My bra makes a silky sound as it flutters to the edge of the rug. I don’t hear it. My groans are too loud, pouring out of me like a crash of notes as Dutch sends his thumb skittering over my freshly exposed skin.
A D# G
Fingers crashing into notes, creating music. Creating chaos.
The friction is too much.
Too.
Much.
I rake my nails through his hair as he drapes me on top of the rug. “Shouldn’t we…” I gasp as his lips connect with the pulse in my neck. “Protection. We need…”
“I don’t have protection,” he murmurs in my ear.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I hear a warning bell.
And yet, Dutch keeps kissing me, bruising my lips, sucking his way down my neck to my chest. Showing me that he has everything I want. Hot, burning pleasure. A storm of satisfaction. A cruel torture.
“Do you want me to stop?” he whispers, sliding a rough finger down my stomach. A bundle of fireworks hisses through my veins. He slicks the length of his finger over my tights, holding my pleasure just out of reach, so I have no choice but to surrender to him.
All my protests disintegrate when he kisses me again, teasing me over my clothes.
His teeth graze my naked shoulder and then he bites.
Tension snaps through me as every sensitive nerve in my body blazes to attention.
I moan louder. Taut. Hyper-aware of his ragged breaths in my ear, his need pressing into my leg.
“Sweet Cadey.” His tongue slides over my shoulder, caressing the bite mark, leaving me aching, reaching, wanting more. “There are so many things I want to do to you.” He presses a kiss to my throbbing skin. My pain. My medicine. “I apologize in advance for not being gentle.”
His threat whips a new invisible chord into the air.
Dark, decadent notes.
B C# Eb
I’m already on the edge of blinding pleasure. Already breathless with need.
I can’t stop.
Not now, when everything I need to quench this immeasurable thirst is within reach.
He has me in the palm of his hand.
This beast.
This monster.
He’s mine tonight.
I crave more.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I taunt him. Goad him.
His lips quirk as if he knows what I’m doing. He sees through me. Through all of it.
Despite the slight smile, his eyes turn to two pits of black. An abyss of dark promises.
“No, not afraid. You were never afraid of me, Cadey. Not even when it would have been better for you if you were.” As he speaks, his hands move. In a blink, the rest of my clothes are gone and so are his.
The notes shift. Pianissimo. Quiet. The quietest a music piece can go. Low and haunting. The sound of silence right before the crescendo. Right before the explosion of sound hits the air.
As Dutch draws nearer, my mind tilts. I thought my body would be liquid heat. I’ve done this before. He’s the only boy who’s been this close to me, closer than my next breath. I’ve traced my nails over his back. I let him consume me. Burn me to a crisp. And I came back to life.
But dragging my eyes lower on Dutch reminds me of the pain I felt.
The adjustment. The feeling that it would break me before it hit the end of me.
My body locks up, anticipating, tense.
Dutch lifts my head up with one hand, so I’m staring into his endless amber eyes. Rough fingers snap around my thighs. He guides my legs wide.
“Scared, Cadey?”
“Shut up,” I hiss, fingers curving into the rug as he pulls his hips back in preparation.
“Look at me.”
I raise my chin, my defiance burning as bright as my lust. I’m aching with desire, each nerve in my body fired up and quivering.
Even so, I refuse to let him see how powerless I am before him.
He holds my jaw in a tense grip, lust and fury tight on his skin. Sweat glistens on his taut muscles. A drop slips from his tattooed arm and plops on top of my chest, chasing a trail down the line of my stomach toward my thighs that are spread open for him.
“You hated me, didn’t you? You’ve hated me for so long that you still think hate is what this is.”
The music in my head becomes louder.
Gradually.
Slowly.
Building.
“Screw you,” I snarl, hissing under my breath as Dutch’s body lines up with mine.
I feel my heart pounding so hard it’s about to burst.
“You hate the way I make you feel, the way I make you tremble, the way I own you,” he breathes. “The way you lose control.”
I’m shaking. Everywhere is throbbing with slick, decadent heat.
In my head—a full chord.
G B D
“My sweet Cadey.” His voice is like a drug, smoke curling around the air, taking over me. Sumptuous, addictive, resonant perfection. “No matter how hard you fight, you’re mine. You’re never escaping me.”
I grit my teeth, mouth open to speak, but it’s too late.
He descends without warning and all I can do is gasp.
The crescendo is quick and rough, snapping through my mind like a crack of thunder and expanding beyond that. A cry escapes my lips that I can’t contain, no matter how hard I try. A million notes being played at once, fingers stretching, stretching, stretching until they’re bound to snap.
Dutch moans and the music lashes.
He moves and the earth shatters, taking my body with it, tearing me into a million little pieces.
His lips crush mine, ripping what he wants from me, possessing my mouth the way he possesses every part of me—body and soul. The kiss is cruel, almost savage, a brutal reminder of who I belong to and why that will never change.
I should fight back, find some way to claw for equal ground, but I’m being wholly and totally devoured to a frantic rhythm matched only by the wild, forceful pounding of my heart.
I can’t hear the music anymore. We’re making our own. Sounds I can’t stop. Sounds I didn’t even know I could make. Gasps, groans, and heady whimpers that unfurl from inside me and lash out like a whip.
My body rocks forward. Our tongues clash like swords.
It’s unstoppable—the pleasure. It courses through me, a torrent of flames that makes me scream. He mumbles something, probably another line about me belonging to him. And maybe I do. Maybe he’s right. I can’t control myself. I can’t hide how good he makes me feel.
He’s claimed me in every way and even if I say I hate it, I don’t think I do.
