The Hunter (33 page)

His mouth descended, latched onto the exact place she’d felt raw and aching. The contact seared her so abruptly she cried out and contracted. His tongue was a warm weight splitting up the center of her sex, his fingers sank to the knuckle and stroked her from inside.

The darkness exploded into lightning, becoming a white flash that surged through her body on a raw cry. She felt shattered by bliss, beaten with pleasure. It surged through her in brief, intense surges that had her hips lifting against his restraining hand, shoving at it, and then retracting from it.

Even when the storm passed he didn’t pull away. His tongue replaced his fingers, a wet and shallow thrust inside of her, drawing out every drop of her release in audible swallows.

Collapsing to the mattress, Millie stared up into the darkness, too amazed, too pleasured to be astonished by his wickedness. She closed her eyes, feeling the soft glide of his tongue on her hot flesh, feeling pressure building again, enjoying the vibration of his moan against her newly sensitized skin. Then he captured the soft protuberance with his mouth. Sucking, then flicking, then tugging.

And again she went flying. Riding his mouth like she would a wild beast, her shoulders peeling off the floor, her cries echoing off the ceiling. This time she flew too high, the pleasure turned into a burn, and she made a wild grab for his hair, yanking until he detached on a snarl.

“I’m not finished with you.” He strained against her grip.

“I can take no more,” she said, panting. “Please.”

Her limbs felt like pudding, soft and weak. Her lids heavy.

“Is it always like that?” she asked softly. “In your dreams.”

“You’ve never tasted so good.”

“Is it like that with every lover?” she wondered aloud.

“I’ll kill any other man who gives you pleasure,” he said savagely, then paused for a handful of audible breaths.

“What is it?” she crooned, reaching down to thread her fingers in the silky thickness of his hair, his face turned to press against her, his lashes closing against her wrist.

“I don’t want this to be over,” he told the darkness. “I don’t want to wake.”

His lips brushed against her thigh. His kiss was more of a nuzzle that melted what was left of her heart. “No man has ever fucked you.” Possessiveness underscored his gentle tone. “I wonder if anyone has touched you, if they’ve tasted you. If you’re truly, only mine.”

“I am,” she whispered, and the veracity of those words struck her with an astounding force, and she stilled.

He crawled up her body in a slow prowl. Slowly, tentatively he lowered himself over her, pressing her breasts back into his chest, and shuddering as his erection slid against her open thighs. She opened trembling legs wider, accommodating for his bulk settling atop her. He was warmer than before, and she sensed a hesitation beneath the hunger.

“In my dreams I am a beast.” He sounded hollow and she wondered how he could in such a lovely moment. “I hold you beneath me. So you can’t escape.”

A bit of cold air hit the heat between her thighs, producing a shiver. “I won’t stop you,” she said, stifling a yawn of pleasured drowsiness. He felt heavy and warm, like a blanket of desire and sex. He could stay there all night if he wished and she wouldn’t complain one bit.

*   *   *

Captured in a bittersweet battle between consuming desire and profound regret, Christopher plunged his arms beneath his dream-lover and buried his face against her hair, knowing it was as inky as the night surrounding him.

He knew how this dream ended. A seductive fantasy that brought him to the brink, and then he woke on a tortured groan with his cock in his hand. Spilling his seed in a hollow parody of the bliss that everything building up to it had promised.

He hated that moment. Hated everything about it. About himself.

The dream had never been this good.

And it never would be again.

“I’m sorry I hurt you last night, when I took you.” He gave the words to dream Millie that he could never say to her in the daylight. She knew, didn’t she? She knew that he’d not meant to hurt her. That he didn’t know she’d been a virgin. That for all the lives he’d taken and the carnage he’d wrought, the sight of her blood made him feel sick and panicky.

The fingers threaded through his hair stroked softly, came to the edge of his scalp and circled back to his hairline to run through the same path.

He’d loved when she’d yanked it earlier. It nearly made him come. But this … this was different. Better, almost. It turned his lust from a bite to an ache. As insistent and demanding but less … savage somehow. For a man who was born in hell, that singular touch was sweeter than the idea of heaven.

