Page 116 of The Nightmare Bride
He jerked his pants down, then gripped my thighs and yanked me to the counter’s edge. My nightgown rumpled beneath me, still caught around my elbows, the torn halves trailing into the darkness. A glance into the mirrors offered me a thousand versions of sculpted magnificence—the rippled texture of Kai’s ribcage and the high globes of his ass. The creamy, cabled length of his thighs. The rounded crowns of his shoulders, bronzed from the sun.
My breath thinned to a standstill. I slid my attention back to him, then downward, to where he’d already lined himself up.
My tongue went dry. Goddess, it would hurt for a second. Maybe for a few. And right then, I could have wept, because I absolutely needed it to. I needed to feel him, all of him, needed to transmute this bottomless craving into something I could name, something I could lose myself in.
He paused, one hand drifting to my waist. It was the first tender touch all night, but I knew it wouldn’t last. It was a prelude, the last lull before he unleashed all the ferocity caged into the straining lines of his body.
“Gentle?” he said. “Or rough?”
“Rough.” I widened my legs. “If you’re gentle, I’ll kill you.”
“Gods. My vicious wife. I was hoping you’d say that.”
Wife. The word bounced around in my head, nonsensical, because hadn’t he signed the annulment already? I gathered a breath to ask, but his grip clamped around my waist, and he buried himself in me in one clean thrust. Everything in my head vaporized to white-hot silence.
Fucking.
Hell.
He eased out, then drove in again. My spine arched, bending me back onto the marble, baring my throat to him. He filledme up painfully, perfectly, oh-so-right, and I made a sound that might have been a word or an appeal or maybe the death cry of every moment in which I’d resisted him, probably knowing the whole time that I would end up right here, entirely at his mercy.
He surged into me. A groan tore from his throat, delicious enough to feast on for weeks. He wasn’t fast, but he wasn’t slow, either. Just forceful and unforgiving, and it was everything I’d wanted and more.
More, more, so much more, because this wasn’t the quiet fulfillment of Merron or the others, but something knife-edged, a totality of pleasure that pushed me toward some desolate brink. Kai claimed me again and again, and I began to unravel, the layers of myself falling away with every buck of my body against the counter.
“Squeeze my throat.” My whisper was barely audible over the sound of my own fade to extinction. “Just a little.”
He obeyed, circling my neck with a calloused palm.
Pressure thinned my airway—not much, but enough to ignite bright stars in my vision. Every sensation daisy-chained itself to the next. Weight became desperation became pleasure became ecstasy.
Oh, goddess. I was going to die, in bliss. And yet I’d never felt more alive.
My awareness shrank to the scrape of breath against silence, the dearth of air in my lungs, the gift of Kai’s body in mine. He gave himself to me, swift and certain. Somewhere within me, greed sprouted wings and grew a heartbeat of its own. I cared about nothing but him, the friction of him, and more and faster and yes, yes, yes, just like that.
Then he stopped, abruptly. The pressure at my throat vanished as he withdrew. I was empty, suddenly. So empty it hurt.
“No,” I wailed, propping myself up on my elbows. At first, I thought he meant to punish me, but he gathered me up like a ragdoll, pulling the shredded nightgown from my arms and throwing it aside. He carried me to the bedroom, then tossed me onto the bed.
Before the mattress had even finished bouncing, he was on me again, inside me, the angle even deeper this time, though I would’ve said such a thing was impossible.
My eyes rolled back. He curled over me, fastening one hand around the nape of my neck as he drove into me, faster now, brutal and beautiful and consuming.
I let go. Between one heartbeat and the next, I dissolved into a cataclysm of pleasure. He was a paradise of heat and firmness, a living artwork I couldn’t stop touching.
That angle. Oh, shit, that angle. He was exactly where he needed to be. Nothing else mattered. Just him, on top of me. Around me. In me.
That abyss surfaced from the deep, coming to claim me, and I bucked my hips, wanting nothing more than to fling myself into its blissful black reaches.
“Come for me, sweet wife,” he whispered, and bit down on my earlobe.
That silver flash of pain joined the roar inside me, giving me the last push I needed to crest the rise and go careening down the other side. I spun apart, a billion star-studded pieces cascading through the dark. Wave after wave consumed me as I called his name.
And then he was doing the same, mincing my name with silken curses as he buried himself deep and stayed there, his whole body contracting. The pinnacle lasted and lasted and finally released him. He melted atop me, an inescapable weight.
I lay there, boneless, my legs twitching. Aftershocks rippled through me.
Moments passed. Or minutes. Maybe a lifetime.
