He wasn’t far behind me, rooting deeply just five, six, seven more heady times, keeping me worked up and in distress with him, clenching around him, coming even while it felt I might peak again.
He held himself deep as he emptied inside of me, staying there while I milked out every last drop, holding my legs split open like that, stretching me so wide and for so long that I knew I’d be sore in several places come morning.
I could have slept after that. Could have passed out cold and slept deeper than I had in months.
In fact, I tried to, but he wasn’t finished. Not even close.
He’d only just begun to slake his great thirst on me, to assuage his terrible hunger.
He pulled out of me slowly, with great hesitation, dislodging himself with regret, lingering at it, moving not just out but around, shifting inside of me, making his presence and its exit known and felt.
When he was finally free of me, he flipped me onto my back like a rag doll, pushed my thighs wide apart and climbed between.
He started kissing my neck, making his way down until he was licking my nipples.
My back arched off the bed.
“So responsive,” he murmured into my skin a beat before he sucked one needy nub into his mouth. “So sensitive. Never get enough,” he muttered, his big hands pushing my breasts together so he could feast.
He kneaded with his big hands and suckled with his perfect mouth until I was crying out his name.
“Yes,” he said against my nipple. “Say that to me, Scarlett. Say yes. Yes, Dante.” He went back to sucking.
“Yes, Dante, yes,” I complied.
“Now say please for me,” he urged. “Please, Dante.”
I was scratching at the top of his back, but I couldn’t hold back what he asked for, “Please, Dante.”
He groaned, moving up my body. “I want to feel your naked breasts against my chest when I take you this time.
Without an ounce of resistance, my body in full rut, I let him have me again, our chests rubbing together, his weight heavy on me, in me, my face in his hands, his mouth possessing mine.
I cried when I came. He kissed my tears away.
It was just too bittersweet, the pleasure and the pain of it, and at my very weakest, when all my defenses were stripped away, there were things even I could not deny.
The brutal, unrelenting truth was all too apparent to me in these moments.
I belonged to him. I was his.
I’d never stopped being his.
It was a cruel, unbearable, and undeniable fact.
He dragged my pliant, naked body into the adjoining bathroom, drawing a bath and tugging me in to straddle him.
I tried to lay my cheek on his chest, but he gripped my face with both hands and started kissing me. Not an idle, satisfied kiss, either. His mouth devoured mine like he hadn’t just had me. Twice.
His hunger reignited my own, and in spite of myself I was grabbing his neck and kissing him back with equal fervor.
I’d never been able to get enough of him like this, when he was so wildly passionate for me. Hungry to the point of desperate.
As ever, I answered that hunger in kind.
I don’t need food. I don’t need air or shelter. I just need this, my body told me with each fevered throb.
His proximity. His touch. His own all-consuming need. Nothing felt more vital to me.
He held me captive like that for a very long time, with his gentle hands and his desperate kiss, devouring me from the outside in, insinuating his all-encompassing craving into every part of me until I was a mindless slave to it.
Eventually the kissing led to more. I had my thighs on either side of his hips, and gradually he worked me closer, his hardness pushing insistently between my legs, ramming teasingly, and then harder against my sex, finally entering me, working in slow inch by slow inch, sucking in each needy breath I gasped out as he invaded me, my cunt sucking in each needy thick inch of his cock.
I tried to move on him, to create the friction that would relieve us both, but his hands let go of my face, snaking down to grip my hips and hold me flush and unmoving, keeping still and buried to the hilt.
All the while, his mouth was unstoppable on mine, kissing, licking, sucking, gasping out the words he knew would get to me the most and the fastest.
I was whimpering by the time he let up, his hands on my hips working me against his thick length in small, jarring movements.
“More,” I managed to get out, but barely. Passion made him vocal, but for me it was the opposite. I was a blithering mess of in-articulation when I was this far gone.
He rewarded me with a few more hard thrusts then began to pull me off.
I protested, but he shushed me, gave me one last long kiss, then lifted me clean out of the bath and perched me on the lip of it.
Gram had given me one of the best suites in the entire mansion, and the bathroom had a garden tub set in a corner with a scenic window. He set my back against the glass, leaned down between my thighs, and went to work.
I gripped my fingers into his hair, head falling back, eyes drifting closed.
His mouth, God, his mouth. It’d been so long.
Pulling me open, his tongue and fingers clamoring inside, he finished me in seconds.
I was still reeling when he rose. He propped a foot up near my hip, gripped both hands into my hair, and pulled my slack mouth within licking distance of his thick tip.
I started to get it then. He wanted to do everything, wanted to have me every way before the night was through.
I knew him well enough to know he’d have his way.
Neither of us was going to get a wink of sleep until he’d gone through his hit list, which was mind boggling and extensive.
He carried me back to bed and laid me down. When he straightened and started to move away, I wondered if I’d been mistaken and he was actually done.
But he was just turning on the lights.
Of course he would. The intrusive bastard wouldn’t let me hide anything from him.
