and tuxedo, lit by sparkling lights and by the glow of the chandeliers outside our alcove. There’s no mistaking what’s about to happen, there’s no mistaking what’s coming next, and that’s the point.
“A choice, Morgan,” he repeats softly. “Your choice.”
I don’t have any answers…but maybe I finally have different questions. And that’s a start, if nothing else.
“My choice,” I tell him. “Yes.”
Lorne says nothing, but I feel his satisfaction with my answer like a living thing, pulsing in the air around us.
And then he pierces my body with his own.
He spreads me—stretches me—an upward stroke that steals my breath and then a slow withdrawal that steals it once more. He keeps a hand in my hair and another under my thigh, his jaw going tight as he spears me again. Fully this time, burying himself in my belly like it’s been his all along. Like he’s claiming what he’s owed—four years apart be damned, divorce be damned, my stubborn refusal to submit be damned.
“God, you feel—” His eyes flutter shut for the briefest of seconds, long, sooty eyelashes resting against the edge of his mask.
Then he opens his eyes again and stares at me, all amber heat and dark lust. “You feel good, my little witch.” He drives in again—hard, hard—sending me to my toes. “Fuck. I’ve missed it. Missed this pretty cunt. Missed these green eyes flashing at me, like you can’t decide whether you want to hiss or purr. There’s nothing like fucking you,” he growls as he rams himself inside me once again. “Nothing.”
Now that he’s fit himself to me, now that he’s mapped me anew, he starts going rough. Vicious. Not the rapid pounding of a youth chasing his own pleasure, but the hungry, brutal strokes of a Dominant partner too long denied.
It takes me a minute to sort out the pain from the pleasure, the using from the choosing, and it’s a feeling I can’t describe, except to say that it’s every feeling all at once. It’s every feeling pouring out of my adrenal system and ovaries in a heady cocktail of chemicals, leaching right into my very blood. Soaking my heart.
And then it’s there.
The thing underneath it all, which is something like completion, except it’s not completion necessarily, and neither is it satiety, because I want more and more and more of it and the wanting is part of the feeling too.
It’s more like...serenity. Or ecstasy. No matter how different those two things might seem on the surface, they are twins at the root. They are both a rightness of self, a rightness of the world.
A rightness so deep that even my bones feel right. My cells, my mitochondria.
Everything is curled up in bliss and singing with happiness to be fucked like this. To be Lorne’s again. However briefly.
“You were going to give this to a stranger,” Lorne breathes, biting at my neck as he pumps into me. “You were going to go to a stranger when I was right here, when you have an ex-husband who could give you exactly what you needed.”
The shock of each and every thrust makes it hard to speak. Everything below my navel is a single, searing ache, made hotter and achier by the near-angry way he stabs into me. Still, the truth tumbles out of my mouth. “I was going to pretend it was you,” I admit, my head dropping to his shoulder. “I wanted it to be you, but my pride...”
“I know all about your pride, little witch,” he says, surging up into me and then giving my clit slow, hard grinds. I moan into his tuxedo. “But your pride is one of the things I treasure most about you. I’d never want you to give it up. Just let me inside it with you sometimes.”
“Liar,” I mumble as the pressure behind my clit becomes unbearably wonderful. “I know Dominants. I know you. You want to play with my pride too, not just treasure it.”
I feel him smile against my hair. His stubble scratches the shell of my ear as he agrees, “Yes, my witch. That too.”
And then—incredibly—I’m smiling back. I forgot how good this feels, the smoldering wickedness of him, being drunk on him. How free and playful it was, how exhilarating, how alive it made me. I mean, I am always alive, of course, and dominating can be just as thrilling, just as sweet, but only with him have I also felt this. This...euphoria threaded through with a delicious kind of shame, a fun