To heal a Rogue

BONNIE

His voice dropped into a register I had never heard from any human. He did not sound like a person at all.

His lips touched the nape of my neck.

The contact lasted half a second.

Then he went still.

I felt him feel it. The precise moment he registered that something was wrong with the picture he was holding. He pulled back slightly, his nose still at my hairline, and then his hand came up, fingers closing around my hair, and he pulled.

The wig came away.

The cap beneath slid free, pins scattering, and there it was: all that platinum white hair, tumbling past my shoulders in the dim light, as damning and unmistakable as ever.

His breath stopped.

Mine had already been gone for a while.

Because... he was... he was... my mate.

He stared at my hair the way people stared at accidents. That brief, terrible suspension of time before the brain caught up to what the eyes were reporting. His hand was still raised, fingers loose, the wig dangling from them for one second before it dropped.

Then his eyes changed.

The last of the man I had watched in that library bled out of them completely. What replaced it was older and less negotiable. His pupils swallowed the iris whole, leaving something purely animal-looking back at me through his face.

He moved.

I had been quick to get away from him the first time. I was not quick enough now.

He was already there, both hands braced on either side of my head, his face dropping to my neck, and the scent of him — that obscene butter-and-sugar warmth that had been tormenting me for hours — poured over me as something poured from a height.

My knees went soft.

I told myself: do not.

My body said: it is already done.

I leaned into his mouth.

I felt him feel that. The way he stilled for a fraction of a second and then made a low sound against my throat that wasn’t language. My hands had found the front of his shirt without my permission, and I was pulling at it, fingers working buttons I couldn’t see because my eyes were shut. He kissed up my jaw and then found my mouth, and the kiss was not gentle. It was all-consuming. The kind that rearranged things. My lips were already swollen by the time he pulled back to breathe, the pressure of it still humming through my face.

I worked on his shirt with more urgency, and he let me for exactly three seconds before his hands went to the back of my uniform. I felt the intent before the action. Some last, stubborn circuit of self-preservation fired.

”Stop,” I said. The word came out wrecked, but it came out. ”I’ll do it.”

He stopped. His hands fell away. His chest heaved, and his eyes were still that obliterated gold-black, but he stopped, and I filed that away somewhere — the fact that even like this, something in him could hear no.

I got myself out of the uniform. Fast and without ceremony, because I knew if I let it become a production, I would lose the nerve to think at all. The jacket. The shirt. The trousers. I stood in my binders and boxer briefs and did not look at his face.

He looked at mine, though.

Then he put both hands on my shoulders and walked me backward to the bed, and I sat when my legs hit the mattress, and he was already over me, his weight settling on either side of my hips. He kissed my neck again, slower this time, his mouth dragging downward across my collarbone. His shirt was gone, tossed somewhere in my peripheral vision, and the heat off his bare skin was extraordinary. Like pressing your hand to a radiator, except the radiator wanted something from you.

His mouth moved lower.

His fingers found the hem of the binder, and he worked it up my torso, and I lifted my arms without deciding to. He tore the last of it when it caught, a brief resistance, and then nothing, and then his mouth closed over one breast, and I made a sound I had never made in my life.

My spine left the mattress.

The pleasure was a live current. I felt it in my fingers, in my thighs, in the backs of my knees. My hands grabbed the sheets, and I stared at the ceiling and tried to remember what I had been so committed to avoiding, and I couldn’t. The thought dissolved the moment his tongue moved.

His fingers found my other breast, and my body arched without my permission. My hips lifted off the bed entirely, and I couldn’t bring them back down. He rolled the nipple between his fingers with a precision that felt entirely deliberate for a man whose eyes had evacuated, and I made another sound, louder than the first.

He lifted his head and looked at me.

”You like that,” he said. His voice was rough, barely recognizable, worn down to its lowest and most animal register. It wasn’t really a question.

”Yes,” I said. The word fell out of me before I could choose it.

He held my gaze for one long second. Then he went back down.

He kissed across my sternum, down the center of my stomach. His hands moved to my briefs, fingers hooking into the waistband, and the fabric gave easily under the steady pull of his hands. Gone. I didn’t protest. I was past protesting.

