The Scandal You Started, page 19
He rocked forward. And she couldn’t kiss him or breathe any longer as her mouth went slack.
“Oh, fuck,” she rasped against his lips, choking on a shuddering gasp.
He did it again, nudging at the swollen bud of her clit, and she leaned back into his arm as she struggled to get her vision to focus.
When it did, the feral, drugged glow in Dominic’s dilated eyes sent the sweetest, sharpest zap of thrill right through her clit. She moaned low and long.
Gosh, he was so absurdly gorgeous, with one of her hands gripping the dark locks of his hair, his cheeks flushed a lusty shade of pink, and his kiss-stung lips hanging open as he panted. The renewed wave of desire that crashed through her made her eyes feel feverishly warm.
“I fucking hate you,” she whispered.
She released his shoulder and smacked her palm on the counter behind her. Arching her back, she rolled her hips into his rocking motion, and the sensitive nerves of her sex quaked violently.
Dominic hissed, baring his teeth from one corner in a twisted look of pleasure and pain. “Dammit, Rayna,” he growled and sank over her, pressing his moving hips harder into her.
He rested his parted lips against her forehead as his hand returned to the back of her hair, before he kissed her right brow. Then he kissed the tip of her nose. Just under her eye. The corner of her mouth. Her jaw. And with each open-mouthed peck he placed, he tugged her head further back, until she was staring up at the ceiling full of spotlights.
“What you do to me,” he rasped against her neck, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “You have no idea how I…” He faded off with a moan as he breathed her in.
Rayna shuddered, curling her nails into the solid counter. But then he swiped his tongue over the pulse under her ear and sucked on her skin, and her body vibrated with unspent pleasure.
“Dominic,” she gasped, eyes rolling.
With a groaned sound, he squeezed her waist tighter, forcing her to go immobile and simply take his insistent grinding. His mouth latched on to her skin harder, and he lapped at her buzzing pulse with messy swirls of his tongue.
Rayna’s arm gave out as white pricked at the edges of her vision, but he didn’t let her fall backwards and supported her with his secure hand. She clambered to grip his body anyway, digging her fingers into his bulging bicep and holding his face to her neck, writhing to pull him deeper into her.
“Dominic,” she moaned again when he dragged his teeth over her throbbing skin.
He shivered on a sigh and licked at another spot. “How I have lived all these years without the taste of you, without hearing your sweet moans, I shall never understand.”
He eased lower, arching her further back as he kissed his way down her decolletage.
“Undo the bow, sweetheart. I beg of you,” he purred against the valley between her breasts.
He begged. But it was Rayna who obeyed like a mindless doll.
With one quick tug, the bow keeping her breasts tied within the fabric of her dress unravelled. She shoved the slightly padded sides apart, exposing her chest to him.
Dominic went still and released a raw groan from the back of his throat. His eyes darkened with ferocious need as they rapidly shot over her brown, puckered nipples and the generous weight of each globe.
“Rayna…you are devastating,” was all he said before dipping his head.
She gasped and shuddered as he licked and sucked and rolled each bud between his teeth in turn. Then he sucked harder until she squirmed, toying with her body like he already knew what stoked her pleasure impossibly high.
Or rather, he was eager to learn what she liked, because his piercing eyes only left her face when they fluttered shut and he buried his nose in her soft flesh, basking in the joy of giving. He might have kept going endlessly if she hadn’t grown restless as her nipples throbbed red and her pussy wept for release.
“Enough,” she uttered breathlessly, yanking his head back by the hair.
Dominic panted, watching her through glazed eyes at half-mast like a possessed fiend.
Oh, fuck…
A shiver scattered through her spine. “You—”
He pounced.
Rayna squeaked as the band of his arm around her waist disappeared. She scrambled to grab his shoulder for support, but his hand was already buried in her hair along with the other one. He cradled her in both arms, angling her face right under his, as she held him close.
Rocking his hips, he jerked the head of his cock against her swollen sex, giving her a taste of what his thrusts would have felt like if their clothes hadn’t been between them—if he’d been buried deep inside her.
Hard. Fast. Possessive. Desperate.
He was so fucking desperate for her.
It was stunning. And she was losing her bloody mind.
“What are you doing to me?” she grated, hooking her legs around his hips.
One hand slipped to cradle the side of her face, and he nudged her lips with his thumb. “Nothing short of what you have already done to me,” he rasped, drinking her gasp into his mouth. “You have made me a broken man, Rayna. ”
He kissed her. Or rather, he tried to consume her soul from her mouth, and she had no choice but to enjoy his earnest attempt. She was willing to give it to him as long as he kept moving.
“Say my name,” he pleaded. “Say it, Rayna.” Kiss. “Let me hear the sweet sound of my name on your lips again.” Kiss.
A hundred arrows of bliss stabbed through her belly, and that was all it took.
The pleading of this big, arrogant, irritating, flirtatious man tipped her over the edge.
“Oh, fuck, Dominic,” she choked out before her face twisted, and she threw her head back.
Rayna cried loudly and locked up all around Dominic as an intense orgasm erupted all through her, puncturing her lungs, charring her nerves, shaking her bones.
