Wishing Well(55)

Nodding his head, he released my knee, stepping back just far enough for me to slide down off the table and stand on my feet. My legs could barely hold me up.

I didn’t have to ask what he wanted me to do, Vincent’s training came to mind, the rules he had set in place for me to follow every time I went to his suite. I could only hope they were the same for the beast that stared at me now.

Slowly, so as not to move too suddenly, I gripped the hem of my shirt to pull it over my head. As soon as my breasts were exposed to his eyes, his hands clenched into fists, a rigidness moving across his shoulders as his eyes locked on my chest. When his jaw ticked, my heart beat like a war drum beneath my ribs.

My hands were shaking as I unbuttoned my pants and slid them over my hips. The material bunched at my ankles over the floor, and as gently as I could manage I kicked it off my feet. I hadn’t worn underwear beneath my clothes because I thought it would be Vincent I’d entertain.

Maurice’s chest beat heavy, a feral sound emanating that shook me in places I didn’t know existed. He stepped toward me and I flinched, insecurity flooding his eyes as if the tiny reaction had been a slap across his face. It was that fear of rejection inside him that made me regret my terror of him.

“Remember not to hurt me, okay?”

Surprised he could hear the words for how quietly I’d spoken them, I tried to smile and reassure him. But before he could lay a hand on me, I reached out, noticed the way he winced before forcing himself to become still and let me palm his cheek. The stubble of his skin was rough against my hand, the vulnerability in him staggering. I could have been touching a hungry tiger and would have felt less scared.

“You’re beautiful,” I confessed. “Do you know that?”

“I’m not,” he said, the truth of his belief sinking deep inside my heart. “I’m -“

Shaking his head again, he snatched my wrist in his grip to yank my hand from his face, stepping forward to force me back onto the table, the surface cold against my skin, as he released my wrist to wrap his hand over my throat and forced me to lie down. I froze in place, refusing to move, to speak, to breathe, as he held me in place while lifting my legs to place my feet on the edge of the table. Shoving my legs apart, his chest beat with excited breath to stare down at my body so exposed.

I couldn’t stop my shaking. Couldn’t help but feel like he would kill me without meaning to do it. Vincent kept this man caged for a reason and I was discovering that reason now. Maurice didn’t behave like an ordinary man. He behaved like an animal - an animal that had lost his restraint.

Releasing my throat, he dropped to his knees, grabbed my waist and pulled me to the edge of the table. And before I could process what he was doing, he grabbed my ankles and forced my feet to his shoulders, holding my legs in place as his teeth nipped at the inside of my thigh, biting down one rough time before his mouth bore down at the apex, his tongue licking inside my body.

The pleasure was instantaneous, the force of it divine. It was as if fear had left me stumbling and over-sensitized and that his mouth would drive me too high. My fear of pain was now a fear of the climax that was building so fucking quickly that I knew it would fracture me once the force of it exploded in my core. I was right to fear that release, the crashing wave of it sweeping me beneath the violence of its storm, dragging me up so high that I floated for only a moment before crashing down again.

As if knowing what he’d done to me, Maurice shook off the last bit of control he had, stood to his feet, ripped his pants open, and with my legs still locked over his shoulders, he gripped his hands on my hips and drove his cock inside me.

The rhythm was brutal, the force without apology, the claiming of me accomplished as his teeth gnashed with each violent thrust, as I looked up into a face that refused to look back at me. Moans poured from my lips as loud as the slap of his hips against the back of my legs, but despite the build of my next release I could see that he felt bad for what he was doing.

Is it wrong that if I wasn’t gripping the edge of the table to hold myself in place, I would have reached up to touch his face again and tell him he wasn’t to blame?

Someone had broken this man, had fractured him while keeping him caged, and I knew that someone was upstairs right now enjoying what he had done to me. It hadn’t been love I’d felt for Vincent before, I could see that now because of the depths of my emerging hatred.

All those thoughts were blown apart when my body quaked with the rush of an orgasm, when I opened my mouth to release a scream as feral as the one from Maurice. We both found ourselves gripped in the cruel but loving hand of a release that was a terrifying as it was natural. And as I slipped back to an earthly plane, I opened my eyes to find Maurice watching me with sweat dripping down his strong chest.

He moved away from me quickly, buttoning his pants and not even bothering to help me up before leaving the room entirely.

A feeling of regret and shame had been left in his wake as a thought occurred, a whisper in my mind. However, as shocked and as breathless as I felt in that moment, I couldn’t put my finger on what my mind was trying to tell me.

The aftershocks wore off after a minute or two, my anger surging to the surface. Not at Maurice, not at a man who was obviously so tortured and broken, but at the arrogant bastard I knew would be waiting for me just as soon as I returned upstairs.

Climbing down from the table, I took a breath and got dressed, a million thoughts racing inside me, crashing against the wave of emotions I felt.