Chapter 27

Chapter

Twenty-Seven

P ersephone

Say yes. His words, rough like gravel shoot splinters of need into every inch of my flesh. I am a thing of need, stripped of caution and hesitation. I am the pinnacle of hunger, but not for food. I hunger for flesh—his flesh. For the pleasures of flesh.

Sin. This is a sin.

Mom and Dad would be so disappointed.

Say yes. The echo of his words rattles inside me, warring against the teachings of my past. I still have my clothes on. I haven't really sinned. Not yet.

And still, I've never experienced a moment so driven by sensation. I've never felt so alive. As though every atom that crafts this body I possess has been fashioned to respond exclusively to this man. Hades.

God, I need him. I need his touch.

Say yes. I can do this. Heat flares inside my body. His touch is like liquid fire—magma against my flesh. The print of my hands streak against the obsidian slab of his desk as I push myself back into him. He's so hot, and yet I crave this heat. My body aches for his hot touch. For the sear of his possession.

He's so tall that when I push back into him, I feel the hardness of his arousal against my spine. My head falls into the crook of his broad chest, and when he dips his head, I feel the brush of his rough beard whispering over the skin of my temple.

Say yes. A whimper falls from my kiss swollen lips, and a sound of rough pleasure drips from the deep of him. I shudder against his body, my eyes sliding down to the hand that toys with my pink panties. A flutter of something quick and intense spreads in my chest at the sight. His hand is so big against me there. His skin so much darker, the burnished gold of his tan stark against the pale of my untouched skin. And his fingers—they aren't the slender fingers of a boy-man. They are thick, veined, and rough with callouses. I feel that roughness when his thumb slides up and down in the space between navel and the apex of my thighs.

Warmth floods me, spilling into my panties at the sight of his big hand against me, claiming so much of me .

I can do this. More, I want to do this. With him.

Say yes. Three months. I have three months with this man before I'll return home to Canada, and most likely never see him again. Three months to explore the woman I feel myself becoming with a man who has the life experience to know definitively who he is. Three months to feel everything that I want—need—to feel.

Three months…

"Say yes, Persephone." The command in his voice paired with my own inner need renders me helpless to do anything but comply.

"Yes." He looses a sound of pure male hunger, raw with need.

My knees buckle and I would have fallen to the floor if it weren't for the unending strength of his arms. One moment, I'm standing and the next his massive weight is pressing into my back, pressing me back to the desk. I ache to look at him, to watch his face as he does whatever it is he is going to do to me. But I can't see him like this. Still, there's something about the way his body covers mine against the desk, so big against my much smaller frame, that spills another burst of wet need into my panties.

He sucks in a breath as a deep rumble of pleasure sounds from him. I get a sharp moment of fear that he can smell my arousal, but I know such a thing is impossible and brush it off quickly. His hand pushes lower, beneath the band of my panties. I suck in air that sears my scorched lungs, pushing my hips back. I'm not sure if I'm trying to give him room to touch me or if I'm trying to escape him—afraid of this unknown that is to come.

Either way, I am unprepared for the hardness of his arousal that meets my butt when I do. I am even less prepared for the way he grinds his hips into mine, the pipe tenting his pants pressing into the crease of my butt still covered by my shorts.

A low growl sounds from behind me, from over me, and his other hand is suddenly shoving at my shorts. Quick fear lashes at my innocent heart as my shorts fall to the floor around my ankles. No man has ever seen me naked.

I can do this. I want to do this. I'm just afraid. This is normal.

"Hades," I gasp as he shoves his hips back into me. Fitting that hard pipe of arousal between my butt cheeks as he slides his hand deeper into the front of my panties to palm my sex.

He pulls in a breath through his teeth, releasing through his nose. It almost sounds like he's practicing a calming technique, and my sex clenches at the thought that I could be driving this experienced man to the edge of his control in such a way he is forced to search for calm.

Yes, I want this. I want to drive him to the edge of control. I want him crazed with desire. I want to push him .

I don't know who I am anymore. But these next three months are the perfect time to find myself, I decide.

I roll my hips back into him, delighted when he gifts me a deep groan of tortured need. I want more. I am ravenous.

"You're so wet for me, Persephone." His voice is dark, bursting with spilled shadows as he presses his lips into the skin of my shoulder. I feel teeth slide over me as he pushes a single finger between my slit, gliding easily in the wet between my legs. He groans. "So warm."

My breath hitches and I bite down on my lip to keep the sound of pleasure and new sensation from escaping as Hades finds my clit with the pad of his finger, rolling over and around it until I am confident I'm going to die from sensation overload.

"I—" I gasp. "Hades, I can't?—"

My hands slide over the surface of the desk, searching for something to hold onto—to cling to as he strokes my core with two fingers now. His fingertips tease my entrance, sliding back to my clit, circling and stroking down again. He does this for what feels like eternity, and entirely not long enough.

When I'm gasping and panting, sweat clinging like dew on my skin, bones trembling and weak with need, Hades hooks me with an arm around my torso, under the breasts that heave with heavy breaths. He holds me against him, hot breaths spilling over my shoulder and between my breasts as he watches his hand move in my panties.