He growled viciously into her chin, clasping her tightly, as his hips gave several hard jerks, sending little jolts of aftershocks through her belly until he finally sagged over her. She slumped, weak and damp and spent, into the cocoon of his trembling hands.
Panting, gasping silence followed.
Then Dominic shifted, laying the softest kiss to the corner of her lips, and the realisation of what had just happened poured over her like liquid nitrogen.
He must’ve felt her freeze, because he eased back, searching her face with a sleepy, blown stare, his skin covered in a thin sheen. “Sweetheart?”
Fuck…fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
What have I done?
Dominic was a Study. She wasn’t meant to touch him or lust for him.
But she’d kissed him. She’d just dry-humped him to an orgasm.
What the fuck am I doing?
Rayna slipped her hand from his hair and locked both her elbows, ready to shove him away. But he’d already anticipated her move and clutched her close.
“No,” he growled, a pained darkness casting over his brows. “Rayna, no.”
“Let go of me,” she bit out tiredly.
He shook his head. “Not when you gaze upon me in such a way.”
“Now!”
She pushed, and despite the frustration screwing up his face, he stumbled back, releasing her. She immediately threw herself off the counter, teetering as if she were wearing heels rather than trainers on her shaking legs.
Dominic reached for her, but she snatched her arm away and charged for the archway.
“Rayna,” he roared behind her.
But she didn’t stop. She just ran.
Chapter 24
Dominic
Rayna had admitted to thinking about him, to wanting him.
And then she’d left.
She’d kissed him in a way that had scored her name on his soul.
And then she’d left.
She’d reduced him to a trembling, begging, piteous man who’d lost all sense of delicacy and clever seduction with one single touch. She’d made him spend in his trousers as if he were pathetically inexperienced for Neves’s sake.
And then she’d left.
Dominic couldn’t wrap his head around it.
No, that was a lie.
He didn’t wish to accept the clarity she felt after their breathtaking entanglement.
He refused to accept the horrified look of realisation that had cut through the glaze of satiated dizziness in her eyes as if what they’d done was wrong.
Perhaps they were forbidden. Perhaps the consequences were large. But nothing about the way her touch had made him burn from the inside out, nor the way his touch had made her sing, was wrong. Far from it. It couldn’t be when it had felt so natural, like their bodies had known each other in another life and recognised a deeply rooted connection.
Dominic couldn’t allow her to brand that—them—as a mistake.
It had taken an immense amount of reasoning with himself not to follow after Rayna when she’d left him. She wouldn’t have listened—he’d known that much—nonetheless, his heart had thrashed and implored and cried to convince her immediately.
Eventually, when he’d had enough of his emotions on tight leashes, he’d taken the bag and trunk she’d abandoned downstairs and left them outside her bedroom before heading to his own. Though only after he’d spent ten minutes fighting not to knock on her door.
Sleep had eluded him as he’d tossed and turned and thrown himself out of bed to pace repeatedly until finally exhaustion had snuck up on him and silenced his mind.
Come morning, Dominic went swimming in the river as he had been doing for several days, the exercise working to clear his head and tiredness. He returned to the farmhouse with determination and a touch of desperation driving his steps.
He couldn’t give her up now that he knew what she felt like in his arms, wrapped all around him. Not when her caressing fingers had struck his heart right out of his chest and into the palms of her hands. He needed to make her see that nothing about them together was improper.
Though the moment he went below for breakfast after showering and saw Rayna in the kitchen, the grating frustration and agitation that had gripped his heart the previous night smashed his carefully crafted argument like a nail through delicate porcelain.
When she uttered a flat, “Good morning,” with the quickest glance towards him, desperation crashed through him. He wanted to corner her, trap her, cage her in protest against her feigned indifference. It was ten times worse than how she’d been treating him already.
That whining restlessness only heightened as he made their morning coffee and tea while she prepped a fruit salad and sweet poor knights’ toast. And grew further as they ate breakfast in brittle silence. And further as they tidied up without her ever meeting his gaze.
Until Dominic’s teeth hurt with all the words he confined behind them, as much as his muscles ached from how tense he’d stayed to keep himself from reaching for her.
But when she tried to leave out the archway with the excuse of needing to check her emails, the wounded beast within his heart roared. The tattered pieces of how he’d pictured the morning would go scattered from his mind, and he snagged her around the wrist instead.
Rayna stuttered to a stop with a sharp inhale, and her charcoal gaze flew around to his. There was a moment, a second, where that panicked horror of the previous night returned with a flicker. But she blinked, and it was replaced by shuttered hardness.
“Let go,” she said firmly.
He tightened the circle of his fingers. “You cannot ignore me, Rayna.”
“I’m not ignoring you.”
“Then what would you call the way you are behaving at this moment?”
“I’m setting boundaries.”
He grunted sullenly, almost cruelly, by the way she stiffened. “Would you not agree it’s rather too late to set boundaries when you wear the mark of what we did on your neck?”
