Chapter 15: Chapter 15

The gun falls to the floor, and I sink to my knees, my hands scrambling to help him cover the hole in his chest, but my efforts are in vain. The minutes it takes for him to wheeze out his last breath are the longest in my entire life. His fingers suddenly clamp down on mine and then release, his arms falling to his side.

I grab his shoulders. “Vic!” Gracin comes to my side, and I glance up, desperate. “Call 9-1-1!”

When Gracin doesn’t move, I slap at him. “Go call 9-1-1!”

He only stares at me with a carefully unreadable expression, and it makes me want to hurt him.

“Why are you just staring at me? He’s dying!”

With a reserve that infuriates me, Gracin says, “There’s nothing you can do. He’s dead.”

I push off from the floor, unable to endure looking at Vic’s blank gaze but not knowing what to do with myself. The air in the room is thick with the copper scent of his blood, and I try to get more breath, but it feels like I’m drawing it in through a thick blanket. I crash blindly around the room, knocking into furniture and smashing into walls until hands pull at me and wrap me tight.

“Hey,” a soothing voice says. “Hey, no, it’s okay. Baby, calm down. You gotta calm down for me. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

It’s a litany of comfort urging me to follow it back to reality. The pieces start to come together slowly but then all at once. Like waking from a terrible nightmare.

“There you go. You got it. Come back to me.”

I open my tightly clenched eyes and find Gracin staring right back at me. Relief—or something close to it—flashes through his green eyes before it’s replaced by another expression I know all too well.

I shove away from his embrace, but I should know better. He’s got his claws in me. I don’t think he’s ever gonna let me go.

“Take your hands off me,” I growl and have to look around because I’ve never heard my own voice sound so wild and desperate.

“Oh, I don’t think so.” He takes my jaw in his hand and forces me to look at him. “You’re done running.”

“Fuck you,” I yell in his face, spit flying, but I don’t even care. I’m so past caring I feel pleasantly numb. “Fuck you. You ruined my life.”

He shoves closer until we’re chest to chest. He’s so close that I can only see his eyes as they bear down on me. “Ruined your life? No, far as I can see, I gave you exactly what you wanted.”

“I didn’t want this.”

I didn’t realize I was shaking my head until he takes my face in his hands to hold me still.

“I know what you want,” he says and then attacks.

His mouth is on mine before I have a chance to bar it against him. My emotions are untamable, unfathomable, and he tempts them into a fever with a black hole of pleasurable nothingness that I’m desperate to let consume me.

And I so want to be consumed.

I want to drown in the taste of him until it blots out the world with a tidal wave of need. He is cataclysmic, and I ache to beg for my own destruction.

“Not here,” he says, and I’m jerked back to reality.

A chill courses over me, and I realize we’re still in the same room with Vic’s dead body. His blood is pooling on the glossy wood I’d scrubbed a thousand times. It’s on my hands and on my scrubs, which I hadn’t had time to change out of after work.

He doesn’t give me a chance to think about it, though. He just tugs me around the corner to the hall and pulls me close to him. I go with him because I want to get away from the carnage in the other room. I don’t know if I want to laugh or cry or scream. Gracin seems unfazed—his only focus is me.

“I’ve been thinking about this since you came all over me. I could smell you for days after. Been driving me crazy,” he says in my ear. I can feel him, thick and long, pressing urgently against my stomach as he rips off my shirt with barely contained violence. His eyes go to my bruises and darken. When his hands splay over them, they’re gentle. “I’m glad the bastard’s dead for what he did to you.”

“No,” I tell him, pushing at his hands. “We can’t. Not here. Not like this.”

He presses me down to the floor, and I’m so out of it, I’m unable to protest other than to hiss out a breath as my back comes in contact with the cool wood.

“Yes,” he says against my lips. “Just like this. I want you to remember what it feels like when I’m not there by your side. I want you to remember how strong you were when you stood up to him. How you won’t ever let anyone treat you like shit again, not even me.”

“Then let me go. You wanted to escape, so what are you still doing here?”

He doesn’t answer. His mouth is too busy at my throat, his lips and teeth and tongue working their way up to my ear. A breath whispers around the sensitive skin, and despite myself, my hips surge up against him. The fact that what we’re doing is so horrible, so terribly wrong and immoral only makes my blood heat faster, my body wanting more.

Is this the result of years of abuse—this dark, dirty yearning—or is it just him?

He doesn’t give me a second to find my equilibrium. There are no officers here, no cuffs or bars. There is nothing stopping him for taking exactly what he wants. And he wants me.

His fingers twine in my hair and tug my head back for a better angle. “I’m going to taste you everywhere,” he says darkly, and God help me, I want him to.

My hands go to his shoulders. “We can’t do this here,” I repeat, but my hips buck when his other hand trails over my breasts and to the waistband of my scrubs. Suddenly, all my clothes feel incredibly insubstantial against his questing fingers. I arch, grinding my head into the wood, searching for some clarity.

