh stretched to accommodate this new intrusion. It burned first, then eased to something wholly different—a heat with no end, a bottomless well of yearning.

  A thousand new feelings rippled outward, drenching me in awareness, in blind need. “Yes!” I cried, triumph and encouragement.

  Hawke moved within me, and it was as if everything I felt expanded. Heightened. In and out, he thrust himself within me with a rhythm that wound my body tighter, drove me further and further into madness, until I dug my short nails into his back and held his sweat-damp body to mine.

  He grunted at the act, threw his head back on an animalistic roar when I dragged one hand down his side. I don’t know if I drew blood; I did not care. I felt. Everything I was lost itself, drunk on impressions I had never imagined I could feel. Not like this. Not like the opium I took or the fog I walked in. This took it all away. Made everything vanish.

  For a brief moment in time, I was lust and need and wicked pleasure, and I cared for nothing else.

  Hawke pushed himself up on rigid arms, filled me so completely as his gaze crackled. In my wild state of mind, I swore that his eyes had gone blue once more. Then I ceased to care about anything but the fingers he wrapped tightly about my throat, the beautifully harsh set of his features as he held me down and drove me to untold pleasures, my own spiraling hedonism taken far beyond anything I could have imagined.

  When my release took me again, it was to the echo of Hawke’s ragged groan, a pulsing ache, and the sensation of something hot and wet sliding over my hip.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I was at a loss.

  What was the propriety of those moments after a tryst? Was I expected to gather my things, thank him graciously and leave?

  Would he want more than that? Less?

  Fanny’s hours and hours of tutelage had never covered this. Hawke sat at the edge of the bed, his back to me, and fastened the trousers he’d pulled back up his legs. Whether to spare me the sight of his nude body or for some other reason, I did not know. I could not tell.

  The man was damned difficult to read on any other day. I expected no different now. He was, in the end, just another man who’d gotten his flesh.

  That I had enjoyed it—no, that it had stripped from me everything that held me down, tore from me the constraints of a life I had no control over, was something I could easily accept.

  I now understood why there were them what risked all for the act I’d always considered more of a chore, a means to a wage.

  The hearth painted the chamber in shades of gold, gilding Hawke’s silhouette. I eased the edges of the rumpled bedclothes around me, feeling a sense of insecurity I’d lost somewhere between the bath and the bed. The remains of his release still clung to my flesh, and I felt awkward beyond all measure.

  By heaven, I made no logical sense.

  Hawke did not turn. The stark contrast of white ridges against the tawny expanse of his back seemed all the more bleak this close, and the angry welts curved over his side left my cheeks hot with the realization that I’d put them there.

  As I’d found myself doing the first I’d seen those lurid scars, I reached out a hand. Traced the edge of one with a gentle fingertip.

  The muscle beneath jumped. Hawke stood, a fluid motion that only served to showcase the grace and agility with which he moved. A tiger, Zylphia had called him once. True enough. Black and gold.

  And wicked as the Devil himself.

  “Those aren’t old,” I said, daring to break the silence grown between us. That parts of me still ached, thrummed with pleasure and other unfamiliar sensations, made my casual observation all the more ludicrous.

  I wish there’d been at least a pamphlet to guide a lady after her first encounter. At the very least, something for brides. Was the expectation that she would have more to speak of with the man she married?

  Impossible. I could not imagine sharing this moment with my late husband. Of all the things we had shared, I could not think of the earl as a man to become more like...

  Hawke.

  Oh, what a horrid thing I was to compared the two, and unfairly at that. The very thought turned me cold, stripped the vestiges of a fading heat from me and left me scrambling for a different need altogether.

  I sat up, clutching the bedclothes to me.

  Hawke strode for the small table beside the hearth, poured himself a glass of something that gleamed like garnets held to flame. Wine, perhaps. Or brandy. “Leave it alone,” was his only reply, before downing much of the liquid.

  My eyes narrowed. “You must think me one of your bits of flesh.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  It took effort to refrain from gasping from the verbal blow. “If you believe that,” I replied, coolly as I was able, “you’re rather more deranged than I credited you.”

  At least he turned, one black eyebrow arched high. The glass in his hand winked. “You’ve no measure of it, Miss Black.”

  The cool return of that moniker cemented my hatred for it. I stood so quickly that my legs bumped the bed behind me. The noise it made as it shifted seemed overly loud in my suddenly pounding ears.

  “Very well,” I snapped, striding to the pile of my discarded clothing—and the opium within the pocket. T
he yawning void opening in my belly spoke of feelings, of injury, I had no desire to share. “I shall leave you to your prison.”

  “As you should have the moment you found it.”

  The reminder only served to widen the ache, tear free the wound inside me. I stumbled over the edge of the blanket I’d taken with me, sank to my knees and found myself fumbling with the coat I suddenly could not see. Not through the blur affecting my vision.

  Not tears. I would never cry for the bastard. Not for him.

  Perhaps for other reasons. Other wounds.

  Even perhaps for me.

  I muttered wordless frustration as I sought blindly for my coat pocket.

  Warm hands covered mine.

  I stilled, blinked hard to find Hawke kneeling before me, his features implacable. Yet he tugged the coat from me. “What is it you want?” he asked, each word constrained to terse effort.

  “The truth,” I snapped.

  Even I did not know what truth I spoke of, but Hawke only looked down to my coat. Long fingers dipped into the pocket. “The scars are the reminder of a punishment that did not take.”

  Any other person might have displayed humiliation, or perhaps a self-conscious regard. Hawke spoke matter-of-factly, unbowed by the whip that had taken his flesh. Unbroken by the badge of shame he carried with no shame at all.

  “They’re fresh,” I said again. “Enough that the scars are still pale. Was it recent?”

  He inclined his head, looking up when he withdrew the bit of opium I’d searched for. His gaze told me nothing, banked and reserved.

  Mine widened. “My doing?” Of course it was. It made sudden sense. Zylphia whipped for her temerity to hire her own collector, Hawke whipped for...what? What part? What had I done to cause his punishment?

  I watched him peel back the wax paper with neat precision, my mind spinning wildly. “I don’t understand. I didn’t know... Why? Why would you be punished for me?”