An animal sound warned Farah a moment before Blackwell seized her hands and pinned them both to the bed at her sides.
His face hovered above hers as he bent at the waist from where he stood in between her parted legs. He wore the savage look of a man about to lose his greatest battle, but unwilling to put down his weapon.
“I’m going to give you one chance,” he threatened. “Do you understand? One chance to deny me, to stop me. So consider this carefully, wife. Is this what you want?” He turned his blue eye to her, affording her a closer look at the angry scar.
If he had treated her thus at any moment before, she might have retreated. But now her body had been awakened to its most primitive desires. Need and heat seethed within her, and overcame the trepidation she should be feeling. Not many a man came this close to the Blackheart of Ben More and survived.
Would she?
Farah met his wounded gaze with absolute conviction. “I want you to … take me.”
“Then God help us both.”
His dark eye flashed the moment before his hard mouth bore down on hers. His kiss felt like a punishment, but for what she couldn’t be sure. Because he wanted her? Because she wanted him?
When the pressure became too much, Farah made a sound of distress, and he broke the kiss.
“Damn you,” he accused, then descended again.
This time, though, he was more careful. Not gentle, per se, but the press of his mouth became another pleasure she’d not previously experienced. He kissed every part of her lips, the corners, the rims, the pillowing fullness, devouring her with the efficiency of an experienced man. Instead of becoming more severe, his movements began to slow. He sampled her like a man sipping and measuring a fine scotch. What his mouth lacked in fullness, it made up for in innate skill. Eventually, those hard lips softened, opened over hers, and his tongue thrust past her closed lips, demanding entrance. His trembling began to subside, though the tension coiled in the muscles beneath the jacket of his fine suit intensified.
Farah opened for him on a sigh of acquiescence, her muscles pooling beneath his body in a puddle of anticipatory submission. If their consummation was anything like this wet, probing kiss, she looked forward to it.
His fingers relaxed their punishing grip on her wrists, the fine leather peeling off her skin, and he pulled away just far enough to look down at her.
In the midst of the frenzy of need building inside them, bloomed a quiet moment. One of stillness and acceptance. His disbelieving eyes searched her face and his lips parted as though a confession hovered on his tongue, but could not breach the hardness of his mouth.
“What is it, Dorian?”
“Don’t call me that,” he admonished gently. “Not here.”
“What shall I call you, then?” she asked, puzzled that the intimacy of his first name could be forbidden from the intimacy of their marriage bed.
“Husband.” The word caressed her cheek. “Call me husband.”
Farah felt a tender smile touch the corner of her lips. “What is it, then—husband?”
“Your mouth,” he confessed with all the reverence of a saint and the torment of a martyr. “I’ve dreamed of this mouth.” He lifted a hand to her face, his breath hitching as he traced her lower lip with his glove. “I’ve imagined that word on your lips more times than you realize.”
Touched, Farah pressed her lips together. Could it be that Dorian Blackwell didn’t just need her for his devious ends, but he desired a life with her, as well? She wanted him to take his gloves off, more than she wanted anything in the world, but knew better than to ask it of him. She desired his skin against her skin, the warmth she could feel radiating from him absorbed by her flesh. Maybe someday, she thought with a twinge of hope, but not tonight.
“Put your body against mine, husband,” she invited. “And kiss me again.”
His eyes pasted to her lips, he released her other hand. “Do not—reach for me,” he warned.
Farah nodded, once again knitting her fingers into the covers.
Placing both of his hands on the side of her head, he leaned on his uninjured hand to lower his body in measured increments. His eyes locked with hers, onyx and ice, reaching for her like a pious man would reach out for a relic, or a godless man would reach for salvation. Farah didn’t dare blink, for fear she’d lose him. That this moment would slip through her fingers, the first of its kind, where Dorian Blackwell lifted the shroud of mystery and didn’t use words to wield shadow and misdirection. Instead, he whispered truths against her skin.
Neither of them breathed as his long, heavy torso pressed against her. Even through the layers of his clothes and the bindings of her corset, she could feel his tempered strength. His solid, lean frame built by years of forced labor and honed by a decade of violent dominion.
She’d do well to remember that. To keep in mind what he was capable of.
