CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 50

AUREN

The residue of my relishslowly fades away, so it takes me a second to process what he’s said. There’s an impish glint flashing in Slade’s eye that makes my stomach tumble.

Hands dropping from the loop, I shift on his lap. “What?”

“We’re having a very serious conversation, and we’re not quite done yet.”

“Really? Because I’m sure I just finished,” I say with a smirk.

A grin stretches across his handsome face, his dark lines swaying against the skin of his neck.

“And besides, maybe I want to go and try to kiss one of those strangers we were talking about,” I tease.

Shocking the hell out of me, he reaches over and flicks back a corner of the curtain. “Pick one.”

I instantly slam my body against his chest, eyes wide as I look out the corner of the revealed window, at the people we pass on the street. “Slade,” I hiss.

“Don’t worry, they can’t see you. Not unless you want them to.”

There must be something wicked about me, because my blood heats.

His hand tucks the bottom corner of the curtain into the notch in the window frame, keeping it folded back that sliver of an inch. “I’m going to fuck you in this carriage, Goldfinch.”

A full-body shiver takes over, my hands pinned to the slope of his shoulders. “There are people outside,” I say breathlessly, even now, turning to look through the curtain. “I shouldn’t have even let you do what you already did. What if someone sees? Hears?”

“Yes, what if?”

I didn’t think he could be any more scandalous than he already was, but Slade does nothing by halves. And when it comes to the heat between us? He always magnifies it, always catches me off guard with the way he can make my mind swim with lust and my body bend to hunger.

“We’re in the busiest part of the city. These streets are packed with people. Yet here you were, on my lap, writhing when I fingered your wet pussy.”

My hands tighten around the hard tones of his muscles. “Slade.”

He grinds up into me, his rigid length hitting my sensitive spot and making me jolt. Simply the thought of him sinking into me makes my pulse race. The thought of him doing that while just a thin carriage wall separates us from everyone else. Even now, I can hear an ensemble of unintelligible shouts and speech, of hooves and creaks, doors slamming open, dozens of feet shuffling against the paths.

It makes my heart gallop.

As if he can read my mind, one side of his mouth tips up. “You want to experience things, so let’s experience them. We’ll start with seeing if your pussy gets wetter with a hint of exhibitionism.”

He grinds up again, shakes an exhale from the recesses of my chest.

“And if you want to experience someone else? Then you say the word, and I’ll take you to the nearest brothel and you can take your pick.”

His fingers knot into my waist, sliding me back and forth over his cock. Again. And again. And again. It doesn’t matter that I just had an orgasm, because with the way he plucks at my body and strums me into a cadence of lust, I’m once again growing hot, growing wet.

My entire face feels like I’m hovering over a steaming bowl, leaving me with a flushed sheen. “How can you just say things like that?” I ask, my voice jagged with the pulls of my hips.

“There’s no shame between us. Especially not sexually.”

To prove his point, he somehow spins me around until the curve of my ass is caught deep against his groin. He clips his thighs beneath mine and spreads them wide, spreading me wide. The waist of my undone pants gapes, too big and too loose to do anything but sag around my hips like the envelope of an invitation already ripped open.

“Fae are carnal. Sensual.” His hands come down, easily slipping right back where they’d left. All four fingers glide up and down over my mound, pressing down hard, a firm drag of slow burn friction. “Your desires are not to be staunched or controlled. I am not intimidated by your curiosities, because they’re natural—and because you have been restrained for far too long. I’m never going to clip your wings, Goldfinch.”

His dark words wrap around me, and I tip back against his chest, let my spine move with his breath. Though my eyes still dart to that wedge of window, at the bodies moving just outside. Everyone out there makes everything he’s doing in here that much more tantalizing.

Slade uses a hand to turn my cheek, to lock our gazes together. “When I say you’re mine, it’s not cheap ownership. I don’t see you as a figure to lock to my arm like a toy to keep away from all others.”

That was the only mine I knew.

“So what are you saying exactly?” I ask with a faltered breath.

“I mean you’re mine to please. To pleasure.” The motive in his eyes matches with the drag of his hand, the curl of his palm as he presses against my throbbing clit and makes me see sparks of light behind my eyes. “You’re mine to protect. To adore. To hear. To see. To experience. To love.”

A pitted lump burns in my throat.

“You’re mine, Auren. As wholly as I am yours. If there’s something you crave, if there’s some freedom you want to try the taste of, then you will do it, and I will be right there with you. Watching you devour your wants. And then I will devour you.”

I turn to face him more, to take in the sharp lines of his jaw, the sincerity in his eye. “You’d really go anywhere with me, do anything? Even stand back if I wanted to kiss someone other than you?”

