Page 57 of Stalking Wendy Darling

“Kingston,” I breathed, stroking up his sides, a pain clenching my chest.

“You did something reprehensible, and I’m not sure I’ve forgiven you for it even now.”

I raised an eyebrow, ignoring the way my stomach tangled and soured. “Yeah? What’s that?”

“You made me feel alive.”

I blinked. Oh. “You felt dead before me?”

His arm stroked over my back, his expression unfathomably soft. For some reason it made me want to cry, they way those eyes traced my features with such care, such love.

“I forgot how it felt,” he rasped, his eyes on me. “To not just walk numbly through every day, but to experience it, to enjoy waking up, to anticipate the day ahead. Initially, it was because I wanted to break you.”

I grinned. “When did you stop?”

He flipped us so suddenly that my heart swooned and my stomach rioted with flutters. “Who said I stopped wanting to break you, mutineer?”

Heat glided through me. “I won’t break easily.”

Hook’s smile was deep, cutting into his cheek like a scythe, putting a devious glint in his eyes that turned my soft flutters into manic butterflies. “I’m counting on it, darling.”

The heat rushed to every other part of me when his arm came across my throat, pinning me in lieu of fingers.Holy fucking yes. Finally.I squirmed, my hips bucking erratically when Hook used his legs to knock mine apart, making space for himself.

“Hands on the headboard,” he ordered, not quite able to hide the rasp of softness in his voice as he looked at me pinned beneath him, my hips writhing, my skin flushed pink.

I scrambled to obey, digging my nails into the wood, my whole body straining towards him. A week and three days of teasing, tempting, and denial had driven me to madness, and now I could hardly stand the feel of his touch on my body.

“Good girl,” he praised, his voice gruff. “Now it’s my turn.”

His turn for… Oh.

I pulled my bottom lip between my teeth as emotion hit me the moment he began to kiss butterfly-soft circles around each of my injuries. The bandages had come off yesterday, the bleeding stopped, but each one gnawed with pain whenever I gave it the slightest bit of attention.

“There were no survivors?” he checked for the tenth time since I returned to the Banshee, dark eyes flicking up to watch my face.

“None,” I promised, lifting a hand off the headboard to brush back the lock of dark hair that fell across his forehead. A dark thrill went through me at the tiny narrowing of his eyes; I set my hand back on the wood above me.

“The trouble with that, darling,” he said, his lips feathering across my next scar, so soft that I didn’t feel even a flicker of hurt, “is that I want people to pay for every mark left on your beautiful body. I want to feel their eyeballs pop under my thumb. I want to cut out their tongue for what was said to you.”

“I regret telling you any of that,” I sighed. I tried not to let Gabrielle’s words get to me, but she’d burrowed deep. Bitch.

“I want hearts to give out from the sheer agony I’ll inflict. I want throats to collapse under my boots. I want to shatter every last bone in the hands that inflicted this upon you.”

I squirmed, my stomach hollowing at that look on his face. “I couldn’t leave even one alive for you, Hook. They hurt you. They wereallpart of the fucked up fortress that hurt my captain. I had to kill them all.”

“Your captain.” Two words, rife with rich, seductive darkness. My breath caught, a shudder at the top of my spine. “Again.”

I felt the command like a physical touch and the shudder ripped down my spine, arching me against him. The feeling of skin to skin was divine. His lips against the burn on my collarbone were doing things to my body, making me ache.

“My captain,” I breathed. Holding my hands against the headboard was becoming increasingly difficult. “Mine.”

His eyes fluttered to half mast, what I could see of them pure black. A touch skimmed up the inside of my thigh, pressing my leg to the bed, and before I could guess his intention, his cock brushed through my slickness and drove inside me.

I gasped and moaned and smiled all at once, my whole soul crying out the wordfinally.

“If you are slow,” I breathed, “and gentle, I will kill you, Kingston Hook.”

His lips brushed my ear as he covered my chest with his, the touch to my sensitive nipples making my eyes slam shut. “No danger of that, darling.”

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