They both gasped when his hips settled into the cradle of hers, forcing them wider. A thick ridge of steel pressed against her cleft, and even through his trousers she could feel the heat of it. It pulsed in rhythm with his heart, and the slight movements sent little shocks of pleasure through her already sensitized core.
Eyes peeling wide, she clenched the covers so tightly, her fingers ached.
“Are you frightened, Fair—Farah?”
“Are you?” she asked breathlessly. “Should I be?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t have time to contemplate which of her questions he answered as his head dipped to claim her mouth once more.
“I want to see all of you,” he demanded before plunging his tongue back inside her mouth, caressing her answering tongue with deep, delicious strokes. Without breaking the fusion of their mouths, he lifted his chest off her enough to jerk at the laces and stays imprisoning her rib cage. The movements created more friction where their sexes pressed against one another, and Farah could tell by the tightening of his features that he felt at least an echo of the pleasure the movement caused her.
When the pressure of her stays gave, Farah filled her lungs with a delicious inhale, as she always did, this one flavored with his masculine scent and warm with his breath.
Her throat clenched, trapping the breath inside as she remembered her treasure. “Wait,” she gasped against his mouth, wrenching her head to the side. “Wait!”
But she was too late. He’d already pulled back to inspect what he’d found corseted to her. He clutched it in his fist and stared at it with all the shock of a man struck by a deadly viper.
“I—I’m sorry,” Farah whispered.
“Why?” Dorian asked as he ran a black-clad thumb across the folded, faded strip of plaid with a very odd intensity. It didn’t seem to anger him, though neither did it seem to please him. Did he mean why did she still have it? Why was she sorry? Why didn’t she keep it hidden from him, this keepsake of another marriage? Of a much different wedding night, this one only sealed by a few chaste kisses and a vow of forever.
The opposite of this night.
They both stared at it, this memento of a boy long dead and love that could not be.
“I promised to never be without it,” Farah ventured. “Are you angry?”
Dorian glanced at her, then back at the plaid, schooling his features. “No,” he said, perhaps more fervently than even he meant to while carefully placing the folded plaid next to the lamp. “Perhaps—it can now symbolize both him and me. A reminder of what binds us.”
She stared at the plaid, feeling naked for the first time that night. “The law binds us.”
He settled back over her, a dark gleam in his one light eye. “We both know how much regard I hold for the law.”
Their next kiss they shared with the tilt of a smile, their teeth softly rasping against one another’s as he spread the corset beneath her and pinched the hem of her chemise. The arch of her back seemed to tantalize him as she undulated in order for him to peel the garment from her prone body, baring the last of her secrets for his hungry gaze.
The barrel of his erection ground at her from behind the seams of his suit, as his mouth returned to hers like it was her lips from which an oasis sprang, and not below.
“Your trousers!” she gasped when he followed some curiosity he found down the curve of her jaw. “They’re wet.” She could feel how drenched they’d become, absorbing the moisture of her desire, the friction creating a stronger, slicker surge followed by a shocking burst of pleasure as he ground them harder against her.
“I don’t care,” he growled, passing his thumbs over her pebbled nipples in tandem, claiming her mouth and swallowing her startled cry as he rocked his hips against her again, and yet another time.
Her thighs trembled, her stomach clenched, and a delight for which she had no name spread like a flood of fire through her limbs.
“This pleases you?” He did it again, his own groan rumbling against her lips.
Pleased her? More than strawberry tarts and decadent desserts. More than she’d pleased herself with him watching. More pleasure than she’d ever imagined her body capable of producing. But she could say none of those things, so she just hissed a “Yes!” as her muscles began some sort of ascension she didn’t yet understand.
With each of his movements, and every one of his kisses, the glorious sensation intensified, electrified, until, unable to help herself, her head dug into the bed and her hips peeled off it. Her body bowed with a jerking, pulsing ecstasy so acute, she felt as though she was lost in an apoplexy. Her heart raced, forcing her blood into each extremity, and then stalled, only to charge again.
She thought she heard her name. She knew she gasped illogical things. Maybe screamed words, but couldn’t hear them, or for the life of her, remember what they were. Perhaps the same incoherent tongues spoken by the evangelicals whilst taken in rapture, for surely that’s what this was. The pulses became so powerful that if she didn’t stop it, she’d see the face of God, because it would kill her.
