Fuse Read online

  A short chuckle. “Yeah, really.”

  “But—”

  “But what? You don’t think I see the hundred reasons why you wouldn’t want me anymore? That I don’t mentally count them down to myself every damn day?”

  She jacks her head back. Impales me with an aqua glower. “Well, stop that!”

  A fuller laugh now. Has that order really just come from the woman handcuffed to our bed and pinned beneath my body? “I can’t stop all those thoughts any more than you can control what you see between Angelique and me, okay?”

  And yeah, I just went there. Because yeah, in so many ways, it’s a damn elephant in the room. It has been since up on the ridge, a fact I recognized from the moment we all returned to the house—and likely should’ve addressed with Emma then and there. But like an idiot, I pussied out to her “I need space” vibe instead—and wound up as the enabler for her bruise instead of being the hero who soothed it.

  Not. Anymore.

  That motivation spurring me, I brush my fingers through her hair with gentle determination. Thankfully, the motion helps my erection stand down its revolt against my pants. Well, a little. “In some ways, what you’re torturing yourself with is even worse, woman,” I finally go on, sticking to the unflinching message. “I’m not bound to Angie by anything more than our mutual grief over Tyce—”

  “And the fact that she’s been to Camp Consortium as well?”

  “Not something we’re reminiscing over with s’mores and Fireball, okay? But the rest of it is fiction in your head, Emma. I guarantee it. And one day, I promise you’ll see that for yourself as well. But I, on the other hand, will never stop waking up most mornings like a freak pop-up toy, or turning raindrops into atmospheric pinballs, or making you feel like my personal Lite-Brite board every time I come at you with stars in my eyes…”

  “I love the stars in your eyes.” She lifts her head, blatantly begging for a new kiss despite the rebellion I’ve sparked in her gaze. “And I love being your Lite-Brite.”

  Though I deny her the kiss, I lap at her with the tip of my tongue. She opens her mouth wider after I slide along the seam of her lips, gasping softly as I take soft, wet jabs into her delicious, dark depths.

  “That so?” I take adamant note of every tiny tremor I induce along the length of her body. When she gives back a couple of fervent nods, I prod, “Even now? Like this?”

  She kicks up the corners of her mouth. Purposely rattles the cuffs again, as if to confirm she’s on exactly the same page as my sensual subtext. “Uh-huh.”

  Well…damn.

  Just a couple of unintelligible grunts, and the woman’s worked a whole Hogwarts house worth of magic on me again. I’m helpless to resist, letting my libido take over more of my control as I somehow manage words in return. “You want to glow for me, little bunny? Even when you’re helpless in my trap? Even knowing you can’t fight back?”

  “Ohhhh…”

  I add a couple of commanding bites to my lascivious laves along the lush pads of her lips. “Tell me, Emmalina.”

  “Uh…huh,” she finally stammers.

  Magic.

  “Ohhhh!”

  And then pure enchantment as I finally unsnap my fly, tear down my zipper, and pull out the heat that’s been my torture master since we stepped foot in here.

  “Yes. Oh yes, Reece. Light me up. Please.”

  I take myself in hand, having to lock my teeth while distributing my precome up and down the shaft to avoid dripping it directly onto her. My juices will instantly make hers explode, and that’s not going to happen yet. No immediate orgasms for either of us today.

  I underline the directive with a tight smirk, as well as the slow, deliberate caresses I give my swollen, gleaming length. “Say it again,” I order in a tone of gathering thunder. “Say it again, Bunny.”

  At first, she can do nothing but gulp hard and then cry out, sweat glistening across every inch of her naked beauty. “Anything,” she rasps. “Wh-What part? Wh-What do you need?”

  “All of it.” I rock back to my haunches to make sure she sees every inch of what I’m doing. The throbbing balls I’m rolling in my fingers. The cobalt veins I’m massaging, priming the electric essence her pussy craves from me… “All of it,” I echo on a husk. “Tell me you love me.” I start with what I need the most. What I’ll never stop needing the most.

  “I do,” she sighs out at once. “I do love you. I love you, I love you, I love you.”