The pain centers my focus, and I reach down to push his hand away. “Gracin, please.”

His hand slips underneath my waistband and delves into my panties. “Please, what?” he asks, his touch so gentle I can barely feel it mixed with all the other sensations I’m trying to process. “Please, don’t stop? Please, keep going. You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

He finds me wet and wanting, and we groan in unison. I want to die. I want to scream. I want him to never stop.

“Please. We shouldn’t do this here.”

My hands go to his wrists, but he’s too strong and his fingers are too talented. They have me seeing stars within seconds.

“Here. Right now,” he says.

My head whips back and forth against the wood, strands of my hair get caught and rip out, but I barely feel the pain. In fact, somewhere along my nerve endings, it transforms, merges, and becomes pleasure. I want to stop, I want to stop, but I can’t. My body doesn’t know what it should do. My brain doesn’t know what to think.

“Yes,” he whispers in the dark. “Let me.”

With the barest of pauses, he rips off my sensible tennis shoes and tears my scrubs and plain white panties down and off. Then he pushes my legs up and arranges them so I’m spread like a feast before him. The look on his face is savagely beautiful and there’s a flash of white teeth before he covers me with his mouth.

The hands that had been gripping his wrists transfer to his hair. “No,” I whimper. “Gracin, oh God, please.”

“Sounds like you can’t quite make up your mind, little mouse,” he says, and I can feel his lips moving against my clit as he speaks.

My thoughts fracture as his tongue wages a new assault. I rip at his hair and claw at his back, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. Any resistance is met with increased determination, and my body recognizes his touch as pleasurable, despite my brain’s confusion on the matter. Even the discomfort of the unforgiving wood floor at my back and the clammy stickiness of sweat doesn’t derail my building orgasm.

He spreads my thighs wider and wraps his hands around my legs to hold me open for his broad shoulders. I don’t know if I’m struggling for him to stop . . . or for him to keep going. The line between panic and pleasure is blurred with each flick and glide of his tongue. He sucks and nibbles, teases and tastes until I’m grinding against his face and moaning unabashedly.

I’ve never felt dirtier in my entire life. Not when Vic beat me. Not even when I cheated on him with Gracin.

But I’ve also never felt more alive, and I don’t know which scares me more.

The orgasm grows to overwhelming proportions. I struggle away from it, nearly sobbing, but Gracin merely releases one leg so he can maneuver his pants down enough to free his erection. Before I can move, he’s driving into me, and I scream as the orgasm rips through me with a violence as brutal as the man who inspired it.

He reaches his first orgasm quickly, but there’s nothing beautiful about it. It’s savage, merciless, and ugly. But seeing the riot of pleasure mixed with pain on his face has me begging for more. I hate myself for it. Still semi-hard inside me, he doesn’t stop pumping, even when I come back to reality and begin to struggle to get free from underneath him.

There’s a second when I manage to scrabble free from his weight while he’s still trembling. His cock disengages, and the loss of him inside me makes me whimper. I flip onto my stomach and use my hands to pull my weight along the floor. Moisture leaks from inside me and wets my thighs and the wood underneath.

I make it until my ass is level with his face and then one arm comes around my waist and pins me to the floor again.

“Where are you goin’?”

“You got what you wanted,” I say between panting breaths and aftershocks. Simply having him near is enough to cause my brain to short circuit. It’s saying leave, leave, leave, and in the same breath, fuck him, fuck him, fuck him. Not even my hormones can make up their mind. “Now, let me go.”

“If you think that’s all I want from you, you’re gonna be in for a real shock in a few seconds.”

“What do you—” His hands sneak up and part the cheeks of my ass, and I’m so shocked I can’t speak. Can’t think. Can only feel.

Fingers bite into my skin, and then his breath warms places on my body even Vic had never ventured to violate. I squirm underneath him and slap my hands against wood to drag my body away from him, but to no avail. In the next instant, his mouth is on me, tasting me, torturing me. In all the years I’ve been with Vic, in all the things he’s done to me, there’d always been limit to what he’d do. With Gracin, there are no limits, no boundaries, no secrets.

“No. Don’t,” I whisper desperately.

“Yes,” he answers, and he kisses one cheek and then the other before placing a final kiss at the base of my spine. “I want all of you, Tessa, and I mean to have you.”

His name bursts from my lips as he pins my chest to the floor and one of his arms steals around my stomach so his hand can reach my clit. With a grunt, he jerks my hips up and peppers kisses down my seam, skating along the puckered opening as his fingers set about rewiring my brain.