Frantic, she clutched at him, clawed at him, struggled to find a voice lost in the agonizing bliss of her release.
“No!” He recoiled with a violent curse, ripping himself from her to stand over her quivering body. He’d just reduced her to little more than a corpse, dying beautiful little deaths as each aftershock singed along her nerves.
Farah realized what she’d done too late, as she watched him yank off his tie.
“I’m sorry—”
She was suddenly in his clutches, dragged to the headboard by merciless fingers, her arms wrenched above her head.
“I told you not to reach for me.” Those eyes so alive and expressive only moments ago, returned to what she’d become accustomed to. Cold. Calculating. Lifeless. He secured one wrist to the intricate headboard with alarming swiftness before casting his gaze about the room.
When his eyes fell upon the plaid, Dougan’s plaid, he sneered, then reached for it, using it as a binding for her other wrist.
She’d been wrong. She wouldn’t have seen the face of God, because she’d been lying beneath the devil.
Panic surged beneath the satiation. He didn’t understand. She hadn’t meant to betray his fledgling trust. Her body had no longer been her own, but possessed by the pleasure he inflicted on her. “Dorian, I—”
He covered her mouth with his gloved fingers. “This is how it has to be.”
Dorian tried to suppress the blackness threatening to smother his desire. He’d passed some line of demarcation. A point of no return. No matter how much his skin crawled and his mind shrank from the grasping hands of another, the hard flesh between his legs still insisted he see this to fruition.
He tightened the final knot on her wrist, and then inspected it for weaknesses, not lifting his other hand from her tempting mouth. She could not touch him. She could not scream. She could not escape.
Dorian breathed deeply, able to gather a bit of his humanity back from the abyss.
A fragrant essence stole his attention from the guilt threatening to reach beneath his armor. It lingered on the tips of her elegant fingers, the ones that had tantalized him with the innocent discovery of her pleasure.
Dorian refused to look at her. If he saw fear, he might take mercy. If he saw submission, he might take advantage. If he saw pity … there was no telling what he would do.
He swallowed the excess of liquid in his mouth, the sides of his jaw aching with the force of it, and stared at the well-kept nails of his efficient clerk of a wife. Acting on pure instinct, his lips closed over her index and middle fingers, framed as they were by the Mackenzie plaid.
They were cold inside the heat of his mouth. After a twitch of surprise, they stilled.
And he savored.
She tasted of salt and musk and … woman. He slid her fingers deeper into his mouth, splitting them with his tongue.
To his utter shock, she whimpered and bit down on the leather of his glove, her hips clenching and lifting off the bed. He freed her fingers with a nibble at the tips. Once released, they curled into a tight fist.
He still didn’t meet her eyes. Instead, his entire being focused on the golden-covered folds of her body. He kept his hand secured over her mouth as he lowered his lips to her ear, watching the trembling of the flat plane of her belly.
“I tasted your cunt,” he warned her. “And I’m hungry for more.”
Her breaths became manic, heaving her breasts apart with each desperate expansion of her ribs. The nipples trembled like little pink confections atop the pale mounds. He was as shocked as she at his words, and yet, not surprised.
An hour ago, the very thought of any human contact repulsed him.
But this was Farah. And he’d made her a promise.
His body responded to her as it had to none other. The sight of her release nearly drove him over the edge.
If only she’d not touched him. If only his skin didn’t feel like it was on fire, and every wound he ever had ripped open again, the sensation of blood trickling down his gashed flesh warring with the intensity of his body’s need.
Someday he’d tell her that he wasn’t angry. That she was tied up for her own protection. In case, in her pleasure, she clutched at him again, and he couldn’t control his reaction.
The thought was enough to turn his veins to ice, but scent was a powerful sense, and hers now entrapped him as no other had.
In order to reach her sex, he had to release her mouth. “Don’t say a word, or I’ll gag you, as well.”
Christ, he was a monster. But Dorian knew that he couldn’t deny her if she pleaded for mercy. That he couldn’t face her if she rebuked or rejected him. And so he could allow her none of those options.
He’d warned her, hadn’t he? Before she demanded this night.
Her nod beneath his palm was enough. He let her go and she didn’t make a sound.
Thank God.
