his forehead. “This is how you should always be, Chloe.”
“No,” I chimed in a high voice, almost chirping, almost whining.
“Yes,” he countermanded, and he answered my defiance with several quick, firm strums of his thumb over my exposed clitoris. I huffed through them like it was Lamaze training. “I own this, Chloe. I own your desire and your body. I own your climax, when I wish to give it to you.” He angled himself over me, his cock prodding my pussy again, his weight pitched forward on one arm planted beside my shoulder. “And you. I own you. Swear it to me.”
Through my clenched teeth, I grated, “No, you don’t.” I didn’t believe me, but I hoped he did.
His jaw tensed, and those full lips pursed tight at the edges. Adrian let his weight fall forward just an inch, and his member pried at my opening and entered me. “No?” he asked as I yelped, at the bolt of pain I always felt as I first flared wide for his cock, before the relentless pounding of a hard fucking made my inner walls relax around him. “Let’s put that to the test, shall we?”
With his eyes unfocused, and holding his breath, Adrian Knight sank into my depths in one torturously slow, thorough stroke that bottomed him out with a harsh kiss of pressure against my cervix. My breath rushed out of me in a cry that threatened to form his name. It was an incoherent curse in the end.
“Did you ever take him this deep?”
It was a question Adrian had no business asking, and one I resented enjoying. I didn’t even want to admit it to myself, that I thrilled at the edge of jealousy in his increasingly husky voice.
“Was it like it is for us?” he persisted. “Every day, so many times a day, so hard and so fast and so goddamn addictive?”
“Please,” I whined abruptly, because I needed Adrian to move, to start working in and out of me. Because I didn’t want to think about the difference between the way Penn and Adrian used me—and the similarity. Because it was too much to expect of me now, after everything, to make me confess my every shame and need.
“Please? Well that’s some progress.” Adrian rewarded me with several ferocious thrusts that dragged him tip to balls against the trembling walls of my sex. At my apex, a mounting ache became a flickering pulse, then a persistent throb.
“Oh, fuck,” I keened again.
“Language, Chloe, language,” he chided in a fast pant, a suggestion of a smile lighting his face rakishly. “You either start to suck your bottom lip or swear then it’s getting good for you. Did you know that? You wouldn’t want me to think you’re enjoying this.” He pulled the hair and the top of my head and nipped at my parted lips. “What would Penn say if he knew?”
I tried to jerk my head away, begging. “Stop… Stop it, please.”
Knight went still against me, muscles coiling, his body ready to strike. “Stop this?”
“No! No, not that. I just don’t… I can’t… No more t-talk.” No more Penn. No more vows. No more taunting and teasing and drawing this out. I needed Adrian to fuck me, to take me, to spend us both.
But it was heartbreaking when he did. He sensed I was at my limit, my end. He understood. And he began to piston smoothly in and out of me, no more words, no more games. Why? Why did he have to just know like that? What I would have given for this, under any other circumstance… But not like this, haunted by the knowledge that no true tenderness or love lingered behind that consummate Dom skill. He was my Master but not my lover, and I squeezed my eyes closed and cried as he drove himself into me with growing power and passion and need.
Behind my closed eyes, I focused on the maddeningly sexy sound of Adrian’s labored breath, huffing out abruptly at the crux of each thrust, dragged back into his heaving chest through clenched teeth. I memorized the smooth, satiny heat of his stomach and chest against mine, the bruising pressure of his fingertips digging into