“I want you,” he confessed. “I want you like this … beneath me.”

“Then I’m yours.” She lifted her hips, pressing the wetness of her sex against him in a gesture so infinitely sweet, it nearly unstitched him.

Rolling his hips, he found her opening and gently slipped the head of his shaft inside of her heat, sheathing himself inch by aching inch. She was as tight as he remembered, but nothing tore this time, nothing barricaded his way.

She gasped and the sound did something delicious to his chest. It swelled somehow, expanded.

“Ohhh.” Her elegant hands feathered over his back. “That’s so … much.”

“Too much?” Had he hurt her? Even here, even in his dream, he didn’t think he could go through that again.

“Don’t … stop,” she cried between heavy breaths.

He didn’t think he could. Blood poured the fires of lust through every nerve, and if he pulled away now, it would surely kill him. It was her fault. She was too sweet, too soft. She was everything a fantasy should be, and somehow more.

He glided back and drove forward again, reveling in her small sounds of pleasure. Only in a dream could something feel this right. Could the icy void become a warm, velvety sheath. A cradle of silken flesh and soft murmurs. Only in a dream could he rediscover what wonder felt like.

He gave himself to her in deep, slow thrusts. Lost part of himself with each stroke. Something came alive inside him, grew, glowed, and pulsed. He wanted to shrink from it, from the pressure, from the pleasure, but he was a man of pure primal lust now. Made of nothing but carnal instinct. Her little, high mewls drove him forward until it was not enough. It was never enough. It would never
be
enough. Desperate to get deeper, he slipped one of her legs over his shoulder, angling himself so deep that he thought he felt her womb.

Her sob touched him as deeply as he penetrated her. Soft hips spread beneath him in sweet feminine submission.

“Come for me,” he demanded on long, almost punishing thrusts. “Say my name … One … more … time.”

“Christopher.” His name was ripped from deep in her throat.
“Please.”
A plea or a prayer, he couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. She whimpered, then screamed. Her body clenched around his cock, bore down on him with a throbbing pressure so intense, he couldn’t fight it.

He closed his eyes, battling the ecstasy building in his abdomen and preparing to burst from him. He clung to the moment, held as long as he could.

Now he would wake. Now he would lose her—

Hot release spilled through him and he gasped his disbelief as his breath expelled along with his seed. He couldn’t draw air back into his lungs. Could do nothing but jerk and strain as every muscle clenched, held prisoner by pleasure. Consumed by sheer unadulterated bliss. It pulsed from him, poured from him, bathing her womb with warmth and further easing his last desperate thrusts.

The tempest passed as abruptly as it had hit him, and in its wake left a crushing destruction. Horror turned his blood to ice, even as the heat of lust still sang through him.

“You’re … still here.” He stood, the wetness of his manhood against his thigh an awful cold burst of reality.

“Where else would I be?” He could hear the confusion mingling with something else in her voice that made it husky and thick. It sickened him. Regret? Fear? Pain?

Christ
. The things he’d said to her. The things they’d just done …

She’d been—she
was
—beneath him. She’d shivered when he settled above her.

He’d held her down …

Fuck
.

“Christopher?”

He stumbled blindly toward the door, kicking it open and making his way on weak legs down the dim hall. He was running. Running from the darkness. From the lily-white woman of his dreams.

From the fantasy that had quickly become a nightmare.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
THREE

Christopher’s knuckle split as it glanced off the rough wood stump he’d weighted down with stones in his training room. Rain pelted the windows and cast the room in late-morning gray, turning his implements into shadows.

Cursing his lack of concentration, he welcomed the sharp, stinging burn like an old friend. The pain would bring focus, the blood would foster clarity.

I want you.

Then I’m yours.

A harsh sound ripped through the emptiness of the room, a growl he could barely identify as his own as he clenched his wounded fist and drove it into the wood again. And again. And again.

He’d trained like this his whole life. Wu Ping had started with sand, building calluses on his knuckles and the outsides of his palms. Then they’d moved to buckets full of pebbles, and wood after that. Finally he’d been punching the walls of the prison, painting the stones with his weakness until his skin was so rough, it no longer broke.

