A Perfect Storm (33 page)

As the truth of Lucien’s feelings hit Sophie full force, she clung to him, kissing him back with every wonderful, complicated, confusing, perfect emotion exploding inside her. “For your plan”—she dotted kisses all over his harsh face, marking him in her own way—“you needed Emma, Jade, and Cale to touch me the other night, but even though it made you hard”—Lucien’s constant prowling as the others had touched her slid into place for Sophie—“you didn’t like it.”

Lucien’s fingers contracted with an even tighter sting in her hair. “I hated it.” His gruff confession rasped across her lips like a rusty kiss.

Soaring inside, she ran her hands down his back to his buttocks, reveling in learning every inch of his body too. “You don’t share what you consider yours.”

“No, huh-uh.” His eyes lit with feral brightness, he crushed his mouth against hers, whispering savagely, “Never.”

Clinging to him, meeting him thrust for thrust, Sophie told him, “You claimed me the minute I stepped foot on this island.”

“Before that.” Lucien’s confession battered the already thunderous sky. With his forehead pressed to hers and his cock lodged deep in her body, he confessed with grit in his voice, “I’ve considered you mine for years,” and smashed his mouth to hers with a desperation that saturated the very air with even more thick need.

The sweetest stab of welcoming pain jabbed Sophie in her core. Running her fingers up his sides to his face, she pushed him a measure away to be sure he could see her heart shining in her eyes. So he could not miss what he did to her. “Then don’t be afraid to leave your mark.” She tangled her legs in his and shoved her hips up to take his straining cock with force. “I can take it, and more.”

Slashing his lips across hers in response, Lucien moaned just as he took complete ownership of her mouth, stealing her breath and branding her with a bruising kiss. He held her body in place under him and drove his thick length into her with rapid, rough thrusts, stamping his need inside her with every slide of his scorching cock. Sophie cried out with each vigorous pump, a plowing she swore went so deep it touched her womb, and she clawed at Lucien’s back with equal desire, desperate to fuse their bodies somehow even more into one being. She wanted every inch of flesh against flesh she could get and used her feet to get his underwear and jeans the rest of the way down his thighs and legs to his ankles, where he took over and kicked them off his body.

The moment Lucien gained complete mobility, he rolled them until Sophie sat astride his cock. As he reared upright, he wrapped an arm around her waist and arched her backward until the top of her head hit the grass. Her breasts were thrust toward the sky. Her cherry nipples were peaked with eraser-tip sensitivity. Swooping down over her, his gaze claiming hers, he uttered, “You are so fucking beautiful,” just before he took one of her tits into his mouth and sucked voraciously.

Pull after pull of shiver-worthy sensations whipped back and forth between Sophie’s breasts and stuffed-full pussy, stripping away the few tethers she had left holding her to this earth. Lucien’s appetite seemed to have few layers. Once he let himself go, he surged into sex and lovemaking full force, no middle ground, and Sophie had discovered with him that she craved and responded to this highly aggressive and forceful level of need more than she ever had with any other sexual experimentation or encounter in her life.

Lucien licked and bit across the valley of her breasts to latch on to her other nipple, and he continued to torment her other tit with stinging tweaks and tugs. Sophie sank deeper and deeper into a place where her complete, pure pleasure came from Lucien losing himself in his desires and needs. Every time Lucien bit her nipple or suckled or squeezed her breasts, Sophie could not control the accompanying pulsing and fluttering in her cunt. He suddenly nipped just the very tip of her tit, and Sophie instantly jerked and cried out as her sex flared with spasms that rocked all the way through her body.

Lucien grunted and jolted too. With a soft curse, he drew them both upright, and the fire of controlled desire lit his stare and sharpened the lines of his face. “Hold on to me.” He wrapped her arms around his shoulders and her legs around his waist. “Don’t let go.”

Riding his cock like a wanton, unable to stop, Sophie clung to Lucien and lost herself in the blazing passion consuming his eyes. “Won’t.” Writhing all over him, she couldn’t stop kissing him or rubbing her breasts against his chest. “Never.”

