CHAPTER EIGHT

ADDIE

––––––––

"You?"

I cum because there's no stopping the wave of fire already blazing through me. My body bows off the mattress, hips writhing as I impale myself on his rigid shaft with shameless abandon.

He's inside me. Rhys is filling my channel, stretching my walls. He's moving and thrusting in languid rocks that draw my orgasm out for what feels like forever while he watches me, his dark hair a wild mess, his eyes ravenous.

"Rhys?" my chin drops to where he's joined to me. Where he's coated in my release. "Oh God, Rhys, what are you doing?"

It's a stupid question.

I can see exactly what he's doing. What I should be telling him is to stop, to pull out.

To not cum in me.

But he already has. A lot. It's been coming out of me in gushes all day and I begged him for more. I begged him to make me his whore and use me.

I still want it. I want it with a maddening desperation that steals all my other senses.

"Rhys..."

"Yes, Addie?" he taunts, hips sliding back until I'm scared he'll come out only to sweep back in.

Every rigid inch.

The tethers hold me open wide for him, but it's the mirror over the bed, the square of glass where I get to watch his ass flex and pump between my sprawled thighs as I lie here bound and helpless. It's so painfully erotic, I can't look away. I can't stop tracing the corded muscles of his broad back ripple as he bucks over me. The strain in his arms bracing him as he wrecks my body.

"Rhys ... Rhys, you need to stop," I choke as another crash of release tightens my core, the pre-warning before it takes me under. "Rhys..."

God, I'm going to cum again.

"Say it," he bites through clenched teeth. The shadows twisting his features to one of barely suppressed hunger as he takes me with frustratingly even strokes. "Tell me to stop, Addie."

The tethers twisted in my hands cut my damp palms. The fabric squeaks, the headboard rattles with the strain of my body.

"Rhys, please ... please."

I don't know what I'm asking. I want him to stop. Just a minute. To take his cock out so I can think, but the thought of him listening, the thought of him drawing out and leaving me empty has my muscles fisting possessively around the pulsing appendage.

I need to cum. I'm so close. I just need him to fuck me a little deeper, a little harder. I need that electric current of pain when he fills me until I can't breathe, until the agony is pure, raw pleasure.

"Please," I whimper again, thigh muscles straining to get wider for him.

His low, guttural growl washes over my face. It claws across my lips as he lowers his head. The proximity has my head lifting off the pillow, lips parted in anticipation to taste him, but he ignores my attempts, dropping his head instead to take a nipple into his mouth. The hot rush of his breath on my skin, the sharp sting of his teeth...

"Rhys!"

"Tell me to stop." He trails to the other nipple. The breast is already straining, eager to be equally spoiled. "Tell me to stop fucking you, Adeline." His thrusts pick up speed. Pounding harder. Harder. Thrusting. Slamming. Taunting with little rolls of his hips. It's so close to what I need I can't even think to answer him when he lifts his head and presses his lips to my ear. "Tell me you're not about to cum all over my cock. Again." His growls fill my ears, roll down my spine to pool in my belly.

With a defeated cry, I slip. I plummet off the cliff with an explosion of colors as he drives wildly into me, cracking the headboard into the wall as he drags every second of my orgasm out until I'm thrashing, begging him enough.

"Such a good cunt." He flicks my bottom lip with his tongue and I automatically open, but he doesn't give me the kiss he keeps teasing me with. "Do you know what good girls get?"

My hazy gaze drops to where he's pulling back, slick and glistening with my release until only his head is being sucked by my opening.

"What do good girls get, Addie?"

I bite down hard on my lip, wrestling with the answer, struggling to get free.

One, heavy brow lifts at my disobedience.

His head pops out and I'm painfully empty.

"No!" my panicked whimper is met with sly amusement.

"Tell me to put him back, Addie."

He nudges my opening, adding just enough pressure, just enough to almost penetrate, but not enough. And I can't touch him. I can't move. I can only watch as he tortures me.

