Page 95 of Bonetide

He fucks me on the floor like he’s been let off a leash he didn’t tell me he was wearing. There’s none of the slow careful unwrapping of last night. None of the soft take it for me, lass. This is the version of him I asked for. His hands in my hair, tight against the rug, his hips moving in a hard steady drag that’s going to leave me with bruises on my tailbone and the inside of my thighs. His mouth is at my throat where the pulse runs and he’s biting, just shy of breaking the skin, and the noise he’s making in his chest isn’t quite a human noise. It seems to come from some guttural, primal part of him and I want it to go on forever.

“You’ll think on this,” he growls against my throat. Low and ragged. “Every time you stand at that stove. Every time you put your kettle on. You’ll see me on this floor for the rest of your life, foxglove.”

I let out a cry, my eyes pinched shut.

“Look at me,” he commands.

I look. His eyes are dark, pupils wide, his gaze fiery and intense, the kind I feel deep in my soul.

“That’s it. There you are.”

His hand has gone from my hair to my throat, his palm flat under my jaw, his thumb at the angle of it, not pressing, not threatening, just holding me there like he’s claiming me, keeping me as his. His other hand is between my legs working my clit while his cock pumps into me, deep and slow. The combination’s going to undo me in about thirty seconds and we both know it.

“Look at the state of you,” he rasps. “On the floor of your own kitchen with your hair spilled on the rug and my hand at your throat. You came over the bay to me last night and now I’ve come back over to you. You’ll not be rid of me, foxglove. You’ll not be rid of me even when you want to be.”

“I don’t want to be rid of you.”

“Aye. You will…”

The words drop into me like cold water, even as his hips don’t break their rhythm. I’m not about to ask what that meant, not when I can feel myself climbing. The world’s narrowing to bits and pieces—his cock deep inside where I’m pleasantly sore, his hand at my throat, and the slow drag of his fingers where I’m wet and swollen.

And the deep, dark certainty in his voice that he’s right.

“There you are,” he murmurs, and I realize I can’t keep anything off my face. I’m there for him to read—and fuck—like an open book. “There’s the lass who sat at my table last night, at my dinner, drank my wine like a queen, then let me take her upstairs to defile her. Look at you now, here beneath me in this home, in your home, defiled even further. Look at what I have between my hands.”

His pace stutters, like he’s lost a thread of himself. The man who sat across from me at the dining hall has been replaced by the man who was on the other side of the bay for weeks, watching and waiting and yearning for me, and I don’t know which one is the real him. I don’t want to know right now, because the one on top of me is moving in me at exactly the angle I need, and the orgasm comes up through me like a rogue wave from the depths.

I come. I come on his fingers and around him, with my hand fisted in the rug, and his palm at my throat, and he fucks me through it, and past it, and into the shock of a second, then he comes with me, his face buried in the curve of my shoulder, the sound he makes against my skin lower and longer than any sound he’s made yet. Purely animal.

“There you are,” he whispers. “There you are, my love.”

He stays inside me a long beat after that.

Then his hand lifts off my throat, goes to the side of my face, his thumb at my temple. He’s shaking almost unnoticeably; a tremor in the arm braced over my head, in the firm, hard chest pressed against me.

I place my hand on the back of his neck and hold him there. He doesn’t seem like someone who can be comforted by anyone who needs comforting to begin with, yet I can’t help myself.

“Iris,” he says hoarsely.

“Mm?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

He doesn’t answer right away.

When he speaks, it’s quiet against my collarbone.

“For coming in.”

We end up in bed afterward. He carries me to the bedroom and sets me down on the quilt like I’m made of glass. He goes to the kitchen and comes back with a cup of water then sits on the edge of the bed and holds the cup to my mouth until I’ve drunk what he wants me to drink.

I let him, because he just fucked the life out of me so much that I can barely walk, and I woke up in the wrong bed this morning, and because, well, honestly, it feels nice to be doted on.

Even though in the back of my mind, I keep hearing the starkness of what he said earlier: I’m not going to manage staying away now. I’m telling you what I’m like so you can decide what you’re going to do about it.

And I don’t know what I’m going to do about it, other than let him keep screwing the hell out of me.