Page 42 of Tourist Season
There’s nothing tender about it. There’s no kindness. No mercy. It’s teeth biting into lips. Nails digging into skin. Blood threading across tongues. It’s pure fight and sheer want. When I frame her face with my hands, she clamps down on my bottom lip. When I grip her hair and wrench her head back to expose her neck to my bites and kisses, she rakes her nails down my chest hard enough to draw blood. And when I push her back against the counter, she moans and tears the robe from my shoulders, shoving her thigh between my legs to feel my erection against her skin.
“If you hate me so much,” she says as I cup her breast and pinch her nipple to draw a gasp from her parted lips, “you’d better fuck me like you mean it.”
In a flash of motion, I whip her around, caging her in with her ass facing me, the terry cloth robe still covering her body. “Do not say that to me unless you mean it.”
“What makes you think I don’t?” She presses her ass against me like an invitation, one I should be trying to resist. But I can’t. I tug the robe down her back to expose her to me fully, keeping the tie balled in my hand as I let the rest drop to the floor. She shivers as I run my other hand from her neck to her ass, not stopping untilI reach between her thighs and cup her pussy. Arousal, silky and warm, coats my palm. My cock grows impossibly harder. I don’t know if it’s the drugs scrambling my brain or if it’s just her, but no woman has ever felt as good as Harper. Her heat, her scent, the way she seems so soft and pliable in my hands despite all the lethal barbs that fly from her mouth. I’ve never needed anyone as badly, the one person I should never want.
I close my eyes and take a long, deep breath, forcing my hand away from her heat. I’m sure I feel the softest whimper vibrate through her spine.
“You’re going to have to ask me nicely,” I say as I loom over her to speak in low tones against her ear. “Because I might be here to kill you, but I’m not the kind of man who would fuck a woman who doesn’t want it. You need me to fuck you? You tell me. You want me to stop? You tell me.”
She trembles as I bite her neck and soothe it with a kiss, but the gentle press of my lips lasts only long enough to bite her even harder for keeping me waiting. “Fuck me like you hate me,” she breathes.
I chuckle, running my hand down the length of her body to smack her ass. She yelps, but it dissolves into a moan as she pushes harder against me. “That wasn’t very nice.”
“Fuck me like you hate me,please.”
“That’s a little better. But you still sound like a brat.”
“Fuck you.”
I smack her ass harder and she braces her hands against the edge of the counter, her knuckles bleaching. “I can do this all night. And I mean that, seeing as how I probably have another six or seven hours’ worth of mushrooms in my system. I wonder whose fault that would be?”
My palm connects with her flesh once more, waves of light erupting from the impact to spider across her hip. Every sensation is magnified. The sound of pained pleasure that escapes her lips becomes a wave of color in my vision. She’s softer than cashmere when I glide my palm across the globe of her ass to soothe the sting. Even the network of tiny moles across her shoulders becomes fractal patterns, a constellation of desire mapped across her skin.
“What do you want?” I grit out.
“I already told you. But as usual, you aren’t fucking listening.” I smack her again. “Jesus fucking Christ, just fuck me, for the love of God, you stubborn asshole.”
My voice is saccharine when I press my lips to her ear and whisper, “But I don’t have protection.”
“I’m on birth control. And I’m clear.”
“How do you know that I’m clear too?”
“I …”
She stalls, her words lost to a silence that pulls tight around us like a film that clings to this moment. My hand folds around her throat, and though some distant thought urges me to squeeze until she begs for air, I keep my touch gentle, little more than a warning. “Tell me.”
“I …” Her throat shifts beneath my palm as she swallows. “I trust you.”
The breath stalls in my lungs. Maybe Harper doesn’t mean what she says. I shouldn’t believe her. But though it might be a lie, even the slim possibility that it could be the truth still ignites every cell in my body.
I was right when I said I’d need to scorch her out of my veins. I just didn’t expect it would be impossible. That she would claim every piece of me first.
I grasp the base of my erection, kick her feet wider, then thrust into her pussy with a single, brutal stroke.
Nothing has ever felt as good as Harper’s warmth enveloping my cock.
Breaths saw from my chest. Her heartbeat rages through her back as hard as mine resonates through my chest, and we haven’t even started. We’re stalled, unmoving, trying to come to terms with what we’re doing, this detour from fate that we’ve both accepted, even if it only lasts for a fleeting moment of time.
I’m supposed to fuckinghateher. I hate how she tore my brother away. He was everything to me, the person who made me want to be a decent man. I hate how she’s eroded every plan I’ve had since arriving in this town. It was supposed to be easy. Come to Cape Carnage. Kill Harper Starling. Feed the vengeance that consumes my thoughts until it’s finally sated. Then get back to the business of living. Find a nice woman, someone friendly and easygoing who fills a few of the holes left by Billy’s absence. Go on to live a normal, healthy, productive life. I was never supposed to be here, buried to my balls in the woman who nearly killed me. And most of all, I hate myself for my weakness. Because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
But I can still punish us both for that.
I pull out to the tip of my erection and thrust all the way in again. God, she really is a fucking angel, the way her cunt grips tight around my cock. Her moan is so otherworldly that Iseeit, ripples of colors that surround me. Another merciless thrust and her freshly bandaged hand lands on mine. She tugs at the tie bunched in my fist, the one I forgot was even there in my mindless need to bury myself in her pussy.
When I loosen my grip on the fabric, she pulls it from me tolay it across her throat, draping each end across her shoulders. I’m unmoving, my cock still lodged to the hilt in her channel, trying to process what’s happening when she turns enough to give me a sidelong glare. I see everything in that brief connection. All her bitterness, her acerbic rage. But I see pain and loss and grief too. Even a hint of the guilt that I’ve been searching for, there in the glassy sheen that gathers at her lash line.