"Say it," he coaxes, head bending to nibble on my nipple. "Say you want my cock in your pussy."

I do. I'm close to tears with how much I want this. Need this. But the war raging through me is stronger.

"You shouldn't be in there," I breathe, breathlessly watching him rock his dick back and forth across my opening and over my clit. "It's so wrong." I lick my lips. "Undo my hands."

Rhys blinks, but rises up to pull the Velcro, releasing my wrists.

I'm going to hell. It's already too late. It was too late that night in the parlor when I went to bed with his cum in my mouth.

"Do it," I hear myself whisper in the soft shimmer of dusk. My arms snake around his shoulders. "Cum in my pussy, Rhys."

Even in the dim glow of the kitchen light radiating up into the loft, I don't miss the hardening in his jaw before I'm folding him in my arms, pulling his mouth down to mine as he drives up into my body, burying himself to the hilt.

Overhead, I watch us hungrily in the mirror as he takes me. As my Rhys fucks me. As he uses my body to pleasure himself. I watch his ass pound and drive, his knees dig into the mattress, his face in my neck as I stroke his bunching back muscles. His hair. As I flex my vaginal walls to tighten with every inward thrust.

"Addie!"

I would have smirked but I'm falling into my own sins. "Don't stop," I whisper into his ear. "I'm cumming again. Cum with me, Rhys."

"Fuck!" he snarls, pushing up with his fists planted on either side of my head.

He drives us both over with six vicious slams of his hips. His release burns my walls and finds their place deep inside and I want to clutch every drop of it to me.

Our labored breaths fill the space, the silence. It matches the uneven tempo of our hearts thumping in sync. Rhys is still inside me, still semi hard and I want to wrap my legs around him to keep him from dislodging.

"Addie."

His face turns into the side of my neck. His nose grazes my jawline before he lifts his head, and our eyes meet.

It's not fair, I think, tracing the lines and angles on a face I have longed for since I was seventeen. Of all the men on the planet, why did it have to be him? Why the one guy who could set a bomb off on so many lives if anyone found out?

Still, when he raises a hand and brushes a stray tear away, I instinctively turn my face into his palm. When he drops his lips to my cheek, I tighten my arms around his neck.

We lie in the tangled afterglow of our sins, and I have never felt so much pain and peace.

Morning sheds light on our shame, or at least, it's supposed to. Instead, when I open my eyes, I'm molded into the hard curve of Rhys's front, enveloped in his strong arms. My face is nestled in the hollow of his throat. His nimble fingers trace the line of my spine in soothing strokes that would have lulled me straight back to sleep if his gorgeous cock wasn't a throbbing distraction grinding into the soft flesh of my belly.

I want it.

I want him.

The morning is supposed to fix my skewed reality, slap me back to my senses, not have me reaching down between our bodies to the thick piece of man meat already smearing pre-cum across my stomach.

"Addie." His tone is heavy with sleep and warning, but he doesn't stop me when I slip a leg over his hip and pull myself on top.

Neither of us say another word as I take him. As I sink inch by agonizing inch down his girth. I don't stop him cupping my breasts, teasing my nipples as I ride him with leisurely shallow thrusts. My nails leave marks in his chiseled chest. My marks. My ownership. I love seeing the welts blaze crimson.

Mine.

For now, at least.

Until I have to face my choices in the light of reality and the consequences of my actions. Until I have to face Mom and Oz, and—

Rhys sits up without warning and I tumble backwards off him with a squeak. He grabs me and flips me over onto my stomach. His heavy hand smacks into my left ass cheek and I yelp. He does it again in the same spot, making the skin burn and my legs kick.

"Rhys!"

His response is grabbing my hips and dragging me down under him.

"Stop thinking," he hisses into my ear right before he plunges inside me, capsizing my soul and sending my nerves into chaos. "In my bed, the only thought you should have is how I'm going to fuck you next."

The clock on the nightstand declares it to be well after noon when Rhys finishes with me, and I can look him in the face without wanting him back inside me. The several hours between waking up and my last orgasm is a blur of hands and mouths and satiated moans as we made up for the last two years.

