ARIEL
In two strides, he’s pinning me against the wall. One hand tangles in my hair, ruining what’s left of Gina’s handiwork. The other hand grips my waist and bunches my dress into a disaster of borrowed silk. His mouth crashes into mine like storm waves breaking on a levee.
I’ve been kissed before, but not like this. Never like this. He kisses me like I’m air and he’s drowning. And God help me, that’s exactly how I kiss him back.
When I gasp, he thrusts his tongue past my teeth and claims my mouth. I moan and let him.
“Last chance to run, ptichka,” he growls.
In answer, I drag him back down to me. The sink edge digs into my back as he lifts me onto it. My dress rides up my thighs and his hands follow, leaving trails of fire on my skin. When he breaks the kiss to trace a path down my neck with his lips, I have to bite back another moan.
“Someone could walk in,” I manage to whisper, even as my fingers work at his shirt buttons.
He reaches past me to lock the door, the movement pressing him even closer. “Let me worry about that.”
Then he’s kissing me again and it’s easy to do exactly that: let him handle the worrying. Some days, it feels like all I do is worry. So for him to pick me up and move me here and move me there and take all that burden off my plate? I feel light. I feel weightless.
I feel like I could fucking fly.
Time melts and skews as he gathers me against him and nips his way down the curve of my throat. I let my head drape backward as I gaze up at the ceiling through half-lidded eyes, fingertips clawing into his thick shoulders for dear life.
He keeps murmuring things against my skin—”ptichka” and “I shouldn’t” and “fucking hell, you taste good.” Every single one makes my toes curl.
When his fingertip ventures up to find the edge of my panties, I suck in a sharp gasp. “This is a—”
“—bad idea,” he agrees. “Tell me something I don’t fucking know.”
But neither of us stop when that finger slides beneath the lace and strokes through my wetness. I bite down where his neck meets his shoulder so I don’t scream. Stuttering half-syllables come pouring through my muffled mouth.
“P-pl-p-pl…” It never quite makes it all the way to a word.
It doesn’t have to, though. He knows what I’m pleading for. Like the first aid kit, everything he touches is exactly where it’s supposed to be.
When he parts me, I come so fast that my cheeks burn red with embarrassment. Scarcely a dozen pumps of two scarred fingers into me and I’m falling apart and quivering in his arms.
It gets messier from there. Clothes fumble. Belts unlatch. My underwear slides down my thighs and vanishes, heaven only knows where.
But when he lines his hard cock up with my pussy, he stops. His forehead is pressed to mine. Eyes huge and blue. Breath rattling in and out of his lungs. He’s just this side of undone, like the humanity in him is thrashing against the steel bars of the cage he uses to keep it stowed away.
I, on the other hand, look absolutely ruined already, if my quick glance into the mirror is anything to go by. The braids are a distant memory. The straps of my dress have fallen down my shoulders to let my boobs peek over the neckline of my dress. My skin is flushed red everywhere he’s touched and kissed and bit.
Of all the things about him that have brought me to this moment, though, this line in the sand, this one door closing and another opening, it’s that look in his eyes that pushes me over the threshold.
He really doesn’t do this.
Not “this” as in sex, because any man that handsome and that obviously wealthy and that supremely confident in his own skin can clearly have women in his bed at the snap of his fingers. What I mean is that he doesn’t do “this” as in gaze down at the woman he’s about to fuck like she might be the death of the self-control that defines him. He doesn’t do “this” as in show that there is anything accessible within him that might charitably be called a soul. He doesn’t do “this” as in let his bedmates look back and wonder just what it might take to crack him open for once in his grim, bloodsoaked life.
He doesn’t do “this.”
Neither do I.
But then he slides into me, and we both do something we’ve never done before.
For all the build-up, it’s almost remarkable how fast the sex is. Brutal things can never last that long. And besides, I’m skittering in and out of awareness, too overwhelmed by how it feels like he’s fucking my heart, splitting me wide open, wider, wider.
The thump and rattle of the sink touching the mirror glass times every thrust. I moan, broken, helpless. His hands carve divots in my bare waist.
“Spread for me,” he orders. “Spread those fucking thighs and give me all of you.”
But even as he orders it, he does it for me, molding me like putty. My hips are screaming with the strain and my throat is raw from the effort of holding back the kinds of moans that would draw attention from the partygoers on the other side of the wall. But I want so fucking badly to give him what he’s asking.
Every twitch of his muscles drives him deeper into me than anyone’s ever gone before. I’m a bouncing, sweaty disaster and I don’t have the brain cells left to give a damn. Even as our mouths clash and our breath mingles and he keeps murmuring filthy nothings that are half-exhale and half-fuck-you’re-dripping-for-me, all I can do is hold on and pray that the climax doesn’t kill me.
He’s not wrong—I am dripping for him. More broken syllables fall out of my mouth. “P-pl-pl… M-m-more…”
And just when I think he couldn’t possibly give me more, he does. He drags me down onto his cock, crushing my waist between his palms, fucking harder and faster and more relentless.
Almost…
Almost…
Boom.
He growls, I whimper, and then we both explode, one on the heels of the next. Light fractures in my vision as the orgasm cleaves me in two. A few starlit, timeless seconds suck us in. For as long as those last, I’m soaring.
Then gravity reclaims us. Time reclaims us. Common sense reclaims us.
And all I can think as I float back down is, That really was a bad idea.
Returning to reality is an ugly affair. I’m suddenly aware of how unkempt my dress looks scrunched around my waist like that. How cold and sticky the sink countertop is. How what I just did—fucking a stranger while literally on the job—was so unbelievably rash that I should probably tender my resignation at the Gazette and go become a nun, because a lifetime of prayer and solitude is the bare minimum of what I’ll need to redeem my soul after this idiotic stunt.
It would help if the stranger would say something. But as he straightens his clothes, shoots his cuffs, and steps back from me, it’s as if he’s pulling up the drawbridge and locking down the castle gates behind his eyes. Those glimpses of soul I saw swimming in the blue of his irises are long gone now. The shreds of humanity are hidden. He looks the way he did when he first opened the stall door.
Cold.
Cruel.
Merciless.
I open my mouth to tell him—I mean, shoot, something, if only because it feels like the silence is gonna swallow me whole if I don’t. Should I ask his name? Should I give him my number? Should I see if he regrets this or if he maybe wants to do it again?
But he beats me to the punch.
He gives me one crisp, formal incline of the head, jaw clenched brutally tight. “Enjoy the gala,” he says in that tar-on-rubble voice of his. “Try not to cut yourself again.”
Then he’s gone, leaving me leaking and lonely on a sink counter, wondering what in the fuck just happened.
