Page 33 of A Murderous Crow
A glow of pride suffused me at that sound, and it was a rush for me, knowing that he was enjoying himself so thoroughly. Still, I couldn’t help but realize that the stripped-down and empty hollow center of my being was just everything about the overwhelmingness of my entire situation, with him pulling back from my shore.
It wasn’t leaving me. It was regrouping, and as everything rushed back in, crashing into my shore in a cacophony of mess and hurt, desire and friction. It was as though he had stripped me completely bare to the bone of everything that had made me,me,and now it was all crashing into me at once.
A lightning bolt of pleasure forked out from where our bodies met at our groins. It licked along the inside of my being with flame – scorching me finely, the tongues of electricity curling around my tight nipples, and fizzling out through my limbs in a spectacular spray of sparks as his body and the motions it made completely unmade me, pulling me apart like a tornado going through a trailer park, and leaving inestimable damage and wreckage behind.
It was one of those moments in your life that you knew you were changed and that there was no going back to who you used to be, andthatwas terrifying.
Chapter Fourteen
Corvus…
I needed to immediately switch gears. She lay trembling beneath me and had taken everything I’d demanded of her body beautifully. But be that as it may, her soul was pointedly in distress. She couldn’t catch her breath, and it wasn’t lost on me that she was sobbing. Though I didn’t feel as though I’d broken her completely, she was definitely in need of some repair.
I hadn’t banked on shifting her completely off her foundation, but I was definitely getting a sense that was what had just happened. God, she’d felt incredible, and the sight of her blindfolded and chained to my bed, powerless and as tame as a new kitten, had fucking done so many outstanding things for me.
I had ravaged her, thoroughly and completely, and though I knew she’d come, and that I’d made her come undone, her fear had spiked at the same time, and now she lay shattered and vulnerable beneath me.
I lay over her, smoothing her hair back from her face, the blindfold beginning to stain, the satin turning from white to gray, and her makeup transferring and bleeding through with her tears.
“Shhh,” I soothed, and kissed her lips lightly. “Let it out,” I urged. “I’ve got you, Bright Eyes. You feel whatever you need to feel.”
The permission made her gasp and pause in her trembling. It was anyone’s guess whether she would collect herself or fall apart completely.
I unshackled her wrists, and her arms came down to hide herself from my sight. There was a part of me that was swamped with immense guilt.
Too much, too quick,I surmised, and I captured her face between my hands, pushing the blindfold up out of the way, pulling her to me, and burying her face into my shoulder. Kissing the side of her head, I breathed into her ear, “Take your time. Take as long as you need to.” And I meant it.
She dissolved into a flood of tears, and I could only admit to myself my folly. She wasn’t at all who I’d thought her to be. I had thought she was just another rich girl, used to these sorts of head games, guarded, stronger than steel – but this? This was something else, something completely unexpected. I had one of two choices – stop now, let her go, and hope that she didn’t breathe a word of this to anyone, or sink my claws deeper, hold on to her even tighter, and take my time figuring her out and what made her tick.
As she trembled finely against me, sobbing into my shoulder, my cock softening inside her and the condom both, I had to admit to myself that the mystery that was Savannah Kittridge was thoroughly under my skin. Option one was a nonstarter.
There was only one way to go, and that was tokeepgoing, albeit more cautiously than I had moved up until this point.Clearly, Savannah wasn’t just another pretty face with an icy-cold heart, even if she had played the part so very convincingly up until this point when it came to our mutual business practices.
This? On a personal level? It was such an unexpected and completely different animal, but no less intriguing to me.
I was a man of my word and did what I promised her. I held her and kissed her forehead. When she looked up at me in hopeless confusion, I kissed first one eye, then the other, kissing away her tears, the salt of them still on my lips when I pressed them to hers, grateful to an extent that she wasn’t so distressed as to not let me in.
Her lips parted, and I slipped my tongue past mine to taste her bottom lip and see if she would be amenable to something deeper between us at the moment, or if I had well and truly scared her off.
I found myself hoping against hope that I hadn’t, and my heart fell when she hesitated. I fully expected a rejection, but then at the last moment, when I was about to withdraw from her, her hand fluttered to the side of my face with the kiss of a butterfly’s wing, and she parted her lips to let me in, meeting my tongue with a tentative touch of hers.
I kissed her with reassurance and captured her hand with mine, where it touched the side of my face, pulling my lips from hers to turn them into her palm and kiss her with reverence there. I breathed deep her perfume, no doubt daubed on the inside of her wrist, and my senses were filled with bright light and sun-ripened peaches.
It suited her more than I could have thought.
I looked into her somber blue eyes and murmured to her, “Stay right where you are, Bright Eyes. I’m going to draw us a bath.”
She swallowed hard and searched my face as I reached between our joined bodies to hold the condom on myself so I could withdraw from her. She sucked in a breath and shuddered beneath me as I pulled from her. I pushed up, getting off the bed and stripping the rubber from my flaccid cock, tossing it in the waste basket tucked between the bed and the nightstand.
I went into the bathroom and started the bath, testing the water to make sure it was neither too hot nor too cold.
She appeared in the doorway a moment later, hugging herself, hiding herself from me, and said, “I need to use the bathroom.”
“Take your time,” I moved past her and shut her inside. It wasn’t long until the toilet flushed, and I gave her just a moment before I slipped back in, letting the door swing wide.
She stood before the mirror, her dress halfway up her legs, and I went to her, hands on her hips, pushing it back down, taking it from her hands.
“You’re okay,” I breathed in her ear. “You’re not going anywhere but the circle of my arms, tonight.”
