Smirking up at me, he curved his fingertips beneath the waistband of my leggings and pulled them down. He took my underwear with them, and I’d never before truly taken time to appreciate how easy it was to give him access to my body in my dresses. The painfully slow drag of fabric over my thighs seemed to take forever, tormenting me when he’d barely touched me.
Stopping with the material bunched at my ankles, he took his time taking off my sneakers and then he placed them off to the side neatly, and folded my pants to rest on top in his bid to purposefully drive me mad with need.
I spread my legs, giving him an unhindered view of my pussy when he didn’t show signs of stopping with his torment and his mouth touched the inside of my knee. I slid a hand over my belly, touching the apex of my thighs and gliding through the already swollen and needy flesh that I found in response to the way Rafe tortured me. My fingertip dipped inside my entrance, barely making headway before Rafe growled in his throat and shoved it to the side.
His mouth covered me immediately, giving me the heat of him against me that I needed. His finger slid inside me, twisting and curling quickly as he loosened me.
How could it be anything else?
“I want your cock,” I murmured, grabbing a fistful of his hair in my grip and tugging when his mouth wasn’t enough. I’d had his mouth for weeks. I wantedhim.
He seemed to agree, tearing his mouth away from my flesh and prowling over me. I shifted my hands down to between our bodies, pushing his athletic shorts down to free his length and wrapping a hand around him. I stroked him only once before lining him up with my entrance and pulling my hand out of the way, groaning in relief when he pressed forward and made his way inside slowly.
Pump after pump, shallow thrusts of his hips brought him further inside me until I was so filled with him that I could hardly see straight. I wrapped my legs around his hips, pulling him closer and wanting him to possess me completely.
He leaned over me, his face lining up with mine and hovering just out of reach as he moved slowly. There was no doubt that as much as we’d been deprived, he wanted me to feel not just his body buthim. That thing that had shifted within our bond and our marriage pulsed between us, the love tangible in the air and hovering between us as he leaned forward and touched his mouth to mine.
The strangled groan that rumbled against my lips was enough to send me crashing over the edge and into my orgasm, my legs tightening around him as everything narrowed down to the feeling of his cock dragging through my tender flesh. He chased his own release, finding it within me as I settled and my grip on him relaxed.
We lay there catching our breaths together for a few moments, and then I let him help me back into my pants. He picked me up and carried me back to the house as I settled into his embrace.
We spent the rest of the day in bed, my training forgotten for the time being.
Love was more important.
* * *
Ismiled as I plated up thepistoRegina and I had made for lunch to bring to Rafe’s office the following day. With everything that had happened, everything I’d lost, I’d come to the realization that love wasn’tonlymore important than all the background noise. It was everything, in a way that I knew I could survive whatever life threw at me.
As long as I had him.
I navigated the steps down the hallway to his office, the shallow bowl ofpistofor us to share clutched in my hands. The office door was open as I stepped up to it, moving into the space with a bright smile for my husband.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Alejandro,” I said as I stepped closer to the desk. Both men looked up from the computer screen suddenly when I spoke, having been too absorbed in whatever they were looking at to notice me. Rafael froze, his body going solid as his eyes connected with mine and he shook his head subtly.
Furrowing my brow as I stared back at him, I tilted my head in question and took another step forward to deposit the bowl on the desk. Rafael and I didn’t have secrets when it came to his work, especially not after he’d told me the last of his deception.
There was an openness between us that defied logic, that meant I would be welcome in his office no matter what he was discussing.
The shrill scream that came over the speakers was muted, as if the volume was turned low so Regina and I wouldn’t hear it. Even quieted, there was no denying the sound of my sister’s voice, of her pleading whimper that followed after the sound.
I dropped the bowl on the edge of the desk, hurrying around the corner to see what had happened to make Rafe look so concerned. To make him lunge for the mouse next to the keyboard. I knocked it away from his hand urgently, desperate to know what answers he seemed inclined to hide from me.
I needed to know what had come of Odina, even if it broke me. I owed her that at the very least, since whatever happened to her was my fault entirely, thanks to my husband and the brothers I claimed as family.
The brothers who had done more to prove their place in my family than Odina ever had, even if they’d lied to me while they’d done it. Rafael grabbed me by the waist, using his arm to keep me out of line of the camera with a ferocity that took my breath away. It quieted the comment that I had ready on my lips, my eyes pausing on what little I could see on the screen. It wasn’t a recording after all, but a live feed.
I could barely make out her face with the angle of the camera being positioned off to the side. The sunken, dark circles under her eyes seemed too big for her face, hinting at an exhaustion that I couldn’t begin to imagine.
Had she slept once since she’d been taken weeks ago? I didn’t want to think of what she’d suffered while I’d lived in my own little world being worshiped. Getting her back was out of my control. It was something I couldn’t force Rafael to do, to the point that I’d barely bothered to try.
Odina screamed again, and I watched the glint of a metal blade as it pressed into the bare skin of her thigh and carved through her flesh. The wound was deeper than what Rafael had done to my neck, meant to maim andhurtin a way that Rafe would have never done to me.
He carved her carefully, and I realized with mounting horror that he was drawing a replica of the scar on my thigh. Of the mark the barbed wire had left on me in the river that day.
“I thought she was lying when she said she wasn’t Isa,” the man in the video said, his cold gray eyes gleaming as he stared into the camera. “What a clever little liar to pretend not to be the twin I wanted, but do you know what I realized when I stripped her pants off and tied her to my bed?”
There was silence when Rafe didn’t answer the question that could only be rhetorical. Given what he’d done to Odina, there could be little doubt as to what he’d expected to find. I covered my mouth to keep quiet, to force myself to shut up as he lifted the knife and touched it to her cheekbone. He didn’t break the skin, keeping it only an inch from her eye in threat.