She buries her face in my neck, moaning, kissing.
Do it, do it.
Her voice is muffled but I can make out the words through the tangle of kisses and desire.
I push aside her panties and stroke my hand along her lips, which drives me so much more feral in real life than it ever could in my mind.
Up, up, I stroke her lips, pushing them apart, and then bring my finger to the engorged nub of her needy fucking clit. When I rub it, she falls away from my neck and starts to moan in my arm.
“Bite down if you want,” I snarl.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she moans.
“I’m not some soft high school punk,” I tell her. “Bite as hard as you want.”
She makes another moan of pleasure as I rub her clit faster, and then bites into my arm with a sweet sting of lust.
I tense my muscles against her teeth and rub her more ferociously, her moans and, most of all, the way she twitches and quivers as I rub driving me to claim her more and more.
I’ve never been much of a musician, but as I strum her soaked nub I feel like I’m playing the best instrument in the world, every sound produced more heavenly than the last.
“Come,” I tell her, whispering close to her ear. “Come all over my hand. Come hard, Lilah, and come now.”
“Ah,” she cries, letting go of my arm and throwing her head back. “Ah, ah, ah.”
I press another finger against her clit and rub faster, harder, with more dominance.
The music reaches a crescendo and then a torrent of creamy release gushes all over my hand and my wrist, drenching me as she grinds side to side and up and down, moaning louder and louder as she squirts thick gorgeous come all over me.
When she’s done, she leans back, her mouth an O-shape.
“I’ve never done that before,” she whimpers.
“What, orgasmed or squirted?”
She opens her mouth to reply, but then there’s a loud crash and a sound like glass breaking from outside.
I leap to my feet, anger lancing through me that anybody would interrupt this moment, that they would dare.
“Wait here,” I tell her.
Her face has drained of color and suddenly our conversation is forgotten. She climbs unsteadily to her feet.
“What is it? Who is it? What’s going on?”
There’s something in the quick-fire way she asks those questions that tells me she already knows.
With a violent tug a thought wrenches into my mind.
She has a boyfriend.
I can’t believe that Lilah would lie to me like that.
But then, what if it’s true? What if she has a boyfriend and he’s outside right now, drunk and with a few of his buddies, and they’re about to try and take Lilah from me?
I don’t know if I’d be able to control myself in those circumstances, if I’d be able to rein in this grim prehistoric she’s-mine instinct inside of me.
As I stride across the kitchen and down the corridor toward the main entrance, I feel like a man from the distant past, walking to the mouth of his cave to find out just who or what the fuck has decided to disturb the relative peace of his family.
I wish I had a club, a spear, a bow.
But my fists will do.
I open the door.
Chapter Six
Lilah
“Wait here,” Dom says, his hand on the door as he glances back at me with those piercing eyes.
My chest is still heaving and my body rioting from the searing contact we just shared, the closeness like a fireworks display between us, sharp, hot. As hot as the fire he rescued me from.
Now my body is doing strange things, my sex screaming at me for his hand and his tongue and everything else, even as a bitter doubt hisses in the back of my head that I’m not good enough for him, I’m not what he wants.
I’ll have to tell him, won’t I?
But right now, with our closeness interrupted by that crashing, smashing sound, my mind twists into another direction.
Craig.
Somehow, the certainty that it’s him slams into me without the slightest doubt, roaring out in my mind that it could be nobody else. Craig has come here because, in his messed up version of reality, I belong to him and nobody else is allowed anywhere near to me.
And never mind that I would never, in a million years, agree to that.
That doesn’t matter to him.
I don’t listen to Dom, because there’s no way I’m just going to wait here like some damsel in distress when the cause of this is me. Well, not me.
Him, that presumptuous, hateful dickhead, but if I wasn’t here then Craig wouldn’t have chosen Dom’s place to vandalize.
I try to calm myself as I follow him into the blazing sun, telling myself that I’m projecting too swiftly into the future, that perhaps a bird just flew into a window or a random kid decided to play an unfunny prank.
But then I get to the end of the driveway and see that the security light has been busted, shards of glass lying like twinkling stars on the concrete, and I see the brick with the white piece of paper taped to it. My belly sinks.
I approach the note as though I’m approaching a dangerous animal that might leap out at me and hurt me any second, my belly churning when Dom lifts it up and reads the note, his hand tightening around the brick so that his whole body tenses and bulges.
“What does it say?” I whisper, voice hoarse.
“It says that no matter where you run, this prick – whoever threw this goddamn message – is going to be there, waiting for you.”
He turns to me slowly, his features pinched, his face almost contorted as rage broils through him with visible force.
“Who the fuck thinks they have a claim on you, Lilah?”
I throw my hands up and wander over to the oak bench that sits under a palm tree, the leaves casting jagged shadows on the concrete.
I drop down and wring my hands, staring down at my feet, feeling tears building in my eyes and threatening to slide down my face.
“I need to contact the police,” Dom says. “Will you come inside, Lilah? I don’t like the idea of you waiting out here after what just happened.”
“Sure,” I murmur, rising to my feet. “Can I see the note?”
“If you want,” he says, handing me the brick.
In the brief contact our fingers make as he gives it to me, I feel the pain inside of him, and the pain he wants to inflict on whoever did this.
I raise the brick and read the note and feel another punch in my belly, the hairs on the back of my neck pricking, some deep instinct inside of me roaring at me to get far away from here, far away from Dom so I can’t infect him with this craziness.
As if the other thing wasn’t bad enough, as if knowing that I’m not what he seems to have presumed I am is deadly, now I have to try and brave this, too.
I search inside of me for the strength to be a different character, a girl who doesn’t give a fuck, but she’s not there. It’s just me. And I feel tears rising in my eyes again.
I wipe them away as Dom leads me into the lounge, gesturing at the leather corner couch and then taking out his cellphone. I squeeze my hands together and try to get the idea into my mind that Dom won’t care, that he’ll accept me for this and that it won’t make any difference.
A nasty laugh ricochets around my soul as I catch sight of myself in the reflection of the large TV, looking flushed and sweaty after the closeness in the kitchen.