She stroked his jaw with her fingertips and he tensed and slammed his eyes shut as though he were in nerve-racking, toe-curling, bone-churning ecstasy.
Chloe wanted to explode in a million pieces and never be the same again. She felt so very weak with this one concession. It was insane the way she wanted him and she couldn’t stop. Instead she wanted him more with every second she felt him, smelled him, spent here, with him.
Graves devoured her mouth again, kissing her roughly with his tongue, and she trembled as he rocked his cock against her stomach. “Touch me. All of me,” he said in a guttural voice that made her womb ripple hotly and her heart somersault.
“Oh, Graves,” she breathed. A ribbon of tenderness unfurled inside her until she was a mass of quaking emotion.
She slowly felt her way along his hard chest with unsteady hands, glorying in the silken feel of his bare torso, every one of his muscles incredibly defined and snug beneath his tight, gleaming, tanned skin. He groaned feverishly and tongued her mouth hard, pulling her tighter against him.
Chloe could smell herself, the cream in her sex, feel the steady little pulses within her. She squirmed hungrily beneath him, making shallow noises as she kissed him back like a wanton woman, her body screaming empty and desperate to have him inside her.
She gasped between his kisses. “Graves, you feel so good, I’m going to orgasm just touching you.”
He groaned and brought his mouth to her ear; his tongue hot and wet. “Chloe, my God, my first kisses…they weren’t like yours. Jesus.”
He licked the shell of her ear, then her dimple, her jaw, her lips again, his mouth warm wherever it touched, his velvet tongue lapping thirstily at her skin. “I didn’t like the taste of my first women. I couldn’t wash it off my mouth for days,” he murmured. Then he drew back to look at her, and his eyes glowed between his lashes and made her feel as if she’d been swallowed entirely. “But you, sweet Chloe…”
“Tell me how it was,” she said, aching to know more of him. Everything. “Your first times.”
His eyes were violently tender on her face as he caressed her sides with his hands, his strong fingers molding her like clay. “My foster parents had nine children, and I used to share a bed with three. I couldn’t even think with all that noise, I guess I’m just not a people person…All five boys were forced to eat together, bathe together, and it drove me fucking nuts.”
“Somehow I don’t see you in a big family, Graves.”
“Neither did I.” His lips twitched for a moment, then he shook his dark head. “I had to leave there, Chlo. I was so damned desperate to be alone. Not that getting the hell out of there was even an improvement, at first. There were nights when I bunked with alcoholics and drug addicts and prostitutes, and I’d wake up wherever I slept to find whores fondling me. People of all ages got raped when they were drunk or drugged, even while they slept.”
An awful sound tore from within her. “Graves, please don’t tell me you were…!”
“I wasn’t.” He set a kiss on the bridge of her nose. “I watched every damned glass of water I took and made sure it wasn’t spiked. To this day, I still don’t drink alcohol.” He brushed her hair back with a gentle swipe of one hand and a half smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes, that smile, and seemed darkened by his memories. “I slept most of the day so I could be awake at night, when everything was shit around me. Some nights I spent scraping up metal parts from dead electronics, working on my first prototype, and when I felt the need for sex, I found that I could take care of it if I set some limits for my…partners. I wasn’t interested in getting intimate with those whores, Chlo…but by the time I hit fourteen I had needs like everyone else.”
Her throat closed, and she nodded in understanding. While Chloe had been showered in hugs her whole life, swamped in praise, in flowers, with a doting big brother to protect her and a set of loving and giving parents…all granting her a life that would make a Disney princess’s trajectory look easy. Yes, while Chloe had cried over a torn Barbie costume, Graves had been surviving out in the streets, all alone. Unsafe at every moment. On guard even as he slept.
His first time had been with a whore, but he had damned well made sure that Chloe’s first was on a bed of roses he’d made for her. A stab of pain pierced through her, and her eyes stung—a fact that he seemed not to miss.
“Shh. It’s all right, princess. You grow used to it. I never felt sorry for myself,” he whispered. His eyes fell to her lips again, and then his thumb traced the path of his eyes and gently caressed her. “I never wanted intimacy. I never even craved to kiss a woman after those first few times. It became a habit not to, and I saw no reason to change if it worked well for me. But then you happened.”
He framed her face within his large palms, and Chloe couldn’t even speak, was falling in love all over again with him this very moment, in love with this little glimpse of the darkness that had given birth to this man, in love with the look of complete and total lust and need in his eyes, in love with Graves Buchanan.
“Chloe, Jesus, how I crave you…how I fucking crave you.”
He made a low, hungered sound as he bent his head and nuzzled her face, while at the same time, he reached between her legs and pressed the tip of his thumb into her clit. Her legs quaked, and her thighs felt liquid as she parted her knees wider and curled her legs around his hips in wanton invitation. She rubbed his small, dark nipples with her fingertips. “Graves…kiss me again. I crave you like crazy, too.”
His warm breath bathed her face as he reached into her nape and fisted her hair in his hand, and then he gobbled up her mouth with his own, his groan deep and heady, as if he was blissfully lost in what he was doing and never wanted to be found.
She pinched his nipples in the way he’d pinched hers, and when he shuddered under her caresses, tiny spasms of emotion seized her. He kissed her mouth again and again, both of them feverish as they rubbed, groped each other, and all the while he scraped his hardness against her pussy lips.
“I’m going to kiss you all morning, Chloe…all fucking morning. Until your mouth is raw and swollen and you’re begging me to stop.”
She shuddered at his words, the sexual promise in them. Chloe could feel the black hunger in him like something palpable; in the whistle of his breath, the gruffness of his voice as he continued to whisper her name against her mouth, over and over again. Chlo. Sweet Chloe.