Page 118 of A Sweet Destruction

“Not…” Esme waved her hand over my bare chest, clearly deciding that was all the explanation she planned to give on the matter. I understood her perfectly.

“Well, I’m sure as shit not going to let you answer the door,” I said, letting my eyes draw over her naked form with a crass, slow tempo.

Esme harrumphed, but grabbed a robe off a hook and pulled it on. “Better?”

“Not even a little bit,” I said through a smile. If anything, she looked more enticing like this, knowing it would take the tiniest slip of that silk tie and she’d be bared once more.

“Oi!” A loud voice boomed through the door. Clearly we’d missed something if he’d resorted to yelling. Probably Freya trying to get our attention through the door with a too-soft voice until Soren got annoyed. “I will kick down this door!”

“Yeah, well that’s not happening,” I said for Esme’s ears alone then walked over and grabbed her hand. “We’re doing this together, come on.”

Esme let out a God’s honest giggle as I pulled her through our room. The Bond was truly a curse, seeing as I was pretty sure she was capable of ripping my heart right out of my chest with nothing more than a genuine laugh.

I settled her in front of me, perfectly positioned to hide my pelvis, and yanked open the door.

Freya, Soren, and Bellamy all jumped back like a bunch of rowdy children, not full grown adults.

“Can we help you?” I asked to a chorus of blank expressions.

“Oh, certainly not,” Bellamy said after a pregnant pause. “You know what, I think we’re doing just fine on our own and you two will be finding your way to Freya’s room to discuss the events of the day on whatever timing suits you. No more than thirty minutes, surely, but we’ll just go ahead and leave you to it.”

Never in my life had I heard Bellamy ramble like that. Clearly, I had misjudged how we looked. I hadn’t yet told Soren that things had taken a turn toward the physical with me and Esme, and I didn’t know what she’d shared with Bellamy or Freya. In any event, our rumbled state was clearly a shock.

Bellamy recognized well enough what was going on, maybe enough to know that the burgeoning grin on Soren’s face was in serious danger of getting knocked right off it.

“Yep, sounds good!” Esme said, voice at a higher octave than I knew her capable. A second later, the door was shut again and Esme made a firm point of locking the door.

The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back on the center of the bed, Esme falling down on top of me.

Right as a question built on my tongue, her mouth fell against mine and held there until I abandoned whatever I was going to say and tangled my hands in her hair.

It was the Bond’s incessant pounding in my head, not at all appeased by the beautiful woman I had on top of me, that got my mind back around to order.

“Esme,” I said against her lips, getting nowhere. Based on the way she was moving her hips, we weren’t going to have any sort of productive conversation—not that kind of productive, anyway—if she kept this up. “Esme.”

With an adorable little growl, she ripped her mouth away from mine. “What?”

“You do realize we weren’t subtle right?” My hands squeezed her hips, if not to try to maintain some grasp on my own sanity. “We’re gonna have to go explain what happened earlier, and they’ll probably bring this up, too.”

“Oh, like I care. I wasn’t planning on keeping this a secret,” Esme said, running her hands up my chest in a way that made it very, very hard to remember why I was restraining her. She leaned down, lining our noses up together. “Now, shut up and kiss me. We only have thirty minutes and if we don’t make good use of that time, the Bond might make me kill someone for looking at you.”

I’d asked Esme for honesty at the beginning of all this, but I’d clearly only prepared myself to hear the dark, anguished secrets she’d been hiding. This open acceptance of our Bond, of me, was not something I’d contemplated.

Clearly, seeing as I felt like she’d just shot me through the chest with a few simple words.

As shocked as I was, I wasn’t stupid. I knew what I held in my hands. I knew the fact that she was opening herself up to me was a precious gift that I’d be damned if I ruined.

My hand went for the silk tie at her waist, finding it as easy to loosen as I’d thought. “Off,” I said against her mouth, though I was doing most of the work to push the robe off her body and toss it away. She was doing the same to the towel still looped around my waist, pulling it away from me and bringing our bodies flush together once again.

The groan that left me at the feel of her warmth against my cock was louder than I was proud of, but it only seemed to kick Esme’s desperation up higher. One of her hands moved to grip my length, giving it a cursory stroke as she lined us up and sank down on me in one swift motion.

My breath caught in my throat as the feel of her shot through my body. I had half a mind to tell her to take things slow, but she wasn’t asking for slow and I wasn’t about to make her feel cautious when she didn’t need to be.

She was an adult. I’d done my job in preparing her well to take me. Our fucking souls were tied together. I’d seen the little pinch of pain in her expression when I’d first entered her, but that, admittedly, was likely due to my size than anything else.

My only job was to not go too insane and try to keep her trapped her in this room while I wrung her dry from pleasure. It was a single-minded goal in that moment, more important to me than my own heartbeat, to see her shaking with an orgasm.

My thumb found her clit and I used my other hand to tip her hips forward, changing the angle on her. The way Esme’s breath caught in her throat on a whimper was enough to power me through the darkest of nights.