His for a Price

Where she was molten hot, wet and soft, and there was no doubt at all that she wanted him. That this was real. That whatever she might be lying about still, and he was sure she was because she always was, it wasn’t this.

This was real. This was true.

This was finally happening.

Nicodemus stroked his way into her, finding her shockingly tight and incandescent all around his gentle entry. She shuddered against him, and he tried another finger beside the first, twisting his hand so that every time he rocked into her, he pressed hard against that jutting center of her need.

And Mattie went wild.

She thrust against him. Her hips were like lightning and he didn’t want to contain it—he wanted to glory in the storm. He held her mouth to his as she moaned, holding her when she would have pulled back, feeling her tighten everywhere as she melted into his hand. Feeling her shudder and twist, hearing her make the wildest, sweetest noises imaginable, until she choked out something that sounded like his name and catapulted straight over the side of the world—consumed in all that glorious fire while he watched, fierce male satisfaction and that terrible need pouring through him, setting him aflame.

“You are mine, agapi mou,” he told her then, pulling his hand from her clenching heat and shifting her over to her back even as she shook and cried out in his arms. “You have always been mine.”

And then, at last, he slammed his way into her, hard.

He felt the tightness, then the tear as she gave way. Felt her go rigid even as she cried out, and no longer in anything like passion.

Impossible, he thought.

But the sound she’d made was sheer pain, threaded through with shock. Her eyes were dark and glassy, and her hands came up to slam against his chest, and he didn’t think she knew she hit him, much less that hard—

She was a virgin.

CHAPTER EIGHT

IT HURT.

Mattie only realized, as that strange, overstretched fullness went on, as the burning part felt like it might drown her and her thighs felt like someone else’s, with so much of him hard and prodding and huge between them and in her, that she’d convinced herself it wouldn’t. Not after all this time.

Not with him.

Dimly, she realized that he was much too still. That it could only mean that her fantasy of him not even noticing had failed to come true. That he had, indeed, noticed.

And worse, stopped.

“It’s okay,” she said in a bright sort of voice that even she could hear sounded strained and awful and much too loud. “It can only get better. Right?”

She gave an experimental roll of her hips and had to suck in a breath, because it wasn’t better. It was...pierced and heavy and full. Much too full, and so much more physical than she’d imagined.

“Even here, you find a new way to lie to me,” he gritted out, his voice a scrape of sound and painful to her ears. “When I’d have told you it was impossible.”

He did not sound remotely lighthearted or amused, or darkly thrilled, all of which she’d imagined as alternate scenarios to him simply failing to register it at all.

And it still hurt.

“I didn’t lie,” she told him, surprised that she could speak when so many things were happening to her, in her, far too many to process—and yet none that looked anything like what she’d seen online and in all those movies. She even managed to sound faintly offended. “You never asked me if I was a virgin.”

He was still holding himself motionless, stretched there above her, every inch of him managing to bristle somehow, as if she’d betrayed him. She didn’t like the tiny little tremor that moved through her, like something in her agreed.

“How?” He bit it off in a dark voice so filled with storms that Mattie shivered again, and hated that he was right there. That he saw it. The way he saw everything.

“The usual way,” she said, shifting beneath him, trying to find a comfortable way to lie there with a man inside her. “Which mostly involved never doing this.”

She could feel his gaze boring into her, burning her, accusing her.

“You are twenty-eight years old. Twenty-eight. I would sooner expect to see the face of God appear on the side of a dinner plate than a twenty-eight-year-old virgin.”

“It’s not like there’s a law that everyone has to lose their virginity at a certain age.”

“No.” His voice then could have stripped paint. “But there is something called reality. To say nothing of your very public relationships, all conducted in the glare of a thousand cameras.”

“What happens in front of the cameras is theater and misdirection, Nicodemus,” she said hurriedly. “A game. You know that.”