Beautifully Cruel (Beautifully Cruel #1)(72)

His face changes. His expression turns from hard, laser-like focus to startled understanding. To recognition, as if he’s seeing me fully for maybe the first time.

Looking electrocuted, he whispers, “Exactly.”

We stare at each other, something huge and frightening blossoming between us. I can feel it in the air, this weird connection, an unspoken knowingness. A sameness. A shared experience that binds us in dark wrappings and has warped us in identical ways.

That experience is death.

However we might be different, in all the ways that matter, my wolf and I are alike.

He pulls me into his arms and kisses me like he’s starving.

From that day on, he doesn’t leave my side.





25





Tru





Untethered from a normal routine that gives it shape and meaning, time slows down. Or maybe it disappears altogether. Either way, without being bracketed by work and school, my days seamlessly slip into one another. The rising and setting sun becomes the only marker of passing time, and even that is so similar from day to day that it loses its meaning, too.

Liam and I exist in self-imposed isolation, cut off from the outside world.

Cut off but not missing a thing.

We eat together. We sleep together. We talk for hours at a time. We watch old movies and avoid the news, cocooned in our bubble. He doesn’t answer his phone, and I don’t answer mine. Nothing interrupts our total immersion in each other. It feels like we’ve moved to another planet.

It feels like the invention of a whole new way of living.

There are only two topics we avoid: the past and the future.

It makes sense, in light of the rules of our time capsule. The past and the future don’t exist for us. There’s only now, because that’s all there ever can be.

The only problem is that each morning when I wake up and see his sleepy, smiling face, my heart surrenders a little more.

I begged him to promise he wouldn’t let me fall in love with him, but who can promise such a thing? Love doesn’t listen to logic. Like time, love has its own physics, universal rules that we’re helpless to control.

Every once in a while, I lock myself in the bathroom and give myself a stern talking to in the mirror, but even my reflection knows it’s hopeless.

The heart wants what it wants, regardless.

And what I come to want more than anything is that Liam and I go on and on in our suspended time warp forever.

“Faster?”

His voice is a throaty murmur at my ear. His fingers are between my legs. I’m lying naked on my side in bed with him behind me, shuddering as he slowly fucks me, stroking my clit at the same time.

I whisper, “That’s perfect. Just like that. Ah—”

I jerk as he pinches my throbbing clit, then tugs on it. The long, hard length of his cock slides in and out of me, unbearably slow. Through the windows I see the orange ball of the sun crest the distant horizon.

This is by far the best way to wake up ever invented.

Liam kisses my neck, sucking so hard on my flesh I know it will bruise. One more to add to the love bite collection. He increases the rhythm of his hips, biting me at the same time with a growl of satisfaction.

Every part of him is big. His cock, his chest, his hand with its rough fingers. His presence and heat, the way he overwhelms my senses with his sheer masculinity. I’ve never slept with such a large man before, and I find the difference between our sizes gratifying in an unexpected, primal way.

He’s so much bigger than me, so much physically stronger, yet I feel more powerful with him than with anyone else.

Maybe it’s because I know this beautiful brute of a man turns to putty when I look at him a certain way. All I have to do is lower my head and bite my lip and he falls apart.

Without warning, he rolls me onto my belly. Rising to his knees and keeping himself inside me, he drags my hips up and back so I’m on my knees, too, my chest on the bed and my ass hiked in the air, my cheek turned to the rumpled sheets.

He grips my hips and thrusts a few times, grunting in pleasure. I close my eyes and moan.

“Love you like this, baby,” he says raggedly. “Look at you. This gorgeous ass.”

He grabs a handful of my butt cheek, fondling and pinching it, then gives it a sharp, stinging slap.

I jerk, gasping. My movement drives him even deeper inside me, so deep his balls slap against my soaked folds, making me moan again.

“You like that?”

“I love it.”

“My sweet, dirty girl,” he whispers, his voice reverent.

I rear back to meet his thrusts, loving the shockwaves it sends through my body. My nipples are hard and aching. I’m so wet I feel it slipping down the inside of my thighs.

Liam reaches around and starts to play with my clit again, thrumming it back and forth. My groan is garbled.

“Fuck. Fuck, Tru. It’s so good…”

He switches from English to Gaelic. Whatever he’s saying sounds so dirty it brings blood to my cheeks, so they throb like everything else.

Then he bends over me, planting one hand on the mattress and winding his other arm around my waist. His thrusts get deeper and faster. Breathing hard, he drives into me from behind as my breasts swing and I grab fistfuls of the sheets.

Just as I’m about to climax, he slows.