Page 54 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)

“Why, Linnea Kai, are you trying to make me jealous?” I suggested in a low hiss as I got up from my chair and abruptly sat on the edge of hers just beneath her hip.

My hand found her long, elegant neck and wrapped around it just tightly enough to feel the air move through her throat.

“Because I have to warn you, the thought of Sebastian’s rough hands on your lovely skin does nothing but arouse me. ”

She pressed up slightly into my hold on her neck, her pupils blowing wide until her eyes were mostly black. My girl liked to be choked.

My cock throbbed beneath my zipper, choked, too, by the fabric.

It was a good thing I liked a little pain as well.

“If he were here, I would have him get on his knees for you,” I continued almost conversationally as I watched her breasts heave and her legs churn restlessly.

“I would dig my fingers in that thick black hair and press his handsome face to your pretty pussy until you came again and again on his tongue. Until you begged us both to stop because you couldn’t stand to come anymore. Would you like that, sweetheart?”

“Yes,” she hissed, her eyes flying open to meet mine with surprising intensity. “And after I used his mouth, I would want to watch you use it too.”

My hand flexed around her neck reflexively at the thought.

It had been too long since I had the pleasure of sliding into Seb’s talented mouth, but I could still remember the awed, reverent look in his eyes when he took me straight down to the root. As if he wasn’t complete until he was filled up with me.

A rough groan rumbled through my chest.

Linnea grinned at me, a sly, ultra-feminine expression. “I don’t just want the two of you for me, Adam. I want the two of you for each other.”

I thought of Savannah without wanting to, remembering how she had always wanted our dalliances to be about her as the center spoke of the wheel.

My therapist had suggested that she had used my bisexuality as an excuse to divulge her need to be worshipped by younger, attractive men in order to validate her worth.

No matter the reason, her subtle maneuvering had only proved to deepen the roots of my internalized homophobia. I knew it, and struggled with it like Peleus wrestling the ever-changing shape of the goddess Thetis, but I had yet to conquer it.

I was making progress, though, and hearing that Linnea wanted Sebastian for me, too, was a balm I hadn’t known I needed.

I bent forward before I could regulate myself, sealing my mouth to hers.

She tasted of lemonade and Linnea, a potent mix that drugged me.

I ate from her mouth and slid my free hand between her legs where one of her own was playing in the obscene wetness of her folds.

Pressing my fingers over hers, I directed her to touch her clit, playing with it almost roughly.

She keened into my mouth, hips juddering as pleasure seared through her.

When I tore myself away from her sweet mouth, she glistened gold with sweat and sunshine, just shy of naked in a way that somehow was even more erotic than true nudity.

“I am not supposed to touch you,” I growled. “But how am I supposed to resist everything that you are? Even when I close my eyes or turn away from you, I can feel your light like sun on my skin.”

“You don’t have to resist me,” she coaxed, tangling our fingers together tightly and arrowing her hand deeper between her legs so that we could press inside her wet heat in tandem.

She cried out, eyes squeezed shut, as I curled our fingers into her front wall and rubbed.

“You never had to resist either of us. We’re yours, you just have to open your eyes and accept it. ”

“You can’t speak for Sebastian,” I countered, but I didn’t stop touching her, didn’t curb the impulse to dip my head and suck a swollen nipple into my mouth.

“If you let him, he would tell you the same,” she pushed.

I kissed her then to shut her up because I couldn’t stand to think any more about the impossible promise of Sebastian Lombardi, let alone combined with the temptation of Linnea.

At this moment, it was just the two of us.

My future wife and the woman who was beginning to consume my soul.

“Linnea,” I breathed against her damp lips as I cradled her delicate throat in my hand. “For now, let this be about us.”

Her eyes were wide, so soft and tender a violet blue they seemed like crushed flower petals. “Okay,” she breathed. “You and me.”

“Yes,” I said as primal satisfaction roared through me. “You are mine.”

“I signed on the dotted line,” she quipped, but her sassiness was undercut by the churn of her greedy hips grinding against my hand.

In retribution, I tweaked her clit between our fingers, and she shuddered.

“A contract is not enough,” I growled, thrumming her thumb against her clit while our tangled fingers fucked into her obscenely wet cunt. “I would write my name on your skin, bite it into your neck, tattoo it onto your soul so that every inch of you was made mine in a way that would never fade.”

