Page 131 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“Then if you don’t relax, this is going to hurt,” he warned, a glimmer of relief shining through the surface of his irises despite it. “Because I’m not going to stop this time, but I want you to feel good.”
“You mean youneedme to feel good,” I said quietly. Immediately, I blushed at my own petulance and averted my gaze, selecting a corner of his bedpost and canopy to study as he hovered over me because I honestly wasn’t sure what was happening. I wanted it. I wantedhim.
“I mean I needyou. Period.” Lucais’s voice was harsh, but the words were honey-sweet and warm. I felt the impact of them settle in my core, soothing and stretching, and lowered my hips so my back was resting flat against the bed once more. “Now. Let. Me. In.” Lucais’s gaze was hard and unyielding as he lowered himself onto his forearms, eradicating the space between us, and coaxed the thick, granite-hard length of his erection back inside me with three slow nudges of his hips, each gaining another couple of inches until he was all the way there.
I was at my limit. I wasfull.I suddenly wondered if I was still flesh and bone or simply glass about to shatter inside a furnace.
Taking measured breaths against the crook of my neck, Lucais stayed still until I’d lost count of our heartbeats, givingme the chance to get used to both the size and the sensation of him. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before and prompted a tidal wave of emotion to sweep over me from head to toe, heart to soul. I had the insane urge to cry, which triggered a flush of shame, and in turn made me want to squirm beneath him so he didn’t feel the rising temperature of my skin pressing into his.
“You’re okay,” he whispered into my ear, sensing the escalating discomfort. “Hold still, bookworm. It’s okay. You’re perfect. Just a few more moments to get used to this, and then we’ll find our rhythm, okay?” He pressed a kiss to my temple, and I squeezed my eyes shut against the threat of tears. “You’re doing so well. So perfect, Aura.”
Lucais slid one hand behind my head, holding me to him as he moved his hips back. The lack of him was an immediate, palpable ache deep in my core. When he slid back in straight to the hilt, I gasped, the sound high-pitched and wonderstruck as an unrivalled form of ecstasy took hold of my nerve endings and applied pressure. I felt the pinch of euphoria running all the way between my sternum and my lower belly, warm and smooth and alive.
Beginning to rock inside me, he moved back and forth, gradually increasing speed until the bed started to jostle along with us.
A loud, sudden growl ripped through the air—
Lucais covered my mouth with his hand to muffle my laughter as we both looked over to where Wrenlock was lying on the bed beside us, fast asleep and snoring.
He chuckled silently and bent down to whisper in my ear, “You must have given him one hell of an orgasm.”
I stifled my amusement and shook my head free of his hand. “What do we do now?”
Lucais’s eyes crinkled at the corners as he glanced around the room. “Floor?” he suggested dubiously. “No…” He turned his head towards the other side of his space. “Wall? Window?”
Nodding, I prepared for him to pull out of me and help me to stand, but he didn’t do either of those things. Instead, Lucais pressed his mouth to mine, drawing me into an explorative, indulgent kiss, and then he wrapped his arms around me with one hand secured on the nape of my neck and one behind my waist as he made another lazy thrust inside of me and the bed fell out from under us.
In an instant, we were against the wall across the room, the cool and slightly roughened stone biting into my skin. Lucais was holding me against it high enough to capture my nipple in his mouth and give a gentle, teasing tug before he kissed his way back to my lips, lowering me an inch or two until I was on him again.
He was so hard and I was so wet that neither of us needed to use our hands. I gasped as he pushed himself inside me in one sudden, hard thrust—and he swore so loudly that I was almost afraid it would wake our companion or draw attention from other parts of the palace.
I pressed the back of my head against the wall as he drove himself into me, but I couldn’t keep it from banging into the stone with each one of his thrusts. Bending forwards, I pressed my forehead into the crook of my elbow, resting on his shoulder as my arms twisted around his neck.
We fell into a feverish rhythm. He filled me perfectly, found the spot in my body that begged for attention, and rammed the head of his cock into it over and over again. Each movement pushed me closer towards a state of all-consuming, mindless bliss, and he forced moans and cries out of me with every slam of his body into mine. I could not be sure if the sounds would seem more like noises of torture or ecstasy to passersby.
I suddenly didn’t care.
The heat reached a climax under my skin and within my skull, and the pinpricks of pleasure began to build like a wave between my hips. I writhed against him, trying to maintain that perfect, flawless angle as he hit that spot inside me over and over again until I was close to madness.
“Oh, fuck.” Lucais’s mouth was all over me, devouring me with kisses and bites that took pleasure and pain around in a circle until I could hardly remember my own name. “That’s it, isn’t it? Let me hit that spot again, bookworm.” His voice made my muscles shudder, on the verge of folding. “That’s it. Just once, okay? I need you to come for me once, and then I swear, you’ll never have to do it again. You can give me one, can’t you?”
My answer was an incoherent sound, half a whimper and half a moan, because he’d already contributed to putting my senses through so much in the last day, and I was feeling the beginnings of exhaustion. Like if I did it again, I would permanently break all over him, and he may never be able to clean up the last of the mess I’d made.
“Lucais,” I whispered. My orgasm was like a spontaneous explosion, and I’d never forgive myself if I ended up in tears over it.
“I know.” He pressed his forehead to my temple, driving into me again and again, as if we might just melt into each other and cease to exist from all of our problems if we tried for long enough. “Fuck, Aura, I know.”
His tip knocked into the detonation zone in his next thrust, and a heat sparked at the base of my spine, triggering a sensation that built in intensity with each subsequent hit. I felt wrung out and spent, but at the same time, like I would die if he stopped.
“Just one more,” Lucais bit out, exertion seeping into his voice. I realised he must have been feeling the same—on the brink of utter devastation with no way to stop himself fromfalling headfirst over the edge. “You can give me one more, can’t you, perfect girl? You’re so fucking pretty when you come. Let me watch you one more time.”
I was undone in a moment.
He turned his head to the side, blazing golden eyes meeting mine, and his next thrust banished the breath from my lungs. Lucais’s hands were so gentle, but his hips were enough to shatter me, his erection enough to split me in half. I was entranced, unable to look away even as I came apart at the seams, and bit down on my own hand to muffle my scream as I pulsed around him.
With an unequivocal tsunami of ecstasy, I came all over him in a way that I had never experienced before—and almost never wanted to experience again, though part of me wished it would never end. It hit me so hard that it was borderline painful, and I held onto Lucais like I’d disappear inside of a dying star if I let go of him because, suddenly, the wall behind me was gone, replaced by the ice-cold glass of the window, and yet I was still falling.
The same brutal pleasure of the orgasm he was giving me hadn’t relented. The sensation assaulted me, prolonged like nothing that could be replicated under any other circumstances, as our bodies stitched our souls together in the kind of way that not even the ends of the universe could break.