Lucien pushed his fingers between their lips, and Sophie immediately sucked them as if it were his cock, hungry for any part of him she could steal for as long as he let her have him. Lucien groaned in response and jammed his dick up into her cunt with driving force just as he swore and ripped his fingers away from her mouth. Before she could cry out, he took her with another deep, openmouthed kiss and changed her protest to a long moan that vibrated the whole way through her.

As Lucien burned his mark into her mouth with his kiss full of dominating ownership, he split her ass cheeks and delved his fingers down to her back entrance. He pushed his blunt fingertip against her hole, and against her lips he whispered, “Take it for me, baby…take it…take it…” and didn’t let up the still-new, strange pressure against her ring until he broke through and eased one long finger deep into her ass.

Sophie gasped at the shock of new penetration even as Lucien brushed his lips against hers, whispering roughly about her hot little hole while moving his digit back and forth within her rear channel
. Oh gosh damn it. Oh my, oh my, oh my
. Extreme discomfort mixed in Sophie’s ass with the tentacles of pleasure already reaching everywhere inside her from everything Lucien had done to her thus far. What he still did. Everything mingled together and created a confusing mixture of exquisite pleasure and fiery pain.
Oh gosh. Oh gosh. Oh gosh
. Lucien slipped his tongue in her mouth, fucking her gently there too. With that slow slide of his tongue along hers and his finger grazing along the walls of her back passage in tandem, a powerful, squeezing response erupted in Sophie’s sex and ass and tore a cry of pleasure through her from way down in her core.

Beneath her, all around her, Lucien groaned and jerked. “Jesus Christ.” Without giving her a moment more to assimilate, Lucien surged his cock deep into Sophie’s pussy at the same time he tucked his finger all the way back into her ass. He latched on to her with a suffocating kiss and set up a punishing pace of drilling his cock into her cunt and his digit into her rear passage. Strains of pain in her little-used ass flared in Sophie’s rectum and around her stretched ring with each rough penetration, but just as fast as discomfort hit, the nearly unbearable pleasure coursing through the rest of her body attacked it and twisted it into an entirely new sensation that didn’t know quite what it wanted to be—something bizarrely uncomfortable yet insanely delicious. The feeling coiled in Sophie a thousand times over and ripped a grunt out of her every time she took Lucien’s double fucking.

Breathing heavily, rocking into her with every pump of his hips, Lucien bit Sophie’s mouth and locked his wildly bright stare on her. “Tell me you like it.” He watched her as he forced a second digit into her throbbing ass.

Her lips parted, and Sophie moaned as she stretched to accept Lucien’s thicker claiming. Fire burned through her tail end, yet at the same time her sex flooded and her clit pulsed out of control.
Yes. Yes
. She bit her lip as her pussy quivered wildly around Lucien’s embedded cock.
Oh my, yes.

With her fingers digging into the slick, firm flesh of Lucien’s back, Sophie shoved down to meet the thrust of his shaft and fingers. As he filled her pussy and ass to the brim, a rough noise escaped her. She promised him, “I love everything you do to me,” and impaled herself on him again.

Unforgiving lines mapped the harsh angles of Lucien’s face. His skin pulled even tauter as he gritted his teeth and then bit off, “You’re killing me.” He grazed his lips over her cheek and down to her mouth, and even more strain took over his frame. “I need to come.”

As the thought of Lucien’s seed filling her hit Sophie where her most secret needs lived, she trembled with unbearable wanting. “Do it.” She squeezed every muscle in her body and held him prisoner deep within her cunt and ass. “Make me feel you all over.”

He slammed his mouth down on hers, locking them together in every way, and shouted an animalistic noise straight into her being. The sound rocked through her just as Lucien shuddered against her. A second later, his buried cock pushed at her pussy walls, and wet heat flooded out of him and into her. He kissed her like a man who would never get a chance again while he drenched her inside with his seed, tagging her as his in a way no other man in Sophie’s life ever had. Or ever would.
I belong to him.

As that truth sank into Sophie as deeply as Lucien’s cum did, she held him to her tightly and came in his arms. Her body clenched in a series of spasms all around him deep inside, stamping his penis into her pussy and fingers into her tender ass.
Please. Yes
. They trembled again, together, as one.