Heart pounding, mouth still watering, and cock pulsing with need, Dorian was glad she offered little resistance as he parted her knees.
She glistened. So. Fucking. Beautiful. He smoothed his wide hands down the insides of her thighs, pushing them open all the way, fingering the garters of her stockings and wondering if her skin was as soft as it looked.
His hunger was a ferocious thing as he lowered to his elbows and let the yearning clench deep in his belly. The slickness of her desire beckoned him. He split her cleft with his gloved finger, coating the tip with her nectar.
She trembled, but remained silent, as she’d agreed to do.
Curious, he rubbed his thumb and finger together, testing the glossy consistency. Soon his cock would be coated with this, slick and wet and—
Christ, if he didn’t get his mouth on her soon, he’d go mad.
Dorian had no fucking idea what he was doing, but her scent lured him down until he pressed his lips to her sex.
Her hips flinched beneath him, arched a little, and he could tell she fought to remain passive, but her body betrayed her. Good. Because his betrayed him, as well.
She tasted like heaven. Like desire and release. Like want and fulfillment. Like woman. His woman. The predator in him was going to dine until he’d had his fill.
And he had a lifetime of hunger to satiate.
The frantic need to struggle against her bindings had leached away from Farah the moment her husband’s mouth had closed over her fingers.
When he’d issued his vulgar threat in her ear, arousal had raced through her with crippling strength. Now his wide shoulders overflowed the space between her parted thighs, and his mouth was doing things that made her bite her lip so hard she tasted blood.
His tongue split her in one long lick. He growled against her, and Farah whimpered in reply, unable to stop herself.
But she didn’t say a word. Not. One. Word.
Blackwell had become that jaguar she’d evoked the first time she’d laid eyes on him. His shoulders rolled and bunched just so as he settled in for a feast. He left no part of her unexplored. His bold tongue found places she’d never known she possessed. He parted her with his fingers, exposing her in a way so absolute, she could barely stand it. And yet, she read the veneration on his face as he looked at her, as he tasted her, as if he committed every single crevice and protuberance to memory. He learned very quickly what made her gasp, what caused her to arch or retreat. He played like a man who’d only just learned how. Testing her reactions, re-creating sensations, enjoying a bit of cruelty as only the Blackheart of Ben More could. Driving her to the edge of her wits and then pulling back, leaving her groaning, straining, and sweating.
She jerked as his finger found its way inside her slick channel, and the vibration of his groan against the soft hood of flesh he’d sucked into his mouth with a flattened tongue shattered her composure.
Farah screamed with the force of it. The need to grip, to knead, to flail seized her, and she tested the strength of her bonds. The harder she struggled against them, the more potently the bliss ripped through her blood and out her throat in desperate screams. He stayed with her, riding the frantic thrusts of her hips as she ground her heels into the mattress and arched. For a moment, she thought the release would break her in half, but he was there, pressing her hips back down and forcing her to experience the devastating finish. She closed her eyes, but light still burst behind her lids. She could feel the muscles of her sex gripping and releasing his gloved finger. Pulling him deeper.
And then he was gone.
Farah collapsed, panting and shivering with exhaustion. Feeling trapped and yet released.
Her head lolled to the side, and she looked down at him from beneath heavy lashes. What she saw made her eyes peel wide.
Dorian had undone his trousers, and knelt between her quivering knees palming his turgid erection. The act they were about to commit hadn’t intimidated Farah until now.
His dark features both ruthless and almost apologetic, he bent and prowled up her body, stopping to slick a bit of moisture from his glove on one nipple and then proceeding to lick it off.
“God, the taste of you. I’m drunk with it.” He moaned, his eyes alight with accusation as he held himself above her, still fully clothed but for the arousal now pressing against the slit of her body. “What have you done to me?”
What had she done to him? “I—I—”
His glove covered her mouth again, stopping words she never would have found.
“I never wanted to hurt you,” he whispered against her ear. “I’m sorry.”
Farah didn’t have time to contemplate just which of his many offenses he was apologizing for before he surged inside her, breaching her virginity.
His glove muffled her cry of pain as Dorian branded her with hot, hard flesh, searing all the way to her womb, or so it seemed.
