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The vibrator on his finger was precise. The masked man used it with expert skill. His finger moved in small, deliberate circles. I let out a whimper as I rose and fell.
“Is this what you imagined while you read your book?” he rasped.
I shook my head. “No.”
His arm circled my waist, holding my weight and pushing the toy in a different, more invasive angle.
“Tell me,” he urged. “Tell me what you think about when you read those dirty, filthy, delicious little books.”
“I think—” I choked. Oh, Madonna santa, I didn’t want to talk about this.
He moved the vibrator to the side and pinched my clit between his thumb and the toy. “Tell. Me.”
The spasm of pleasurable pain sent my eyes rolling in the back of my skull. I rocked my hips urgently. The kraken toy inside me was no longer cold. My body had warmed it, claimed it, turned the alien into something that belonged to the landscape of my pleasure. The ridges pulsed against my inner walls with each shallow movement of my hips, and his cock throbbed against my back, and the finger vibrator held its relentless, perfect pressure against my clit.
The midnight voice growled against my ear. “What do you find so attractive about being claimed by a monster, Rose?”
“Escape!” I cried out. “I think about escape.”
Behind me, the living, breathing monster in a mask stilled. “Escape?”
I nodded, desperately thrusting back to reclaim the delicious rhythm. “I want to escape to a place where someone feels as lost as I do. Where they recognize another part of their soul in mine. Where…where their obsession with me isn’t just physical, but it was fated to become a happy ending.”
The masked man flexed his hips and drove his cock against me. If my answer was shocking, he didn’t tell me.
I was too far gone to care.
The orgasm hit and broke something inside me. A dam, a levee, some structure that had been holding back a pressure I hadn’t fully acknowledged. My back arched. My thighs locked. The alien silicone became the fixed point around which everything else contracted.
The man who likened himself to Santa drove me through the pleasure, steering me with skill. The vibrator stayed exactly where it was, and he helped me ride it out, let me grind against his hand while the waves rolled through me in overlapping peaks, each one slightly less intense than the last but no less thorough. My muscles seized. A strangled gasp punched from my lungs.
And then, to my horror, a single tear leaked down my cheek.
As the pleasure ebbed, as my body was reduced to a trembling mess, I silently began to cry. This wasn’t a book. I was drenched in sweat. It gathered along my hairline, between my breasts, and along my back where his chest had been pressed.
“Hush, carina.” He turned off the toy and lifted me from the kraken peen.
I swiped at my eyes, feeling silly, but unable to quell the cathartic, emotional release.
Gathering me in his arms, he moved forward until my back hit the mattress. He didn’t stop reaching as he stretched to turn off the lamp. The thunk of the kraken hitting the floor was followed by the whisper of fabric as he removed the face mask.
“You have escaped, Rose,” the stranger growled, leaning down and pressing his lips against my tears. He kissed them away, one by one.
I hated myself for crying.
But his attention sent my heart fluttering and the tears ending.
“I’m just being silly,” I insisted, trying to sound steadier than I did. “Don’t mind me.”
“No, listen,” he urged, his weight settling over me. “You escaped. You’re in the underworld now.”
That…that was technically true.
“You blew into town like a winter succubus, descending in a cloud of white fury as the blizzard raged around you.” He kissed either side of my throat, letting his words calm my pulse. “Welcome home, little one. Welcome to the underworld.”
I’d done no such thing. If anything, I’d slunk down the road like a mule plodding along. “You’re being dramatic.”
“Am I?”