As he moved about, I admired the view. Even the fresh scratches I’d left all over his back. Every inch of him was the benchmark of my personal preference.
I’m so fucked, I thought, my eyes drifting closed.
But the bastard didn’t let me sleep.
He kept me up until the sun was rising and every inch of my body ached.
“I might let you sleep after this round,” he told me, kissing my shoulder.
He was on my back, groin flush against my ass, my legs spread wide, his clenched fists on the mattress on either side of my head.
I was in exquisite, tantalizing distress, my face in the pillow, mouth opened wide in a silent scream as he rutted hard and deep into my sensitive flesh.
His pace increased as he got close, his thrusts getting almost too rough to bear.
He lifted my face from the pillow with a firm hand in my hair, bending down to kiss as close to my mouth as he could reach, and, buried to the hilt, he emptied himself deep.
He stayed inside of me, hips flexing as he rubbed out every last twitch of his orgasm.
“Jesus,” I groaned, as he pulled out of me with excruciating slowness. It was just too much.
And still he wasn’t done. He kissed his way down my back, pushed my knees up on the bed, and fitted his head underneath me.
I braced myself on my elbows, moving my hips as he ate me out yet again.
My body was still vibrating with pleasure as he flipped me onto my back and straddled me.
“You’re a beast,” I panted, and it wasn’t an insult.
He pinned my wrists above my head, staring solemnly down at me.
A million things were pouring out of his ocean eyes at me.
I didn’t even have to say it aloud. We stared at each other and thought the words, a silent conversation with nothing but our starving, devouring eyes.
It doesn’t matter what’s happened tonight. It doesn’t matter that we mourned together, and made oursel
ves and each other feel better for one bittersweet night.
I can’t forgive you. I can’t and won’t trust you again. You betrayed me and it can never be made right again.
Also, I can’t forgive myself. The things I did to hurt you, to survive after you left, and of course, the things I did to take revenge for the things you did, have damaged me beyond all repair.
But we didn’t say one word out loud. Finally he bent down and kissed me, and it was so soft and so tender as to be devoid of passion.
It held something else, something even more dangerous. A thing I was afraid to even think.
He pulled back with a gasp and started panting like he’d been underwater.
After that, he let me sleep.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
“If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.”
~Laurence J. Peter
I woke up to a steady knocking on my bedroom door.
I cast one bleary-eyed look at Dante, who appeared so deeply asleep as to be unconscious.
“What?” I called out, and even then he didn’t twitch. He’d always been a sound sleeper.
He slept like a guiltless baby, the bastard.
No answer. Just more knocking, and still more, going and going in a precise, continuous rap. Not hard, not soft, not fast, not slow, just steady and determined.
Whoever it was seemed to have no intention of leaving until I answered that door.
But the thing was, I really didn’t want to. There was a limited number of people it could be, and not one of them I wanted to see this early. Or ever.
I wasn’t even dwelling on what they’d discover when I opened that door. It was bad enough that I knew what I’d succumbed to in the dark, lonely hours of the night. I certainly wasn’t thrilled with the notion of anyone else discovering it, but there was no way we could hide it.
First of all, we were both naked. Dante didn’t even have a sheet to cover him. He was sprawled out on his back, exposed to the air, sleeping the sleep of someone utterly capable of trust, which was ironic since he’d been the one to rob me of mine. The Bastard.
Second, the room reeked of sex. I reeked of sex. I’d lost count of the things we’d done over and through the long hours of the night, and the evidence was everywhere, most particularly inside of and all over my well-used body.
Third, the room looked like it’d been ransacked. The bedspread was over by the window for some reason I couldn’t remember, every knickknack on my dresser had been knocked over or off, and Dante’s pants were literally directly in front of the door, like he’d left them there to send a message.
I wondered idly if he’d had the possessive foresight to leave a sock on the doorknob.
I glanced around, trying to decide what there was to be done about it, and also, where the clothes I’d gone to bed in had ended up. All I could see were his clothes, and they seemed to be everywhere, making it impossible to miss that there was a naked man in my bed even if I’d gotten rid of the naked man himself.
“Open the door, Scarlett,” a soft female voice that I’d recognize anywhere called.
My entire sated body stiffened.
Well, hell. I wasn’t going to hide this from her, of all people. In fact, if I ever had to set eyes on her again, this was the demoralizing setup I’d have chosen.
I stood, negligently wrapping a sheet around the essentials, but not bothering to cover too much. Let her see what he’d picked over her last night. Let her see what she could never compete with. Just as her rail thin body always brought out my worst insecurities, I knew my over the top curves made her feel just as inadequate.
How could a man desire two women of polar opposite looks? I’d often wondered. And worse, which type does he prefer?
Though some part of me, my gut I guess, always knew that it was me.
He was a slave to this body, helpless against every curve and hollow of it. If there was one thing I was certain of about him, it was that.
I swung the door open wide as I answered, hiding nothing. Well, nothing in the room. On my face was pure stoicism.
On my face I hid everything.
My hate. My contempt.
