Chapter 2

2

ALEXUS

T wo thoughts are running through my mind as I look at Raina Bloodgood lying back on her elbows, naked on the gambeson, legs bent and spread just enough that I can glimpse her soft brown curls and that delicious pink slit, her witch’s marks shimmering under the firelight.

Those two thoughts are that, for one, I could fuck her for days if she’d let me. Every single thing about her makes my cock so hard it aches for release. There’s just one problem, and that’s the second thing running rampant through my mind. As excited as I was moments before, I now feel apprehensive, because it’s going to take everything in me to suffocate Neri long enough that he has no part in this.

I swear I can hear the bastard laughing at me, but I tighten my magick around his spirit, clenched like a fist, and drag him to the deepest, darkest part of me, until he is completely, utterly silenced.

“You’re certain,” I ask Raina, needing her assurance one more godsdamn time.

I stand at the foot of the gambeson, gripping one side of my unlaced britches. She said she’s taken birthbane, and I trust her. That isn’t the issue. The issue is that I need to know that she won’t despise me once the truth about my darkness is revealed.

I expect her to sign or nod. What I don’t expect is for her to spread her legs a little wider and slip her hand down between them. She opens herself for me, her slit glistening and ready as she fingers her clit.

Mouth watering, I exhale a shuddering breath, because fuck all. With that one simple move, I am done for.

Quickly, I shuck my leathers and brais and kneel between her legs, my hands on her knees. I don’t miss the way her throat moves on a swallow as she glances at my cock. I know it’s a little intimidating. Having lived for three centuries, I’ve seen that look before. But I know how to use my body for a woman’s pleasure, or how to let it be used, how to be careful until she’s ready for me to be punishing.

I push her knees further apart for a better view, and she begins to withdraw her hand.

I tsk and shake my head. “Don’t stop. Let me watch.”

There’s a delicate timidness to her, though it hides beneath her fire. If she feels any insecurity or hesitance as she begins working her pussy, it’s now buried under lust and determination. She wants this, so much, and with that look on her face, that mask of sheer need, I couldn’t deny her if I wanted to.

I sit back on my heels and just watch, stroking my hands up and down her sleek thighs as she dips her fingers inside herself, her mouth open as she pants softly.

“Such a good girl,” I tell her, just as I slide my finger inside, too, the both of us moving in and out.

She gasps, and I smile. She’s so tight. So wet. So perfect.

But then reality hits me in the face. She said she had a special someone in the valley, and she’s a grown woman, but that doesn’t mean she’s ever slept with someone.

“Have you taken a man before?” I ask, moving my finger more tenderly.

Her breathing picks up as she nods. She fixes her gaze on my hand, biting her lip, and then she looks into my eyes with hunger in her stare. I don’t even need her to sign. Somehow I know that look and what it means. Like I’ve seen it staring back at me for centuries.

She wants more.

I insert a second finger. “Does that feel good?”

Her hand falls away to let me take control, and she signs a simple Yes . But it’s the silent whimpering look on her face that tells me just how good it feels.

Testing her limits, I push a third finger inside her and rub her clit with my thumb, my cock throbbing all the while. With her chest rising and falling fast, she grinds against my hand, which sends a bolt of delight and longing through me.

“There you go,” I tell her as she fucks my fingers. “That’s a little closer to what my cock is going to feel like.”

Her dark blue eyes storm over, and she signs, “I want you. ” Then she pushes up on her hands and stares at my mouth like she needs to kiss me.

Gripping her hips, I drag her onto my lap. I want her close tonight. I want as much intimacy as I can get with this woman. I tell myself that I’ll let her set the pace. That I’ll give her control. She isn’t used to me, and I need to let her acclimate. But gods if I don’t want to bend her over and ravage her with all the ferocity I possess right now.

As I tamp down my desire, she wraps her arms around my neck and buries her hands in my hair. I kiss her like she wants. A divine kiss. A kiss that awakens my soul.

I would swear I’ve felt this mouth before tonight. That I’ve already claimed it as my own. It's too easy, my lips and tongue too sure. There’s no clumsiness. No needing to learn her mouth.

I already know it.

I know the softness of her tongue against mine. The plumpness of her lips between my teeth. I know her taste and the way she arches against me when I kiss her deeper. It's like she's been mine all my life. Forever and an age.

Breathing hard, I pull away, keeping one hand in her hair. “I want you to take me inside you, as much as you can. Sitting just like this. Then I’ll move us into the perfect position.”

Her eyes search mine for a moment— nervousness —but then she’s straddling me, and all that perfect softness begins to envelop my cock.

As her body closes over my throbbing head, I lean down and take her nipple into my mouth, sucking, biting, and flicking my tongue as she lowers onto me, inch by inch. I can hardly stand it, the feel of her working me inside, can hardly keep myself from thrusting up into her. Because that sensation—being wrapped in her tightness, her wet warmth—leaves me breathless with yearning. It’s like I’ve been searching for something and finally found it, as though after all these ages, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

With her.

She tips her head back, luscious lips parted, her hands braced on my shoulders, fingers digging in as she takes the last of me. I watch her for long moments, the way she rocks to feel me deep. It feels so godsdamn good, every tempting rub against the tip of my cock a reminder that I’m going to get to come inside this woman tonight.

I unfold and sit beneath her, legs outstretched, and though she gasps again at the feeling of me moving even deeper, she naturally wraps her legs around my waist. Any distance left between us is gone, my cock fully seated inside her.

She wraps her hands in my hair and draws me close for another kiss, and we begin to move in perfect timing, a gentle writhing. But then she presses one hand to my knee and starts rocking again, pressing her feet into the ground for more leverage, just before her hips change their momentum to a long slide up and down my cock. I lean back on my hands, and we both look down to where we’re joined, watching as she works her pussy along my length, my flesh slick with her desire.