He pressed a kiss to the inside of my thigh, and I clenched.

Then his mouth found the outside of my folds, and the sound I made got trapped in my hand, which flew up over my mouth before I had consciously directed it there. He worked slowly, deliberately, tracing the edges of me before his tongue slipped inside and the world went briefly white.

My thighs closed around his head like they had an agenda separate from the rest of me. My free hand went straight to his hair and held him down, because whatever rational part of me still existed knew that if he stopped now, I was going to do something I couldn’t take back. Like beg. Out loud. With words.

His tongue moved in long, sweeping strokes and then short, focused ones. He found the rhythm that made my hips roll upward, and then he stayed there, relentless, until my whole body was shaking. The sounds coming out of me were muffled by my hand but not eliminated. I could hear myself, and I couldn’t stop. The pleasure built in tightening circles, winding and winding, and then broke entirely.

I squirted, shuddering, my legs locking around him, my hand pressing down on his hair hard enough that he could have pulled away and chose not to. He took everything. Lapped it up with the same unhurried thoroughness he had applied to the rest of me.

He came back up.

He kissed me, and I tasted myself on his tongue, and my face went hot, and I kissed him back anyway, both hands finding his jaw, keeping him there. In the middle of it, some desperate region of my brain chose its moment.

”I need your cock,” I said against his mouth.

He pulled back just enough to look at me. Some expression crossed his face, too fast to name, and then his hands went to his belt.

I watched him work through the buckle and the button and drag the zip down, and I wanted to help and couldn’t make myself move fast enough. He pushed the trousers down, stepped out of them, and stood at the edge of the bed in white briefs that were doing nothing to conceal what was underneath. The fabric pulled and stretched, and the outline of him was unmistakable.

My hands reached out, and I pulled the waistband down.

”Very naughty,” he said.

His voice was still wrecked, but the words landed with a weight that made heat creep up my throat. I wrapped my hand around him, and he exhaled through his teeth. The tip was already slick, and I ran my thumb over it, feeling his whole body respond, the muscles of his stomach clenching visibly. He let me for a moment. Then he leaned back down and kissed me, deep and thorough, and I kept my hand on him through it, learning the shape of him, the way he responded to pressure, and he kissed me until I forgot what I had been doing with my hands.

I broke the kiss with my mouth against his ear.

”Inside me,” I said. ”Please. Now.”

He moved.

He took my right leg and lifted it, settling it over his shoulder in one smooth motion, and I felt the stretch of the position before I felt him. Then he pressed in, and the air went out of me entirely. He filled me in increments, slow and inexorable, until he had all the way in and I was so full I couldn’t remember what empty felt like.

He paused. One breath. Two.

Then he moved.

The rhythm he set was not gentle. It was not meant to be. His hips snapped forward, and the headboard hit the wall and then again and again, the bed frame creaking with each stroke, a rapid, urgent percussion that matched the pace of his breathing above me. I gripped the sheets in both fists and took it, and the sounds coming out of me were continuous now, stacked on top of each other, because there was no space between each wave to close my mouth.

He bent lower and kissed me anyway, one hand cupping my breast, thumb working circles, and the stimulation from three directions at once rewrote my ability to form thoughts. He broke the kiss and pressed his mouth to my jaw, my cheek.

”Mine,” he said. His hips didn’t slow. ”Only mine.”

I didn’t argue. I couldn’t. My whole body was building toward something so complete it felt structural.

”Mine,” he said again.

The orgasm started somewhere deep and gathered everything on its way out. I felt it in my spine, my thighs, my chest. My legs were shaking, and I was saying his name, which I had not made a decision to do, but there it was. His lips dropped to my throat, to the nape of my neck, and his breath was burning against my skin.

”Lysander...”

Then his teeth broke through.

The fangs sank in, and the pain and the pleasure collapsed into each other so completely I couldn’t tell them apart. My orgasm hit like something falling. My whole body seized and released at once. He groaned against my neck, low and broken, and I felt him pulse inside me, felt the warmth of him as he followed me over.