Waking Eden (The Eden Series Book 3) (15 page)

R
amsay squeezed
the steering wheel so hard it was a wonder the reinforced plastic didn’t snap. The world sped by around them, Trinity’s Accord not at all prepared for the punishment of the man driving it.

Trinity stared out the passenger’s side window, her profile troubled and strained, her thumb shuttling back and forth along her lower lip.

He’d never wanted to gut a woman before. Not until he’d blasted through Carol Blair’s memories.

Praise The Great One. The things Trinity had endured. No touch. Her father’s death. The vilest emotional abuse dressed up with the pretense of decency and love. Yet, Trinity was still Trinity. Good. Sweet and considerate.

The steering wheel groaned beneath his torturing grip. He turned onto Trinity’s block and took another calming breath. “Tell me about the premonitions.”

Her thumb stilled.

“Surely you can’t think the concept would surprise me,” he said. “Not with the things I’ve shown you in the last twenty-four hours.”

She clasped her hands in her lap. “I wouldn’t say I predict things. I just get a nasty buzz in the back of my head when something important is about to happen.” She glanced up at him, the hurt in her eyes so fierce and sharp it pierced his heart. “Hardly something to mark me as a child of Satan.”

He zipped her car into the driveway and killed the engine. The sudden silence held a tangible weight. “It could be a sign you’re Myren.”

Her lips tightened and she reached for the door handle.

Ramsay pried himself from the car and met her as she hurried up the sidewalk. “Lexi had something similar. Her intuition was strong her whole life. Turns out one of her gifts is emotional empathy.” He stopped her at the apartment complex door. “There aren’t many seers in Eden, but there are a few. Maybe that’s your thing.”

Trinity shrugged him off and swung the door open. “You need to let it go.”

Like histus he would. Why wouldn’t she even consider it? Lexi had fired right up to the idea. Or at least she had after they’d convinced her she wasn’t in a drug-induced coma and imagining the whole thing. Then again, Trinity had spent her life with a mother accusing her of being evil. Maybe Trinity was afraid to accept anything that seemed supernatural as a birthright.

For the time being, he followed her up the outer-staircase. Two wall sconces cast a cool white glow against the foyer’s stock gray paint. Inside her unit, a single light burned above the kitchen sink, the rest of the place sinking into night’s shadows.

Trinity tossed her keys onto the counter, and the clatter of metal on concrete jolted the quiet. She snagged the unfinished bottle of red from the night before and yanked the cork free with unnecessary force.

Seeing her like this, raw and angry, seemed to cross every synapse in his mind and body until all he could process were sharp, needling shocks. “I need to thank you,” he said.

Trinity hesitated mid-reach for a wine glass. “For what?”

“For offering your mom’s memories.” He slipped behind her and gripped her shoulders. The contact calmed him. Not enough to wash the sensations away entirely, but enough his lungs found a solid rhythm. “Your journal may tell us what we need to know about the prophecy.”

She poured two glasses and re-stoppered the bottle. “You don’t have to thank me. I told you I’d help.” Her voice was cold and flat. Distant.

He gave her time to take a good, healthy drink, turned her to face him, and pulled the glass from her hand. “We’ll get your box, Trinity.” He set the wine aside and wrapped her up tight, guiding her head to his chest while he stroked the length of her spine. “Jagger and Ludan are already on their way to the police station. They’ll grab your stuff and meet us back here and no one will be the wiser.”

She shoved his chest, not enough to actually make headway, but enough to meet his eyes. “They can’t do that. You’ve got enough problems with the press.”

So sweet. Always thinking about everyone else. Even the ones who’d abused her soul. “The masking, remember? We’re pretty good with locks too, if we know where they are.” He tapped his temple. “Telekinesis has its benefits.”

He tucked her head so it rested against his sternum. “Trust me, as long as the place isn’t up to Fort Knox standards, it’ll be no big deal. Until then, you and I will hole up here and take some time to recoup.”

