Page 83 of Cinder
High on my newfound determination, I climb the grand staircase to the second floor landing and walk along the hallway to Lars’s room. I knock on the door, and the moment it opens, my lips are on his, urgent and wild, and I’m pushing him into the room and kicking the door closed behind me.
Caught off guard, he hesitates. But I deepen my kiss with a ferocity I’ve never known, and his resistance disintegrates, and he kisses me back with a wild ferociousness. He feels warm and damp and fresh from the shower, and I absorb everything about this moment into me. The smell of soap.The heat. The demanding stroke of his tongue. The deep groan from his throat as he takes the kiss deeper.
I force him backward onto the bed and climb on to his lap, and the heat soars from hot to liquid molten in seconds. Lars loves to kiss, and I can feel it in the way he slides his big hands up my neck to my face, and in the way he groans and drives his tongue into my mouth as if he can’t get enough of me. It makes me feel wanted and desired and alive. Feeling him grow between my thighs, I groan and grind against him. I want all of him right now, right here.
“I want you to fuck me,” I beg against his lips. “I want you to be my first.”
Right now, it is all that matters.
Feeling his naked skin against mine.
Feeling him touch me.
Feeling him push inside me.
But he pulls away. “You’re a virgin?”
He’s taken aback. I can hear it in his tone, and I wasn’t expecting it.
I don’t answer because I can already feel him receding like the tide. Instead, I try to kiss the hesitation from his lips. But he pulls away. “How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-five.”
His perfect eyebrow arches. “And you’re still a virgin?”
“I had a very over-protective father.”
“Had?”
Again, I lean down to kiss him because I don’t want to talk about my dead father, I want to get back to kissing. But Lars wants answers. “Ella… talk to me… what’s happening.”
His use of my actual name and not a nickname sounds foreign and serious and my skin starts to cool.
“Does it matter?” I ask. “I want you to be my first.”
He brushes a strand of hair from my face. “Baby, you don’t want me to be your first. You want something special.Someonespecial.”
I want to scream at him that if he doesn’t take it, then a brutal crime lord is going to rip it from me in an encounter I can’t bear to think about.
I grab the front of his shirt as I brush my mouth to his.
“That’s you,” I whisper against his lips.
He shakes his head. “I don’t want to be your first. I don’t want to be anyone’s anything.”
His words sting.
I thought we were friends.
I thought there wassomethingbetween us.
Had I really misread the situation? Let my imagination get the better of me?
The sting of rejection settles over me, and I suddenly feel cold and stiff and really fucking stupid.
Oh my God.
I climb off his lap.