Rayna’s skin ignited to a hot red, nearly disguising the pink bruise just under her ear where he’d sucked a little too long and hard. Her left arm twitched as if she were fighting not to raise a hand to the mark, but at least the shutters dropped from her irises, exposing a humiliated rage behind them.
Somewhere in Dominic’s mind, he knew angering her wasn’t going to help him win her over. But if anger was the only reaction she’d give him, then he’d take it over no reaction at all.
“I can set boundaries whenever I want, Dominic,” she bit out.
“For what purpose? When last night you were—”
“Last night was a mistake.” The sharp snap of her voice rang through the thick silence.
There it was.
The words that had been printed in her eyes. What he’d feared hearing most.
“It wasn’t,” he muttered hoarsely.
Panic made her lashes give a subtle flutter, but it was enough to make Dominic realise something.
She didn’t think it had been a mistake.
She was trying to convince herself and him that she thought it was.
But she couldn’t persuade him, nor would he let her persuade herself.
“Last night,” he said, softening his tone. “It was what we both wanted.”
He tugged her arm, trying to close the gap between them, but she stepped back on one foot, resisting his pull. “It was a mistake.”
“You kissed me.”
“I was confused.”
“You said you wanted me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
A sharp sting cut across his chest, and he tried to tug her again, but she still weighed back. “You admitted to thinking about me while with him. What else does that mean?”
“Means nothing.”
“You are lying,” he said, his voice growing rough with anguish. “And you may lie to yourself, but you cannot lie to me.” He shifted towards her. “You want me. You kissed me. You gave a part of yourself to me. You cannot now take that back. I will not let you.”
She shook her head, the mute movements rapid and jerky.
“Rayna.” Her name fell from his lips as a frustrated plea. “You do not have to lie. I shan’t tell anyone. I will keep what we have safe.” She reluctantly came half a step towards him when he pulled. “No one other than us has to know. I would do everything to keep us a secret. I would never dare endanger your job at the lab. I can promise you that—”
“You can’t,” she croaked, accusing him of failing already.
“I can. I will. I swear that to you on the Norland name.” He drew her closer yet. “There isn’t anything in this world I would not do for you. Because I care immensely for you—”
“No, you don’t.”
The iciness of her tone sent him reeling back. “What?”
She snapped her wrist out of his slackened grip and created about a pace between them, though it felt more like twenty. “You don’t care about me.” She gulped slowly. “At least…you think you do. But you don’t.”
The temperature of his blood rose, and he curled his hands into fists. “Would you care to explain how I supposedly only think I care for you?”
How dare she? How dare she insinuate his feelings weren’t genuine? And why? For what—
“I was the first woman you met here,” she said, lifting her chin to a stubborn angle. “To you, I was practically naked. You were shocked, and it was confusing, and I was different from what you knew, so how do you know you’re actually attracted to me and not just the idea of a woman from the future?” She shook her head. “It didn’t have to be me. It could’ve been Erin, Izzy, or Tip. But it just happened to be me. Who’s to say you wouldn’t have felt something for them if you’d met them first? Maybe it’s the excitement of discovering something new, and you’re confusing it for attraction? What happens when the excitement fades? What if you find someone else exciting, like Hania? How do you know you won’t—”
“Stop,” Dominic growled.
Boiling blood splattered from the dozens of painful little holes Rayna had made in his heart. But his muscles felt like blocks of ice, covered in dripping trails of molten red, beneath his skin.
“You may kiss me and rebuff me,” he said, low and slow. “You may run from me, pretend you do not want me. You may insult me, curse me, shout at me, hurt me, and deny me.” His voice grew louder and angrier and pained. “But do not ever belittle how I care for you. Ever!”
Rayna stilled, not exactly shrinking into herself when he jerked towards her, but the guilt that twisted her expression caused her to look smaller.
“I am not a child, that I saw you as some fascinating toy, so easily replaced by the next new one waved before my face. Neither am I confusing excitement for attraction.” He paused and threw a hand out. “I have not gazed upon another woman in my time here because I do not care to do so. Because they do not mesmerise me with their strength and beauty and intelligence the way you do. Because even if they had all the qualities you do, I would still want you!”
He shook his head. “I will not deny that you were different, that I was excited at the prospect of becoming acquainted with you. But because it was you, Rayna. Not these other women you name, who I have never met. Not Hania. You.”
He dropped his hand, losing strength in his arm and voice. “For you to even accuse me of that…” He swallowed around the sudden tightness in his throat. “How dare you? How could you? How do you not see my affection for what it truly is when I have not hidden it from you? Or is this merely another way of rejecting me?”
A pained frown twisted Rayna’s brows together. She started to speak, but he continued before she could say another word to bruise him.
“If after last night you still cannot bring yourself to accept you desire me, then reject me once and for all. But do not go so low as to insult how I feel.”
She shifted ever so slightly on her feet, her face crumpling further. And Dominic wanted to let out the hollow chuckle of a bleeding, broken man.
Did she even realise she was gazing upon him as if he were rejecting her, not asking her to reject him—something she claimed she wanted to do?
You lie, sweetheart.
But there was only so much battling Dominic could do before the wounds rendered him unable to fight any longer.
