Page 145 of Golden Queen
I ran my hand over his bottom lip, remembering the way he had bitten me. Just the memory stoking the fire in my belly again. "And I will not say it again," I said, leaning forward and laying my lips against his chest. "You didnothurt me." I bit him—hard.
His hand came up to the back of my head, but he didn't jerk me away as I half expected. He pressed me to him as I tasted the faint sweetness of his blood.
"Point taken," he said, groaning.
I climbed over him, straddling his hips and letting the blanket fall away. I kissed him, and his hands came up to my hips. "Sera..." he warned.
I cut him off with a look. I knew he was ready to tell me all the reasons why we couldn’t be together—why it was wrong.
I reached up, cupping his face in my hands again, looking into sorrow-filled eyes that had returned to their familiar darkness. The flames of his rage were gone, and I was not ashamed to admit I missed them. "I know we shouldn't," I told him. "Gods, Io, Idoknow that. But I simply don’t give a damn. I'll do my duty...and you'll do yours. But just for now, Io, please, just don’t give a damn with me."
His dark laugh filled me with a joy that I now knew I did not deserve to feel. I let it wash over me anyway as his lips found mine again, and he kissed me.
"Now," I said, between his exquisite kisses. "Show me what you were about to do when I stopped you. Show me how badly you need me." I made my lips into a pout. "Please," I begged, sweetly.
He laughed again, shaking his head. But then he rose up and flipped me straight onto my back, positioning himself over me on the mattress, with my head at the footboard. "Since you asked so sweetly," he said, grasping my hips and shoving one of his long fingers into me, gently at first, but then when I moaned and arched into him, he moved roughly, growling his satisfaction against my mouth.
It didn't hurt, but there was an edge to it, and a stark pleasure at the rough way he slid it in and out of me.
I bucked against his hand as the wet sound of my flesh on his finger filled my ears. His teeth grazed my neck, and I groaned, low in my throat.
“You like it this way, don’t you, you cruel, wicked creature.”
I smiled in answer. I did, quite unexpectedly. I had always been drawn to the darkness in him. When he was saying such deliciously wicked things, touching me with no concern for being gentle, that darkness was paramount.
His teeth came up to my ear—his hoarse whisper hot against my skin. "I won’t pretend I haven't thought about fucking you hard, making you scream as I drive you into the mattress—or up against the wall—with my handsaround that pretty throat, a million different times. Just walking down the streets of your city, an image in my mind of me inside that tight little cunt of yours would make me so hard I thought about tearing the city down just to find you."
I gasped as his words rolled over me with an unexpected pleasure all their own. He was unchecked and furious; shocking. It excited something inside me that craved the wildness.
I felt him undoing his pants and then his hot, rigid flesh against my thigh as his fingers still thrust in and out of me.
Finally withdrawing them, he shifted me roughly and poised himself at my opening. I felt his hand at the back of my neck. He pulled my head up so that I was forced to look in his eyes. "It's going to hurt this time, Sera."
The words sent chills down my spine. They were exactly what I wanted. Not for him to coddle me with this newfound virginity, or to be repulsed by it, but to undo it as violently as I knew he would undo the men who had done it to me.
He slid in—only a little, and fire erupted between my legs and in my chest. It burned, but I welcomed it. I welcomed him opening me.
"And I'm not even sorry for that." he said as he pushed in a little further. "Because I want you to feel me, stretching you, filling you—claiming you."
Need pulsed in me, bringing the fire to some promised peak of fulfillment.
"Because you are mine, Sera.” He slid into me, all the way, in one swift slide toward madness that tore a scream from me as pain lanced through me. “You belong to me,” he growled.
“No matter what happens...no matter if the whole fucking world burns for it, you will always be mine."
His words, the pain, the utter fulfillment—the claiming, blended into one jarring cataclysm that had me screaming with savage release. The waves of pleasure rolled through me, each cresting with another furious thrust of his hips as his body pounded into mine, relentless and merciless. I shattered around him again, moaning his name as ecstasy tore through me.
And then he found my lips and growled his own release against my mouth. "Mine, Sera," he said as he spilled himself inside me. “Mine,” he repeated, hips jerking a final thrust in time with the spasm of my body cradled around him.
I held his gaze as my heart pounded and my breaths were shallow and wild in my chest. "Mine," I whispered, so low I wasn't sure he even heard. "You are mine, Io. Only mine."
I slept with my head pillowed against his chest and when the dreams came, they were achingly sweet and beautiful.
I dreamed of frosty starlight and mountains covered in snow. Dragons wheeled through an endless night sky against a backdrop of colorful auroras that seemed to stream from heaven itself.
I dreamed of a life filled with dark-eyed children who called me mama, and of nights spent in a big fur covered bed, before an impossibly large hearth—the fire bright, wrapped in the protective warmth of his embrace.
My beautiful Eroa, for that was her name, carried me on pale, silvery-white wings as I flew across the Godsgrass Kingdom where I somehow knew that the king and queen—my parents—sat the throne.
