thighs. His neck turned at an owlish angle beneath me as hands dug into my hips to open me to him.
His tongue was rough. His lips were smooth.
Sandpaper and silk, working in concert to wrench the sanity from me in controlled undulations and feather light flicks.
I forgot to fight.
Delicious friction caught fire on my flesh. His tongue was unnatural in its control, unyielding in its punishment, unhurried in its exploration. A gasp tore from my throat as the cupped tip began a relentless circle around, but not on, the place that throbbed in time with my heart’s erratic song of want. Fingers trailed the curve of my hips, finding the flesh made slick by the combined efforts of tongue and time.
He split me with the length of his middle finger and fastened his mouth around me in one concerted stroke. My back arched away from the sudden, intense onslaught even as my cry of pleasure echoed through the darkening attic. He gripped my dress, holding me fast, even as he shoved his hand harder against me, driving his finger deeper, lifting me with the force of his thrust. I felt myself contract around him, a shockwave warning of the coming storm. His pace catapulted from hungry to savage, his palm abrading sensitive folds of flesh as hands that had killed on my behalf now sought to cripple me with pleasure.
Unable to move with its own undoing, my body shot the pleasure up my spine where it erupted outward in a ragged scream. Head thrown back, fingers tearing into the mattress, I felt a final searing rush between my thighs.
Chapter 17
“You are going to be the death of me.” Mark stared toward the ceiling overhead, unblinking. His words were neither expression nor hyperbole.
“That’s less than flattering.” It was an effort to force levity into my voice. In our shared silence, I’d been drowning in unwelcome revelations. Crixus had apologized to me. Crixus had told me he loved me. Not Mark. What little comfort those words brought had been torn away with my panties. Stripped from me along with any hope for resolution. Two beings sharing the same space, and occasional pleasure, but nothing more. Worse than that. Combatants with opposing sets of neuroses. The living illustration for the intersection of weakness.
“What do you want from me, Hanna?”
I sat up on the mattress and tucked my knees under the shredded remains of my skirt. “Rhetorically speaking, or is this an actual invitation?”
Mark did not rise, remaining prone as he stared at the ceiling. “Actual invitation.”
Love?
I swatted the word away as quickly as it had arrived.
Love was not something I was willing to ask for.
“I want the whole story. My whole story. Just when I think there’s solid ground to build on, it crumbles, and I learn I have further to fall. I’m tired of falling. I’d rather it was just as bad as it can be. That would be somewhere to start, at least.”
“It’s not just your story, Hanna. It’s my story. The story of people long dead and gone, and others still living in danger. You have no more claim to it than anyone else. You’re not the only one I’ve made promises to.”
“You mean her?” A childish tactic, I knew, and told more than I intended of hurt feelings and jealousy.
Mark sat up. After re-buttoning and buckling his clothes, he grabbed my wrist, hauling me to my feet. “Come on,” he ordered.
“Where are we going?” Digging my heels in to slow the progress would do no good, so I let him tug me over to a corner of the vast attic where he flipped a switch, bathing those dusty environs in a rosy glow. Directly in front of us, a spiral stair climbed up to a loft, where shapes obscured by old sheets gathered like a congregation of ghosts. Dust muted all the objects like the fine sprinkling of snow.
Save for one spot.
“Look,” Mark said, holding an open-palmed hand toward the one sheet puddled on the floor.
I walked past him toward a painting leaning up against the broad silhouette of an armoire or portmanteau.
Not a painting. The painting. I knelt before it, the hush of satin like the sigh of awe I couldn’t properly give voice. As I looked at her face, a moment of déjà vu rushed into my head, rocking me back on my heels. The white neck, the green velvet bodice. The hood circling the auburn waves like a halo born of earth rather than heaven. “Kirpatrick,”