This time Elijah doesn’t deny me.
The cot is low, low enough for him to spread my legs with his big hands. He looks down between them to where I’m completely exposed. His eyes are a match, and I’m kindling. I’m ready to burn into a massive flame.
I need more.
Elijah takes himself in his fist and gives himself two absent strokes, jaw working. A flash of fear caresses the back of my neck. He really could hurt me.
He was honest about that.
A vicious fucking might actually damage me beyond repair.
But I’m already damaged beyond repair by him. I can’t go back to the life I had before—not really. The last six months are proof. All those colorless days in my apartment and with my agent and doing all the mundane things from my mundane life tumble through my mind while I grit through this final wait. A lifetime of ordinary boredom when I could be doing this.
I can’t take it, I can’t take it—
The words are on my tongue when Elijah thrusts into me, all at once.
It’s pure pain and pure pleasure, meeting each other like opposite storm fronts. He means to shield me from the worst of him like this, he tries his best, but it’s not enough—this isn’t enough. Not for him, and not for me. Three deep thrusts and he’s crawling up over me, onto the cot, fucking so hard it takes the air from my lungs.
It hurts. It hurts bad enough that I moan in agony.
It’s perfect.
Every time his hips meet mine there’s an answering jolt of pain in the wound. The pain is nothing compared to how good it feels to be taken. Elijah’s body is all tension and take. Mine is all give. This is how it’s supposed to be, this, this, this.
Pleasure coils tight at the place he’s using me now. He lets his head fall forward, his face in my neck. Lips on my skin. If he hadn’t already stolen my breath with his body I’d lose it now. Every shallow tug on my lungs is supercharged with him. On fire with him.
I want him to burn me alive.
Being burned by him, being fucked and used and taken by him, is a thousand times better than lying here waiting for the pain to pass. Who does that?
Who just lays down and lets things happen to them?
Not me.
I didn’t do it when I got kidnapped. I didn’t do it when London found me. I don’t know what I was thinking, trying to fit myself back into my old life when I’ll never fit there again. The only place I fit is here, with Elijah, no matter how many times he tells me I won’t.
His body tenses over mine and for a moment I think he’s going to come, fast and hard, then leave me here, wanting, needing.
He lifts a hand. His fingers circle my throat. And a burst of energy knocks me back into my body. The painkillers tried to displace me but they failed. Like everything else, they failed. I lock my hands around his wrist and his eyes fly open, a low growl escaping him.
“Are you trying to stop me? You should try to stop me, goddamn it. Fight me off.”
I’m on the forest floor again, tired and beaten and back in France. The ghosts of his hands on my wrists press into bone. “Say please.”
His eyes widen, the green flaring bright. “You want me to beg you to stop me?”
He has to remember the way he said this to me that day in France. I know he does from the tick of his pulse in his jaw and the way his pupils blow out.
“Yes.”
He kisses me hard, vicious, almost a bite. Still fucking. As animal as I’ve ever seen him. It came to this because of me. I wanted the beast, and I got him. “Stop me.”
“That’s not begging.”
Elijah gives me three more hard thrusts and then we’re moving. He’s in control the way he is always in control. I hold my breath, bracing for tearing pain. It doesn’t come. Somehow, he’s maneuvered my injured self and his broken heart onto the cot so I’m on top.
I’m on top.
I splay my hands flat out on his chest.
It should be impossible, riding him like this, completely impossible. My core isn’t strong enough. I’m dying, I’m dying. But I’m dying because it feels so good. Because Elijah hasn’t let up. He’s braced his hands on my hips, holding me up so the full pressure of my body isn’t on the wound. It’s all on him. On the thick length that’s stretching me from the inside.
“Say please,” I tell him again, even though I’m the one close to begging, a shudder running up from my core all the way to the top of my head. I clench around him and he hisses.
“Stop me. Make me stop hurting you. Now.”
“How am I supposed to stop you?”
“You have to.” From this vantage point he’s so handsome. He’s still so powerful, even lying underneath me. It hasn’t diminished his strength at all. “You have to. I’ll be the death of you. I’ll tear you apart. I’ll hurt your wound. I’ll fucking kill you.”
I lean forward for more contact on my clit and get it. I’m swollen, oversensitive from wanting him and not having him. This new tug is an electric pressure that borders on sweet pain. “You’re already the death of me. I’m not the same anymore. Ever since I met you, I’m not the same.”
He lets go of my hips and lets me sink down onto him, his palms traveling up and up and up until his fingers are tangled in my hair. “Fuck, oh God, Holly, I—”
There’s more he wants to say. The twist at the corner of his mouth makes it obvious. But I don’t care. I can’t care right now. He’s at my limit and I work down against it anyway. He’s at my limit and I still want more.
“All you have to do is beg me, Elijah, and I’ll make you stop.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Yes.” I am a liar. I never want him to stop, even if it hurts. Maybe I don’t want him to stop because it hurts. My body was made in some strange way that wants pain.
I know I’m alive when it hurts.
“Damn it, Holly.” He says my name through clenched teeth and it’s almost like begging, though I know a man like Elijah North would never really beg. It would be beneath him. He would cajole and command and threaten but he won’t beg.
Or will he?
I see his lips start to form the word, start to say please.
It’s too late.
The winding, punishing orgasm that’s been building and building shears off and explodes. And if I was trying to fight with him, if I was trying to take control—god, I don’t know what I was doing. All of that is gone now. Destroyed. Elijah’s body stills but mine doesn’t. I’m aching and shuddering and clenching all over him.
His fingers tighten in my hair. They keep my face turned to his.
“Look at me.”
The rough edge of his voice makes me peak again. It’s nothing like you need to rest. It’s nothing like the infinitely patient way he’s been speaking to me, speaking around me, for the last thousand years. It’s a voice that can’t be disobeyed.
So I do look at him while I ride out the rest of this orgasm and its aftershocks. I trace the lightning in his eyes, the sunflower bursts of gold around his irises, and the dark shadow of guilt and pain and love behind all that new-leaf green.
He must sense the moment I come down because his fingers untangle themselves from my hair.
Elijah returns his big palms to my hips and holds.