Stolen: Dante’s Vow by Natasha Knight
Dante
It’s only when I pull out that the reality of what we’ve done, what I’ve done, sinks in. I look down at her, see her soft, relaxed face. I slowly release her legs.
She lies still, spent, but I see her pulse beating at her throat.
“Did I hurt you?” I finally ask, my voice sounding strange, grainy like sand, not my own.
She shakes her head, reaches up a hand to brush hair back from my face. I’m not sure if it’s wet from the shower or sweat.
Relieved, I nod, walk into the bathroom because I need to be away from her for a minute. Away from those eyes. I switch off the still running shower, clean myself off, then hold a washcloth under warm water and carry that and a bath towel back into the bedroom.
She’s lying exactly where I left her, legs dangling off the bed, her expression soft, sleepy. Her body boneless. She blinks as if her eyelids are too heavy, her eyes tracking me as I cross the room. Looking at her like this, lying naked on my bed, makes my cock stir again. I push one leg open, and she doesn’t resist when I clean her. I notice a little smear of pink on her thigh and shift my gaze back up to hers as guilt settles in my gut.
“I did hurt you. You should have said—”
“You didn’t.”
It’s not her words that silence me. More her tone. Different than usual. More sure.
I finish cleaning her then dry off what’s left of the water from the shower. I look at the cuts on her chest, stomach and thighs, then pick up one of her feet to see the cuts on the bottom. I shift my gaze up to hers.
“Why?”
A shadow darkens her eyes, and she looks away momentarily. “I’m sorry,” she finally says.
I raise my eyebrows. “You’re sorry? You’re fucking sorry?”
She swallows, sits up at this change.
I shake my head, walk across the room to my dresser and drag on a pair of sweats before going into the closet to pull out one of my button-down shirts. I hand it to her.
“Put it on.”
She does and I return to the bathroom to get the first aid kit, then backtrack to her. She’s leaning against the headboard buttoning up the shirt.
“Leave it. I need to clean those cuts.”
She looks down, drops her arms. The shirt barely covers her nipples. I think how much I like how she looks in my clothes again. And I think about how she’s a woman now. No longer a girl.
But then I imagine her out on that cliff, steps away from plunging to her death and something inside my chest twists. I take a breath in.
“Why?” I ask again, sitting on the bed and taking her feet on my lap to clean the cuts with alcohol.
“I don’t know. Being back here, in this house, my grandmother, Noah. Lizzie’s room so close. It’s all just…it’s too much. I told you on the boat. I can’t do this. It’s too hard.”
I bandage the worst of the cuts as I process her words and only when I’m finished with both feet do I look at her again. “After all this time, I didn’t find you only to lose you again.”
“If it makes a difference, when I saw you up there, I didn’t want to do it anymore. I didn’t want to die.”
I study her and I don’t think she’s lying. I’m not sure she’s capable of lying. She’s somehow managed to hold on to her innocence. After everything, all those years, she’s still innocent.
That knowledge makes my chest ache. She lived with monsters for so long. Alone and no match for them for too fucking long.
But the thought of almost having lost her returns. It hardens me. “Good. Because if you try anything like that again and I will never forgive you. Do you understand me?”
Her neck and cheeks flush red, eyes growing wide and a little frightened.
Good. I want her scared of this at least. I raise my eyebrows and she finally nods.
“Lie down. Let me look at those.”
She obeys wordlessly and I open the shirt. My dick is hard again as I lay her out, taking in her perfectly round breasts, puckered nipples. I want to take one in my mouth. Suck it. Bite it. Make her come again. Take my time and hear her call out my name when she does.
It takes all I have to shift my gaze away, to clean the cuts on her stomach, chest and thighs. They’re not as bad as her feet, so when I’m finished, I set the first-aid kit aside and look at her.
Her eyes move from my face to my bare chest, lower. I wonder what she thinks when she sees the scars. The patch covering the place my eye used to be.
“I came,” she says when she meets my gaze again.
“I know.”
“No, I mean, I’ve never come. Before you.”
“What?”
Her cheeks go red again. “I’ve never had an orgasm.”
I guess I hadn’t thought of this. I remember what Petrov said but I’m sure he was lying, trying to get under my skin. But never before?
“Not even when you touch yourself?”
“I don’t.”
I am speechless.
“I didn’t want to. Not after—” she stops abruptly and her expression darkens, some of that anxiety creeping back into her face.
“Open your legs,” I tell her, wanting that softness back. Never wanting to see her anxious or afraid again. “Open them for me. I want to see you.”
Without shifting her gaze, she spreads them open.
I move between them, look at her. I lean toward her to kiss her, taking my time, tasting her. Her pupils are dilated when I draw back, so I bend to take a nipple into my mouth. It hardens instantly and I tease it, suck and nibble it before repeating on the other side. I’m hard as I straighten, spread her legs wider and look at the pretty pink lips of her sex.
Leaning down I smell her arousal. I close my mouth over her sex, licking the length of her, clit to ass and back. I do it two more times and when she lets out a moan, I close my mouth over her clit and suck hard. It’s moments before she’s bucking beneath me again, coming on my tongue. Her fingers are woven into my hair as she grinds herself against my face. I cup her ass cheeks, pull her open, lick her from clit to ass again, then start all over. Devouring her, my dick so fucking hard it hurts.
I want to take her again, but I can’t. I’d hurt her. She’s tight and I’m not small. The one thing I do not want to do is hurt her. So, I tug her to the very edge of the bed and push my sweats down just enough to fist my cock. She watches in fascination as I rub it between her folds, moaning a deep, throaty moan as I smear her come over myself. Her eyes lock on my dick as I pump hard and come all over her tits, her stomach, her pussy, wanting to cover her with my scent like some animal. As if marking her as mine will ward off the evil in her life.
But that’s not what I’m thinking about as I shudder with orgasm. It’s not that when I tuck myself away and lean down to kiss her again. To take her offered tongue in my mouth. I’m thinking about something else. The one thing that is the only thing. The only way forward. And it’s so clear. So fucking obvious. Like it was always meant to be. Like we were always meant to be.