“Make no mistake. I will watch you with hunger and feast on the scene of your thrill. But after you’ve had your fill, I’ll be there, driving my cock into your sweet cunt, purging all others from your skin as I take you. Over and over again. Until you remember that I’m the one you crave the most. The one who will always give you what you need. Until you remember that you’re mine all over again.”

Great Divine.

“So what will it be, Goldfinch?” he purrs into my ear. “What will it be?”

Innocent words. Wicked meaning.

My chest slings with gasps, my body a million prickles all over. My thoughts spinning.

What will it be?

I slowly lift up from his lap, turn. And with the shaft of light feeding in from that peeking window, I kneel. Right there on the cramped floorboards between the stretch of his open thighs.

And I look at him, eye to eye, truth to truth, and say, “I choose you.”

His eyes flare. Hands tighten into fists at his sides as if it’s the only way to keep from snatching me up. Because he knows what I’m saying. And from the intensity surging through his expression, he also knows that I mean it.

It’s always going to be him.

Poised between his legs, I undo the ties at his pants, slipping the cords out of their loops. I look up at him, and with his gaze searing into me, I tug. His hips lift just enough for me to draw them down, just enough for me to see an inch of dark hair.

When I peek up at him, he nods. “Go on, Goldfinch. Slip your fingers down to my cock and claim what’s yours.”

A rush goes through me as I reach up and tug at the front of his pants. I delve beneath the gap and grip his length, pulling it free.

He groans. Kicks his hips up slightly in the sexiest position shift I’ve ever seen.

Still watching him, I fist his cock and squeeze, pumping him slowly. Once. Twice. Three times.

“The fact that you’re not threatened by any of those things I told you, the fact that you’d support any of my decisions and wants...I have to admit, it’s a huge turn-on,” I tell him.

“Yeah?” Slade asks, as he reaches down and grips my chin. “Show me.”

A new current charges through me in a rush, igniting me all the way to my core. When he’s like this, when he shows me this dominant lust, it spreads through me like a wildfire, and all I want to do is burn.

And I want him to burn with me.

I lower my head, flick my tongue out at the beaded drop collected just at his tip. My tastebuds curl around the taste of his musk, my tongue a tease as I swirl around the head. Lapping at it. Wetting it. Provoking it until it jumps in my hand.

“Mmm, you want to play?”

In answer, and maybe just to catch him off guard, I suddenly part my lips and suck in the head of his cock. An inhale grits through clenched teeth as I dip my head, trying to go lower, trying to take him as deep as I can go.

But he’s thick. Long. And so incredibly hard. My jaw acclimates, loosening as I move up and down over him, trying to go a little bit deeper every time.

“What a perfectly indecent mouth you have,” he says, just as his hands come down to thread through my hair, delving into my braid, fingers jabbing through.

“Let me see,” he tells me. “Mouth open. Tongue out.”

I ease off him, lips parting to fulfill his request. My tongue lies flat, stuck out as far as it can go. His hand comes down over mine at the base of his cock.

“Yes. Look at that,” he says as he taps his crown against my outstretched tongue. “Naughty tongue. Profanely plush lips. And you here, willing to kneel between my legs with your eyes on my dick. Such a perfectly wicked girl you are.”

These thrills at his words are collecting in my stomach, a bounty of lust for me to consume.

He releases his hold, letting my hand grip him on my own again. “I want you to tap my thigh if it’s too much, okay?”

“It won’t be too much,” I quickly say.

He smirks. “Don’t tempt me. It’s best not to push your limits while we’re in a moving carriage.”

I swallow hard as I wonder what exactly these limits are that he’s referring to.

Before I can ask him, his fingers thread deeper into my hair and he leads my head down. I go easily, lips parting around him as I take him in again. But this time, his hand is at my head, guiding me.

He goes slow at first.

Lets me get used to his thickness, content to let me lick and swirl around the underside of him as I bob up and down, while my hand still clenches his base.

But when I come up, pausing too long at the crown, he pushes me back down. “Deeper this time, Auren.”

I relax my jaw. Take him down. And he pushes me further and further until I begin to gag. He keeps me there for a moment, and maybe it’s a test, but I don’t tap his thigh. I want to do this for him. I may be the one kneeling, but there is power here on my knees, with him in my mouth, with him beneath my grip. Such power here.

He pulls my head back, lets me gulp in some air before feeding his cock right back into my mouth. “Relax your throat, baby,” he murmurs huskily. “Let me feel you swallow me.”

I push past my body’s inclination to gag or to gasp, throat working to try and gulp like someone dying of thirst.

And then the carriage lurches, jostling me up, bringing me back down hard and fast and rough, his cock hitting the back of my throat.

