Page 43 of Pierce

“Your life isn’t the same anymore. The sooner you understand that, the better. You are not the same person you were before the mudslide. Why do you insist on fighting what we both know is true?”

“You think you know it, but that doesn’t make it true.”

Her body betrayed her. I could see it. Sense it. Feel it. Instead of glaring at me, she shifted her focus and stared over my shoulder. Instead of clasping her hands, she rubbed her palms on her thighs. Nervous. Arguing with herself.

“You and I both know what happens when we fly together. You change. You’re free. Isn’t that right?”

“Who doesn’t feel free when they’re flying?”

“It’s deeper than that. You know it. I feel it when you’re on my back.” I took a step toward her. Then, another. “You never feel more like your true self than when you’re connected to me that way. You trust me to take care of you, and I do. And you push me higher, harder, faster. You make me better without even trying. This is the way it’s supposed to be, the way life is supposed to work for the two of us. When will you quit fighting it?”

“Stay where you are,” she whispered when I was only a few feet away.

“Why do you keep pushing me away?”

“Because I have to.”

“You don’t want to.”

“Don’t tell me what I want to do.” She turned her face away. “It’s not entirely up to me, and I just told you why. I belong to someone else.”

“You’ll never belong to anybody but me.” I stood in front of her and took her face in my hands, turning it back to me. “Don’t you feel it?”

She closed her eyes. “No. I don’t. Just because I like flying with you doesn’t mean we’re meant for each other.”

“Look at me, Jasmine.”

She hesitated, but finally opened those big, green eyes of hers. I could’ve drowned in them. One word, and I would’ve been her slave for life.

She refused to understand. It would all be so easy, if she would only stop fighting what was a fact.

“Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t feel, deep inside, that this is where you belong.”

She started trembling. Her chin quivered. Her eyes went bright with tears. “Don’t do this to me. You’re only making it harder.”

“You’re the one who’s making things harder than they need to be. There’s not a person or a force on Earth that I wouldn’t gladly wipe out of existence if it meant your happiness. There’s not a thing you could ever desire that I wouldn’t move mountains to get for you. Nothing has to stand in our way. Nothing but you.”

I leaned in, while drawing her face closer to mine, and she didn’t resist.

Her eyes closed, her lips parted.

I let myself finally give in to just a tiny piece of what I’d craved since the moment I laid eyes on her when I took that first taste of her sweet, willing mouth. It was bliss, the way her lips moved against mine, the shockwaves of pleasure that ran through her body and into mine when I slid my tongue inside and swept around, exploring and feeling and drinking in her essence.

Her sighs sent a surge of blood straight to my cock, and the way her hands ran through my hair told me this wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a crazy, breathless, in-the-moment mistake she would regret later.

She wanted me the way I wanted her. At a deep, instinctual level, she knew what I knew: we were meant for each other.

Just as suddenly, something changed.

“No.” She twisted her head away. “No, stop this. We can’t.”

Don’t let her do this! She is ours! We need to possess her!

After that, it was all meaningless roaring in my head, rage and frustration and the agony of thwarted desire.

I pulled her to me, but she pulled back again.

“I said, no. No, Pierce.”

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