I… I might even love it.
Dutch flips me around, and the rug barely manages to stay tethered to the ground as he grabs my hair and unleashes a wild, forceful storm. The music we create changes again. The raw, animalistic slap of our bodies is a forbidden song.
His breath gets choppy. I hear it and something inside me instinctually responds to it. The ruthless king of Redwood stripped to his base form. Brought to his knees by me. Beneath the anger, beneath the obsession, beneath even the hate—a surrender.
I arch my hips and he groans, a dark, thrilling note that’s thick with need. His fingers tighten on me. Savage. Crazed. Forceful. So hard and fast I wonder if he’s trying to snap me in two.
And then he cries out my name.
I can’t see his face, but I feel him. The tension. The pleasure.
He rolls off me and I tilt my head to look at him. Amber eyes. Menacing lips. A creation of darkness and shadows, and yet he made me see the light.
Dutch rakes his fingers through his hair, his gaze hot enough to steal my breath away. Moonlight pours through the sun roof above the treehouse. Its silver fingers stroke the lines of his face and I know without him having to tell me—the night is far from over.
“This truce is just for tonight,” I pant, because it will probably take me all week to catch my breath again. Besides, I can see in his dark gaze that he thinks this means I’ve accepted him. The ring. The future he wants for us. Everything.
“Truce or not, tonight is the beginning of forever.”
“Forever?” I scoot back. Close my legs. My shoes are gone. I don’t even remember him taking them off. Trembling slightly, I inhale and get hit with the scent of him mixed with the musky scent of us. “We’re still young, Dutch. And life is unpredictable. You really think you want forever with me?”
I try to inch back again, but he doesn’t let me get far.
His hands slam on the rug like brackets on either side of my thighs. Muscles and ink. A perfect combination. At least on his long, lean body. He presses forward, his face a breath away from mine.
My eyes flash on the slight scratches on his shoulder from where I raked my nails over his back.
“Cadence,” Dutch says, drawing my eyes back to his lips. My mouth throbs, recalling all the ways he bruised it. My lips aren’t the only part of me that’s aching. I can already tell my scalp will be sore in the morning.
“What?”
“Marry me.”
I hold his stare, my heart thundering like a war drum in my chest. “You’re really trying to piss me off, aren’t you?”
Dutch’s mouth curves into a sharp grin, teeth flashing white against a face thrown in shadows.
“You’ll look good in white,” he says and then he pushes me back, grabbing my knees and prodding my legs apart.
A surge of adrenaline pounds through my veins. I thought once was enough. I thought the night couldn’t get any hotter, but the blaze that roars through me as he turns his attention to my pleasure cannot be doused.
I feel that chaotic need again.
Energy unfurls through me as his eyes gleam with dirty promises.
“I won’t stop until the whole damn world acknowledges that you’re mine, Cadey.”
My head falls back into the rug as Dutch seals his promise with his tongue and then his fingers. Filthy. Bloodthirsty. Obscene. He doesn’t care how messy it gets, lapping at me with an abandon that takes over my brain. In a second, I snap over the edge.
My whole life is flashing before my eyes. Bright lights. Stars.
No one has ever made me feel like this.
I dig my fingers into his blond hair, barely catching my breath before he climbs over me again.
“Dutch,” I cry, but he grabs my jaw and kisses me. I taste myself. I taste disaster and destruction. And yet I fall deeper. Even though it’s foolish. Even though it will definitely wreck me. Even though he was the beast who made every day at Redwood hell.
I’m pulling at him before my better senses can take over. I wrap my legs and then my body around him, his heart beating against mine while we both erupt into flames. All movement, heat and friction. All groans, lips to neck, teeth on shoulders.
And when I think I’m done, when my body pulses and I’m about to roll away and find what pieces of me he hasn’t shattered, he pulls me on top of him. Fingers working. Hips thrusting despite his instruction to take over.
I don’t think I’m going to survive the night.
Dutch Cross is trying his best to kill me.
But I don’t die.
After the last snap of a crescendo, after the last cry of pleasure screams through the room and echoes into silence, I find myself back on earth. My body is limp. I lie on top of him, rising and falling as his chest balloons with each pant.
My face sinks into the crook of his neck, tasting the sweat, tasting the essence of me. Dutch shifts his head to the side and kisses me like the world is ending. Like it’ll never be enough.
And maybe it won’t.
Just like there seems to be an everlasting fountain of hate between us, there will always be a persistent and unmistakable desire drenching us both. Drawing us back to each other when nothing about us together makes sense.
Dutch rolls me on my back, dropping whisper-soft kisses against my face and down my sweaty, naked body. His fingers slide between my thighs with unmistakeable intent.
My body zings and I arch my back off the rug.
“Dutch,” I moan, already hyper-sensitive. “I can’t marry you if I’m dead.”
He laughs and keeps going. “Is that a yes?”
I realize what I’ve said, how it sounded, and I blink rapidly. “N-no.”
I’m punished for my defiance in a way that sets all the shadows on fire.
“You want to fight, Cadey?” Dutch taunts, looking down at me drenched in sweat and the evidence of my satisfaction.
My eyes glint at him.
He smiles. Cruel king. Depraved ruler. Despicable beast.
Putting his lips to my ear, he warns me, “You’re my girl. My fiancée. My wife. Did you think I would let you walk out of here before convincing you?”
I look up at his menacing face and the music starts in my head again.
Pounding drums. Insistent crescendoes.
The song of a madman.
And I’ve joined in his delirium.
Because it doesn’t hit me until the next morning that, all through the night, we never once used protection.
