AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Rory turns my head to the side. “Do you realize you’re leaving a trail of destruction everywhere you go?”
“I don’t care,” I snap, though that’s not true. Not exactly. Sometimes I think I care far too much for someone who believes herself without emotion.
“What do you want?” Rory asks, curious, as though this question really is a genuine novelty for him.
“You.”
The wind howls around us at this admission. Rory’s expression remains placid, though he blinks more in that second than in any other.
“The other chiefs will be here later in the week, and I’m not in the habit of fobbing off my friends.”
I bark a bitter laugh, which Rory stifles with the pad of his thumb. The shock of his touch silences me instantly.
“I know they’re equally… intrigued by you, so I don’t have any desire to keep secrets from them.”
“So don’t let me be a secret.” I say this like it’s easy, like the son of the Prime Minister and the future lord of Lochkelvin estate has any business even acknowledging a scholarship girl like me, a girl on my knees in front of him, his fingers hovering against my chilled lips. Nevertheless, the tips of his fingers stroke me soothingly, as though the suggestion contains merit.
“Perhaps,” Rory concludes, and he peels off his tweed wool cap as if to understand better, gazing up at the swollen, shaded belly of the gray sky. Rain falls along the ridge of his noble brows, gliding down the sides of his pointy nose and flushed cheeks. Bedecked in rich country gear and adorned in a quilted moss-green jacket beneath his waterproof anorak, he looks more like a farmer who’s lost his way, not a boy contemplating the advances of an enamored girl.
“We should head back,” Rory says suddenly, his eyes dropping from the gathering storm clouds in the distance to the sheen of my lips. And then he doesn’t move at all. I watch him, his dark blond hair darkening the more rain falls on top of us, dousing the crisp sharp blondness and softening all of Rory’s hard edges into someone more normal, someone less intimidating to gaze upon. Captain Porthos barks, his hind legs loping as he bounds toward us. Rory’s hand absently falls to Captain Porthos’s head, stroking him behind the ear as he stares at me through the thick curtain of rain. “You don’t want to be up a mountain during a storm.”
Still, though, Rory doesn’t act on his words. He watches me, as though waiting for me to make the first move, and that’s new too.
Maybe it’s the setting, the wilderness — the screaming wind, the lashing rain, the forbidden warning palette of the sky — but I feelferalhere, effortless and pure and broken down into basic components, in a way that I only ever experience when I dance. I’m positive I could lean forward and draw Rory’s tongue into my mouth if I wanted. Maybe he’d resist, his lips skittering down my frozen, drenched cheeks. But right now I could do anything — and I want to, I want to do everything, because the storm surrounding us is no match, pales into insignificance, compared to the red-hot fury roaring through my heart.
Rory returns his cap to his head, looking like at any moment he may leave. I grab Rory’s wrists in a sort of “stay” motion. He looks at me in askance, and Captain Porthos wanders off again to howl into the barren valley below.
“I—”
Rory raises an eyebrow. I hate it. I hate the delicate superiority wrapped up in that single, querying gesture. The look that saysoh, what is this idiot of a girl about to say nextand the part of his mind already hunting for popcorn.
But love and hate are two sides of the same coin, and I hunger to be dismissed by Rory almost as much as I ache for his touch. I want to be feasted on by his attention, the same way I crave him to undermine me, needle me, get under my skin and improve me.
When the wind swirls around us again, this time it’s different. This time it shrieks as it weaves between our distanced, kneeling forms, a laughing bully that shoves me precariously into Rory.
His arms wind around me in a heartbeat. My cheek flattens against the pillow of his quilted jacket. His cap makes a cozy shelter, its wide brim as secure above me as the overhang of a roof. Before I can pull away with an embarrassed cough — because hugging, holding, it’s far much more demonstrative than the hot press of lips in a longed-for, inevitable kiss — Rory’s arms wrap tighter around my body, directing me so that I’m looking up at both him and the sky. And then his mouth crashes onto mine.
All at once, he’s everywhere, his lips on mine, heat bursting beneath a searching tongue. He kisses me like he needs me, as though I need to be under himright nowor else he’ll scream bloody, vengeful murder at the entire world for not fulfilling his desires. My body jerks from the punching force of his kiss. It’s a feral, brutal beast, as untamed and wild as the lengths Rory takes to make sure he presents himself as the opposite. This all-too-civilized, spoiled boy is falling apart in front of me, steered by the fearsome energy of the gathering storm into becoming a creature of passion and nature.
And I relish it.
I whine, a broken noise, into his seeking mouth, and Rory steals it and my breath away with his tongue. I gather him as close as humanly possible, craving more and more of his powerful kisses, each one a shockwave that splits my body in half and spirals tightly to my core. In the chilled air, I’m a being of contrasts: a glowing fiesta of feeling, sweat slick across my body, sticking messily to my insulating waterproofs, the ache between my legs almost tangible in its hunger. I’m wet. I’m hot and wet, and no matter how coldly the wind blows, it feels like nothing will ever soothe the growing inferno raging inside me.
Rory kisses me until there’s no breath in my body, until I’m shaking inside his protective arms, my lungs allowing dramatic, shuddering gasps as I try to remember how to breathe.
He pushes me backward as he kisses me, and the world spins around me. No. It spins aroundhim. Rory centers himself into my vision, and I think how often I’ve thought about this, of being on my back before Rory Munro, of his towering statuesque body filling up my gaze, a Roman emperor worshiped for his military strategy as his imperious face dwells upon his latest conquest.
There had been considerably fewer clothes involved in my dreams.
He straddles my waist with firm, clenching thigh muscles, pinning my arms into place above my head. I wouldn’t be able to struggle if I wanted to. I don’t want to. I stare up at Rory, admiring the godlike curve of his cupid-bow mouth, of lips that spill such cruelty with ease.
“You were speaking,” he reminds me arrogantly, his gray eyes boring into mine as he hunts for my concealed truth. “What were you about to say?”
I think I love you.
Because this… this obsession, this mania… It can’t just be infatuation, can it? Lust? Hormones? Ever since our first meeting, my heart has always been Rory’s to do with as he pleased. Benji gave me a wooden yo-yo in much the same way, but I handed over my heart in exchange for Rory’s attention. Pretty little posh boys with daddy’s money are dangerous to know, and yet, and yet… Rory may have trodden on my heart in his carelessness, squeezed it experimentally until it bled inside his enclosed fist, but it’s still whole. It’s still intact. It still beats, thunderingly so, for him.
And he knows that.