My jealousy. My fear.
“Good morning, Tiffany,” I said, deadpan.
And since Dante was sleeping and not dead, finally something jarred him out of his enviably peaceful slumber.
With a jerk he sat up. I watched his body flex with the movement, gaze darting from that drool worthy sight up to the dawning horror on his face.
I couldn’t decide which thing I liked looking at more.
“What the fuck, Tiffany?” he snarled, the horror turning to something darker, something I liked even more if for different reasons.
As he began to scramble to find something to cover himself with, I turned back to the bane of my existence.
I saw her face when she noticed his back.
I saw her go pale as she took in every scratch I’d left on him.
She shot one hostile glance my way.
I feigned a cringe. “Ouch. Those looks like they hurt,” I said with a mock sympathetic pout.
“They do,” Dante grumbled, still looking for clothes.
The chain around his neck and what hung from it were conspicuous when he was naked and moving like that. I didn’t imagine she could miss seeing them any more than I, and that didn’t make me sad.
“What do you want?” I asked her, trying to make my tone neutral but landing on borderline rude.
I hated that she was still shamelessly watching him.
I was starting to understand the phrase claw her eyes out.
“I just had to see this with my own eyes, though I still can’t quite believe it,” she said, directing the words at Dante’s naked back, using a tone with something in it, some bit of ownership for him that I simply could not tolerate.
My hands were in fists, and I knew it wasn’t a good sign. My temper was quickly running away from me. “Are you kidding me?” Disdain dripped off the words. “Did you think we needed your permission?”
For that, she looked at me.
I took a step closer to her. “He was mine before you ever had him, and even when you did, know this, a part of him was still mine. You never got what I had. You had what was left when I was done with him. Even last night, and it was a long night, what I got from him had no piece of you in it.”
For that, I got the reaction I craved. In her dilating pupils, her shortened breath, her quivering lip, I saw how I’d annihilated her with a few brutal sentences.
Good. I had no mercy for her. She’d helped to ruin everything I cared about, helped to make me less whole.
But still, she didn’t speak to me, didn’t address my words.
“Did you think I wouldn’t know?” she asked him, a world of accusation in her voice that I for one thought she had no right to. “We’re sleeping under the same roof. Did you think you could keep this from me?”
It took him so long to answer that I thought I might scream, but then, “I think it’s none of your fucking business,” he told her in a tone so black and deadly and overflowing with scorn that it made me shiver.
“You think that?” she glanced at me, her scathing eyes at my throat.
Even then, I didn’t catch the significance.
“What else don’t you think is my business?” she asked, something pointed in her tone that I didn’t catch right away.
It was the sort of thing that would float around for a while before it parked itself in my consciousness.
“I think none of it’s your fucking business and it never was,” Dante thundered back, his gorgeous temper coming out to play. “How’s that? Clear enough for you?”
“You’re going to regret this,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was speaking to him or me.
Either way, I took exception. I opened my mouth to lay into her again when she added.
“You go to bed with trash, Dante, and you can expect things to get dirty.”
>
My mind went a little hazy for a time.
Only seconds, I believe, but certainly enough time to do some damage.
When I was cognizant again, a naked Dante was behind me, arms wrapped around my chest, holding me back.
Tiffany was in the hallway clutching her bleeding nose with both hands, a boxer clad Bastian apparently appearing from nowhere and holding her back, as though she might attack me.
I thought it was cute that anyone thought I needed protection against her. The prissy, entitled bitch couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag.
“Get out of here,” Bastian told her sternly. “Quit fucking instigating, and go.” He aimed her down the hallway and nudged her until she started to haltingly move.
“You’re going to regret this,” she sobbed as she stumbled away.
“Come back here,” I snarled at her, trying to heave myself out of Dante’s impossible hold. “Let me do a few more things I can regret, you fucking home-wrecking whore!”
There was an awkward, pregnant moment when she was gone, punctuated only by the sound of my rage-filled, panting breaths, when it was the three of us left in the hallway, none of us dressed.
I noticed that Bastian looked pretty freaking edible when he was half naked right about the time that we all realized my sheet had slipped down to my waist in the struggle, leaving me topless.
Dante started cursing as he yanked it back up. “Avert your fucking eyes,” Dante barked at Bastian.
Bastian, who’d clearly only shown up to help, raised his hands in the air and started walking away with a muttered, “You’re welcome for the help, brother.”
“Wow,” I said when we were shut back into my room. “You know that’s the first time I’ve put my hands on that little princess bitch.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. She never does her own dirty work, always keeps her hands clean. She’s an instigator, not a fighter.”
“Don’t I know it,” he said succinctly, not looking at me.
“You really hate her, maybe even more than you hate me.”
“I never hated you. I was just extremely upset with you for a very, very long time.
Whatever he wanted to call it, it had felt a lot like hate, but I didn’t get into that with him. Instead, “What’d she do that you hate her that much? Did she sleep with Nate too?” It was supposed to be a joke, one in very poor taste, but a joke.