Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
His palm comes to the side of my throat. He doesn’t squeeze, doesn’t hold, just lays his hand where the pulse runs, the way he has before, except now his hand is cold.
I exhale, the noise shockingly loud in the room.
He makes a noise back, a small intake of breath, the smallest acknowledgment, like he needed to know I was fully here and present. Then his mouth is at my throat where his hand was. Not biting, just his open mouth against my pulse, breathing me in, taking the scent of me into him slow, his nose at the side of my neck and his lips under my jaw, his breath warm. He stays there a long time, just…smelling me.
I don’t move.
When he speaks at last it’s so quiet I almost miss it. “Foxglove.”
I make a sound. Then find my voice. “The salt.”
I salted the window; you shouldn’t have been able to get through.
“I know,” he says against my throat. “I know what you did, foxglove. The salt would not have stopped me. You knew that when you laid it.” A pause, his mouth moving on my skin. “You laid it for yourself.”
His hand has moved down between my breasts, the backs of his fingers grazing me through the cotton of my shirt, down the center of me to my stomach, where his palm goes flat. I feel the cold of him through the fabric.
“Lift,” he murmurs.
I don’t ask what he means. My body has its own agenda. My arms come up on their own accord, and he takes the hem in both hands, drawing the shirt up my body, the cotton dragging over my hips and breasts and collarbone. Once it’s over my head, he lets it drop off the side of the bed.
I’m naked under him, the cold blowing over me, making my skin tight and goosefleshed.
He looks at me. It’s too dark to read his face well, but I can read the rest, the way he goes still over me, the way his weight settles, the way his breath catches.
“You’re mine now,” he rasps. “You always have been.”
I don’t speak; I can’t.
He puts his mouth on me, starting at my collarbone and working down my breast, my ribs, my stomach, the inside of my hip, then the soft place between my hipbones, an open kiss there, long, his tongue in it, and I can’t help but groan. His hands push my thighs apart, slow, unhurried, and then he goes down on me like he has all the time in the world, like he’s made time stand still for as long as he’s in this room. Who knows, maybe he has? At this point I’ll believe anything.
The first stroke of his tongue is flat and slow and I moan loudly in response. As his mouth works, he places a hand under me to lift my hips, his other arm hooked around my thigh to hold me open. The cold of him shocks my skin, and somehow it isn’t unwelcome, somehow it’s exactly the temperature I want him, because I’m rising fast and hot—faster than I should—all the waiting and all the dread coming out of me at once.
Then my breathe catches.
I can feel his teeth.
They’re at my inner thigh, and they’re not the teeth he had before, not the teeth any man has—longer at the canines, narrower—and when he closes them on the soft skin there, they catch.
He doesn’t quite break the skin though, he stops just before, holds his teeth there, lets me feel it.
I feel it. Oh, I fucking feel it.
And I’ve never been so turned on and terrified in all my life.
He lifts his mouth and looks up the length of me, his mouth wet, his face shadowed so I can’t see his teeth now, can’t tell if they’ve changed. He says nothing, just stares with an intensity that makes the back of my neck prickle, that makes my clit throb, my fight-or-flight fully activated, except it’s more like fuck-or-flight.
He puts his mouth back on me, his teeth are blunt again. Or I imagine they are. Or I’m past the point of telling what I imagine and what’s real.
I come with one hand fisted in his thick, damp hair and the other at my own mouth, biting my knuckle against the sound trying to get out of me, because everything feels too quiet, like the sound might wake me up from this beautiful nightmare. My orgasm crashes through me long and hard, leaving me wrecked under him.
He moves up my body the way he came down it—hipbone, stomach, ribs, breast, collarbone—and kisses my mouth. His tongue tastes of me and something with the faintest metal in it, like water that’s sat too long in old pipes. I don’t pull back. He kisses me long, and open, and wet, with his hand between my legs again—two fingers in me now—working me slowly where I’m nearly too sensitive.