“Fuck,” he hisses. His free hand comes to my throat, thumb pressing gently, reverently. “I can feel me inside you, right fucking here.”

I swallow again, tears rimming my lids and slipping down my cheeks, my cut-off breath straining my chest.

When he guides me back up, and I gasp in my inhales, breathing leveling out, I don’t wait for him to guide me slowly this time. Instead, I go down on him with a fervor, sucking and bobbing so fast that it tears a vicious growl from his throat, and his fingers tighten against my scalp with a sting.

And that’s when I strike.

With the fist curled around his base, I let my gold drip.

It comes out in solvent heat, hedonic liquid metal that I have wrapped around his length, sliding around him, glazing him in slippery luster that makes Slade lurch on the bench. “Fuck...”

The gold seeps out and coats him like oil, until he practically rips me up from the floor. I lean over him, taking in the wild, fierce look on his face, his eyes merging from green to black. “That was a very wicked way to use your gold-touch,” he says as he tears down my pants until they hang around my ankles. He reaches up and grabs my hand still wet with gold, and he presses it firmly on my mound, making me gasp.

With my gathered wetness already there, the pooling liquid in my palm makes me so slippery, so slick that I nearly fall back into the bench.

“That’s it,” he croons. “Now sink down on my cock. I want you facing out. I want your eyes on the window. I want you to see all those people right outside while I fuck you. Claim you.”

A whimper comes from my lips as I turn around. He grips my shaky frame and leads me down. Achingly slow. The crown of his cock breaches me, stretches me, and he gives it to me inch by inch. Sinking me down, lower and lower, so slow that I can feel every bit of him.

He moves my knees apart, spreading me wide, and then right before I reach the hilt, he slams me down that last inch, making my lips fall open with a noise of surprise that bounces off the confined walls.

“Goddess...”

His mouth comes up against my neck, pressing, breathing, licking. One hand comes up to grip my breast, to delve beneath the fabric and twist my nipple, to knead my heated, heavy flesh.

“Fuck me, Auren. Bounce on my cock.”

I brace my hands on his knees as I lift myself up and down, shakily at first, movements slightly awkward. But then he uses his hands to hold my waist steady, to help guide me up and down, and I get a rhythm. Tilt my hips so that he hits that spot inside of me.

The first moan slips out.

My eyes dart to the window. To that sliver of light poking through, to the bodies moving. Heads, feet, shops, windows.

They could see something. Hear something. Could see me fucking their king, could hear him groaning my name as I claim him behind these paper-thin walls. All the rumors, all the accusations of me seducing him for his magic, right now, it seems almost laughable.

Because he has so thoroughly seduced me.

“Are you looking, baby?” he murmurs. “Are you looking at all those people just outside while you fuck me? While we do this very filthy thing right here where everyone could see?” He jams up into me from beneath, and I swear, it’s like a lightning bolt of pleasure striking.

I moan. Too loud. “Slade...”

“Shh, Goldfinch,” he says, a hand coming up to cover my mouth. I arch my back, biting his finger between my strained jaw.

I need. I need so intensely that my body is climbing up, my eyes watching. My legs moving faster up and down him, slamming harder, chasing the peak that keeps rising and rising.

“Don’t make a noise,” he purrs, though it sounds like a challenge. Like he wants me to scream.

And he must, because his other hand comes down to my achy clit and starts thrumming over it to match the pace of our fucking.

We’re loud.

Too loud.

His head knocks against the wall behind him. My moans start coming in earnest. The skin of my ass slapping against his thighs, and I don’t care.

I don’t care if they see—if they hear.

In fact, I like it. The thrill. The what-if. The vulgarity of this wild fucking. Like it’s a wicked secret bound to come out.

“I can feel your pussy quivering,” he whispers. “You want to come, baby?”

My answer is mumbled against his clamped palm. “Yes...”

It’s an answer.

It’s a plea.

“I want your slick to coat my cock. I want your pussy to clamp down around me so hard that it demands me to come with you. I want to burst inside of you until my cum and your gold comes dripping from this hot”—thrust—“tight”—thrust—“cunt.” Thrust.

I explode.

With his hips thrust up so deep inside of me I can feel him in my stomach, I burst into flames and bliss. My orgasm is tremulous and quaking, a full-body shiver that makes me scream against his hand.

I feel his choppy thrust up into me, and then I hear the most erotic groan as he spills inside of me, delivering on his wet promise.

Perfection.

Pure perfection in his wicked seduction.

When my orgasm fades, I slump against his chest, and he holds me there in his lap, the bounce of our rushed breaths pairing together.

And I realize right then, that those men back at the market? They weren’t wrong.

I did jump from one king to another—from one male to another.

But the difference?

This time, I actually chose right.