Page 112 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
She was sorry for all he had suffered. She’d take it from him if she could.
And yet, a swell of something hot and wet clenched deep between her legs. There was nothing her Ash could not overcome. Nothing he’d not endured. He had a resilience and a strength only belonging to men of myth and ancient gods.
He was her own, personal legend.
She clung to him as a wave of lust threatened to buckle her legs.
As if he read her mind, he cupped her bottom with his big hands, and hauled her off her feet, splitting her legs around his lean waist as he bunched her skirts to her hips.
He bit out a harsh noise as she brushed the curious ridge of arousal beneath his trousers before releasing him.
Lorelai didn’t feel like herself. Never would she have thought she could enjoy a violent lust such as this. She reveled in the caustic grit of the wall behind her. And in the predatory, almost evil gleam in eyes that had never before seemed so very black.
The strain in his muscles as he held her aloft did more to stoke her desire than any poetry ever could. She released a rush of wet need on a tortured moan, and a tempestuous sound from him told her that he knew exactly what he’d elicited within her.
Lorelai let out an unbidden cry as he impaled her in one sleek thrust, setting her blood on absolute fire. He gave her only a moment to adjust, to dimly wish she were naked against all of his marvelous skin.
Instead she wrapped herself around him as his cock glided through her intimate flesh in slow, strong strokes. Her hands clutched at the wings on his shoulder blades as he fucked her into oblivion. She opened her body, welcoming him deep. She kissed and licked and bit at him as her sex gripped tighter with each of his withdrawals.
He rocked inside of her, stinging her with hard curls of his spine. No word was spoken, no apologies made. Her body hungrily accepted what he pounded into her. All his rage, his pain, his fear and his loss and his longing.
She felt the weight of everything, and wondered how it had not crushed him into the dirt by now.
Her body responded in kind, until she used the wall as leverage to thrust her hips back toward him. To meet him thrust for thrust. Her moans became demands, and then incoherent words.
Their eyes locked. Then their lips. And finally their bodies, every intimate part of them clenched together,pouring secrets and the past through the spaces contained between their molecules.
Pleasure sang behind the inferno that had become her blood, immolating her ability to draw breath. She felt the pulses of their sex synchronize, reveled in the warm jets of release he buried deep against her womb as they rode a simultaneous release so incredibly high, the cave echoed with the song of ecstasy that promised to fuse their very souls.
For the soft moments after, or maybe an eternity, they rested their foreheads against one another, struggling to regain enough breath to say the words that needed to be said.
He used his shirt to clean them, then discarded it to the sand, still unwilling—or unable—to release her from the prison of his arms.
Lorelai collapsed against him, leached of all strength. A willing captive, yet again. “Are you all right, my love?” She smoothed her hands down his heaving back, nuzzling into the muscular cove where his neck met his shoulder.
His gasp landed somewhere between wrath, disbelief, and laughter. “AmIall right? Lorelai… Jesus seafaring Christ.Youwere just abducted by a mutinying band of pirates, nearly shot, and then ravaged in a way more bestial than human.”
“I’m no worse for wear, thanks to you,” she said against his fragrant skin. “See for yourself.”
He pulled back only enough to look down at her. More like, to devour her with eyes so dramatic, she had the sense he couldn’t take everything in at once and it frustrated him. “Ash…”
“No, Lorelai, I’m not fucking all right!” he exploded, crushing her to him with even more force, this time. “Goddammit, I saw you slipping through my fingers once again. I was faced with losing you forever. What if youwere killed? Taken across an ocean even I wouldn’t be able to forge, as surely in the next life we’ll be forced in opposite directions.”
Lorelai tucked a smile against his chest, as now wasn’t the time, and she had to admit to a bit of pleasure in his admission of how much she meant to him. “I could do my level best to be more wicked,” she suggested. “After what we’ve just done, I’d hazard that I’m well on my way. Then, wherever the next life takes us, at least we’ll be together.”
“No,” he said between feathering soft, desperate kisses over the whole of her face. “You are an angel, Lorelai.Myangel.”
“And you are mine.”
“Don’t tease me,” he admonished darkly.
“I’m not. There are many kinds of angels. Fallen ones, for example, avenging ones…”
“Iwillavenge you,” he vowed against her skin. “Just as soon as I can tear myself from your arms, I’ll cut off every finger he touched you with and make him watch as I feed them to the sharks. I’ll hang his bleeding corpse out like bait and watch them leap for him, taking great chunks—”
“Just stop, Ash. Stop it.” Lorelai ineffectually pushed against his chest, only gaining enough ground to look up into his swirling, fathomless eyes. “I don’t care about any of that. It’s not what I want.”
He gazed down at her in dismay. “What do you want? Anything. Name it. It’s yours.”