In the aftermath, they remained together, entwined with the mist surrounding them, their breathing the only sound filling the morning sky. Many minutes later—the first time Sophie shivered as the cold seeped in through the warmth of Lucien’s body—Lucien lifted her in his arms, his fingers and cock slipping from her body as he did. He held her to his chest as if she were delicate and precious to him and carried her into the house, still without words. Sophie gave him his silence, sensing he needed it, and let him take the lead.

Lucien carried her into his bedroom and to the bathroom, where he put her down in the shower, stripped her skirt and panties from her waist, tossed them aside, then got in with her and shut the door. After turning on multiple showerheads full-blast—steaming the bathroom and quickly warming her chilled skin with stinging pinpricks of hot water—he washed her hair for her and scrubbed her down, all without speaking. He cleaned himself too, and Sophie didn’t force eye contact, feeling in her core that he might shatter if she pushed him to cut open his soul for a second time in as many hours.

Still quiet after he dried them off with a pair of plush towels, Lucien linked his hand in hers and led her into his bedroom to his wardrobe. He pulled out a white button-down shirt and put it on her, even taking the time to fasten the buttons up to between her breasts. Leaving her there, he then moved to his dresser alone, donned a pair of black sweats without any underwear, and finally braced his weight on the dresser top, exhaling shakily in a way that broke Sophie’s heart. He was so exhausted. From more than the last twenty-four hours or even the last week. She didn’t have to ask to know that he likely hadn’t slept peacefully since his brother’s death.

His head still low, after an agonizing minute, Lucien said, “I’ve hurt you, and I’ve misled you, and I brought you here to destroy you, so I know I have no right to say this, and that by all that is judged by sanity and logic you should have shot me and left me for dead on this island”—his back heaved terribly with his pause, and Sophie covered her mouth to keep from crying out—“but I want you to stay.” He clutched the dresser so hard his fingertips turned white. “I am begging you to stay.” His rough plea cut a jagged line straight through the air to her heart, and Sophie started to move, her body unable ignore his pain a second longer. “With me.”

Sophie slammed into his back, and the hoarse, desperate sound he made when she wrapped her arms around his waist called to her for even more contact. In between pressing kisses to his bare back and lifting onto her toes to graze her lips across his shoulders and nape, she whispered, “Shh, shh. It’s okay. I’m not going anywhere.”

A sob wrenched out of Lucien, and he spun to cling to her just as tightly as she did him. Sophie switched to kissing his chest and throat and continued to soothe him with assurances that she wanted to stay with him, right in his arms.

He took a long moment, but eventually Lucien gathered himself and pressed a kiss to Sophie’s forehead. Holding his lips there as he spoke, he said, “I want to show you something,” and then turned to face the dresser again, this time with her at his side.

He took another deep breath, and Sophie rubbed the small of his back, letting him feel her support without words. Nodding, seemingly to himself more than to her, Lucien opened the middle drawer of his dresser and withdrew a beautiful wood box with an inlay starburst design in different shades of wood. He opened the box and withdrew another one, this one simple, with just an inscription on a brass plate attached to the top.

Caressing his fingertips across the square of metal, Lucien said, “This is my brother, Lysander Joshua Cabot.” He wiped the corner of his eye quickly, not letting a tear fall. “And I really loved him a lot.”

Ah. So his first name wasn’t Josh
. That, as much as whatever machinations Lucien had put into play so long ago, offered an explanation for why Sophie hadn’t been able to find his obituary online.

She leaned her head against his arm and continued to rub her hand against his back. “I’m sure wherever he is—if you believe in heaven, as I do, then I know he’s there—Josh knows how much you love him.” As Sophie studied the nameplate again, her mind flitted through how the others at Ravenstoke had also referred to Lucien’s brother. “Why does everybody call him Josh?”

Lucien chuckled, the noise full of rust. “Josh hated the name Lysander.” He glanced at her, showing a gaze bright with unchecked affection. “He probably hated it as much as I hated Lucien when I was a kid.”

“I love your name,” Sophie shared, looking up at him with a gentle smile.

He curled his hand around the back of her head and dipped down to brush another soft kiss against her forehead. “Thank you. I like it now too. But Josh never grew out of hating Lysander. I can’t recall ever calling him anything other than Josh from probably the time he could talk. He was always just Josh. It suited him…before…before…” Lucien’s Adam’s apple bobbed convulsively. “When my dad was still with us.”