And he wasn’t. I ground my teeth as he luxuriated in teasing me, occasionally closing his lips over my clit and giving it a little suck to the rapid sound of my approval, before pulling back again. He just kept teasing and teasing and teasing, until everything ached, until I was crying out, almost in tears, until he pulled away, face glistening with me, grinning up at me darkly.
“Ready to come, baby?”
I was a flurry of nods, his grin spreading as my thighs did. I watched him stroke the length of that fucking thick dick, wanting the ache that would follow when he pushed it inside me.
This time, he didn’t hold out on me, his hands going down on the bed, his body hovering over mine.
“Last chance to say no, love.” My response was to pull him down, to kiss past the taste of me to get to him. I made animalistic sounds of approval as I felt him part my folds, that big, broad head coating itself in my slick. “Now you know,” he said as I clawed at him, trying to drag him deeper. “Now you know what the ache inside me feels like.”
I didn’t get a chance to ponder that as he drove himself into me. I choked on word and thought as my body struggled to adjust, feeling the delicious, wanton stretch of being fuller than I’d ever been before with one man. He hung above me, shadows playing over his skin as he let me adjust.
“You good?”
I saw it now—the faint cracks in the dark prince façade he liked to maintain in the shake of his arms and the tightening of the skin around his eyes and his mouth. I dug my fingers into his hips, hauling him that much deeper.
“Are you?”
“No, Kira. I’m not. I know this is just a cock in a vagina, that I’m being hit by all the feel-good hormones she kept me free of, but, love, you fucking destroy me.”
I got no right of reply, his mouth landing on mine as he began to move. I frowned, wriggled, then pushed back against him, wanting every inch of what he had to give. My hands roamed, unable to decide if they wanted to rake through his hair or across his back. In the end, I decided there was just him and that was all that mattered.
Because he speared into me as his body did, breaking open my defences and laying me bare for him, but it was OK, because he felt the same. When he pulled away, when he stared into my eyes, when the mask slipped entirely… There was a moment as we raced towards coming, where the frantic noise of our bodies faded away and there was just him.
“Love…” he rasped, his face mobile as he processed what was swelling between us. I saw the fear and the pleasure and the joy and the need and the ever-present fear of that need, and knew it as my own. Because it was my own. We were both dark, spiky things, pricking each other when we got close but unable to stay apart. And I wouldn’t be able to after this, I knew it. No matter what I’d said or done before, Billy was under my skin.
Billy was mine.
“Yes…” he growled out in the most desperate of voices, like he’d heard my thoughts, and maybe he had. “Yes, love. Come for me, Kira. Come around my cock.”
I dragged him down against me as I did just that, as if the intense flare of pleasure that burst inside me, igniting my whole body and reducing me to screaming, was contagious. And maybe it was. He came apart moments later, fingers buried so deep into my skin, I’d wear his marks long after we’d separated
“Mine…” he sobbed as the last of him emptied into me. “Mine…”
Chapter 18
Coming out of sex with Billy was a bit like surviving a bomb blast. We put each other back together again, something uneasy yet comforting. He tried to draw me close to him, to hold me in his arms once he’d seen to the clean-up, but we struggled to find a way to fit together, despite being locked tight moments before. He sighed.
“Look, this consort thing works for me. You’ll have Mar and Aen and Johnno for cuddles, because I’m shit at it. Usually, people were straight out the door after we fucked or too stoned to feel anything.”
I pushed him back flat on the bed, ignoring his wary, watchful eyes, not so different to the child Billy I’d seen in the visions. I stroked my hand through his hair until he relaxed and then laid my head down on his chest, his arms belatedly going around me. This seemed to settle him, and when his body softened, so could mine and we fit again.
“Do you want to be better at this?” I asked, staring into his muscles, tracing circles on his skin, anything but look into his eyes. I felt the rise in his chest, the words about to be spoken as a twist in my belly. I didn’t know Billy and found it hard to predict his reactions.
“Yeah.” Lips brushed across the top of my head. “I think I do.”
“So we do what mere mortals do when they’re learning—we practise.”
“Practise…this?” I nodded. He pulled me tighter against him, moulding my body to his. “Yeah, I could do that.”
We didn’t get long to try though, just a few minutes of sweet quiet, where time felt like it stopped and an endless peaceful stillness settled over the room.
“When were you going to tell me?” I asked Ashanti, pacing back and forth in her office.
Once the haze of being with Billy faded a bit, reality shouldered its way back in. He’d grimaced when he saw it, the questions, the tension in my body.
“Should never have shown you Rutherglen,” he grumbled. “Should’ve known how it’d go.”
“I’m glad you did, but now I need to know more. Nan, Mum, Dad. Ashanti needs to know who the targets are. I need to know if she’s already aware of that. I need to know…” Suddenly, all the many, many holes in my understanding came rushing up at me, clamouring for my attention, my hand going to my sternum, rubbing the bone there as I felt my chest tighten. “Is Lucas all right? Is someone looking after Mark? Is—”
“One thing at a time.” Billy slipped from the bed, wrapping his arms around me and showing me he was actually damn good at this, if he wasn’t thinking too much about it. “Which one first?”
“I can’t choose! People’s fucking lives are at—”
“Which one first? Doesn’t mean the others aren’t important or you won’t see to them as well. But you need to do this logically. Which one first?”
“Rutherglen. Mum, Dad, Nan. I need to know what’s happening there.”
“Then we go see Ashanti.”
“When were you going to tell me?” I repeated as she paused, watching me move, obviously concocting a response.
“When it wouldn’t derail you from what you must do. I understand if you were upset by what you saw. We all are. I was remiss. I didn’t get Beau’s call for help until much too late. Communication can be an issue here, especially now with so many people. But what is happening with Rutherglen is a temporary situation. If you take the trials, ascend—”
“Or die trying.”
She nodded slowly, acknowledging that point but not flinching from it.
“Then all of this will go away. You will either remove Rutherglen and all of the sky father’s minions from the board…”
“Or they’ll find someone else to hassle. The next avatar, because I’ll be dead.” I swallowed, frowned, the fight with the sim coming back to me, Aen, Billy lying motionless on the ground. “Or they will be.”