“No,” he snapped. “Stop talking.” He climbed off the bed and disappeared again.
The next time he returned, he held the gold tie.
He obviously wasn’t going to use it to bind my wrists seeing as I was trapped. My eyes. He wants to blindfold you.
Panic laced my blood at the thought of being in the dark again.
“You want me to fuck you, this is how it’s gonna be. You don’t touch me. You don’t see me. You take what I give you and don’t ask for a drop more.”
“I let you restrain me, but I don’t want to be blindfolded.”
Kill chuckled, running his rough fingers down my cheek. “Still thinking you have the power to say no.” Bending over me, he whispered in my ear, “Where you’re concerned, I’ve given the wrong impression. You don’t get to ask me for things. You obey me and hope to God you please me. You’re only here because I want you to be here—but under my fucking terms. Got it?”
He’s lying not only to me, but himself. Yes, I was bound and about to be fucked under his rules. But only because I’d kissed him. Only because I wanted this.
My heart beat harder for a man so deeply entrenched in denial. Could he not even admit to himself that he’d met another woman who could affect him like his Dead Girl? So what if I looked like her? I was different from his past. Different from my past. What was happening between us was exactly that—between us—not between ghosts and memories.
If he needs to believe his fibs, let him.
I needed to make him keep me. I didn’t mind playing his rules in order to do that.
Nodding, I whispered, “Okay. I’ll do what you want.”
Surprise flared his eyes, followed by smoldering lust. “Damn right you will.”
In a fast move, he leaned over and pressed the tie around my vision. His fingers were soft as he secured the blindfold behind my head, blotting out the soft light of the bedroom. Instantly, my other senses went haywire. Prickling with extra sensitivity and heat.
My eyelashes crushed beneath the restriction, and I swallowed my rising panic as he secured the knot at the back of my head. I winced as he tugged accidentally on my hair.
“Why?” I panted. Without vision, my body became a focal point. My breasts were suddenly heavier, my core suddenly wetter. My heart whizzed faster while my breathing slowed with self-preservation.
“You know why.”
I do know why. I just didn’t think it was the reason he thought.
His fingertips trailed down my stomach, following my belly button and the dip of my muscles to my core.
I tensed against the cuffs, my toes curling against the overload of sensation. I burned where he touched; I shivered where he didn’t. I wanted to be consumed.
“The darkness, the blindness. Everything is amplified. Do you feel me?” His breath skated over my skin, making me tremble as my need turned into a beast demanding more.
“Yes,” I moaned as his touch followed the lace of my panties, caressing ever so lightly over my clit. I bowed off the bed as his touch turned ticklish, tracing the inside of my thigh all the way to my knee. “You’re focused entirely on me. I can see how wet you are through your underwear. I can smell how much you want me.”
I moaned as the bed shifted with his weight.
“Your senses overcompensate. You’ll want me more. You feel everything I do to you ten times more. Do you deny it?”
I thrashed as he dragged his touch over my panties again. “No. It’s true.”
“Maybe it will help you remember,” he murmured against my mouth. I arched up, seeking his lips. Desperation filled me for a simple mind-warping kiss.
But he was gone.
“I know how it feels to be robbed of sight. I know the panic as your senses become hyperalert.” His voice was hypnotic and dangerous, drugging me, pushing me deeper into his spell. “Every smell, every motion, every sound. You can’t control it.”
I writhed beneath him, my fingers opening and closing over nothing, craving the ability to touch him and make him suffer as much as I did.
Everything he said was true. I could smell the muskiness of his arousal, and the salty tang of his unique ocean and leather. I could feel every motion of the bed, sense his weight like a physical force above me, and could hear the shallowness of our matching breathing, the distant tick of a clock, and the rush of my racing heartbeats.
I was happy he couldn’t see into my thoughts, because he wouldn’t like what else he was making me feel.
Togetherness.
By cutting off my eyes, he asked my body to reach out and connect. To form conclusions by touch and instinct alone. He forced my brain to unlock things it wasn’t ready to unlock.
