Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Turns out humans adapt. That’s what we’re good at, and we can adapt at incredible speeds, to circumstances that have no business being adapted to. Because in my case, the alternative is going mad in the kitchen, and going mad in the kitchen doesn’t make the deadlines or get the groceries or let me sleep.
So I drink the coffee and watch the bay and make my sketches of fading fall flowers, and I let the monster who killed dozens of women across this last century, and who knows how many more, pour my second glass of wine, and somewhere around what I think is the ninth or tenth day that we’ve been playing house, I notice I’ve started wanting him again the way I wanted him at the rocks, the way I wanted him before I knew anything at all.
That’s what the accommodation does. It comes back around to wanting. Not just with my body, has never stopped craving, who perhaps only desires him more, but with my heart, too. My poor heart, that has been through so much these last few years, and somehow still wants to take another beating, so to speak.
Which is how I find myself, late on what must be the Tuesday of the second week, putting my pencil down at the kitchen table over a sketch of wolfsbane—or monkshood, but wolfsbane has always sounded more witchy to me—that I haven’t finished drawing in seven days. I walk to the sitting room, where Alasdair is in Effie’s chair with a book of old Gaelic poetry open in his hands.
He doesn’t look up. “You’ve been at the table a long time,” he says, his thumb turning a page. “And the pencil has not moved.”
“How would you know?”
“I know.”
“Don’t be smug.”
“Aye, lass.”
His mouth has done the corner thing again. The book’s still open on his knee, and he isn’t going to lift his eyes from the page until I make him.
I’m going to have to make him.
I cross the room and stop in front of his knees, and he finishes the line at his own pace before he raises his face to mine. His eyes are the pale blue they’re supposed to be, and the look in them is the one I’ve learned over these weeks, the one he gives me when I’ve done a thing he was secretly hoping I’d do.
“Put the book down.”
“What for, foxglove?” he asks, eyes gleaming.
“You know what for.”
Chapter
Twenty-Four
Alasdair sets the book down on the arm of the chair without looking and sits back, folding his hands in his lap, large and pale against his dark trousers. He looks up at me with a careful expression on his face, though I can see the dark hints of desire in the depths of his blue eyes.
“Tell me,” he begs, his voice rougher, raspier.
“I want you to be the thing you are when you’re not being careful with me,” I tell him, and, for a moment, I have to marvel at how confident and brazen I’m being, sexually, anyway. He’s truly unlocked some hidden part of myself that had been dormant for way too long, a side of me I never even knew existed. I suppose it’s hard to know exactly what you want when you spent most of your sexual life being married to a man who didn’t care about your wants in the slightest.
“Aye. Could you be more specific?” he asks, nostrils flaring slightly.
“I want you to take what you want,” I tell him, feeling coy. “I don’t want to be asked. I want you to use me however you want and not check on me. I want it to be the way it was the night you came through the window, but in daylight, and I want you to make me ask for it.” I pause. “And I want you to make it filthy.”
He looks at me a long beat, his lips parting. As always, he’s gone still, nearly frozen, the appearance of a predator about to pounce.
“On your knees, foxglove,” he demands, his voice thick.
I obey before my brain has finished processing the instruction. The hooked rug is hard on my knees. His hands move to his fly, slow and deliberate, the careful, old-fashioned competence he does everything with, and I watch his fingers deftly pull down the zipper, the sound filling the room.
He unbuttons the trousers and pulls himself out. His cock is thick and hard—but seriously, when isn’t it?—and he wraps his hand around the base of himself as he looks down at me on the rug.
“Open your mouth,” he commands quietly.
I open it.
“Wider, lass.”
I do as I’m told.
He slides the head of his cock between my lips and he doesn’t go slow. He pushes in past my teeth, over my tongue, to the back of my throat, and stops there; the size of him fills my mouth until he’s jammed in.