Kate Hewitt - Bad Blood

“Pay attention, Grace,” he murmured, amusement and passion in his low voice, bringing himself down against her chest, his skin like hot satin over steel, rubbing against her taut breasts, making her sigh as the aftershocks still rolled through her.

And then he thrust inside of her.

Grace felt the leftover pleasure from her last climax coalesce and shiver through her, kicking into her as he began to move, slow and sure, building her up again when she would have thought she was more than sated.

Lucas rolled over, keeping himself deep inside of her, but bringing her on top of him. Dazed, Grace could only stare down at him for a moment.

“I thought you wanted control,” he said, pressing kisses to her jaw, the corner of her mouth, her neck. “By all means, take it.”

“Your concept of control is a bit more elastic than I’d intended,” she said, amazed that she could speak at all—astounded that she could hang words together, no matter how breathless her voice sounded.

He laughed, and she felt it inside of her, as deep as he was. She felt it radiate through her, pleasure coursing outward from where they were joined, lighting her up from within.

“I don’t much care for boundaries,” he said, pushing her hair back from her face, teasing her lower lip with his teeth. “Unless I set them.”

He was so hot and hard within her, so uncompromisingly male, and Grace felt suddenly restless, urgent. Unbelievably, she felt that tightening, that coiling desire, begin to pull taut inside her all over again. All that mattered was that feeling. She sat back, settling herself against him. Then she rolled her hips into a slow, steady pace and watched his eyes go dark with passion, reveling in the power she had over him just as surely as he could wield it over her.

But she didn’t care about the power. Not anymore. Not after what had just happened between them. She knew she should care about that, but she shoved it aside. She cared only about the pleasure, about the slick slide of their bodies, the thrust and the pull that made her feel wild, insatiable. She forgot about the photos, forgot about the past and the pain, forgot about the lessons she’d decided she’d teach him. The truth was his hard length within her, his wild hands on her flesh. The truth was she wanted him with a desperation that should have terrified her, but instead made her yearning all the more intense. She was more hungry for him than she had ever been for anyone. Than she had ever imagined it was possible to be.

She was too hungry for him to protect herself. Perhaps she had known that from the start.

At a certain point, his hands gripped her hips, and Grace could no longer think, she could only feel. And when she shattered one more time, he spurred her on, his thrusts wild and urgent until he, too, fell over the edge.

She thought he even called her name.

Lucas knew how he was supposed to act. Smoldering, arch, easy. Hadn’t he played the role a thousand times? He knew how to perfect the postcoital scene. He knew how to make a woman who had just bedded him feel like a queen, as if she’d never made a better decision in her life. He knew how to leave them wanting more.

But none of them were Grace.

Outside, the night had long since fallen, casting the room in shadows. Only the lamp on the antique desk shed any light, and it was the barest halo, yellow against the gloom.

He was still deep inside of her. She was still sprawled over his chest.

He had no idea why he felt a great sense of melancholy when he considered his next move, almost as disconcerting as the unusual sense of well-being that washed over him when he did no more than hold her and breathe.

So much for the exorcism.

She stirred. He had the strangest urge to pretend he was asleep, to keep her there against him, the perfect, soft weight of her holding him down, as if she anchored him to the world, to herself. But instead, he let her move away from him and disposed of the condom as she pulled herself to her feet on the opposite side of the wide bed.

She looked over her shoulder at him, thoroughly disheveled, and he felt a fierce stab of a kind of pride. Her hair was a wild cloud around her face, her lips still slightly swollen, her eyes not entirely focused.

“I am going to shower,” she said, her voice still rough from passion. There was something awkward in the way she held herself, something uneasy. She did not quite meet his gaze, and he knew as she pulled an arm around herself that she felt the heaviness, the weight, that hung there between them.

He was a master at this scene. He should have sorted it out already, made her laugh, flattered her and teased her into pleased satiation. But his happy manners, his notorious charm, seemed to have deserted him completely.

“Grace.” He did not know why he said her name like that, why he felt it reverberate through him, why he wanted to reach for her for no reason at all but to hold her close. To stay in this moment, not to let it go. He did not know why every part of him felt that could be disastrous to move forward, to keep going.

To admit that he was back in Wolfstone, with all that entailed.

He was descending into melodrama, and she was not even looking at him.

“Why don’t you order room service?” she asked lightly, her tone not fooling him at all. But what could he do when he was not even sure what held him in this odd, tight grip around his chest? “We could use some food, I think.”

And then he watched her walk across the room to disappear into the en suite bathroom, naked and more beautiful than any woman ought to be, her head held high and regal, the culmination of fantasies he hadn’t even known he’d had.

He was in trouble. More trouble, he understood, than he had ever been near before.

“You accused me of hiding yesterday,” he said without turning around, not moving from where he stood in front of the big bay window. “In plain sight.”

He had heard the water shut off, had heard the old pipes cease their chattering and clanking. He’d heard her move around in the bathroom, and then emerge. She brought a cloud of fragrance with her, something floral with a faint kick of spice. Her soap, shampoo, perfume. It teased his nose and made him harden again in the jeans he’d thrown back on to answer the porter’s knock when their food had been delivered. Lamb with buttery mashed potatoes and peas. Hearty fare befitting a cold March night—and yet he could not seem to summon up an appetite.

“It was an observation,” she replied in an even tone, closer to him than he’d expected, though he still did not turn. “Not an accusation.”

“It was astute, either way,” he said. “But I cannot seem to do it here.”

He turned to find her just beyond his shoulder, her face carefully blank, her brown eyes noticeably wary, her hair piled haphazardly on the top of her head and curling at the ends. She was wrapped in a thin silk wrapper of a deep royal blue, her skin flushed pink and rosy from her ablutions. Or perhaps from what had happened between them.

She looked like candy, sweet and damp and all too edible. And he could not understand why tasting her again, though he yearned to, was not the urge that drove him. Why something else battled to take him over instead.

It was the ghosts again, he thought darkly. There were too many, especially in Wolfestone. Hadn’t his run-in with Jacob taught him the folly of revisiting the past? And yet here he was, back in this village, as if he’d learned nothing at all. He’d even been the one to suggest coming here, so full of himself, never considering the consequences. The story of his damned life.

“I don’t know what this is,” he muttered. “If it is you—or this damned place. It brings back far too many memories. None of them good.”