Overture (North Security, #1)(52)

He stirs in slow degrees, his hips moving experimentally, his cock nudging me in an intimate place. I wait for him to pull away. He’ll probably leave the bed now. I have no illusions about his reaction to this. I’m the one who started touching him, knowing it would lead to sex. I’m the one who made the overture. He’s the one who will retreat.

Except he doesn’t leave my body. Instead he thrusts back inside, as if we’re still having sex. As if he didn’t just flex and spurt warm liquid into my body.

“What are you doing?” I whisper.

“Losing,” he says.

“But didn’t we just—”

“One time isn’t enough,” he says, his tone dark with promise.

It sounds like a threat, except the large pulses of cum smooth the way for his cock. They give me a sense of warmth that wasn’t there before. Then he shifts his angle slightly, and his cock finds a place inside me that makes me arch and cry out.

“Wait,” I say, but he doesn’t wait. He does it again, finding the place with a carnal knowledge. How can he know my body better than I do? My secret muscles clench helplessly around him, and he answers with a flex of his cock.

He fucks me with a wealth of patience, pulling pleasure out of my body so long and hard that every muscle hurts, thrusting inside me long enough that I feel myself turn raw. I know what he wants from me, but it’s too much.

“I can’t,” I say in broken sobs, desperate enough to beg.

“You can,” he says, his voice a velvet murmur.

His thumb reaches down to press my clit, and I flinch in the few precious moments before the climax overtakes me, clamping down on every muscle, squeezing my lungs, tightening my sex around something too large to fit.

His groan sounds like pain. Like a small and welcome death.

He collapses on me for a second time, and I think to myself, We’ve done it. Finally. Except his cock stirs inside me, and I realize I did not understand the size of this mountain. I did not know the strength of this army.

“Again,” he demands, tender and inexorable.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX





Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring was so original and provoking that during its 1913 premier it caused protest and violence from the audience.


LIAM

“What the fuck is this?”

The words rip through the air, tearing me out of sleep.

Elijah stands in the doorway, surveying our naked bodies with a mixture of shock and fury. He looks ready to kill me. I pull on my jeans, so that at least I can die with some dignity.

“Let’s take this outside,” I say as Samantha stirs in the bed.

“No, you can explain what the fuck you were doing to Samantha Brooks, the child you’re responsible for, practically your daughter, right fucking here.”

I don’t flinch, but it’s a close thing. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh really. Did you put your dick in her?”

Josh appears behind him in the hallway, looking almost amused, the bastard. “Are we going to have the birds-and-the-bees talk?”

“You knew about this?” Elijah says, incredulous.

“I figured he was teaching her safe sex.”

Elijah lets out a growl. He’s always been the one with the most normal sense of morality, between the three of us. “I thought you were better than this,” he says softly.

“I’m not,” I say because he doesn’t need any fucking illusions.

Samantha pulls herself out of bed, fully awake now. “Hey, can you stop talking about me like I’m not part of this? I’m an adult now. I get to make these decisions for myself.”

She’s using the pink sheet to cover herself, but in the sunbreak it’s practically translucent. With a growl I push her behind me. Elijah lets out a snort. “Oh, now you’re worried about someone seeing her? After you fucked her?”

“Well, we can see why,” Josh says, his tone appreciative. “Look at her with that just-got-fucked hair and whisker burn on her shoulders. Someone’s all grown-up.”

Red colors my vision, and my control snaps. I launch myself at my brother, throwing a punch that sends him careening into the wall. It leaves me open for a split second—a second that Elijah uses to land a fist in my gut. I absorb the blow with a quiet oomph, stepping back from the force. Samantha grabs my arm, which is raised to hit back.

“No,” she cries, and the sound cuts through the haze of shame and fury.

“Christ,” I say, glaring at Josh. I want another go at him.

“Please,” she says, tear tracks glistening on her cheeks. “Don’t fight.”

“Why the fuck not?” Elijah says, muscles straining as Josh holds him back.

“Because I won’t be the reason you hurt each other,” Samantha says, her voice trembling. “If you want to punch each other, you’ll have to come up with another reason.”

She stands there with her chin held high, a sheet wrapped around her slender body. She weighs a hundred pounds of nothing, but she looks like she can stop a war. That’s what she’s doing, with nothing more than the force of her will.

If there was ever a piece of my heart held back, a part of me that wasn’t fully in love with her, it’s gone now. She’s a warrior. A goddess. I want to fall at her feet in supplication. Now I understand why knights would kneel before their queen and bow their heads. It’s the only position that makes sense for a man in the presence of such a woman.