He cursed, spewing blasphemies Farah hadn’t even encountered in all her years at the Yard. Though her flesh stretched and bled, his scarred face contorted into what appeared to be a mask of pain.
Farah strained against her bonds, against his hand, wanting to escape the pain, wanting to soothe him, wanting control of her limbs back.
But control was something the Blackheart of Ben More would never allow.
Dorian forced himself to look at her. To witness the pain in her eyes. The pain he inflicted. How cruel was a God that made entering her body the sweetest pleasure for him and the sharpest torment for her?
She wanted this, he reminded himself.
Not as much as you, whispered a dark voice.
I never wanted to hurt her, he argued. And never like this.
You wouldn’t have stopped until you claimed her. Until you’d tasted her like this, until you’d invaded her like this.
She’d never deny me, he thought frantically.
Then take your hand off her mouth.
He didn’t. He couldn’t.
So locked in a battle with himself, Dorian almost missed the gradual give of her intimate flesh locked so tightly around his own. In warm, slick little pulses, she accepted him into her body. The fight and fear drained out of her muscles until they were soft and pliant beneath him and the pain and panic leached from her gray eyes until they were pools of silver again.
He remained motionless, his every sinuous muscle wound tight as a coil. He was on the edge of a precipice, one he couldn’t bring himself to leap from.
If he’d learned anything, it had been that reality never lived up to a memory, or even worse, a fantasy. But that long-held belief shattered as he held himself inside of his wife. Her body only sheathed a part of him, but her warmth suffused him, surrounded him, until he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that once he lost himself inside her, he’d lose himself to her, as well.
She let a soft sigh of relief through her nose and her lashes fluttered as her hips flexed, testing the feel of him inside her.
A hot ripple of lust tore through him, followed by a tidal wave of pleasure. Instinct won over intellect, and Dorian lifted his hips, only to sink again, and again.
Ecstasy crawled over the pleasure, clawing at his flesh, ripping him apart, draining the very essence from him, and bathing her womb with it. Rendering him an empty vessel, a dark void of bliss and hunger, sated but not satisfied. He was a powerful man swimming against a riptide, realizing too late that he battled a force of nature stronger than himself.
And he was lost.
Farah felt him swell inside of her, stretching her already taut flesh. It only took a handful of movements for him to find release. He ducked his head against her neck, silent, not breathing for longer than she thought possible as each shudder racked his powerful body in unrelenting waves. He held his weight on one hand, as he had all night, his wounded palm still fixed over her mouth, the pulses echoed in the clench of his fingers.
When the storm subsided, he released his captive breath on a gasp against her hair. She hadn’t known what to expect after he’d found his pleasure, but what he did was absolutely not it.
Blackwell didn’t pause, or even abate. He maintained a slow, rippling rhythm, his manhood just as hard and unyielding as that first thrust. His gasps became pants that melted into groans.
He lifted his torso to look down at her, disbelief a foreign expression for his sharp, unsettling features. The fine wool of his jacket abraded her sensitized nipples. The leather of his glove, a buttery-smooth reminder of his fortunes, trailed from her mouth to her jaw, her throat, and her breasts. His seed further eased his way as he slid into her untried body with long, deep strokes.
Farah had thought her part over, that he’d coaxed from her body all the pleasure it had to give. But, to her ultimate surprise, a tight, aching heat bloomed low in her belly, starting in her womb and reaching for the shaft of branding heat plunging and retracting from inside her.
Her lips parted of their own accord, and a small sound of delighted surprise escaped.
Blackwell’s eyes sharpened. Questioned.
Farah’s body answered without thought. A lift of her hips, a press of her thighs, and a soft moan of encouragement.
It was all he needed.
Blackwell didn’t kiss or taste her. Instead he watched her face with an intensity that abashed her. Every flutter of her eyelid, or intake of breath, the way her lips parted or pressed together. His body again became a conduit of her gratification.
It shocked her how he could support his heavy frame all this time on one powerful arm, but the thought dissipated as he used his other hand to explore her, rendering her mind useless and directing her awareness like a symphony conductor. He traced the line of her jaw, the curve of her cheekbones, as though committing her to memory, or visiting one, she couldn’t be sure.
