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.
I can’t catch my breath and for a dizzying instant I think maybe he was right. Maybe I should have been resting instead of trying to fuck him like a crazy person.
But he’s here, too. He’s rocking his hips up to meet mine again. He’s pushing himself up on one elbow so he can kiss me while he also braces me with his body.
I didn’t know I could feel the wound until he does this, and then it’s too late to feel anything but his release.
It takes him over. His thighs bunch underneath mine and he tips his head back, looking up toward salvation or just the ceiling. I graze my teeth over the line of his jaw and he turns into the touch. I’m still so hot for him, so wet I can hear it. Hear the low, soft grunts he makes as he comes. Hear the relief in his voice that he’s worked so hard to hide from me.
When it’s over he puts a hand to the back of my head and folds me into his shoulder, easing us both down to the cot. My skin hums. I could be in a field of bees, only I’m not, I’m in the basement of an abandoned church with one Elijah North taking up all the room on this narrow bed. Fine with me. Fine. His hard body feels like it’s keeping the blood inside my skin. The bullet wound hurts, but it’s a faraway pain, like it can’t quite touch me.
Elijah reaches for the table next to the bed and something drops onto the floor with a plastic clatter. He doesn’t move away from me to pick it up, only reaches for another bottle.
Those damned painkillers.
I’m too high from the sex to argue with him when he puts one on my tongue. I’m too high to do anything but sip water from the bottle he offers.
It kicks in fast. I have just enough time to sling an arm over his chest.
Stay, I mean to tell him. There are other things I want to tell him, too, so much I have to say.
Too late.
Sleep closes in.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Adam
London’s apartment raises more questions than it answers.
Questions are easy to come by, here on the couch, listening to the unsteady rumble of traffic out on the street.
Most people’s apartments—or houses or dungeons—give away lots of information about them. People tell their whole life story in what they keep and what they throw away. But I find I have a particular interest in my surroundings. This is because of my particular interest in London Frank. Particular interest is an understatement of the kind that makes me laugh out loud, even when I’m alone in a silent apartment.