My Sweetest Agony, page 19
“Mmm…” I instinctually shift back even more, rubbing against him, my ass nestled to his crotch, needing the contact, wanting it, despite how drained I already feel.
His cock instantly hardens, and he nips at my collarbone, making me twitch. “I’m trying to be good here, Ivy. I’m trying to let you sleep.”
I arch my neck and tilt my head toward him, then reach and run my hands through his damp hair. My nails score over his scalp, drawing a low groan from him and a shift of his hips that presses his hard cock between my ass cheeks in a way that reawakens the heat I thought had ebbed after what happened on that canvas. “You told me you weren’t good…”
Cam’s own words from earlier seem to hang between us for a moment before he issues a low, muttered curse and tilts my head back enough to kiss me. His tongue delves into my mouth, warring with mine, my body jolting alive again, and my already wrung-out clit throbbing, wanting more of what he gave me only a short time ago.
Why is it like this between us?
What sort of twisted game has fate been playing to lead me here? Into this man’s arms and bed?
All the questions continue to race through my head as the heat builds with his searing kiss, and he slides his left hand from my stomach down between my legs to cup me gently. His lips flutter across mine. “Are you sure, Ivy?”
The promise is there.
He would stop if I said I didn’t want this.
If I chose to drift off to sleep in his arms with his hard cock straining against me, he would gladly let me and hold me all night.
But that isn’t what I want, despite the exhaustion I felt only moments ago.
Back in his arms like this…I want more.
I nod vehemently, pressing my lips to his hungrily. He tugs my left hip over his, spreading me wide so he can delve his fingers between my legs, my body starting to slicken there with my renewed arousal. Heat licks across my skin, every inch of me already aflame. He skims a finger through my folds, dragging the liquid up across my clit, and I groan, arching back even more.
“Fucking hell…” He mutters the words next to my ear, then reaches between us and adjusts his cock so it rests against me, my wetness coating him as he rubs it back and forth, and his fingers play with my most sensitive spot, drenching him even further.
A desperate little mewl slips from my parted lips.
It feels so fucking good that I don’t want it to end.
But I also need more.
Faster.
He seems to sense my growing frustration and alters the angle of his hips so he can slide the head of his cock inside me. I gasp as he spreads me wide, then shoves up, fully impaling me.
I gasp at the sheer force of his entry, and he rolls, taking me with him onto his back so I’m draped across him. With his arms looped over mine, he pins me in place so he can brace his feet into the mattress and hold me hostage.
Completely at his mercy.
Again.
Only, instead of the almost manic pace of earlier, he thrusts up into me slowly. In long, steady strokes that make me feel every single inch of him in exquisite detail.
So unlike what just happened on the canvas.
That was rough and wild.
Fast and hard.
This is…almost reverent.
Every brush of his lips against my ear. Every breath fluttering across my skin. Every drive of his hips designed to worship me in a way that makes tears burn in my eyes again.
He releases my arms, and I reach back to tangle one hand in his hair as he nuzzles my cheek. My other hand drifts down to the mattress, clutching at the sheets, seeking a way to ground myself when he expertly tries to make me spin out of control with every move he makes.
The roll of his hips. That extra little thrust at the top that catches the head of his cock inside me. The sweep of his tongue and lips and scrape of teeth against my neck and shoulder.
Then he lifts my leg, dragging it up and back, giving himself a better angle and exposing me more as he thrusts up in that same rhythm I’m convinced is a slow form of torture.
I bite my lip to contain the whimper that tries to slip out, and Cam slides his hand across my stomach to the apex of my thighs.
“Tell me how you want it, Ivy. Like this?” He rolls his finger over my clit, and I jerk, clenching down around him. “Slow and steady?” His grin presses to my neck. “Or do you like it fast and hard, like before?”
The whimper falls out.
God, I like it all.
I want it all.
Tonight is truly the first time that I’ve felt alive. The other night, my world was collapsing around me, and what happened between us was tangled in grief, guilt, frustration, and regret.
But not now.
All of that is gone.
All that exists is the feel of his cock filling me, his calloused hands gliding across my skin, and his hot, frantic mouth all over me.
“Answer me, Ivy.” He keeps pumping in that dangerously languid pace that’s more like torture, thrusting up, languidly dragging his fingers across my clit, not giving me what I desperately need…
But God, it feels so good.
His teeth scrape along the column of my neck, his lips following with so much care that the tears finally slip free.
I can’t breathe, let alone speak, to offer any sort of answer.
And he just keeps going, setting a completely unhurried pace, as if he has nothing else to do, nowhere else to be but right here.
Where I want to be.
I don’t want him to move from this exact spot.
Something about being spread out across him like this, feeling every move of his chest, his tightening and flexing abs, his rolling pelvis, his tense legs braced to give him leverage against my own as he works me up, heightens everything.
My skin feels too hot.
Too tight.
Every brush of his fingers across my clit too intense.