The sensation of knowing him. Of recognizing his smell and body all crashed over me until I couldn’t bear it.
Licking my lips nervously, I whispered, “Please, stop torturing me.”
He chuckled. “I’m not torturing you. I’m not even touching you. You’re doing it to yourself. You’re getting wet all on your own. You’re craving something I haven’t even said I’ll give you.”
I moaned in frustration. “Then touch me. Take me. Do something!”
“Calm your breathing. Don’t strain,” he murmured against my ear. My jaw gritted as his fingers hooked around my underwear and pulled them down. I shivered as he freed my legs and the bed wobbled as he fumbled with his boxers.
Somehow, I knew he was naked. Some part of me knew without the aid of sight. I also knew he hovered above me with his hot, hard cock just waiting to claim me.
“Who are you?” he demanded, shattering the rapidly winding anticipation.
The question sent me back whirling back into amnesiac darkness. Instead of straining for an answer I wouldn’t get, I whispered, “I might be the person you need to save your life.”
Kill reared back, his lack of body heat obvious as a chill bit into my nipples. “What makes you think I need fucking saving?” His entire body vibrated with loathing, sending the bed into an anxious wobble.
Tread carefully. Don’t push. Not now. Not yet.
“I don’t. But you do.”
I bowed off the bed as he suddenly raised my hips, positioning my strewn form over his lap. My spread legs snugged against his hips as he angled his cock to my entrance. I’d never been taken like this before.
Not that I would remember.
But the strangeness of being joined only where it was essential made me sad. I’d wanted his weight to smother me. I wanted the joy of experiencing his galloping heart as he thrust into me. But this way, all I felt was the poised invasion of his erection and the unhurried imprisonment of my hips.
I wished I could touch him. Everyone needed touching. Everyone needed a hug now and again. My arms ached to leach some of his angst away.
It wasn’t fair he took so much from me all while granting me nothing. I wanted to know. I wanted to understand if I was insane for feeling such a connection to him or if I was truly listening to my heart.
“The flames of beasts came out to feast. No priest can save the singed deceased,” his voice whispered over my skin.
My heart lurched to a stop.
“What?” I panted, craving his touch but begging to know what he’d said. It tugged at some dark recesses of my mind, rattling the door that remained stubbornly shut.
He was so close, positioning himself deeper between my spread legs. His hands captured my hips, bending over me, bringing body heat and the tickle of breath on my lower belly.
“It’s inked into your side,” he said quietly, as if afraid it would jar something in my mind. I’d already figured out I must’ve been in a fire and survived. It also made sense that I might’ve lost people I loved in the flames.
You littered yourself with tattoos about loss, lust, and heartbreak for a reason.
The evidence was there—just waiting for me to make the correct conclusions.
“What does it mean?” Kill asked, his tension and animosity mysteriously gone.
“I don’t remember.” I sucked in a breath as his fingers moved to my kneecap, his touch tracing ink after ink while his other hand trailed my scars.
I shivered.
His voice came again. “We met in a nightmare, loved in a prayer. We gave everything until both were laid bare.”
I shot awake, my heart thundering with a connection.
Write it down. Quick. I scrambled out of bed, searching for a pen to jot down the verse that’d come to me in my sleep. My notebook grew week by week as snippets fell from the vault my mind had become, raining onto dry dirt where shoots of newfound hope appeared.
My hands shook as I scribbled.
My mind full of a soul mate I’d lost.
The profound sense of love suffocated my heart. I loved someone who wasn’t real. I’d given my heart to the boy in my dreams. What did it all mean?
Was my nightmare the man between my legs who was as inept at solving my puzzle as I was? Could it be possible?
Cruel fate. Cruel love.
No matter the truth, I couldn’t stop my misbehaving heart beating harder for Kill. For Arthur.
He sat up. His touch went to my foot, capturing it, raising it for inspection. I froze as his fingers traced the tiny proverb I’d found hidden on the side of my arch.
My lips moved with his as he said, “I loved and lost. He loved and found. But they had the greatest laugh of all.”