Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,97

know happiness anymore, if I ever had at all.

And this…this scene reeked of it.

My body felt wrong, wrong, wrong in this space that smelled of sugar and peaches, of a girl so sweet I felt the ache of it in my molars.

I surged to my feet so violently that my knee crashed into the table and sent the snowman cup crashing to the floor, where it sloshed its contents all over the pristine cream rug. My heartbeat was too loud and muffled in my ears, the air around me pressurized so my body moved too slow.

Automatically, my feet took me down the hall through her girly bedroom with the canopied bed into the bathroom, the door already ajar with steam billowing out like a curled finger beckoning me inside.

I stopped just inside the room, steam thick in the air along with the scent of peaches. My cock was hard from the fragrance alone, but I wasn’t aroused.

For maybe the first time in my life, I was fucking panicked.

And then my eyes found her in the close air, her body all in watercolour pinks and creams behind the foggy glass of the shower door. She was washing innocently, bent away from me to clean her calves, so the shape of her plump ass was an exaggerated curve begging for a firm grip, a short slap.

All I could hear was the shush of the water falling and the harsh rasp of my breath through my lungs. Music played from a little speaker on the basin, but I couldn’t hear the notes. I could only feel the throb of it mimicked in my dick.

I was meant to tell her I was fucking leaving. That I probably wasn’t coming back.

Not ever.

I’d found I was allergic to pink, allergic to peaches, allergic to all things Bea fucking Lafayette.

But then she turned under the spray, eyes closed, mouth parted so water spilled out between her lush pink lips, hands raised to all that slicked back hair as suds raced down her body.

She looked like a statue of a nymph trapped in a fountain.

And suddenly, irrevocably, I needed to taste the water spilling out of her well.

I took the time only to shuck my boots and socks then I was stalking across the floral bathmat and entering the shower behind her. She didn’t hear me over the water in her ears and the music pouring through the steam. I relished the idea of scaring her. That was just the kind of man I was, and it sent acid chewing through my stomach lining.

The boogeyman was in the shower with her, and she didn’t know just how badly I wanted to sink inside her sweet heat and forget every nightmarish thing about myself.

My hand struck out to wrap fingers around her exposed throat.

Instinctively, she struggled.

Instinctively, I held tighter, then pushed her back against the wall past the stream of water. As I moved under it, my clothes waterlogged in an instant, and dirty water circled the drain.

Her eyes were wide, all dark, all terror as they popped open and fixed on me.

I bared my teeth at her, unable to articulate the fierce fear and boiling need churning up like a witch’s cauldron in my gut. She’d cast some kind of spell on me, and as much as I fought it, I couldn’t for the life of me resist.

I watched emotions move across her face, the pinch of fear, the softening of recognition, the high flush spilling from her cheeks to chest as she realized I had her trapped and naked, utterly vulnerable.

Fuck, she was perfect.

She loved to be preyed upon so long as I was the predator gnashing his teeth at her throat.

She loved to be yielded hard in my hand like a weapon and not played softly, tenderly as so many women I’d been with before her.

She was perfect for me.

She loved me.

With a ragged groan that tore up the inside of my chest with rancorous claws, I collapsed in on my impulses and surged against her slight body, plastering every inch of my clothed form to her naked one.

Then I was kissing her.

No, not kissing.

Savaging her mouth with mine. Eating it. Devouring it. Eviscerating it with my tongue, lips, and teeth.

Her pulse went mad against my thumb.

She writhed against my hold, half in lust and half in struggle because I knew, even if she didn’t voice it, she liked to pretend non-consent.

My cock was an angry rod of pulsing flesh trapped in the sodden denim, but