“I missed so much,” she whispered against his chest. Her fingers dug into his back, almost desperate. “I did everything she asked. Walked and talked the way she said was right. Lived a life so far removed from the world it’s a wonder anyone knows I exist. And for what?” She looked at him. Pain radiated from her nearly black eyes. “I missed everything.”

He cupped the back of her head, barely couching the need to fist the soft strands. He wanted to roar. Fight. Tear someone or something into tiny bits if it would rip that look off her face. “We’ll make up for it,” he said instead. “All of it.”

Her expression shifted, one second lost and agonized, the next as resolute as a man braced for war. She licked her lips. “I still haven’t had sex.”

The Great One be praised. His cock took note and hardened so fast it was a wonder he kept his feet. “I gathered,” he choked out, his voice apparently impacted by the rush of blood to his dick as well.

She tightened her arms around him, crushing those perfect tits of hers against his chest. “I want to fix that.”

Fuck.

“I want to feel more. Do more.” She gripped his neck and urged him toward her mouth. “Please.”

Her plea fluttered against his lips a second before he caved and kissed her.

God, but he loved her taste, the rich wine on her tongue mixed with her own unique flavor. He pinned her against the countertop, greedy for more, angling her with hands at either side of her head for his assault.

Trinity gasped into his mouth and gripped his shoulders.

Slow, dumbass. She’s had a shit day.

He rested his forehead against hers and fought to calm his breath. If his brother or Ludan saw him now, they’d never let him live it down. The best living strategist for their race, thrown off kilter by a barely-five-foot ray of sunshine.

He stroked her cheekbone. Her jawline. Peppering each stroke with easy kisses.

“You don’t have to be soft with me.”

Oh, histus, yes he did. She’d suffered enough today. Suffered enough her whole life. She deserved to be cherished. Not thrown on the kitchen counter and taken wild. “It’s your first time. You need soft.”

“Is that how you’d be with other women? Soft?”

Ramsay gripped her chin. “I won’t ever be with you the way I am with anyone else. Ever.” The sooner she understood the distinction the better.

Her head jerked back as if he’d slapped her. She shoved his shoulders and wiggled free, then stomped toward her room. “God, I’m an idiot. Not good enough for my mother. Too Goody Two-Shoes for you. Figures.”

He shot across the room so fast the lamp perched on her end table wobbled and the blinds rattled against the window jam. He spun her to face him, the hunger he’d kept in check fighting its way past all his barricades. “I think you misunderstood.”

Trinity took a cautious step back.

Something inside him snarled at her response. He wrestled his instincts and kept his hands to himself. “If you want edgy and raw, I’ll give it to you. I’ll hold you down, fill your ears with every fucking dirty word I can come up with, and push your boundaries until you fly, but there will never be anything between us as empty as what I felt with other women.”

The world around him stopped. The import of his words slammed into his soul as hard as one of Ludan’s right hooks.

Shit.

She’d never be like anyone else. Couldn’t be.

Mine.

His muscles unlocked, every fiber in his body unwinding in a liberating stretch. A wild animal freed from a cage it hadn’t even known existed. Powerful. Fucking invincible.

“You shouldn’t say things like that.” Trinity’s voice shook. “We set boundaries and you’re crossing them. You’re supposed to be teaching me, not toying with my head and my emotions.”

“Boundaries.” He stalked her, every one of his steps forward answered with a backward step of her own, herding her through the living room. “You’re absolutely right. I think we need to clarify.”

The hallway shadows closed around them.

He shifted, steering her into her room without so much as a touch. Another step. Then another, the bed looming behind her. He flicked the small bedside lamp alight with his mind.

“You’re scaring me.” Trinity’s legs met the mattress.

“Do you think I’d hurt you?”

Her mouth opened on a tiny O. “N-no.”