As the slow pressure mounted, her moans became mewls, her mewls became cries. His finger drifted along the outline of her lips, slipping past her teeth and leaving the taste of sex on her tongue. Sex and leather. She closed her lips and rolled the glove between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, feeling the hard ridge of his finger beneath.
He hissed, growled, and pulled his hand away, drawing it down to her hip and gripping the curve of her ass, spreading her wider for his accelerating thrusts.
Farah’s head tossed against her pillow, her eyes rolling back into their sockets, retreating from sight, as her other overwhelmed senses demanded her attention.
Leather and sex. Darkness. Spice. Chilly air. Hot Blood. Textiles. Smooth, slick flesh. Wide, hard male.
A mouth on hers. A tongue thrusting inside, tasting the essence of her he’d left there, lapping at it.
Farah could feel the waves of sensation pressing against her spine. She feared it, like the first stirrings of an earthquake, or the silent breath after a lightning strike.
She waited for the answering thunder which was certain to resonate through her bones. Straining against her bindings with weak and trembling muscles, she wasn’t sure she could survive another earth-shattering release.
But there was no escape. It rushed over her helpless body like a rogue wave, drowning her in crash after crash of sensation. Blackwell swallowed her frantic cries until abruptly, he ripped his mouth from hers and reared back, letting loose a deep, hoarse roar, and then another. Calling his second release to the sky like a prisoner set free.
A languorous satiation turned her bones to liquid. Farah would have wondered if she were still connected to her body if not for the ties still binding her wrists to the headboard, or the small, errant twitches of exhaustion pulsing in her limbs.
Dorian Blackwell, her husband, lingered over her as they both fought to regain their breath. Peering up into his mismatched eyes, she shared an unspoken moment of awe with him.
Something in their world had shifted. Some sort of cosmological knowledge, or a secret thought lost at sea floating to the surface. In this quiet, unfettered moment, she knew him, truly saw him for what he was. Hard, ruthless tyrant. Abused, wounded boy. An empty heart full of promise, and a soul of shadows in need of sunlight.
Not only did her eyes feel more opened, somehow, but her heart, as well.
Curse her expressive face, he must have read her probing thoughts. Because before he even withdrew from her body, he drifted back behind his screen of shadows and ice, leaving her cold and vulnerable and alone.
Don’t go, she thought desperately. She’d unlocked something. Exposed it. But couldn’t decipher what it was yet, or what it meant. She needed more time, just another moment with him. Beneath him.
“I must,” he clipped, drawing out of her body and off the bed.
Farah frowned at his back as he adjusted his clothing and buttoned his jacket over the front of his trousers. She hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud until he answered her.
“Why?”
Dorian retreated from the question, walking over to the basin and pitcher and pouring water over a towel.
Why? The reasons were innumerable. He was both protector and coward.
Protector, because his nightmares, while physically harmless to him, might prove lethal to her. If he woke in a panic, fighting off his memories, he’d likely break her before he’d fully become aware.
Coward, because he couldn’t face her hatred in the morning. Couldn’t see the marks the bindings had left on her wrists. Couldn’t bring himself to witness the regret and disgust when she realized what she’d done. What he’d done to her. That he’d taken her precious innocence and left his tainted seed inside of her.
Twice.
He wrung the excess water from the towel and returned to her. She looked like a captured goddess. Like the spoils of an ancient war, tied and displayed for her new lord’s pleasure.
He’d treated her as such.
And he deserved to die for it.
Releasing his necktie that bound one of her hands, he pressed the cloth into it. He should stay and wash her. But the sight of her broken virginity might send him over the edge. Better that he escape, while he still could. While he was still together, because surprisingly, he was. He was strong. He’d kept his word. His duty was absolved. She could untie the knot of her plaid with relative ease.
Of Dougan’s plaid.
His composure cracked.
“Stay?” she prompted softly, her eyes almost obscured by heavy lids and thick lashes. “I’ll not—reach for you.”
“Sleep now,” he commanded, turning away from the beckoning halo of her curls. Dousing candles on his way to the door, he didn’t look back as he left her in darkness.
Once the latch clicked behind him, his control gave. Imported carpets muffled the sound of his knees hitting the floor. He’d been a fool to think he was strong. A bloody fool.
He had an evident fucking weakness. One with liquid gray eyes and silver curls.
And God help him if she ever found out.
