Her fingers curl around my shirt. “You scared me. Don’t do it—”
I twine my fingers into her hair and drag her mouth to mine. “Don’t talk,” I order. “Not now. Not Yet.” And then I’m kissing her, and she is sweet, so damn sweet. The kind of sweet a Kingston destroys, but I’m not a Kingston. I’m just the bastard son.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Harper
Eric’s mouth comes down on mine, and I can taste his urgency, his hunger. His fear and his need, things I recognize in myself. Every moment that we’ve been together, has come with someone dividing us, trying to destroy us. Every moment feels like it could be our last. Just knowing that he’s here, that he’s alive, undoes me, drives me. I don’t want to know what he did or didn’t do to his father right now. He didn’t kill him. He just hates him. And I want to help the pain of that hate go away. He needs that from me and I need him. I need him in a way that I can’t even explain. In a way no one has ever made me need, and the honest to God truth is that I’ve needed him since the moment I met him. And he needs me. I taste it on his tongue. I feel it in the possessive way his hands caress my body and mold me closer. There’s a desperation between us, the intensity of the burn we share swelling into an inferno like I’ve never experienced, like nothing I believe this man lets anyone know he can feel but he lets me know. He takes me with every touch, claims me with every lick, and yet, he denies me more.
He leans back, putting intolerable space between my mouth and his. “I’m not walking away from you again. You know that, right?”
“Am I supposed to object right now?”
“You should object,” he declares. “You should walk away.”
He’s a contradiction in this moment, a man who wants me and tells me to leave. “Why would I walk away, Eric?”
“Because you were right. I’m a Kingston. I can’t deny that anymore.”
I grip his shirt, twisting it in my fingers. “What does that mean?”
“It means I’m many things, Harper, that you won’t like, and you shouldn’t try to.”
I know then that his willingness to embrace his title of bastard is destructive in ways I hadn’t seen before. “Because you’re the bastard and I’m the princess?”
“Because I’m me, Harper. I always was, and always will be, me.”
“I don’t know what you think there is to hate in you, what you think will scare me away, but it won’t. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” At least until he shoves me away, which I feel him doing now, even as he holds me close.
His eyes narrow, his scrutiny deep, as intense as the way he’d kissed me, and try as I might, his expression is impossible to read. I search, I probe, and I’m still trying to read him when suddenly he’s kissing me again, licking into my mouth, testing my words on his tongue. I sink into him, absorbing his hard body into mine, clinging to him, meeting him stroke for stroke, trying to answer him, trying to show him that I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. He can’t scare me away.
There’s a low, sexy rumble in his chest that I feel everywhere. It’s that moment of no return for him, that moment where he snaps, where he needs to claim and possess, rather than think. He wants me. He doesn’t want me to leave. He doesn’t want me to walk away. I feel that in him now, but I also feel his torment. He thinks I should leave and no matter what he claims, I think he’ll walk away for me. But even as I feel that thought try to build a wall, he lifts me and distracts me.
In a few long strides, he carries me to the bed, a driven man with a purpose and I’m that purpose. But he doesn’t lay us down. He settles me on the edge of the mattress just long enough to remove my clothes and then his own shirt, rippling muscles and all that beautiful ink, splashed before my eyes. I’m still drinking in the pure, raw sight of him, before he shackles my legs, and pulls me forward, spreading my legs.
He says nothing.
He speaks with actions.
He drops to his knees and before I even process what he intends, his mouth closes on my sex and then he’s suckling, stroking his tongue over me. I pant and try to reach for him, but another lick and I fall backward, letting the soft cushion of the mattress absorb my body, while his fingers slide inside me. I arch into the feel of him stretching me, pumping into me, my fingers closing around the blanket beneath me, and oh God, he’s good at this. So very good, his tongue’s erotic play tantalizing in all the right ways, too right.
I’m embarrassingly already on edge, already right there in that sweet spot of no return. I tumble over the proverbial ledge, right into a shattering quaking release that says this man owns my pleasure, and while he doesn’t know it yet, all of me. He owns all of me. It’s a reality that is daunting in this moment of complete vulnerability. He could hurt me. He has that power. And yet he tells me to walk away. Yes. He could hurt me.
He could hurt me in ways that no man in that warehouse could ever hurt me.
If I let myself really love and trust Eric, I’m at his mercy.
No matter where it ends.
r /> I don’t like the inevitability of my thoughts and I suddenly need to read his face, to read his emotions, battling my own, but he’s already shoving off his pants. Undressing and his cock is jutting between us, thickly veined with arousal. My eyes meet his and the punch of erotic heat between us steals my breath. In another moment, he’s laid me back down on the mattress. My arms wrap his neck, and he’s on top of me, the heavy weight of his perfect body pressing into me, and I forget what I was worried about, what I needed to see in his face. There is just me and him, and a sudden, intense awareness that we are finally in his bed, where he wanted us.
I forget everything but him. How can I not? He owns me. That was my fear, but I don’t feel fear now. No fear at all. But there are other emotions, a swell of unnamed emotions overwhelming me. We’re in his territory, his home, the danger and darkness of this night, driving confessions and intimacy to a whole new level. “I’m not just going to fuck you, Harper,” Eric promises. “I’m going to make love to you.”
Love.
I spoke that word to him, so hearing it on his lips shouldn’t send shockwaves through me, but somehow it does. It shouldn’t make my chest expand with fear that I didn’t feel moments before, but it does. I both want him to love me and fear the moment he does. With love comes real pain when he tells me to walk away and gives me a shove when he doesn’t really follow, because he decides the bastard and the princess can’t survive.
My walls erect. I need to protect myself. “What happened to fucking the princess and leaving her behind?”