“Harry is loading the luggage. Did you get everything you need?”
“Yeah…no. Um, did you happen to see that little broken cat?”
It had been in shards after Ben’s antics, but I can’t leave it behind. It’s Mom’s, and I know that leaving the house will already be painful enough, but leaving that…
“Yes. It was dust.”
Oh God. Do not cry.
“Um, did, did you…”
“I’ll get you a new one, Ash. Now come, please, we have a lot to do before our home is set up,” he mutters, holding a hand out to me with a hard look that brooks no argument.
I know, instinctively, that the moment I take that hand I am well and truly owned. If I accept him and everything he’s forcing on me, I am as good as signing myself over to him, lock, stock, and barrel.
Looking over the old kitchen where Mom used to cook and tell me stories about her and Wesley’s romance and younger days, I take it all in one last time and stand, placing my hand in his larger one.
His breath rushes out quietly before he grips me and pulls me into his side, leading me out the door, away from the only life I’ve known.
***
“Good morning, love.”
The deep, husky rumble makes me tense, and my eyes fly open when I feel the satiny soft glide of heated skin along my back, coupled with something seriously huge huddled between my ass cheeks.
My mind freezes when I feel warm lips coast along my nape, caressing my skin before his mouth opens and sucks me in. The heat and carnality of it sends shooting tingles to my sex, and I groan, pushing back a beat into his hard shaft.
“Hmm, that’s it, love.”
“What are you doing, Lucian?”
“What does it feel like?” he purrs, stroking his left hand over my navel before dipping the tips into my panties to tickle at the top of my mound.
I can’t answer because, honestly, he doesn’t give me time before that hand descends and dips lower and pauses right over my now throbbing clit. My hips move of their own volition, and soon I’m grinding myself into his hand and breathing so hard I’m lightheaded.
No man has ever touched me before, not like this, and I am as terrified as I am aroused.
“That’s it, love. Take what you need,” he purrs again, moving his hand in tighter to cup my whole sex. Those fingers slice through me and dip in as his palm meets my nub and presses down in maddeningly slow circles.
“Oh, oh, Lucian. What…”
I’ve had and orgasm before—of course I have, I’m human—but what happens when he pushes a finger deep and hits the heel of his palm into me is…so insane.
I explode from the inside out, thrashing and screaming as my sex contracts in brutally blissful waves of pleasure so intense I can’t breathe afterward.
I’m boneless and whacked out from the pleasure when he rolls me over and takes my mouth in his hand, opening me up.
“Don’t move your tongue or lips,” he growls before opening his mouth and clamping it over mine.
This… I can’t even begin to explain what it feels like to be totally at his mercy as he thrusts his tongue into my mouth and licks at me as if he’s dying for the taste.
It’s a little uncomfortable, because, yeah, I’m that girl who thinks about her morning breath, but he doesn’t give me the luxury of protesting, just keeps spearing his tongue into my immobile mouth for the longest time, moaning deep in his throat before pulling back to look down at me.
“You’re mine.”
I don’t respond to that statement, because I honestly don’t know what to say to that. I mean, we’ve just had…I can’t say ‘sex’, but our first sexual encounter, and he’s going all weird and dominant on me, as if the past has no meaning and my feelings are not even on the table.
“Lucian.”
“No. Sorry, love, but its best you hear this now before you get any ideas about where this is going. You and that boy belong to me, now and always.”
“But—”
“No ‘but’. Now get up and get dressed; we have a therapist to see and a school to scope out. Oh, and by the way, I left a gift in your drawer.”
Just like that he’s up and out of bed, his smarmy ass whistling the whole time he’s in the shower and getting dressed. It takes me a little longer to move because what I find in the drawer, well, it’s hard not to cry when a man does something that sweet.
And now how the heck am I supposed to hold onto my grudge when all I want to do is squeal like a pig and attack him with kisses?
He’d gone back to my house—now I know where he’d gone after dropping us off at what I can only describe as a freaking mansion—and dug my mom’s ruined little figurine out of the trash.