Page 80 of Little Blue

“Ilya.”

“I think you’re lying, Irelynn.” His voice is a low timbre that resonates deep inside me. I’m losing control, my head shaking from side to side in the nook of his broad shoulder. “I think you’re hot and wet.” If I have to listen to him rumbling these words in my ear any longer, I might combust right here in his arms. “I think your body begs for my touch. It’s your mind I still have to convince.”

“Never.”

“I’ve never backed away from a challenge.” The shadow of his day-old scruff calls goosebumps to the surface of my skin when he trails it over my shoulder, my neck. “This is a challenge I will conquer.”

Then, to my horror and relief, the hand at my navel dips low. He pushes his fingers into the tight curls between my legs, more red than the hair on my head, and groans as his fingertip meets my wet heat.

“I fucking knew it.”

“Ilya,” I moan. I can’t help myself.

“Spread your legs for me, Blue.”

I shake my head again and am quickly awarded a sharp pull on my nipple that eases the moment I let my legs fall open. Firelight flickers close by, illuminating the arousal I wish I could hide as he pulls his hand back to gaze over my shoulder at the glistening shimmer on his finger. Then he lifts it to his mouth, sucks it clean, before he lowers it and sinks it inside me.

I cry out at the delicious intrusion, my body arching against his even as my legs try to close around his pumping hand. My mind spins as he rolls and twists and pulls and flicks my nipple. The hard arousal pressing into my back a distant and ominous warning that I may push him too far one of these days.

He might be a man of astonishing control, but I’m learning that he only has so much when it comes to me.

“You’re so tight.” He strokes his finger in and out of me. The sound of my body sucking him in deep feeds my arousal. “You’re so warm and fuck—” He rocks his hard cock against me once. I moan. “I want inside you.”

“No—”

“I know,” he soothes with an open-mouthed kiss to my shoulder. “You’re not ready for me. But you will be.”

I want to deny, but no words have ever felt so much like a lie, I can’t quite force them from my tongue.

Instead, I try not to think at all as he plays my body like an instrument.

I don’t think about the fact that my captor is running his rough lips over my skin.

I don’t think about the odd little boy turned monstrous man.

I don’t think about the lethal finger that pumps into my core, again and again, pushing me closer and closer to the ledge.

I don’t think about the heart in my chest that pounds in sync with the one at my back, inside the brutal, relentless man.

I don’t think about the fact I’m falling madly, deeply, irrevocably, tragically in love with the man who stole me from my life. With a monster. A killer. A Bratva King.

My body falls apart around his finger, and he pumps me through wave after wave as I cry out. He stokes me until my body falls flat over his, entirely spent. Then, with no words and no attention paid to his own desire, demanding nothing more from me than he’s already taken, he lifts me into his arms. Cradled in his strong embrace, he walks me to the bed. He tucks me beneath a heavy blanket before he settles into the bed behind me. It’s the first time I haven’t worn his shirt to bed.

It's also the first time that I twist until I’m facing his broad, inked, naked chest.

It’s the first time his arms come around me as he lays flat on his back, and he pulls me over his chest.

It’s the first time I fall into sleep with my head on his chest, listening to the steady, strong thunder of the heart he claims beats for me.

In the haze between wakefulness and sleep, Ilya murmurs into my hair, “You’ll fall in love with me, Little Blue. I vow it.”

Thirty-Three

Irelynn

It’s with shock and surprise that I greet Tara with a stuttered, “G-good morning,” as soon as I enter the kitchen. Ilya’s strong arm is laced around my waist, holding me close. I can’t miss the way her dark eyes drift over the two of us standing intimately together, like a real couple.

We’d slept like a real couple, too. A tangle of limbs and twisted hearts.

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