And fuck, I suddenly no longer wanted chocolate.
My balls ached, and my cock twitched, demanding some sort of friction. Without thinking, I dropped my eyes to it, fisting my hands so they wouldn’t get any ideas of touching it.
The usual faint marks from my past had been replaced with bright wounds from our fight. Indents of her nails and bruises forming at the bottom of my shaft blazed in the gloom.
It ought to have summoned my temper. To have me cursing her very presence.
Instead, it granted a strange kind of kinship. She might not wear anyone’s ring. She might be tied in my rope. But in some sick way, I now belonged to her. She’d been the first in a decade to brand me. And, for the first time, seeing her punishment still embedded in my flesh filled me with lust instead of horror.
“I’m sorry...by the way.”
Her soft voice wrenched my head up. Her hazel stare on my cock only made my belly clench harder.
“Does it hurt?” she asked, unwrapping her chosen meal and taking a huge bite.
Christ, yes, it hurts.
Hurts for you, goddammit.
“No,” I snapped.
“To be fair, I wouldn’t have had to hurt you if you didn’t have such a fascination with wrapping your fingers around my throat.”
“If you stopped being such a menace, perhaps I’d stop trying to kill you.”
“I’m the menace?” She pointed at herself with the half-eaten Snickers. “I think if others were watching this twisted relationship of ours, they would disagree.”
“If others were watching, I’d tear out their eyes for seeing you bare.” I dragged my gaze down her mud-filthy beauty. “I’m debating between torturing myself watching you eat that chocolate bar or demanding you get on your knees.”
She inhaled sharply. Her hands shook, wrapped around her chocolate.
The small space of the car switched from awareness into lust-laced senselessness. The air was tiny fireworks, the oxygen we breathed electricity, and the carbon dioxide we exhaled a drug slowly drowning us.
Ever so slowly, she took another bite.
Her tongue licked her lips, her teeth bit down, her throat worked as she chewed.
And I almost came.
I throbbed, wanting inside her mouth, wanting to be the chocolate bar as she swallowed and devoured.
Turned out, giving a woman to a sexually repressed, starving man was not a good idea.
Snatching the half-full water bottle I’d drank from, I leaped from the vehicle and into the rain.
“What are you—?” Her confused question halted as I tipped the bottle over my cock and gritted my teeth against the grotesque sensation of touching myself.
I performed a perfunctory cleaning. That was all. Wrapping my hand around my hardness, washing away the dirt and mud from rolling around in the storm.
A crest of sickness tried to push up through my guts, shoving aside cocoa and sugar, replacing good with bad, tainting everything with sordid reminders.
I tore my hand away, tipping the rest of the bottle over my length, letting droplets trail to my balls.
The second I was clean, I tossed the bottle to the side, crawled into the tailgate, and didn’t stop until I kneeled before her. Kneeled with trembling muscles and rapid heartbeats. Kneeled with desperation and a shitload of pain.
I kneeled before her.
Now, it’s her turn.
My voice had gotten lost in the darkness inside me, echoing through my chest as I growled, “Kneel.”
She froze. Her chocolate bar fell from her bound hands. “No.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not going to sleep with you.”
I merely shook my head. “You’re wrong. I’m already inside you.”
She gasped.
For the longest second, we stared at each other. I physically felt as if her eyes were chains, slinking around me, holding me immobile as locks snapped into place. Padlocks with no keys, chains with no weaknesses, a cage of knots and fastenings that would never be undone.
I couldn’t catch a breath as heat filled my heart.
A heat filled with knowing that she was right about our connection. That it burned bright, despite our war. That it was more powerful than the both of us.
The longer we stayed together, the harder it would be to undo. Even now, pieces of me were being erased—for good this time, not just behind a wall I hastily erected. It erased fragments of the cruelty inside me, the distrust, the violence, the heavily conditioned boy who knew death better than he knew living.
For a single heartbeat, everything felt right.
Easy.
Peaceful.
God...peace.
She gave me peace after a lifetime of distress.
She gave me the silence I sought every second that I was awake. I didn’t need to run around the valley. I didn’t need to absorb myself in a book. I didn’t need to hide from the mania inside my mind.
All I had to do was look at her.
Be with her.
Sink inside her.
A sudden pain struck me in the temples, making me wince. My vision blacked out for a second, the weird vertigo I’d suffered from her striking me with the shovel returning.