“Not even in three years?” she whispered, even as her eyes started rolling back into her head and her breath hitched.

“Not even when our bodies turned to dust,” I vowed. “Now, come for me, pretty little thing, and show me just how glorious you are when you come apart.”

I squeezed my hand just a little bit tighter around her neck and ground my thumb into her swollen, slippery clit.

Her gasp was thready as it escaped from the pressure in her throat, and her whole body went tight as a wire a moment before she shuddered over into a climax that made her groan and writhe.

I pinned her still with my hands, driving her pleasure higher and higher until she let out a soundless scream and squirted. Riveted by the wet flood of her cum over our hands, I pressed harder against the front wall of her grasping pussy and watched as she drenched herself.

“Fuck,” I cursed hoarsely, so aroused my vision swam. “Such a good girl squirting for me like that. Coming all over our hands like a good little slut.”

“Oh my God, oh my God,” she chanted in a warbled murmur, eyes shut, head arched back into the cushion, legs juddering. “I can’t, I can’t.”

“You can,” I hissed, eeking out the last of her climax with a relentlessness that edged just shy of painful.

I could tell she enjoyed my ruthlessness by the weak moan that trembled through her throat under my grip.

When she lay panting and boneless, I carefully slid our wet hands from her pussy and used the edge of her towel to clean them before gently dabbing the terry cloth over her cum-slick thighs.

I wanted to get on my knees and clean her up properly with my tongue, or better yet, have Sebastian here to do it for me, but years of control kept me from caving in.

She was utterly still as I tended to her but for her heaving chest and the hand she kept loosely circled around my wrist as if she was afraid I would let her go.

Tenderness filled me to the brim, threatening to split the seams of my skin.

More than making her come like that, so hard she was almost afraid of it, I loved that she trusted me to take care of her. It was a vulnerability I found difficult to admit to myself, so it meant all the more to have someone gift it to me.

I stroked her neck with the fingertips of my clean hand and traced up to the shell over her ear and the curve of her cheek. Her eyes fluttered open, slumberous and dark as Italian plums as she regarded me from under her lashes.

“What do I have to say so that we can do that every single day?” she murmured in a ravaged voice.

My own chuckle startled me, and another fierce tide of something warm and bright, like love, surged through. On its heels, fear swiftly followed.

Nothing good had ever come from me falling in love.

Why would it be different now, falling in love with a woman who was contractually obligated to be mine?

It occurred to me with a suddenness that felt like a ham-fist to the chin that I didn’t want to marry Linnea Kai because I had to.

I wanted her to be Linnea Meyers because she wanted to bear my name and make it mean something pure and honest again.

Because she wanted to be my partner and advocate in this life and the next.

Because she adored me, the too old for her curmudgeon with a closet full of skeletons and fears almost as big as the love in his heart.

I wanted her to want to take me on, not because she needed money for Miranda’s care, not because she wanted a career in Hollywood, not because she was a bleeding heart who—God forbid—felt badly for me.

If I were the moon, as Sebastian had so often inferred, I wanted her to be the sun reflecting light and warmth into my cold, dark life. I wanted her to give me the strength to pursue joy again, even if it came with consequences.

Just as I had feared she would from the moment I saw her, Linnea Kai had brought me back to life, and Christ, it was painful, but it was also bloody exhilarating.

Because I had found the will to desire things again.

I had remembered how to dream.

With her, even Sebastian’s impossible universe didn’t seem so out of sight.

I was standing before I realized it, stepping away from her as if backing away from a predator.

“Adam?” she said softly, totally unselfconscious, sprawled naked and cum-soaked on the chaise. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

I swallowed thickly and heard myself speak as if from underwater. “Like what?”

“Like I scare you,” she said softly as she sat up.

Even though she did not reach for me, I could sense she wanted to.

And if she touched me now, when everything I felt was seconds from bursting out beneath my stretched-tight, fragile skin, I didn’t think I would ever be the same again.

I took another step away, cleared my throat, and shoved my hands in the pockets of my linen pants.

“Wanting what you cannot have is terrifying,” I admitted with a smile that felt flat on my face. “Sometimes dreaming hurts.”