  “Tell me I light you up.”

  “All of me. Always. You do.”

  “Tell me you lust for me.”

  “In more ways than you know.”

  I don’t miss the meaning behind her vow, and it impacts me as if she’s turned back into the sun and then dived into the middle of my chest. The heat waterfalls against my ribs, suffuses my stomach and hips, and then—

  Fuck.

  With a barely suppressed growl, I guide my tip to her entrance. Did I really have to ask her about the lust part with this glistening flower spread open for me like this? But goddamn, what hearing the words has done to me. What she always does for me. I’m pulled apart from the inside out, a fucking bloom of something in my own right, all my leaves blown away until only the pistil of my need is left, stiff and ready for her. So ready…

  “Tell me one more thing.” I feed just my bulging tip into her, gritting back the urge to embed myself with one thrust. Purely selfish move. What she’s surrendered to me right now, in her control and in her words, has been like watching the dawn over the ocean. I never want it to end. Fuck, how I need it to end. “Tell me you need me, Velvet.”

  Strangely, she seems to double-take at me. “Need?” she murmurs.

  I move over her, bracing myself on both elbows. “There a problem with that, Miss Crist?”

  That same wash of intangible emotion drenches her face. “Love. Light. Lust.” She releases each like a sundrenched prayer. “But then…need?”

  “Aha.” I punctuate it with a purposeful roll of my hips. “You want your missing M. Is that it?”

  “Uh…” She swallows again, arching a little as I swivel and then dip, which pushes my length just a little farther in. Enough for her deeper muscles to engage and constrict. Enough that everything south of her navel shudders. Enough that she finally stutters, “C-Could you r-repeat the question, please?”

  “Hmmm.” I vibrate it into her neck between hot licks and soft scrapes of my teeth, until my mouth is fitted against her ear and I’m bearing down on the sensitive place near its base. As she moans in mindless desire, I murmur, “Please? Well, now who’s skipped ahead?”

  “Ohhhh!” It’s more a collection of gasps and groans than a cohesive exclamation, but I’m feeling a hundred kinds of opportunistic bastard right now—and prove as much with my long, dominant, decadent surge all the way inside her. If that drawn-out vowel isn’t the only way she can respond, then I’m not firing enough electrons right.

  But I guess the circuits are connecting fine, because her second iteration is more fragmented than the first. Could have something to do with my really bastard move of sliding my grip to her ass and parting the cheeks far enough to gently finger her back there.

  “Oh, baby. Now you’re really mixed up. O is after M too.”

  “Damn it!” She all but snarls it while pounding my spine with her heels and thrusting her berry-hard nipples into my chest. “Who cares? For the love of fuck, who cares?”

  Damn great point. Not that I’m weighing her logic, once her filthy word choice rockets all the way up my cock. But hell, how I love ramping her to the point that F-bombs flow from her, meaning more of the perfect honey from her pussy will soon follow.

  And it does.

  Yesssss, how it does, until the slicks between our crotches are as loud as the harsh, hard pants from our lips and the rhythmic, erotic chings of the handcuffs.

  “So you’re serving me alphabet soup instead, Miss Crist?”

  She opens her eyes enough to show me th
e thick lust in her gorgeous turquoise depths. The rest of her face is sheened in sweat and passion, with the exception of her kiss-stained lips. “Soup is good food, Mr. Richards.”

  I lift a smile that darkens her stare and hardens her nipples. Both beckon me to twist a bruising kiss on her succulent mouth before I push myself all the way back up and in, using my hold on her ass to turn her body into my grinding, pounding plaything, her pussy lips ignited by my juices as they suck me inside over and over again.

  “You’re just…good,” I grit out. “Dear Christ, Emmalina, you’re so good to me.” And perfect for me. And spellbinding to me. She’s got me damn near hypnotized now, filled with demented victory as the electricity from my thrusts grows and spreads along the plump tissues continuing to let me invade and incinerate and excite and ignite. I never just fuck this woman. I fuse with her. Unite with her. Lose myself in her. And never, ever want to be found. I’m going to wander in her wilderness for the rest of my days. Roam in the electric abyss of her blissful heat and offer every drop of my energy in worship to her magnificent matrix…

  “Reece. Reece!”

