Page 18 of Not In Love

“Nice swerve, Doc, but it won’t fly,” he said, shaking his head. The strands of his hair tickled her inner thighs. “This is all on you.”

“I had no choice but to keep going.” The words fought to spill through her pursed lips. “If I weaken, if I stop, everything around me does.”

“That’s fucking arrogant of you, baby. There were any number of people you could have leaned on, including your friends.”

“I couldn’t trust anyone else to handle it,” she said, tears scratching her throat at how right he was yet again. “No one was there before. I couldn’t take the chance now.”

“You walk around so fucking perfect,” he said, lips brushing her skin in a trail of reverent kisses. And yet his words were full of snark and anger and censure.

The last pricked at her like a thousand needles, making her skin snap and crackle. Anger rose within her like smoke, slithering its way into bone and sinew, a thousand screaming birds under her skin, begging to be let free. “I had to be perfect. For everyone around me.”

He continued kissing her and condemning her in the same breath, as if she hadn’t interrupted him. Then he thrust one finger roughly into her. “Cardiology queen.” Kash gasped. “A fiercely loving aunt.” He added another. “Everyone’s goddamn pillar.” Three fingers and it was that tight, painful stretch again. “But under all that?”

Thighs trembling, Kash thrust into his touch just as his mouth came to her folds again.

His tongue flicked once, slow and thorough, slurping at her flesh as if it was his favorite dessert. “Underneath you’re just a filthy, aching thing waiting to be cracked open. Begging to be seen, to be messed up, to be debased.”

Her whole body jerked as pleasure tugged at her pussy, like his words were a chord deep inside her and he was strumming it. She flailed and keened, thrusting her hips shamelessly.

Diego didn’t pause. If anything, his voice boomed and pinged against her skin, rich with a savage satisfaction. “You like it when I talk to you like this?” He groaned against her, like the taste of her ruined him. “Of course, you don’t need to be praised, do you, Kash? You have no need for fake praise and foolish adulations. You know what you’re made of. You know you’re a queen, baby girl. But a reluctant one. One who wants to be imperfect and messy and filthy, yeah?”

Wetness gushed out of her, and onto his lips, as if a dam that had kept her locked up, that had buried her alive, had finally been shattered into dust. “Diego,” Kash whispered, amidst fevered pants. Her entire body danced on the razor edge of her climax, vibrating to each of his words. “I’m so close, so close, please.”

“You’re such a greedy, needy cunt, Preciosa. If only I had figured that out earlier, if only I knew that pegging you down is what would earn me your surrender.”

He sucked her entire clit into his mouth, his lips and tongue ravaging her.

She whimpered and he sounded savagely triumphant when he said, “I’m going to learn every way your body begs. I’m going to make you forget you ever lived in that cold, polished shell.”

She was close—terrifyingly close—and he knew it.

“You’re mine when you come,” he said, voice tight. His fingers hooked to nudge at her g-spot. “Mine, in the only way you can be claimed, Kash. Mine in the way that no other man has.”

And that broke her. The feral claiming.

The orgasm tore through her like fire, like she’d been waiting three years, no, forever, for someone to yank her out of herself by force. To make her submit and surrender by breaking her down, by telling her she needn’t be anything more than what she was at the heart of her.

She came with a scream she didn’t know she had in her, body arching, clenching, unraveling. Whispering his name like it was an incantation, in case the blessing he gave her disappeared in a poof.

“Yes, baby. Come for me. Drench me in you, Kash. Fuck, that’s it.”

On and on, he licked her clit and pumped his fingers and on and on, her release went, popping off sparks within her, shattering her into tiny fragments of pleasure and nothing more.

She arched and twisted and convulsed, the after tremors as powerful as the original wave.

And then, her knees buckled, a broken sound clawing from her throat as she came fully undone, her vision blacking out at the edges. She folded into Diego’s waiting hands like her spine had been pulled out of her, and with it the pressure to be everything to everyone.

And now she was no one. Nothing but pleasure and fragments and tears and …just her. Wholly herself for the first time in years, as if the orgasm and the man who had given it to her had chipped away the shell.

Crooning words she didn’t understand, Diego held her with steady hands, his hard body a fortress of warmth and safety. Arms around his neck, Kash burrowed into him, the scent of his sweat and cologne already familiar to her senses.

Then she floated as he scooped her up—arms solid beneath her thighs, chest warm against her side—and carried her to the bed like she was precious.

The bed felt like a cloud when he placed her on it, her head empty of everything.

When he tucked her face into the crook of his neck and shoulder and pulled her into the warmth of his body, she let go. Clinging to the illusion that she belonged to this kind, generous, clever man for an eternity, instead of using him, and his overdeveloped sense of honor, for one measly night.

CHAPTER6

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