89

89

Make Me

Before I can guess at what he’s going to do, he presses my legs apart and lowers his head. I’m leaned out over the drop as I cling to his arms, his hands holding me by the waist, and his mouth…

His mouth.

With that sinful tongue, he laps at the heart of me. He takes all the sensation we’ve been building together and intensifies it, ratchets it up until my body is pulsing. He slips a finger inside me, then another, stretching me, moving them in time to what he’s doing with his mouth, his tongue.

And oh…gods…

The explosion of sensation blindsides me. No warning. I go off like a bang, and I cry out as everything about me draws in hard before rushing outward. I cry out again when he suddenly lifts me off the ledge, pulling me hard into him.

“Wrap your legs around me. Now.”

I do, and, staring into my eyes, he lowers me until the swollen, jutting tip of his cock presses against where I’m slick with the pleasure he’s already given me. I’m still pulsing with it. His dimples appear in full force as he offers me a wicked grin.

Then he’s pressing into me, stretching me, filling me.

He pauses. Once. Letting me adjust, letting my body settle. Then, like he can tell I’m ready, he keeps going until he’s deep inside me, and my world narrows to a new reality. A place where we are joined.

He buries his face in my neck, taking a deep, rasping breath. Then he jerks his head up and claims my lips again.

He kisses me until I can’t breathe, until breathing seems like a secondary need anyway. But then something feels different around me. I open my eyes to find we’re no longer in the water but lying in one of the beds. Sheer white curtains drift around us as he settles deeper inside me, his weight over me only adding to the sense of being claimed.

His hands, free to move now that he doesn’t have to hold me, stroke along the outsides of my thighs in frantic brushes, as if he’s painting me, memorizing me by touch.

“Be careful what you ask for, my star,” he warns.

My body contracts at those words, eagerness billowing inside me. Satisfaction whips across his features a heartbeat before he moves.

Not slow. Not teasing. Not leashed.

If I thought he’d already let go, this is something else entirely. His movements are…ruthless. Driven. And desperate. I squirm beneath him, wrapping my legs around him to hold on. But the more he loses control, the more I do the same.

I lose myself in him. In the feel of him. The strength. In the way he watches my face to see my reaction to each move, each touch.

When I rake my nails down his back, he throws his head up on a growl of pleasure. A smile that is a warning slides across his mouth, and then he’s taking my hands in an unmerciful grip, stretching my arms above my head.

My eyes go wide, and his laugh is near feral.

Then, still buried deep inside me, he lowers his head and takes one nipple into his mouth and sucks. Hard. Then bites.

And I about come off the bed.

The rough stroke of his tongue against that sensitive tip that comes next, though—I can’t help but arch into it more, chasing the sensation. He doesn’t stop until I teeter on the precipice. That’s when he lifts his head.

“What?” I groan. “Wait. Don’t stop.”

Another feral grin, his hair disheveled over his forehead—from my fingers running through it, I realize. “I’m going to make you wait and want, the way I have been all this time.”

Oh. My. Gods.

He positions himself on his knees, his hands at my hips lifting me, changing the angle, and thrusts.

I cry out, every nerve ending alive as he rears back, then thrusts again. Harder.

“Fuck.”

And that sends him pitching forward to grab at the headboard. Straining. Gaze never straying from mine, he pistons his hips. Fast. Hard.

Suddenly, smoke rises all around us, the scent laced with the bitter dark chocolate that is just…him. By the way his eyes intensify, I know that this is his power, but out of his control. The smoke forms into tendrils.

And the tendrils…reach for me.

They touch me.

Every part of me. Soft and tender. A slide like silk. Harder, more aggressive. They touch me everywhere. As if only using his corporeal body isn’t enough. As if he’s so impatient to explore every part of me, bring me every pleasure possible, that this was the only way.

I don’t know if it’s him or the smoke that plays with the pulse point at the juncture of my thighs, but it’s like having the heat of his mouth on me all over again. Moans tumble out of me as the sensation builds and builds, drawing me closer to bliss.

But it’s his eyes, devouring my reactions I don’t bother to hide from him, that truly catapult me higher.

With everything I am, I pour the sensations he’s creating in me back into him. I pour my need back into him. I pour my heart back into him.

This might be our only time, my only moment like this with him. Is he thinking the same thing? Is he determined to revel in it, and damn tomorrow and any consequences? The edge of desperation makes me want it to be everything. For both of us.

For the woman who has always craved love.

But also for the god who stands so very alone, managing the eternity of the souls under his care with more heart than any other god has shown us mortals.

His touch, against me, inside me, and everywhere, is like fire that threatens to both consume and to renew, burning at his will.

Like Hades himself.

“Please,” I whisper against his mouth. I’m so far gone at this point, I’m not even sure what I’m asking for.

But he seems to know.

We both reach for a kiss, each capturing the other’s sounds of pleasure with our mouths.

For a tiny second, I think this is too much. Too intense. Too necessary, as if I won’t be able to breathe without him after this.

Hades rears back, and his eyes go wide with a glimmering of what I think might be shock—and then their molten grey depths start to glow. “Lyra—”

A smile curves my lips. I did that. I made a god who values his control above all else completely lose it. He growls low in his chest before leaning down to nip at my neck, his hips never breaking rhythm until we both break.

The rush comes then and threatens to obliterate me, slamming through and cresting over me, tumbling me over and over and over. Hades gathers me closer as he follows me into the torrent on a shout. And I swear obsidian-tipped flames rise up in the smoke all around us.

Pleasure batters at us but then slowly eases, drawing us back down until we are like castaways thrown upon a shore the morning after a storm with the waves gently lapping at us.

And as the smoke dissipates, everything else about the world drifts away until it no longer exists for me—pain, fear, the past, the future, the gods and champions, the Overworld and Underworld, Olympus.

All of it is irrelevant in this moment. In this incandescent melding of bodies, minds, hearts, and souls.

Hades gathers me closer, burying his face in my hair as we breathe together. This time, his emotions, when they come, pour into me sweetly—unending, incandescent pleasure, a shattering kind of wonder, and soul-deep possessiveness.

I’m his. My heart claims him back as we cling to each other. Even if he can’t go beyond tonight.