  “I know, baby. I know.”

  “Then set me free. I need to touch you. I need to show you…”

  “You already are, Velvet.” I stretch a forefinger in, circling her asshole with insistence—and delighting in what my glowing digit does to the hot torque of her cunt. “Fuck, in so many ways.”

  “But—”

  “Just take me, Emma.”

  “But it’s so—”

  “Take me, Emma!” I bellow it because I don’t have any choice now either. Because the heat and pressure and need in my dick are at the complete command of my senses, ordering me to push and pound and stretch toward a conclusion as inevitable as lightning erupting from clouds and the earth it’ll scorch in the end.

  I need to scorch her.

  Gash her.

  Mark her.

  As she’s already branded me. Emblazoned herself onto me. Forever.

  “God!” She thrashes her head from side to side as her skin breaks out in a million points of bejeweled light. Damn, the woman turns even sweat into a work of art. I’m in awe as I continue to plunge in, ramming her deep every time, watching her carefully. Waiting for just…the right…moment…

  As her womb seizes.

  As her channel constricts.

  As her breathing stops.

  And becomes a scream.

  I fall forward again, landing back on my elbows but gripping her face between my hands. “Watch me,” I dictate, digging fingertips into her hairline. “Watch me as you come.”

  And then I rejoice. She doesn’t hesitate to obey, the flushed curves of her face fixed in a mixture of agony and ecstasy, of climax and completion, of orgasm and ovation. Just as that intensity wanes, her eyes pop wide from the force of her second climax—as my balls squeeze in and then punch a load of liquid light through my shaft, exploding deep inside her with rope after rope of blinding, blaring, bursting fulfillment.

  “Oh. Fuck!”

  I go completely still. Okay, not true. Every inch of my dick is still shooting off inside her, throbbing like no other orgasm I’ve ever felt, but I fight my way past the brainless heaven to rediscover my gray matter and grate, “Is soup still good food?”

  She ekes out a smile, though giant tears thread out from the corners of her eyes. “Just…just hot.” A shiver consumes her, and her tunnel thrums around me. “Really, really hot.”

  I roam my stare urgently over her. “But still good?”

  “Yeah.” She nods but then hums as if trying to stave off pain. “Fuck yeah.” But even the profanity does nothing to help me believe her—until she turns her legs into a pair of boa constrictors, squeezing the air from my lungs as she rocks her head back and screams—at the same moment her sex grips me with twice the force as before.

  And just like that, I’m coming all over again. With her. Into her. Because of her.

  My balls thunder in protest as a roar rips up my throat and liquid fire gushes from my cock. Emma rides the tsunami with me, clearly lost in as much dazzled disbelief as me. Amazement illuminates her face as wave after wave of carnal force flows through us, pushing us toward a shore where we’re finally collapsing, spent and sweaty and sated, tangled in each other’s arms.

  “Holy shit.” Her sentiment is so perfect, especially completed by her cute little laugh, that I just bury my face in her neck and grunt out an approval. “I…I can’t move.”

  “No kidding.” I don’t fight the post-tsunami lethargy, because even that’s perfect. I even ponder the possibility of getting in a nap. Yeah, right here. Yeah, just like this. My leathers can’t exactly be shucked off from where they are, halfway to my knees, but everything’s just fine where it is anyway.

  Everything couldn’t be more fucking perfect…

  “No. Reece. I mean I can’t move.”

  “Damn.” I rustle out of my post-coital coma to send small zaps from a forefinger into the keyholes of the cuffs, clicking them open at once. As soon as Emma pulls her arms free, I pull them between our chests and carefully rub her fingers, palms, and wrists. “You okay?” I murmur. Though everything appears that way, this isn’t my first spin on the yay-yay-kinky thrill ride. Endorphins and adrenaline make people blurt all kinds of things for the sake of keeping the feelings going. “You’ll probably have a few minor marks”—I capture her gaze with mine while kissing the inside of one wrist and then the other, communicating how thoroughly that turns me on again already—“but nothing’s in a lot of pain otherwise?”