I whimper as his tongue laves me from one hole to the other and then back again. There’s no word to describe it other than dirty. I’ve never been particularly shy about sex—what would be the point? But not only does he conquer the secret part of me with no hesitation to speak of but also he shows no aversion to licking every part of me still covered in his cum. Even as I writhe underneath him, desperate for release, I’m scrabbling against the floor to get away from the sweet violation he’s determined to commit.

“If I let you go, are you gonna run from me?” he asks.

He keeps his fingers strumming on my over-sensitized clit until my hips begin to buck back into his tongue. I press my forehead into the wood grain, hoping the pain will bring me to a sense of clarity, but it doesn’t. There is nothing sensible about what’s happening, nothing logical in the way I respond to him.

“No,” I say and hate us both.

“Good girl.”

He presses a kiss to my spine and releases the hold on my back. I have time enough to suck in a breath before I feel the tickle of hair from his thighs on the back of mine and sense the presence of his body looming over me. My clit aches with each heartbeat, and even as I consider running to the back door just a few feet away, my back arches to accept the first delicious thrust.

A fist twines in my hair, the other clamps down my hip. I’m present in the moment only through where our bodies connect as though my consciousness is dependent on his existence. Hands I’d been using to pull myself away now push into the floor to throw my weight back against him, causing him to fuck me deeper than anyone ever has.

The hand in my hair pulls my head back until I come up to all fours, and he gathers me close enough that his lips brush against my ear. “You think you don’t want this?” he asks, and I know he doesn’t mean what he’s doing to me, because I can’t deny that I do. Not when I’m screaming for him to do it harder, faster. “You shouldn’t.” His teeth bite into my shoulder. “You shouldn’t want me. I am not a nice man. I am not a good man. I do bad things for bad people.” He licks the bite, and his mouth skims up my throat. “I want to do bad things to you.”

Oh, God help me, I want him to do those bad things. In fact, I’d beg him to do them. But the hand in my hair tilts me violently back, so far that breathing is a struggle, making speaking impossible. As I’m focusing on drawing in air, I don’t pay attention to his other hand until it bumps against the tight entrance he’d so thoroughly aroused. I make keening noises in the back of my throat as his thumb breeches the taut ring just a little, but it’s enough to make my body seize in the first throes of release.

“Ease up around me.”

I think I say I can’t, but it comes out garbled as his thrusts slow, edging me away from the impending orgasm. I reach a hand back for his hip, but there’s no moving him. Frustrated tears spill from my eyes.

“Open up for me, Tessa, and I’ll give you what you need,” he says, and his words are followed by a long, slow thrust that I feel everywhere.

My muscles loosen, and I go limp in his arms. I am his to control, but he isn’t just taking it. He’s asking for it, and I submit to it freely.

“That’s it, sweetheart,” he says, and I cry out as his thumb breeches me fully.

His cock drives into me harder, and he releases my hair to cup my throat. I gasp for breath, and his fingers caress my lips. I bite them without thought, without care. Needing to taste him, to have a part of him like he has all of me, I suck one into my mouth. He roars behind me, and I arch back to take him more fully. There isn’t a place on my body left undiscovered, no part he hasn’t conquered, and yet, I want to find more to give.

It isn’t his cock or his hands or even the violence that takes me over the edge this time. It’s a kiss. He pulls his hand away, and I release his finger from my mouth with an audible pop. With his palm cupping my jaw, he turns me to accept his mouth, and I do, greedily. There shouldn’t be anything right about what I’m letting him do to me, but there isn’t a single brush of lips or thrust that feels wrong. It’s more right than anything I’ve ever done.

As soon as I have that thought, I whimper against his mouth and the orgasm overtakes me, washing away all doubts, all fears, and all common sense. Something in him breaks as I constrict around him, and the tension in his muscles drains away. In one long, slow drag, he removes his thumb, causing my orgasm to double over on itself. He hisses in response and fills me with his own pleasure as he follows me over the edge.

Sometime later, I come to realize we’re still on the floor. My extremities don’t respond when I tell them to move, but it’s okay. The heavy weight of Gracin on top of me is an anchor securing me to earth. Reality intrudes, along with the cold as he shifts to the side, his arms and legs still entangled with mine.

“We have to get out of here,” he says eventually. My brain still isn’t quite working, but when he adds, “The police will get here soon, and we don’t want to be here when they do,” it jump-starts.

“We have to go,” he says and stands to pull his pants up and buckle them.

I look around for my scrubs and underwear, but I can’t see them in the near absolute darkness of the hallway. The darkness is probably a good thing. As the cold steals over my rapidly cooling frame, the memory of Vic’s dead body is enough to clear my thoughts of what just transpired between us. I tuck it away for . . . later. Way, way later when I can’t still feel the aching emptiness inside me.

Gracin returns with my scrubs in hand, and I dress, my cheeks alternately burning and blanching as I vacillate between embarrassed and horrified.

“Get dressed. I’ll go get a car.” He kisses me and leaves me with the taste of myself lingering on my lips.