Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 40759 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 204(@200wpm)___ 163(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40759 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 204(@200wpm)___ 163(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
Everything shifted around me, altered, and there was the scent of bergamot and sage, pine and leather. The bed was different, softer, the ropes as well. But I was in the same position; that was unchanged.
“Raph?”
“Tell me,” he said, and I barely heard him with how low and deep his voice was. “What do you think would have happened if the baron had violated you?” he asked, and through the ropes, his hand smoothed down over my ass. “What would have happened to us?”
“I don’t—” I couldn’t see him, though I tried, straining even for a glimpse of him, needing to see his face. “Untie me!” I demanded sharply.
“You will answer,” he insisted, hands testing the ropes before tracing over my skin.
I turned my head to the left and saw a wall covered in inlaid tile, then to my right, a red velvet chaise edged in gold brocade. A different room, a different place. “Raph…lemme go.”
“Answer,” he demanded again, and his voice was hoarse, gravelly. “And be honest, or I’ll know.”
I took a shallow breath because the ropes were too tight for me to take a deep one. “I thought I was better off dead than…”
“Defiled,” he offered.
“Yes,” I croaked out, voice cracking, trying to squirm and finding all my movement, as I logically knew it would be, utterly restricted.
He made a noise, and there was the aroma of warm honey-scented oil, a smell that, because it was his favorite, was inexorably linked to Raphael in my mind.
“Raph, I’m—oh,” I choked, breath catching as he slowly, with great care, slid two slippery fingers inside me.
“There is nothing that could ever, ever befall you that would change my love or desire for you,” he said solemnly, reverently, as he withdrew his fingers, only to press them into my body again, slathered with more oil, making circles with his fingers, massaging my channel with one hand and using the other to trace over my cock, now slowly thickening and pressing to my abdomen.
“Raph, please, you’ve gotta—”
“Did you hear me, Jackson? Did you hear what I said?” he asked as he shoved three slick fingers into my ass.
“Yes,” I ground out, lost in the sensations he was pulling out of me.
“You can’t be kept from me,” he intoned as he slid his hand free, climbing onto the bed behind me and kissing slowly, seductively, down my spine. “But even if you could, even if I found you, as you are now, but also taken and used, with the seed of others spilled on you, in you, I would do all that I could to heal your mind, body, and soul, but you would know, always, that you have my heart, and yours is my greatest treasure.”
There were no words.
“You’re mine,” he growled as he took hold of my hips and pressed inside me, the slow push seamless, as slicked with oil as I was, and endless, until he was buried to the hilt.
I gasped with his entry, with how full I was, my relaxed muscles now clenching around him, trying to suck him in deeper, the pressure and the stretch a dull pain that quickly succumbed to a glorious aching need.
He was enormous, long and thick, and the oil allowed for movement, the slide of him rubbing over every nerve ending as he ground deeper, making me roar his name.
“Go ahead, shout louder so everyone knows,” he whispered, the bindings keeping me still as he pulled out slowly only to thrust back in, harder, faster, rutting into me, all his power there on display as he used me savagely.
It should have been frightening, and had been before it was him, but now, because I knew if I had insisted, if I had said no, if I had told him unequivocally to release me, that he would…it had become something else altogether.
I was helpless, all the control was his, and because it never was, because we were always equal, had been from the start, I had never put myself wholly in his hands. I had never let down my guard completely with anyone. From the time I was sixteen, when I became a warder, groomed to fight and protect, to stand between the innocent and the abyss, I had been watchful, ready, never allowing a moment of complete vulnerability.
But now, suddenly, there was no choice. And he’d saved me, made me safe. I was his dominion, his prize, his love, his life, everything. I belonged to him, and in that moment, I let go.
“Jackson,” he whispered, and there was a pull on the ropes at my wrists and then release, the tightness gone for seconds before his lips grazed the slope where my neck met my shoulder, and then his fangs. The bite was deep, and I was lost, plunged into nothing but a distant hum as my vision washed white.