I've never been so happy. So unimaginably relieved. The face reveal had been a gift from God and if I wasn't stunned at the same time, I would have cried with joy.

"Not disappointed?" Rhys — my Rhys — asks with his mouth on my neck and his cock in my hands.

"With him?" I give the appendage a playful squeeze. "Never. He's brought me so much happiness. Five stars."

Rhys laughs and the vibration tickles my skin. "I meant that I'm Atticus."

"Ah, that. Well," I scoot up onto my elbow and peer down into his breathtaking face. For a moment, I'm too overwhelmed with the knowledge that he's actually here that I forget what I'm going to say. "I didn't want him to be anyone else," I confess quietly. "I couldn't ask him ... you to take the mask off because if it wasn't you..."

I sound so stupid and pathetic, but I don't know how else to explain the fear that had sunk serrated claws into my chest for two years.

Rhys captures my chin and lifts my eyes up, forcing me to face him.

"I wouldn't ever let it be anyone else who got to have you. It was me or nothing."

I have so many questions, so many thoughts, they tangle up in my head, making it impossible to think, nor do I get the chance to when my stomach gurgles loudly, demanding sustenance.

Rhys is out of bed before I can function and he's pulling me with him despite my protests. I'm dragged into the bathroom where he takes an exceptionally long time lathering every inch of my body with body wash. Somehow, rubbing his palms down my legs, his mouth finds my sex and I'm holding Rhys by the back of the head, one foot braced on his shoulder as I ride his face.

Downstairs, he makes the rest of the turkey bacon and eggs with whole wheat toast. He sits me on the counter to feed us both from the same plate and ... I can't stop staring at him.

I can't look away.

I'm terrified he'll vanish or worse, turn into someone else if I take my eyes off him. My heart has been a giddy mess of delight and panic all morning, and I can't help feeling like it's going to get ripped away from me if I'm not vigilant.

Rhys is in my arms. He's between my thighs and in my head and tattooed across my heart, and I never realized just how much I missed him until he's making me laugh like we were never apart.

I love you, I want to blurt, but the last time I took initiative, I fucked things up so badly, I bite my tongue.

"The photo I took of you that night on your hands and knees, my handprints on your ass, showing me your dimples is still my screensaver on both my phones," he tells me, grinning like a naughty little boy.

My face flames as I think just how many people might have seen it, but I also get hot by the idea. I love that he kept it and looked at it every time his phone went off. That he kept something so personal from that night, and that photo was personal.

"What happened to that game?" I ask, changing the subject before I distract us both.

"It's in my room. Hidden in my closet." He grins when I laugh. "I was really hoping we would finish it."

My heart skips in my chest even as I bite my lip unsure. "You wanted to finish? I mean, you wanted..."

No matter how I try to word it, it sounds so ridiculous that I wish I never opened my mouth.

"You?" he finishes quietly for me. "I wanted you. I want you. I will always want you. But yes, I wanted everything we did."

I can hear the crack of my heart against my breastbone. It vibrates through my skull as I forge to life the fear in my gut.

"Even though it was wrong?"

Rhys pulls in a slow breath that lifts his shoulders. His warm eyes watch my face for too long before he speaks.

"Is that why you left?"

Caught, I tear my gaze from his and try to avoid his prodding into my soul, but he has my chin between his fingers and I can't.

"Is that why you wouldn't talk to me after?" he presses, not exactly sounding angry, but genuinely curious.

I try to dampen my lips with a dry tongue. "I didn't want you to ... I pressured you to be with me and because of my selfishness, you had to live with what we did. I thought it would be easier if—"

"Pressured?" he murmurs quietly, cutting me off.

"I got the game. I came to you knowing ... knowing you wouldn't say no because you never said no to me, and I took advantage—"

Rhys bursts out laughing, making me jump. "Oh fuck, Addie. My sweet, beautiful Addie." He captures my face between his hands and kisses me so deeply, so thoroughly I'm floating in a liquid stream of pleasure. "If I told you all the times I've wanted to bend you over something, all the times I wanted to follow you into your room at night, all the times I watched you with my cock hard in my pants, you would call me a pervert, and this was before the game. The night you came to me was the best night of my life."