He speaks something in a language I don't know, but somehow feels familiar. It's filled with hot, dark heat that ignites my boiling blood with deeper, more persistent need.

I don't think about reservations as I spread my legs wider for him. I need something more, something deeper, though I'm not entirely certain what that something deeper is.

"Look at you," he murmurs, his voice a spill of coarse gravel against soft skin. I shiver. "So beautiful and open for me." He teases my entrance with his fingertips as his palm presses into my clit. I whimper. He sucks at the skin between shoulder and neck. When he speaks, his voice vibrates deep into the core of me. "I can't wait to be inside you. To stretch you and fill you."

His words affect me physically and instantly. A deep throb pulses in my sex. I feel achingly, agonizingly empty.

I whimper, "Please."

I don't know what I'm begging for, but I know he can give it to me.

He hums his approval, as though my begging for him is exactly the thing he wanted before he presses the tips of two fingers into my entrance. I gasp, stilling against him as he pulls free before pushing in again. He's deeper this time, stretching and filling me. He pulls out, and pushes back in until I feel him filling all of me. He roots himself deep and stays there, his thumb shifting to swirl over my clit. It's sensation overload.

I can't breathe. Air is trapped in my lungs, snared somewhere behind the cage of my ribs. Dizziness swims in my head, muddling my thoughts. The pinch of discomfort I'd felt as he pushed knuckle deep inside me is ebbing slowly away. It's swept up in the waves of a deep need for something more with every swirl of his thumb over my clit, every second his fingers remain deep in my core.

Seconds from crying out for him to move—to do anything—from screaming—Hades begins to pump his fingers in and out of me. Stars with cores of ebony burst in my vision, floating over the lids I slam closed against a pleasure that builds into a pressure I'm confident will be my undoing.

The quake begins in the core of me, subtle at first. It doesn't stay that way for long, before the tremulous shake of it threatens to split me in two. My eyes snap open as I pitch my body forward, my hands slapping out to grip the edge of the desk as Hades fucks me with two thick fingers. I'm over sensitized, trying to escape the soul-tearing pleasure that threatens to consume me by closing my legs, stopping the pump of his fingers inside my body, the swirl of his expert thumb.

But his knee is there between my legs and his warning is low and dangerous. Deadly. "You will come apart for me if I have to force every drop of pleasure from you."

My eyes lock on the dry gold paint that coats my finger before my vision blurs. My head rolls back between my shoulders and I feel his big body curving around me, covering me, consuming me . His breath is hot and ragged. I can hear the wet sound of his fingers moving in and out of my body. I should be embarrassed, but I'm incapable of focusing on anything but the way he's making me feel. There is no room for shame in this moment. Maybe after, but not now.

"Hades," I cry his name, and he growls his approval. "Oh, God?—"

"Yes," he purrs darkly as something inside me crests. My fingers curl and I do my very best to escape this ripping pleasure that edges pain with the dangerous promise of a violent overtaking.

Hades seems to know what I'm doing. That I'm unable to take this—it's too much—because he commands, "Take it, Persephone. Feel it. Come for me."

It's as though his words tug on the strings that have bound a lifetime of pleasure deep within me. One moment, I'm whole and the next I simply erupt. I am untethered, rooted to this earth exclusively by the fingers he pumps inside me and the arm that bands my waist.

My ears ring as I moan. Or maybe I scream. I can't be sure. Everything but him—his hands on me, in me , feels far away.

My body is shaking and I feel impossibly weak, boneless. The quick, exquisitely violent invasion of his fingers in my body slows to something decadently gentle and sweet. He's capping his possession with a taste of wonder, ensuring a craving for him lingers in the cracks of this new me he'll leave behind when he puts my pieces back into place.

He lifts me from the desk with his chest pinned to my back. Slowly, gently, he pulls his fingers from my body, his hands from my panties.

Now that he's no longer inside me, I feel an overwhelming need to hide from him. When his arm loosens from around my waist, I drop to pull my shorts back into place. I'm about to tell him that was nice and make my escape when I see what has his attention. He's holding his fingers up, his eyes locked on the two that had been inside me. Horror is a whip lash inside me as my eyes focus on the ribbons of muted red that glisten on his wet fingers.

I bled.

Oh my God, he must be disgusted.

Black eyes lift to mine as soon as the thought enters my mind. I'm struck by the feeling that he heard my thought and I can't help but wonder if perhaps I spoke it out loud.

As though in answer, Hades lifts his fingers to his mouth and sucks them clean. I'm stuck in some place between horror and new arousal as I watch him taste— devour —my innocence. Knots twist in my belly and I feel my jaw quite literally drop.

This man, my boss, just tasted the innocence he took from me.

How is this my life? How did I go from the God fearing, Alberta farm girl who tended flowers in her mother's shop, never having had a boyfriend or even being kissed, to being finger-fucked by my billionaire boss in another country?

I'm going to hell and right now, I'm not certain I care.

He pulls his fingers, now clean, from his mouth. A spear of something intense and hot cuts through the knots in my belly. Breath shudders from my lungs and I swear, before he blinks, I see flames in his eyes.