He laughed hard again, the end note cracking in two. “Mo cuishle, you are my heart.”
“I’ll keep it safe,” I pledged as I cried tears for him, the wet disappearing instantly in the shower torrent. “I promise, it will always be safe with me. I don’t care if you’re a killer, if you are scarred physically and mentally by your tragic, brutal past. I love all of you, and no line you could cross would make me change my mind about that, okay?”
When he didn’t respond, his eyes hot and heavy as coals burning in his skull, I shook him. “Okay?”
“Okay,” he agreed impassively, as if it didn’t mean anything when it meant absolutely everything. “Okay, Bea. You keep my heart safe, and I will keep you safe.”
I trembled, fear rushing in as I thought of the serial killer, of his tenacity to strip my life of love so he could step in and plug in the holes with his mad need.
“He’s coming for me,” I whispered. “He wants me to be his.”
“You’re mine,” Priest vowed darkly, dipping down as he squeezed my throat to remind me just how owned I was by him. “If he has to learn that the hard way, he will.”
He kissed me then, sealing my lips with his promise and eating up the sobs from my tongue like they were sweets. Touching his naked flesh, knowing I finally had all of him wrapped up in my limbs, tangled irrevocably in my heart, made me dizzy with want, and when his fingers found my sex, I was already wet.
He grunted. “Good to know this doesn’t disgust you.”
“We all have scars, Priest,” I murmured as he bit into my neck and pumped his thick fingers inside me. “You just wear yours on your skin.”
He moaned into my neck and lifted me easily by the hips to pin me against the shower. When he slid into me to the hilt, I cried out, the throbbing heat of him both settling me and soaring within me simultaneously.
“This is why I fuck you bare,” he explained over a series of short, hard thrusts that made my womb clench. “He beat me so bad, there’s no way anything will ever come of it. But knowing I’m inside you like this, coming in this tight, sweet cunt makes my fuckin’ head spin. Makes me feel like a fuckin’ conqueror, like I was never someone’s victim.”
I cried out in passion and empathy, clutching his hair so tightly it unraveled from the leather hair tie and spilled across my chest as he bit my nipple and held me high to fuck me deeper.
“You’re the angel with the yellow hair that haunted me from the stained-glass,” he confessed before biting hard into my neck, grunting as I spasmed around his driving shaft.
“Yes,” I hissed as his cock hit that spot inside me that made me see spots. “I’ve always been yours, just waiting for you.”
“Don’t believe in fate,” he protested as he tongued my pulse point. “But fuck me, if I don’t believe in you.”
He crushed his mouth to mine, his love searing from my lips down my spine where it exploded into flames between my thighs. I climaxed so hard, my vision went dark, and Priest savagely ate the little breath I could muster from between my lips as he drove harder inside me, chasing his own orgasm.
Moments later, I felt the flood of heat at the entrance to my womb as his dick kicked inside me, triggering a second, smaller climax to roll through me.
Shattered, I hung limp in his arms, head lolling on his strong shoulder as he spent inside me then pinned me against the wall to regain his equilibrium. After a couple of minutes, he pulled away to check my face for trauma.
“How’re you doin’, Little Shadow?” he asked, husky and tired.
I loved knowing I’d made such a strong man grow soft, if only for a moment, if only with me.
“Better,” I confessed as he turned off the water and carried me to the sink where he sat me down to retrieve towels. I watched him walk on that powerful, sensual gait like a predatory animal to the closet where he pulled down two dark towels, completely unselfconscious even barring his myriad of scars to me. They glinted against his pale, freckled skin like artifacts half unearthed in the dust of some ancient ruins. I pledge then to excavate each and every one until those painful stories were unearthed from his memories and laid properly to rest.
When he returned to perfunctorily dry first me, then himself, I stopped him from lifting me up again with a hand to his chest and told him the truth of what he’d done for me. “If you can survive what you went through and end up the most beautiful man I’ve ever known, I know I can survive this. Thank you for giving me that conviction. I know it cost you a lot.”