“Fuck, Raina. Look at you taking me so well.” When I meet her gaze, what I see there makes me feel like a feral animal in a cage.

Instantly, our rhythm changes, again.

Raina folds her arms around my neck, and I wrap my arms around her waist, and together we fuck , hard and fast, her hips pumping up and down, my teeth grazing her nipples as she greedily takes all of me she can.

“Stop,” I warn her after too many minutes. “Stop or I’m going to come.” I was not as prepared for this as I would’ve liked to have believed.

She does stop and, after flashing a sexy, demure smile, captures my mouth with hers, too pleased with herself for having so easily driven me to the point of no return.

When I can think again, I lean into her, until she drops back on both hands. I mirror her position, and the blissful torture of being with her begins anew.

With our gazes locked, I angle my cock just right and push into her awaiting heat. Her long hair is a dark cascade around her shoulders, a couple tendrils falling over her beautiful breasts as they move with my every thrust, her pink nipples peaked in the cool air. She arches her hips for me, and the sight of my cock moving in and out of her body nearly undoes me again, the need for release throbbing through me.

I close my hand around the back of her neck and draw her near, kissing her like it’s impossible to get far enough inside her. But this time, I can’t restrain myself any longer. I slide my hands underneath her thighs and rise onto my knees. In one movement, I’m holding her mid-air, her legs around my waist, her arms tight around my neck, her lips on mine as I pound my cock into her welcoming, wet heat, offering what we both need.

Her hands tighten in my hair, her fingernails scraping my scalp, but she rips away from the kiss, gasping for breath as she stares into my eyes. She’s so close. My body knows, as though I’ve taken her before, enough that her climax is a thing I can sense rising inside her.

I lay her down on her back, still buried inside her, watching as her eyelids drift closed, feeling her grow wetter and tighter, her pussy swollen with want. I kiss her throat as I fuck her, dragging my lips to her ear.

“You’re going to come for me, aren’t you? All over my cock.”

She nods, that sweet whimper on her face as she grips my shoulders, and I know— I know —that we can come together, and that it will be everything .

I push up, bracing myself on my hands, and she wraps her legs tightly around my hips. This angle lets me reach even deeper, and gods, do I ever. With her gaze roving over my body, I drive my cock into her pussy like a man who hasn’t fucked in years, because that’s exactly what I am.

“Touch your clit,” I tell her, putting an edge in my voice.

A command.

She obeys so easily, and that sends a thrill through me that I feel in every muscle. After wanting to kill me days ago, she now wants me in an entirely different way, needs me to destroy the last vestiges of the wall she erected between us. I annihilate that barrier with every thrust, though something else is happening as well, at least for me.

Something inside me thrums with that same, peculiar knowing, something that feels like it’s reaching for Raina’s soul—and it has nothing to do with Neri. My magick has him bound deep, rendered more silent than he’s ever been.

No. It’s a tender thing, filled with passion but also unity, a connection that feels broken, longing to be mended. It makes my heart ache in a manner it never has before. It even causes tears to prick the backs of my eyes though I choke them down and blink them away. The severity of emotion I feel is unexpected, but it consumes me like a quenching fire.

Leaning down, I kiss the skin over her heart, and then I kiss her mouth, our tongues and lips moving in that same perfect rhythm. My orgasm builds, rising from a heavy ache in my balls to a tingling pressure racing up the shaft of my cock.

Raina clings to my shoulders and tips her head back, that lovely mouth open again in ecstasy. The things I would love to do to that mouth. I’m distracted from that thought, however, because a tear slips from the corner of her eye down her temple.

A tear of pleasure. A signal that now is the time.

My claiming is a brutal one. Far more brutal than I’d planned when this began. But she wants it—I see the request in her heated eyes, the longing for more and more and more . And I need it, as though my body must bury its presence in her core, a mark that says this woman belongs to Alexus Thibault. Now and forever. If ever anyone was meant to be mine, I know it’s her. Even if I can’t explain how or why.

I know.

Her name is written on my soul.

When we come, the pleasure is three-fold. There’s the divine sensation in my cock as my orgasm pulses through me, each euphoric surge wrenched from me by Raina’s pussy fluttering and clenching with her own release. I spill inside her, coming so hard and long I curse and moan into the night.

Then there’s the pleasure of the mind, that feeling of floating in endless bliss that comes with climax, that space where nothing else exists but me and her and this moment.

But the last one. The last one is the kind of pleasure I can’t remember ever having felt before. It’s strange feeling it now with a woman I hardly know, even though she’s a woman I feel like I’ve somehow known for an age. The pleasure of the heart. A deep serenity and peace I have no doubt will linger long after the pleasure of the flesh has faded.

Spent and tired and utterly drained, I finally pull out. I have to look at her. Have to open her and memorize the image of my cum spilling slowly from her body. She shivers as I flick my finger over her clit, her teeth dragging over her bottom lip as I meet her gaze.

“You are so fucking beautiful,” I tell her, admiring the curves of her body. “And I mean that in every imaginable way.”

After cleaning us, I grab the blanket and lie with Raina on the gambeson. She lets me hold her, something I’m not certain I expected. The intimacy of this night was intense for me. But was it as intense for her? Or was this only relief?

When she looks up at me with those heavy eyes and touches my face, running her fingertips through my beard, I think it might’ve been more than only relief. But this is new for her, I know. I’m new. Still a curiosity and an intrigue, though I long to be so much more.

I kiss her, needing her taste on my lips one more time. “Sleep,” I eventually whisper. “We’ve a long road ahead.”

She nestles her head against my chest, and for the first time in what feels like forever, I rest soundly.

Because Raina Bloodgood is at my side.