As quickly as I started, I stop. I lift her up from my lap so she’s an inch above the tip of my cock. It hurts, the dry air on my private flesh. It hurts to be outside of her.
“No,” she moans, her hips rocking uselessly where my cock used to be.
“Promise me,” I say, licking my lips. “I’ll only let you come if you promise.”
“Promise what?”
“Promise you’ll say I shot him.”
Her eyes are lust-dazed and dark. They go wide when I say that. It takes her slow seconds to focus on me. Outrage and desire mix in her brown gaze. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Don’t… No. You can’t be serious.”
“Stone cold,” I say, resting her ass on my thighs. That gives me space to bring my hands to her front, to run my thumb through her wet folds. God, she feels good. I want her around my cock again, but not without this. “You want this cock, you promise me.”
Fire flares in her dark eyes. “You’re sure I’ll give in.”
My thumb finds her clit, and I circle, circle, circle. She gasps and wriggles in my arms. There is no country safe enough. There is no safehouse hidden enough. We will be found. The only way to save her is this. “Promise me, and I’ll fuck you until you cry.”
Her thighs tremble around me. Her hips give a small, telling jolt. “No. Please.”
“It’s so easy,” I coax, an asshole to the last. “So easy to give me what I want. Then I’ll make you feel good. I’ll fill you up and come inside you.”
She shudders. Her eyes drift closed. “Please.”
I stroke her with blunt, harsh movements. I’m not trying to make her rise gently. I want her spilling over and desperate. She has a strong will, but I have time on my side. Seconds turn into minutes. They might even become hours as I fuck her with my fingers, keeping her on the edge, never letting her fall into orgasm. Tears fall down her cheeks, squeezed from beneath tightly closed eyelids. “Promise me, sweetheart. That’s all you have to do.”
She should have known I’d get my way, whether I used the pain medicine to distract or sex to fuck her into oblivion. She’s rocking on my legs, arousal dripping onto my jeans, lips parted in a sexy pant, whole body moving in time with my thumb. I’m relentless, bringing her inexorably to the pinnacle only to hold her there. She can’t move. Can’t go anywhere, can only take it. The tears come faster now, they flood down her cheeks, because she knows she’s lost.
The words are a broken whisper. “I promise.”
Relief sweeps through me, wiping out all thought. I slam her down onto my cock, and she comes immediately, her muscles clenching and quivering around me, liquid desire sliding down my cock to my balls, and I come in a hard, endless pulse that coats her inside with come.
CHAPTER TEN
Holly
Washing up at a utility sink shouldn’t be sexy, but it is.
I shouldn’t spend my time memorizing the dips and lines of Elijah’s hard body, but I do.
He rubs soap between his big palms. Water runs over his knuckles in white suds. Such mundane movements but the sex has given them a surreal, shimmering quality. A joke about being in a movie comes to mind and flits back out again. He looks too serious for jokes. So serious. So tense. Like someone might burst into this dark church at any moment.
I see the shadow of fear in his eyes when he looks into the mirror above the sink, but he blinks it away in an instant. Did I imagine it? Does he truly believe that the net is closing in around us, or is it just his nature to be prepared? God knows he’s earned the right. Survival has been the focus of his entire life, and not in the abstract way it is for other people. We’re all trying to make it in the world. Elijah carves out heartbeat after heartbeat.
It’s my new mission to convince him this isn’t true.
“Elijah,” I say, and his green eyes meet mine in the blackened mirror. They’re so intense that I’m winded. What was I going to say to him, anyway? That he’s wrong about the world around us? That soon, we’ll be able to sneak out into the dark and disappear? I didn’t have a plan when I shot that gun and I don’t have a plan now. I just have a fierce, delirious need to prove to him that we’ll survive. We can survive anything as long as we’re together.
“I love you.” The words fall out of my mouth like stones to the bottom of the ocean, swift and sure of their way down. It isn’t a solution. It won’t protect us from bullets, but it doesn’t have to. It has a power all its own, and the love builds inside me until I’m bursting.
He whirls to face me, stunned for a single, breathless moment.
Three things happen at once in the pause before he speaks.
There’s a sound of wood splintering on stone. Elijah blinks, and when his eyes open again, something flashes through them, onyx through emerald. It looks like heartbreak but it’s gone too soon to pin it down. And he moves.
“What are you doing?” It’s a pointless question, wasted breath, because as soon as he’s between me and the bathroom door it’s obvious.
It’s so horribly, awfully obvious.
He was right.
I’m out of time to prove to him that we’ll be okay in the end.
We will not be all right. Love doesn’t conquer all.
Men swarm down into the basement, too many to count, a swarm of black shields and weaponry. They’re multiplying, shouting. My question is swallowed up in the storm of noise. Something loud explodes in the next room, toward the cell, but nothing heats or burns. A flashbang? I discover I’ve put my hands over my ears and I’m too late.
My entire skull rings with the noise.
Elijah’s shadow falls away from me.
He’s falling, too. There are so many people, too many people, and they’re coordinated. They knock him down and he gets back up. The bathroom is too small to fight in, far too small. The rim of the sink presses coldly into my back. I’m afraid to let go of my ears in case my brain spills out, but I do, I do, because I have to reach for him.
I get a fist into his t-shirt.
It’s ripped away.
A frustrated scream I can’t hear scorches my throat, fear corroding the raw flesh. They’re kicking him. Killing him. How is ever going to survive this? He won’t, not unless—
I lurch forward and throw my body down over his. There’s a chance if I can hold on.
There’s a chance.
I can’t hold on.
How many people have crowded into the bathroom? Six? Ten? Four hands dig into my skin. I don’t know what I’m shouting as they drag me away. I get one arm hooked through his. It comes to nothing. My nails rake across his bicep, leaving red trails behind.
He’s hidden from me by the black outfits and combat gear and I feel something like vertigo. Something like the disembodied horror of losing a tooth. They’re dragging me, carrying me, toward the stairs.
I’m not going to get back to him. If they take me out of here and I die, I won’t be able to get back to him.
I let myself go limp, the full weight of me pulling down toward the floor. My heel catches on the stairs and it sends a bolt of pain up through my leg. At least I have contact with the bottom step and I dig it in.