I bite back the excited little smile fluttering in my chest. "Really?"

Rhys kisses me again. "You did nothing to me I wasn't a hundred percent committed to finishing. If our parents hadn't come home when they did, I would have ruined their little girl in ways that would ensure we both never got into heaven."

I never want to leave our bubble. I don't want to face the world when everything I have ever wanted is reclined under me, arms folded beneath his head, looking up at me as if I hung the stars. As if he can't bear the thought of looking away.

A feeling I understand to my marrow because I can't stop looking at him either from my throne straddling the chiseled landscape of his stomach while we cuddle on the couch.

"How did you find me in the chatroom?" I ask, running my hands over his shoulders and down his sculpted pecs.

His hands move up my thighs, over my hips and waist to curve under my breasts.

"You left your phone in the kitchen over Christmas, and it was on. Some fucker with some stupid username wanted you to send nudes."

I pause in my exploration to cock my head to the side. "Nudes? I don't remember that."

Rhys scowls with furrowed brows and pursed lips. "That's because I blocked his ass and deleted the text."

"Rhys!" I gasp, trying to portray outrage, but actually amused.

"Fuck that. Your body is mine."

I stifle back my grin by bending down and kissing him lightly. "I wouldn't have done it." I sit up. "I only just joined that app the week before. I was lonely being so far from everyone. I was trying to make friends. Nothing more. Whoever he was, I would have blocked him, too. I didn't want that."

"But you didn't block me," he points out.

I shrug. "You weren't an asshole. You didn't ask to see my boobs."

"I did though."

I chuckle. "Not right away. By the time we got to the intimate stuff, it was months of talking to this guy who understood everything I said. He listened and talked to me like he'd known me forever." I cradle the side of his face. "I felt safe with him. I still missed you, but I wasn't obsessing over the fact that I betrayed your trust."

Rhys swipes his thumb across my lips, and I instinctively kiss it. His eyes darken as his hold on me tightens.

"I wish you'd talked to me, Addie. You just took off."

The warm feeling vanishes.

"I was so ashamed of my behavior. I hated myself for ruining what we had. I thought it would be easier."

He sits up and I slide down between his legs on the cushion. We're chest to chest, legs entwined, my head in his hands.

"You thought it was easier to live without you?"

"Yes!" I blurt. "What's the point when we can't be together once we leave the cabin?"

"What are you talking about?"

Why was he making this so hard?

"We can never tell anyone about us. They will never understand, and it will destroy our whole family. It will jeopardize your grandpa's construction company. Oz's law firm. Mom's craft business. Not to mention the chaos it will cause our parents. The looks Grams will get at church, and our cousins at school. It's not just our lives on the line, Rhys. We can't be selfish."

He's quiet for a long stretch of time. I'm thinking he's taking my word to heart, and he will agree.

"The fuck I can't," he says flatly. "I don't give a shit what anyone says. We're not breaking any laws. Anyone who has a problem can say it to my face because I'm not losing you. I'm not letting you go. I'll give you time to figure out how to tell everyone, but they're going to find out."

I stare at him. "How? How would they know if we don't say anything?"

Rhys leans in and nips on my bottom lip with his teeth. "Because nothing is stopping me from grabbing your ass and pulling you in to kiss. Also, as soon as you say yes, I'm putting my baby inside you and telling every last fucker who asks that it's mine."

My pussy seizes with the same ferocity as my heart leaping in my chest.

"That's cheating," I whisper hoarsely when he pulls back.

His sharp gaze bores into mine, unapologetic. "I'll play as dirty as I have to. I'm not letting you go."

I'm being foolish. I'm being short sighted and unrealistic, but why can't I be? Just for a little longer at least. It's already too late to pretend we haven't been fucking relentlessly for almost forty-eight hours. It's too late to pretend he doesn't make my whole world bright.