The blood meant he was growing too soft. That he was getting weak. That he could be broken.

Come for me. Say my name.

Christopher … please.

He was no stranger to entreaties, to pulling people beneath him and silencing their pleas. But hers cut through him like a jagged stone. Had she been begging for release, or had she been pleading with him to release her?

He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t remember. Part of him was glad he didn’t see her last night, that the memory of fear or pain on her face wasn’t branded onto his mind’s eye.

Goddammit, it was supposed to have been a dream. With her, it had always been a dream. Words like that didn’t come to him when he was awake. Needs as primal as those didn’t belong in daylight. Men like him didn’t leave a woman wet and writhing.

They didn’t care to.

He. Didn’t.
Care
.

This time, it was the wood that splintered beneath his fists.

He’d been at this for what felt like an eternity, trading his obsessive mental mortification with the physical kind. Sweat ran down his naked torso in chilly rivulets, blood pulsed, pushing his veins close to the skin. Muscles swelled and burned.

And still he couldn’t forget the softness between her thighs, the bliss of holding her beneath him, of grinding his hips down against hers.

He’d coerced her. Treated a virgin like a common whore, took her from behind like one. Ripped into her like a barbarian, but at least
then
she’d consented.

And still he’d cringed from what he’d done.

Don’t … stop.

He rummaged through the haze of lust and frenzy, desperately trying to unravel the meaning behind those words. In his dream, she’d been goading him on, encouraging him to take her.

In his nightmare, he’d taken her against her will.

In reality, he’d spilled his seed inside a woman for the first time in his life. What if she was—What if they’d made a—

“Fuck. Fuck.
Fuck
.” He punctuated each new blow with a bellow of frustration.

“I wouldn’t let Mama hear you say that.” A small voice permeated the echoes of his vulgarity with a gentle reproach. “She doesn’t like that word.”

Wonderful
. He’d said it fucking plenty last night, hadn’t he?

Jakub stepped from the doorway and ventured into the room, pausing to study the weapons in the rack beneath the second-story walk from which a climbing rope dangled. His pale fingers closed over the little wooden handle of his garrote with fascination.

Christopher opened his mouth to tell the boy to leave, but what came out was, “Have you seen her?”

“She’s getting dressed.” Jakub caressed a set of throwing daggers next.

“Is she … all right?” Cursing the tinge of anxiety in his voice, Christopher clenched his wounded fist.

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

There was no safe place to go with that question.

“Don’t touch that,” he barked.

Jakub’s hand jerked away from a shiny pistol and seemed to bury itself in the pocket of his little trousers in shame. “Sorry,” the boy mumbled, then brightened. “Did you break that?” He jogged over to the log, settling his hand on the fresh split with reverence before he craned his neck to look up. “Welton said to come down and look for breakfast after I dressed, but then I heard a crash. You did that with your fists?”

From this angle, those blasted spectacles made the child mostly a set of gigantic eyes with a few skinny limbs dangling from them. Christopher had difficulty looking down at him.

“You must have to be terribly strong to hit something that hard.”

The wistful note in the boy’s voice tugged at him, and Christopher looked down to see Jakub run a finger over the split in the trunk with his brows drawn into a frown.

“I am terribly strong, but you don’t have to be to do damage like that. It takes knowledge, discipline, and agility more than strength.” He walked to a shelf in the corner, reaching for a cloth with which to wrap his knuckles. Eyes snagging on his bandaged forearm, Christopher flinched at the memory of Millie’s gentle care.

“Mama could never do that,” Jakub argued. “Nor could I.”

“Nonsense.” Christopher turned back to the boy, rolling the bandage over his hand. “The martial art I practice was taught by a female monk in the East decades ago. It was said she could shatter stone with a flick of her finger.”

“That’s just a story,” Jakub scoffed.

“A story told to me by the master who taught me to fight. He was a very small man, smaller than your mother, and I saw him shatter bricks in his palm.”