The drag of his cock inside my cunt too damn good.
But it never crests.
A languid build that doesn’t seem to lead anywhere but my extended purgatory.
“Cam, please.” My plea comes out as a whimper, the kind of noise that I never like making, that makes me sound so needy, so desperate.
But I am.
For him.
For more.
He takes mercy on me and plants his feet, driving up into me harder, faster, but still completely in control, an artist with his canvas, every stroke deliberately placed, all the tension and harsh lines of his body coiled beneath and around mine. And when he finally takes my clit between his fingers and pinches, twisting it, I come on a strangled cry that echoes off the exposed brick and steel beams of the ceiling.
His own gasp joins the sound as my pussy clenches around him and unleashes something he had managed to restrain until this moment.
Cam’s hips piston harder.
His body tenses as he chases his own release with hammering drives up into me until he finally finds it, lips and teeth clamping down into my collarbone as he comes underneath me.
He drags my head to the side until he can get to my mouth, kissing me in the same rhythm with his tongue as he just did with his cock.
Advance and retreat.
Long and slow as we both try to catch our breath and come down from the high we just experienced.
Finally, I sag fully against him, and he rolls me back onto my side, coming with me, his cock still embedded inside of me. His arms tighten, his body twitching as he nuzzles me, gently dragging his fingers down my arm.
Minutes tick by in comfortable silence, only our heavy breathing filling the air until his chest finally stops heaving against my shoulders.
He kisses my cheek and pulls out, slipping away with a groan.
I roll over to watch him as he climbs from the bed, his semi-hard cock glistening with our releases. He stalks across the studio, buck naked, completely, unabashedly nude, tattoos coming alive as he moves. “Cam? What are you doing?”
He grabs a blank canvas and moves toward the paints lined up along the floor near the one we spent the evening on earlier. “I have to paint you.”
“What?” I push up onto my elbow, my head spinning, still foggy from exhaustion and the pleasure still making my body twitch. “Camden, no.”
The look he tosses over his shoulder at me shuts me up immediately.
He wasn’t asking.
His eyes blaze with the same absolute focus I saw when I first arrived and watched him start painting. This is his muse speaking to him, telling him what to create. And apparently, it’s me.
Almost frantically, he gets what he needs on his palette and brings it over toward the bed, along with the blank canvas and several brushes.
He pauses, stares down at me, and under his assessment, I fall back, allowing my head to hit the pillow.
“Just like that. Don’t move.”
With one leg up, my pussy, still dripping with his release, is fully exposed, as is the rest of me. The corners of his lips curl as he takes me in by the pale moonlight shining in from the row of windows, and he casually moves back a few feet, sets the canvas on the floor, then squats, still fully nude, and starts painting.
Every movement of his hand makes the corded muscles of his forearm and biceps bunch. He uses broad strokes of blacks and whites, then creates three different shades of gray, slicing the bristles across the canvas so fast that I can barely follow it.
His eyes narrow on me. “Don’t move.”
“I’m not.”
The corners of his lips twitch. “You are. You’re trying to peek.”
“Well, it is me…”
He chuckles low, the sound doing something to me that I don’t want to admit as he keeps painting, his gaze flicking between the canvas and me.
Minutes tick by, the time melting away easily, the longer I watch him work.
Because he’s a fucking masterpiece himself.
The way he moves, how easily he creates something so beautiful with seemingly so little effort…
By the time he rests back on his heels and examines the painting, my eyes are drooping, the emotional and physical events of the evening taking their toll.
I don’t even know when he finishes, just that I feel the bed dip and his body align to mine. He drapes his arm across me and tugs me against him, fluttering his lips to my cheek and then my ear.
“Fucking stunning, Ivy. A true masterpiece.”
It’s the last thing I hear before the world starts to darken at the edges, and I finally allow myself to drift off, blissful in the arms of the man whose warning I undoubtedly should have heeded.
25
IVY
I push my breakfast around with my fork—bacon, eggs, and toast that should smell delicious but instead makes acid climb my throat. And I barely even see the food on the plate.
My eyes won’t focus.
My mind only able to concentrate on one thing.
And it sure as hell isn’t eating.
The same questions I somehow managed to lock away last night, long enough to give in to my merciless attraction to Cam, are screaming in my head now. An incessant spiral of guilt, shame, and disbelief over everything that has happened—that I’ve allowed to happen—has left me dizzy and unsettled.
My stomach roils violently, and my eyes burn with tears I’ve been fighting all morning. Since I woke in Cam’s arms and fell back into him so easily and completely, let him take command of my body again, and again, and again, until we finally came up for air—and breakfast.
Which he insisted I needed.
Given the…exertion of the last twelve hours, he’s probably right.
Every muscle is sore in the best way possible. The aches remind me of how utterly Camden consumed me—enough that I was able to forget. Or at least, pretend to for a glorious period of time that eventually had to come to an end.
And it did end.