"You are crazy."

He captures my mouth. Kisses me deep and hungry until my head is rushing, and my pulse quickens.

He draws back to peer into my eyes. "You make me fucking crazy, Addie. You make me feel deranged. You make me want to do things no sane person ever would."

My heart is pounding in my chest, but I cup his face and smile. "Like chase a half-naked girl through the woods just to fuck her?"

His dark, brown eyes are sharp, brutally focused when he twists my hair in his hand. His chest rises and falls, and I'm suddenly unsure I want to know.

"Like climb up her fire escape at night to watch her fuck a dildo while moaning my name."

I freeze.

My heart claps harshly against my chest, a frantic bird slamming into a window. It jitters in the cavity of my ribs, uncertain, but aroused.

So. Fucking. Aroused.

"You watched me?"

Our eyes never break contact. Neither of us even blink. We stare into the other's soul as layers are peeled back on our darkest secrets.

"Every night. I imagined you riding my cock like that. Taking me deep. Riding me the way you did this morning."

I lick my suddenly dry lips. "Did ... did you touch yourself?"

He gives the faintest nod.

We're sitting so close. There's no missing the hard bulge growing between us or the way it's pressed right up against my center, but I'm trying.

We stay so still, whispering secrets we both know no one else would ever understand.

"Did you cum?"

Again, he nods with just the slightest inclination of his head.

"In my flowers?" I half tease.

He draws in a breath. Shakes his head.

I'm breathing hard and I don't know why. "Where?"

Rhys lowers his face. Brushes his mouth over mine in a feather light whisper before leaving the words on my skin.

"On you. In you." He nips my bottom lip between his teeth. Sucks once. "After you'd fall asleep."

Shit.

Fuck.

"Rhys..."

I kiss him hard and desperate. My arms tighten around his neck, flattening my chest to his as I press him closer.

Part of me always suspected something was happening when I'd wake up with my lips coated in crusty, white flakes. Other times, I had an odd taste in my mouth or an extra sticky spot on my skin. I never paid all that much attention to the mysterious occurrences. Never once did I ever think the man of my dirtiest fantasies was climbing up to watch me get myself off with him in mind.

"Did you fuck me, Rhys?"

Rhys shakes his head. "Fingers only. Sometimes my tongue."

Still. God, that image. That visual has me practically coming apart at the seams.

"I want you to fuck me next time," I tell him. "I want you to spread my legs and use me to cum. I want to wake up with you deep inside me."

A muscle hardens in his jaw, mirroring the harsh pull of his hand in my hair dragging my head back.

"My perfect, little cum whore."

I shiver at the name and wiggle against the dick I can't get enough of. My lips settle over his as he folds me tighter into his chest.

Yours. Only yours.

Hours later as I lie awake cocooned in Rhys's possessive embrace, the scent of my honeysuckle body wash and our relentless coupling steeped in the air around us, I have no choice but to face the colossal fuck up I've created. Without Rhys distracting me and my own body completely abandoning sense, I know I have made things so much harder for everyone.

This can't continue. It can't. Never mind the fact that I tell Mom literally everything, I can't go home knowing Rhys will be there and not touch him. I can't sit across the table from him and pretend his cum isn't drying inside me.

Also, Mom isn't stupid. Oz isn't blind. They are both incredibly perceptive and brilliant. They will take one look at my face and know I'm a disgusting and foul individual. Filth. An embarrassment.

I bite down hard on my bottom lip, stopping the quiver as my eyes burn. I turn my face into Rhys's collarbone and immediately his arms tighten around me, and I have to stifle back the sob lodged in my throat.

This isn't going to work. In no world can we be together. Not unless we leave everything behind and move to another country. But I can't go a day without calling Mom. We may not live in the same city, but she and Oz come to see me almost once a month. I have never not had contact with her. Running off, cutting ties would destroy us both.