  “Only all the parts that matter.” The humor in her voice flows across every beautiful inch of her face, especially the smiling ribbons of her lips, which I can’t resist claiming in an adoring kiss.

  “Thank you,” I whisper several minutes later, after I’ve explored her mouth with all my senses along for the ride instead of my lust being the bull in front of the cart. “Holy hell, woman. That was like my birthday, Christmas, and National Soup Day wrapped up in one.”

  She bursts into a full laugh, which contracts her muscles hard enough to push me out, even with the half-wood I’ve still got going on. Sometimes, it really is a good-thing-bad-thing situation to be a walking libido factory—though it’s tough as hell to summon even half a grimace about that, as the music of her mirth fills the air.

  “National Soup Day is that special to you?” she quips with a wry smirk.

  “It is now,” I growl. “Which reminds me…” I fix my expression with new determination while rolling off the bed, hitching my leathers back up, and retrieving my phone from the top of the dresser. Without ripping my gaze from the nude goddess still lounging across the bed, I tap the device’s self-messaging button. “Tell Chase to add a soup company to the Richards portfolio.”

  And what’s better than a lounging nude goddess? That deity turned into a giggling nymph instead. “For the love of cheddar potato, Reece Richards.”

  “That your favorite flavor?” I toss my finest rogue’s smirk. “I’m ordering six cases now.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  She springs to her feet as well, snatching my phone out of my grip and tossing it to the built-in loveseat under the window. As the device lands, the screen lights up with an incoming call, but I’m too far away to read it and too taken away by this woman to care. Neeta’s handling everything at the Brocade and the other properties in the region today, and if something’s up with the Richards empire as a whole, Chase knows he can yell up the stairs at me.

  Everyone and everything else do not matter. Not today.

  “Come here.”

  And especially not right now, as Emma turns the tables to become my conqueror. At once, she traps me with her sweet whisper, cuffs me with her gentle grasp, and tosses away the key of my resistance with the captivity of her soft, lingering kiss.

  At once, it’s not enough.

  Will it ever be with her?

  I move in, yanking her close with digging
grips to her hips, delving my tongue inside her mouth and sending my moan deep into her throat. And still—yes, already—I need more. Always more…

  “Ohhhh, man.” But instead, she’s dragging away with a cute little whine, giving back as good as I’m giving in the disgruntled glare department. “You really would’ve done it, wouldn’t you?” she charges. “Told Chase to look into buying that company. Had six cases of prepackaged soup delivered up here.” She adds a little grin. “And dealt with Anya chucking every single can at your head…”

  “Worth it.” I’ve rarely been more sure of a statement—and guarantee she knows it, as I change my hold into a tight circle around her graceful curves. “I’d face a thousand soup can firing squads for you, woman.”

  She doesn’t hide the massive chomp on her lower lip, minimizing her laughter by a little. She’s not so successful with the glints in her eyes, like sunshine on the Caribbean, as she rewards the metaphor with a solid kiss. “You know what kind a visual I just got on that, right? Especially with you standing here like this?”

  “Depends.” I nudge her crotch with mine. “Are you in the visual too? Like this?”

  “Hmmm.” She lets me lean her back a little, going at her neck again with my mouth as I glide a hand in for an eager cop at her breast before softly venturing, “That…errrm…depends.”

  I still my ravishment. Even stop my fingers from fully yanking at her nipple as I was originally planning. “On what?”

  “On whether Angelique’s there with us too.”

  I drop my hand all the way. Rear back to explore her face in full. “You’re serious.”

  It’s definitely not a question. She nods anyway. Bites at her lip even harder.

  Hell.

  She’s not just serious. She’s nervous.

  “I think we need to talk about some boundaries, Reece.”

  Perplexed grimace. Really perplexed. “About Angie?”

  “About Angelique. Your ex-lover. And the fact that with her cover now made, she’s a recognizable fugitive from the Consortium too. And the fact that a member of our team, still in their captivity, is responsible for that—which makes us responsible for that. But with responsibility, there are rules. And with this responsibility, they’re my rules.”