He palmed her nape, massaging her tense muscles. It was either that or wrench her head back and claim her perfect lips. “No, I won’t.” He sampled the column of her neck, licking and sucking a path up along her jawline, freeing the buttons down the front of her prim pink shirt.

“I’ll tell you what I will do.” He pushed the crisply starched shirt off her shoulders and unlatched her matching bra with just a thought. He pulled the sweet lace and silk number free and tossed it aside. The pendant that had drawn them together hung heavy between her breasts, dark filigree against creamy skin. “I’ll devour every glorious inch of your body, and I’ll keep at it until you don’t know where you end and I begin.”

“Ramsay.” She gripped his shoulders and tried to pull him close, her nipples hard and practically begging for his touch.

He nudged her off balance so she fell back onto the bed and made quick work of her tailored brown slacks, sliding them and her panties down her trembling legs and thumbing her prim pumps off in the process. “Scoot back, Sunshine.”

She hesitated, one hand fluttering to rest between her breasts.

“You said you wanted to feel.” He pulled his T-shirt off and threw it to the floor, his muscles twitching with anticipation, craving the contact of her soft, giving body. “Stretch out for me. Show me you’re ready.”

She pushed toward the head of the bed, her arms shaking and her eyes wide with a mix of passion and uncertainty.

The minute her head hit the pillow, he stroked an invisible touch along the inside of her wrists, lifting her arms until they rested at either side of her head, and pinned them in place.

“Ramsay?” So much said with just his name. Apprehension. Innocence. Hunger.

“Shhh.” His cock throbbed, hard and straining with the single-minded focus of sliding home. He mirrored the calming stroke at her wrists along her hips, warming the air and guiding it in a sensual slide against her skin as he shed the rest of his clothes.

Trinity arched into the warm gust. Her eyes slid closed and her legs parted a fraction. Welcoming, yet hesitant.

“Look at me.” He crawled onto the bed and nudged her legs apart with his knees, soothing the inside of her thighs with his hands.

Her eyelids fluttered open and her breath caught. Her gaze locked on his raging erection before snapping to his eyes.

“You wanted to talk boundaries, so let’s talk.” He leaned over her, one hand anchored in the mattress beside her and the other splayed across her belly. “I don’t want any.”

She gasped. “What?”

He cupped her breast and teased the tight skin with his thumb. “I plan to knock down every last resistance and fill every decadent craving you’ve got. I’ll be the one to teach you, the only one, but my fuck buddy days are over.”

Beneath his palm, her heart hammered and her sweet breath fluttered across his face. Breathless. Vulnerable. “I don’t understand.”

His.

“I’m saying I don’t want distance.” He pressed his hips against hers, giving her his weight and rocking his shaft through her wet folds.

So close. Almost home. Exactly where he needed to be. “I want what’s mine.”

* * *

T
rinity’s breath
hitched then froze in her chest. Every inch of her burned, straining for more of his wicked touch, craving the fullness he promised but stopped just short of giving.

He wanted her. Not just sex, but her. Trinity Blair. The bookworm who’d always kept to the corners. The woman who didn’t have a clue how to touch or seduce a man outside of a
Cosmo
article.

“You’re thinking too much.” He nipped her earlobe, the delicious rumble of his voice vibrating in all the right places. He pinched her nipple and a ripple fired through her belly straight to her sex.

Her hips flexed into his and the muscles at her core contracted. God, she wanted him. Every hard inch, fast and deep. “Please, Ramsay.”

“Please, what?” He shifted again, the wide head of his shaft slicking through her wetness, so close to the sweet contact she ached for, then gliding up and teasing her clit. “Please fill you up? Take your sweet pussy and claim you?”

A short squeak eked past her lips. The muscles in her abdomen spasmed and her thighs squeezed his hips, trying to keep him in place, to urge him on…something. Anything to ease the pounding need.

“Say it, Sunshine,” he muttered against her mouth, the sound of his voice as grated and broken as what was left of her thoughts. “Tell me who you belong to, and I’ll give you want you want.”