But finding out what I did ... she would be horrified. I know she would be. I was there with her and Iris in the kitchen the day after what Rhys and I did.

I had no plans for afterwards when I took the game to Rhys. Tomorrow was a lifetime away and a problem for later. At eighteen and feeling like I knew everything, I had zero concept of consequences, but they came in the form of Rhys's Aunt Iris in her oversized coat, smudged, red lipstick and plastic bangles that clattered noisily as she stormed into the kitchen waving a book over her head.

"Can you believe this!" She smacked the book down on the island in front of me and Mom. "I was at the store this morning grabbing groceries for supper and found this at the register."

Mom and I both leaned in to study the graphic, but tastefully done art on the cover. At a glance, it resembled every other romance novel displayed at the register of any store, but the man was green and scaly with the captions, double the breeding across the top.

Aunt Iris slapped the book from my hands when I reached to flip it over to read the description. Her expression was one of abject horror and disgust.

"That is not for you to see!"

I blinked. "Why not? What's it about?"

I had an idea; the lizard man was double the size of the tiny brunette nestled against his chest, and she looked very, very happy.

"Nothing you need to concern yourself about. This is what's wrong with the world and girls today."

I raised an eyebrow. "Sexy lizard men with two—?"

"Adeline Josephine Broker!" she hissed, slapping the book down with a vicious smack. "The very fact that you can talk so candidly about something so vile shows how lax your parents have been raising you. This is trash. Human waste. The author clearly has no father at home to teach her what is proper."

I tried to sneak a peek at the author's name for my own personal research later, but Iris was on a roll.

"They're all like this now. Degrading trash some godless publishing house deemed fitting for publication. Monsters. Demons ... dogs! Mating with humans. The Bible..." she stopped abruptly to suck in a breath. "Those who breed with animals..."

I bite back my laugh. "They're fiction."

"They're someone's fantasy. Women who read this, want this."

I dare a glance at the cover on the marble counter, at the lizard man with the big, strong hands and apparently two penises.

My brain immediately flipped to Rhys's dick sliding between my lips, across my tongue. His pre-cum hot and salty filling my throat. I had to press my thighs together at the memory alone.

"And that's why I demanded to speak to the manager."

Mom, who hadn't said a word the entire interaction met my eye and shook her head.

This was Iris. This was what she did. We all just accepted it.

"I made sure she took every one of those copies down."

I didn't point out she supported the author by buying a copy. It didn't seem to have registered yet and I wasn't going to bring it up.

"But I followed her to where they keep the other books and..." she clutched her chest and dropped into a stool. "The sheer volume of pornographic filth. Women with criminals. Women being sold and traded between multiple men. Brothers fornicating with their sisters."

I freeze as she spits out the latter. My entire body goes rigid with a cold chill. My heart thumps wildly in my chest.

"Incest. Can you even fathom?" she slapped her purse down and chucks the book inside. "The very idea that you could look at your brother and think, that's the one. Of the billions of men in the world, my brother is the one I want. It's sick. It's vile and disgusting. People who think this way need to be checked. There's clearly something wrong in their heads."

I licked my lips nervously and hazard a glance in Mom's direction. She had a pensive furrow to her brows as she cradled her tea between her slender fingers.

"I understand what you're saying," she said slowly after a moment. "There is a lot we can't all agree on."

"Your brother, Paloma?"

Mom winced. "Well, maybe not—"

"I would never look at Oz that way. I would never ... ugh! The very thought." A thick hand shot up and waved in my direction. "Could you imagine Adeline and Rhys doing something so unholy? What would you do? Accept them like it's fine? Celebrate their depravity and welcome them into the family? People who crave their own flesh and blood will go on to hurt their children."

Mom chuckled quietly. "Well, I don't think I have to worry about that."

I would never hurt my children, and I know Rhys wouldn't either, but maybe Iris was right about everything else. Maybe there is something wrong with us. Maybe we are sick and twisted.

But when Rhys dips his head and brushes a kiss to my temple in his sleep, I can't imagine this feeling of bliss being wrong.