The moment we stepped out of his building and he lit up that cigarette.
Watching him take that long drag and blow out the smoke was like flipping a switch in my head, reminding me of that first time he warned me away and all the reasons he was right that I was not privy to.
All the deception.
Not just on his part, either.
And that’s what hurts the most.
Drew’s lies—the ones I built our life together on…
“Ivy?” Cam’s voice draws me out of the haze of disbelief, anger, and self-loathing, and I glance up at him across from me in the booth at the diner down the street from his studio. As he watches me, his eyes still hold that same edge of uncertainty that they did when we climbed onto his bike this morning, but they also swim with steely determination. “You need to stop.”
I clear the lump from my throat. “Stop what?”
He raises a dark brow at me, his hand tightening around his mug of shitty coffee sitting next to his empty plate. Because apparently he had absolutely no problem eating this morning, but I can’t seem to bring myself to take more than a few bites, my stomach churning, acid billowing up, along with all the emotions that want to choke me.
And somehow, Cam seems to see all of it through the wall of forced smiles, nods, and idle chit-chat I’ve tried to maintain.
This man knows me, while so much of him is such a mystery that he doesn’t seem inclined to want to share with me.
But he clearly has something to say now as he shifts forward slightly, resting his elbows on the Formica tabletop. “You need to stop second-guessing your entire relationship with Drew.”
I recoil slightly at being so blatantly called out when I haven’t said a word about Drew or anything Cam revealed since we ruined that canvas last night. “That’s not what I’m doing…”
That brow of his stays up in accusation and disbelief. “Isn’t it?”
He holds my gaze, the sharpness of the blue in his like piercing ice straight through my soul. It shreds me, so easily getting down to the core of everything that’s been billowing inside of me since I learned the truth.
All the emotions that want to smother me and bring me back to that horrible place I was in before Cam appeared in my life.
I finally let my fork clatter to the plate, giving up the pretense of actually eating when he clearly knows I’m not. “I just don’t…” Dropping my face into my palms, I rest my elbows on the table and release a long sigh. “I just don’t know how I’m supposed to… I don’t know”—pulling my head back, I throw my hands up with a frustrated noise in my throat—“process any of this.”
Last night and this morning were…a beautiful distraction I let myself drift away in so I wouldn’t have to deal with the hard things. The questions and feelings that I knew would end up making me like this—a quivering mess.
I let myself give in to this attraction to Cam, submitted to whatever this magnetic pull is that keeps bringing me back to him—apparently from the first fucking second we met.
But now, in the bright light of day, sitting across from him, knowing the truth, my whole life looks different.
Every single word that was spoken. Every shared kiss and touch. Everything that happened over the last four years with Drew seems like it was a lie, like it was something else entirely than the life I thought I had lived.
So much of what made my relationship with Drew so special, what I loved so much about it and him, was that he was always so open. So honest with his emotions. And he had the ability to pry out what was bothering someone so they could talk about it and move past those things that held them back.
And now, even that feels like a lie.
When he was keeping something so big from me…
Cam reaches out and grasps my hand, squeezing it gently, and that simple touch sends a little thrill racing through me as every inch of my body remembers that touch.
The way he worshipped me last night.
Not just with his hands.
But with his mouth.
His cock.
Every fiber of my being still buzzes from it.
A relentless, pulsating thrum that seems to rush in my blood and heat me from my core outward to every limb.
Yet all of it, everything we shared, is now tangled up in the lie that started that night. The lie Drew maintained for so long so he could pretend like it hadn’t happened.
Cam brushes his thumb across my knuckles, and I watch his lazy, comforting strokes. “Just because it was me that night doesn’t change anything that happened between you and Drew after it.”
I jerk my head up to look at him. “How can you say that?” My mouth opens and closes a few times as I try to make sense of any of it, but the longer I attempt to find reason in the lies, the harder it becomes to rein in my emotions. “Of course it changes things.”
It changes everything.
Each day we spent together. Each night in bed. Each and every one of them was built on that lie that he perpetuated.
I pull my hand out from under his and shove it back through my hair, unable to concentrate on anything rational when he’s touching me, even so innocently. “He knew, Cam.” A little mirthless laugh floats from my lips. “He fucking knew that something had happened between us out in your mother’s yard, and he never told me. He never came clean and told me it was you. He never told me the truth.” I scan the diner around us to ensure no one is at the tables close by and dip my head closer to him. “We slept together that night.”
Cam flinches slightly at my confession but does his best to try to hide it.
“It was our first time together and…” I squeeze my eyes closed, trying to stop myself from spiraling the way I want to into all the questions, all the lies he must have told. “I mean, was that all because he was trying to…one-up whatever happened between the two of us?” That thought seizes my chest. My breaths come in hard, short pants, my vision blurring. “Was…any of it even fucking real or just some game he had to win with you?”
Pure panic clutches at me.
Threatening to make me lose control of myself in this very public place.
