Chapter 33: Forbidden Knowledge
The candle flame guttered, casting a frantic dance of shadows across the portraits of forgotten lovers. The air, thick with jasmine and sex, suddenly crackled with a new, sharper energy.
Lilly’s teeth remained a sharp pressure on the ridge of Eris’s collarbone, a claiming bite that held neither pain nor plea. It was a punctuation mark. Her hand, which had been tracing the line of his hip, slid down with deliberate purpose. Her fingers closed around the sac of his balls, not caressing, but squeezing with a firm, testing roughness that made the breath stutter in his lungs.
He went utterly still beneath her, a predator recognizing a shift in the wind.
“I came across some very naughty spells,” she purred against his skin, her breath hot. Her voice was sweet syrup laced with iron filings. “In one of those books in the Map Room. The ones with the shifting vines on the covers.”
Before he could form a question, a retort, a command—a coil of shimmering, amber-tinted energy, the color of Autumn at its most volatile, snapped from her palm. It wrapped around his left wrist with the swiftness of a striking adder, yanking his arm up and over his head. A second coil followed, catching his right wrist, pulling it to join the left against the carved mahogany headboard. The magic solidified into bonds that looked like braided, living hawthorn, thornless but unyielding.
Eris’s eyes, wide for a fraction of a second, narrowed into slits of molten emerald. He tested the bonds, a single, powerful tug that made the wood groan. They held. A muscle ticked in his jaw.
“Lilly.” Her name was a low warning, a rumble of distant thunder.
She ignored it. With a fluid, confident movement, she shifted her body, rising from his lap where she’d been poised. She didn’t go far. She kneeled over his chest, then sank down, straddling his face. The heat of her, the slick evidence of her own arousal from their earlier, frantic coupling, hovered just above his mouth.
Her hands braced on the headboard on either side of his restrained arms. She looked down the length of their bodies, her blonde hair a messy curtain, her blue eyes dark with challenge and molten desire.
“Let’s see how long you can last,” she whispered, her voice dropping to a husky register that vibrated through his very bones, “without touching me.”
Then she lowered herself, grinding her dripping cunt against his mouth in one slow, filthy, overwhelming slide.
The sensation was a bolt of lightning to his system. The taste of her—musky, sweet, hers—flooded his senses. His body jerked, a primal instinct to seize control, but the magical bonds held firm. A guttural sound, trapped between a curse and a groan, vibrated against her folds.
Lilly moaned, her head falling back. “That’s it,” she breathed, beginning to move. Not a gentle rocking, but a deliberate, grinding rhythm, using his mouth, his nose, the planes of his face as her personal toy. Each downward press smeared her wetness, each lift denied him. “Use that pretty mouth for something other than giving orders.”
His response was not submission. It was a counter-attack.
If he could not use his hands, he would use his tongue, his teeth, the entire force of his will. His tongue lashed out, a broad, rough stroke that speared directly into her core. He didn’t tease. He ravished. He ate at her with a focused, brutal intensity, his lips sealing around her clit, sucking hard, his tongue fucking into her in sharp, relentless strokes that matched the tempo of her grinding.
Lilly’s composure shattered into a cry. “Fuck! Eris!” Her fingers clenched on the headboard, her hips losing their controlled rhythm, beginning to buck against his face. The binding spells shimmered, a faint pulse of amber light echoing the frantic beat of her heart.
He pulled back just enough to growl, the words muffled against her swollen flesh. “You wanted naughty spells, darling. This is the consequence.” He devoured her again, his tongue circling and pressing, learning every sensitive spot anew in this position of her enforced dominance. He could feel the tight coil of her orgasm building, the tremors in her thighs.
“I’m not—I’m not coming yet,” she panted, trying to regain control, to slow the frantic ride. “You have to earn it.”
He laughed, a dark, wet sound against her. “I am.” He redoubled his efforts, his nose nudging her clit as his tongue plunged deep. He was orchestrating her undoing with a merciless precision, his own hardness straining painfully against her calf where it rested beside him.
Her protests became incoherent whimpers. The magic binding his wrists flickered more violently, fueled by her diminishing concentration. “Oh gods… oh, right there, don’t stop, don’t you dare stop—”
He didn’t. He drove her over the edge with a final, sucking kiss. Her scream was raw, unfiltered, shaking the candle flame. Her body convulsed above him, her cunt clenching around nothing, spilling wet heat against his tongue and chin. The hawthorn bonds shattered into a shower of harmless, glittering dust.
His hands were free.
Before the last tremor had left her thighs, his arms shot out. One hand fisted in her hair, dragging her mouth down to his in a kiss that tasted overwhelmingly of her climax. The other hand gripped her ass, fingers digging into the soft flesh, shifting her weight effortlessly.
In one fluid, powerful motion, he rolled them over. The world spun. Now she was pinned beneath him, the carved posts of the bed framing her flushed, stunned face. His cock, rock-hard and leaking, pressed against her inner thigh.
He stared down at her, his breath ragged, his face glistening. His green eyes held a ferocious triumph, a wildness she had only rarely seen unchained. “My turn,” he said, the words a graveled promise.
He didn’t guide himself into her. He notched the head at her entrance and slammed home in one devastating thrust.
The air left her lungs in a punched-out sob. The fullness was staggering, a claim that went deeper than flesh. He didn’t wait for her to adjust. He set a punishing pace from the first moment, each drive of his hips jolting her up the bed, her shoulders pressing into the pillows.
“You bind me?” he gritted out, the control in his voice fractured, leaving only raw feeling. “You use me?” He pulled almost all the way out and slammed back in, making her see stars. “This is what happens.”
She could only wrap her legs around his waist, her nails scoring down his back, meeting him thrust for thrust. The over-sensitivity from her climax was morphing into a new, sharper need. “Yes,” she gasped. “Fuck, yes. Do it. Show me.”