Page 5 of Deviant

Most of all, I wanted his last name.

“Please…” I said on a choked plea.

The surrounding air grew thicker. Darker. As I started to slide under, he expelled a deep groan right before he whispered my name, his voice reverent.

I gave myself over to the blackness infiltrating from the edges.

Seconds might have passed. Forever might have come and gone. As I regained consciousness, I had no way of knowing in my disoriented state. I only knew my chest felt lighter, rising and falling with the gift of oxygen.

Rafe spread my thighs, and I forgot how to draw in a breath when he dipped his tongue between the folds of my drenched sex. I cried out, my spine arching, the heels of my feet digging into the ground. He anchored my wrists at my sides, and I grieved for his hands. I didn’t want them holding me down—I longed for them touching me, his thick fingers thrusting inside me, keeping pace to the steady licks of his tongue.

My body broke out in a sweat, and even though I squirmed, cried, and begged, I knew he wasn’t going to let me come. This was his way of punishing me for bringing up marriage again, for scratching my skin, for hiding my nightmares. He refused to open up about his, but he expected me to tell himeverything.

His stoic silence didn’t fool me. I was at the center of every horrid detail he relived in his sleep. Not as an active participant, but the reason behind it all. He could trace every memory of those rapes in prison back to me.

To my selfishness at fifteen.

To my cowardice.

To my lie.

A lifetime of loving him wouldn’t make up for what I’d done.

So I tried in the only way I knew how. I let him torture me with his tongue, and turned my body, my will, myeverythingover to him.

2. Passion and Pain - Rafe

Bacon sizzled in a skillet above the campfire. The smoky aroma would coax Alex out of the tent soon, and I needed to prepare myself to face her. Last night still bothered me. This wasn’t the first time I’d found her standing at the edge of the lake in the middle of the night.

I refused to overlook her nightmares another day, and the fact that she’d tried hiding them from me…I’d have to do something about that. I knew better than anyone how emotional baggage had a way of tormenting a person in their sleep.

Her nightmares weren’t meaningless. The average, well-adjusted person could explain away the occasional bad dream. But there was nothing average or well-adjusted when it came to Alex and me. There were reasons behind the shit haunting her in her sleep.

And those reasons twisted in my gut, shredding the guilt that already lived there, dueling with the anger over her secrecy. She would disagree with me, but her nightmares were my business because I’d fucked up too many times to count, leaving her damaged and insecure.

She didn’t trust my love for her.

We’d gotten nowhere out here in the middle of the woods. After drifting from place to place for months, always on the move, paranoid of someone coming after us, we’d needed to find some fucking downtime.

But seclusion wouldn’t fix what was broken. Enough time had passed to be sure no one was gunning for us. Zach had disappeared into thin air, not a whisper of his existence making its way through the underground circles Jax knew of.

And Shelton had found a new fighter to build his illegal fight ring around, so I didn’t think I was important enough for him to worry about anymore.

There was no reason to remain in hiding. The world waited, maybe not with open arms, but with grudging acceptance. Last time I talked to my brother, he told me he’d hired a lawyer to get my exoneration rolling. And the cabin on the island was a few weeks from completion.

Now we just had to go home and reclaim our lives.

If Alex had her way, we’d head straight for the aisle.

I would never find another woman who loved me more, who willingly accepted my need to dominate in every way imaginable. There was no question I loved her. I’d killed in her name, thirsting for justice as much as vengeance, but when it came to making our relationship legally permanent, I stalled.

She deserved better.

She deserved a man who didn’t get hard at the thought of choking the breath from her. There were only two things in this world that kept me sane, and fighting in the cage was one of them. The other was Alex. But having one without the other was a depressing existence—one I’d already tried.

I craved her howls of pain, needed the way a single glimpse of her jade eyes told me how she loved me with an intensity that bordered on obsession.

Returning home and getting married would change everything. I wasn’t ready, but my hangups didn’t matter if she was hurting because of it. She needed me to prove that I was in it for the long haul. Thing was, I didn’t see how a fucking piece of paper would do that. It sure as fuck hadn’t kept my mother from walking.

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