Madame X - Wilder Jasinda - Страница 36

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Our kiss is one of starvation, as if we’ve both gone all our lives without this, knowing in our guts we needed it and not having a name for it or a definition of it but now here it is and we cannot live without it another moment. A kiss of utter need.

I writhe, my legs around his waist, my core grinding against his belly. My breasts crushed against his chest.

I could come from the kiss alone, nearly do.

“X . . .” he breathes, and the kiss is broken.

Ding.

I leap down off him, twist away and dart through the doorway, running for my room. Slam my bedroom door behind me. Dive under the covers of my bed.

I tremble.

I weep, so wired with ecstasy I could light a city. Weep, the tears wetting the sheet under my cheek, overwhelmed, overcome. And, as I weep, eyes clenched closed, I see him. Blond hair hanging around his face, and now his hand brushes through it, pushing it back. His eyes are warm, knowing, caressing me with their ultraviolet light. And I feel him, his body around mine, his hands on me, his lips on mine, his tongue inside my mouth. I taste him. Scotch and faint cinnamon.

Tears on my cheeks, chest heaving with a wild disarray of emotions, I am subsumed beneath a wave of need so potent I writhe on my bed, legs scissoring. My dress is hiked up around my hips, and I am covered under my blankets. I am hyperaware of my hand as it steals across my belly and between my legs. Slips under the elastic of my underwear. I lick my lips and taste the salt of tears and the faint impression of scotch and the flavor of Logan’s lips. I feel his mouth on mine. His hands on my backside, caressing, squeezing, exploring with such sweet possessive gentility. And his kiss, how it blazed alight within me, fire in my soul, making me feel more alive than I’ve ever felt.

I touch myself.

I put my fingers to my privates, slip them into my damp heat, and I make myself come, once, hard, immediately upon contact, faster than thought, and I see his eyes, feel his breath, taste his need. I stifle a moan. I writhe against my fingers and pretend they are his, swiping against my clitoris, circling it . . . thus . . . making me come again, harder, and I pretend these are his fingers, two of them, diving deep into my slit, curling up and in, dragging wetness over my clitoris, and they are his fingers, smearing my essence in ever-faster circles until I jackknife under the blankets, huffing wild breaths of hot recycled air, teeth clamped down on my moans of his name.

“Logan . . . Logan . . .” Whispered, desperate.

I have to breathe fresh air. I toss the blankets back to my waist. Wipe at my eyes with my free hand. The one not still caught between my thighs. I’m not crying anymore, but I’m so distraught I don’t know how to even feel it all, how to express it. I could scream. Energy boils inside me, my entire body afire with adrenaline and memory and heat.

I need Logan.

I need him. God, I need him. He makes me feel alive. I am free in him, with him.

I rush to the window. Yes! There he is. Striding across the road, gait loose, easy. Hands in his pockets. He reaches the other side, stops, turns. Looks up. Can he know my window from all the others? It’s but a single rectangle of dim light in a city of incandescence. Am I lost in the glow?

I put a hand to the glass, palm flat, fingers spread next to my forehead touching the cool window. He sees me? He raises a hand, waves, once. And then, oh, then he puts his thumb to the corner of his mouth, as if wiping away a droplet of moisture. A gesture, repeated, mirrored. A sign?

Thirteen stories up, yet he sees me? Is it possible?

He turns away then. Descends the stairs down to the subway. Gone.

I quiver with the memory of his kiss, the aftershocks of my fantasy of his touch.

I’d do anything to make that fantasy reality.

Anything.

I know I will never sleep, so I go to my library and pretend to read, pretend I’m not thinking of him. Pretend I’m not machinating, hoping, dreaming—

Fantasizing of impossibilities.

I fall asleep in my chair in the library, lights on, in the silence, dreaming of blond hair and indigo eyes and lips that take me away from here.

THIRTEEN

I wake, disoriented, stiff.

And then I remember last night, and my fingertips touch my lips. I smile. I stretch, legs straightening away from the chair, spine stiffening and curling backward, arms tensed and trembling, a full-body stretch, feline and luxuriant.

Ding.

I blink in confusion; have I overslept? I am still in my dress from the previous day, hair messed and tangled and partially knotted, makeup smeared. I can feel makeup caked and flaking at my eyes.

The space of time between the arrival of the elevator and my front door smashing open is infinitesimal. A breath of a moment, less even.

A gargantuan black frame fills the doorway of my library. Thomas. “He sees the video from yesterday.” His voice is like the deepest bass note being electronically distorted lower. Impossibly deep, syrupy, and yet somehow smooth as silk.

I am slow, sleepy. “What? Who saw what video?”

Thomas takes three long angry strides toward me, towers over me, and the expression in his eyes is so terrifying I am shocked fully awake. “He see you and that man from the auction. With the yellow hair.”

“Caleb. He saw the tapes?” I’m starting to fathom the problem.

Thomas grips my arms, twists me, propels me toward the front door. “He is a madman. You must go.”

“Go?”

“Or I think you die. He is mad.” Thomas, with his thick African accent, does not mean mad as in angry, I realize. The implication is more frightening than mere anger.

I am barefoot. My shoes from yesterday sit forgotten, between the front door and the library. One, on its side. The other, upside down. I right them with my toes, stuff my feet into them. Shuffle to the door, untangling my hair.

Thomas growls in his chest. “No time for shoes, no time for fixing your pretty hair. GO!”

I let go my hair, take a step toward the door, and stumble out into the hallway, into the elevator, which stands open. The key is still in, twisted to the 13. Thomas, in his tailored Western suit, looks fierce and wild, the whites of his eyes flashing bright, teeth bared. Even in the Western suit, he looks like an ancient Nubian warrior. I can see him with a lion skin, a round shield, and a long spear, dancing in the dust and the baking heat of the African sun.

I blink, and it’s just Thomas again, in a black suit with a white shirt, thin black tie, a curly cord trailing down behind his ear and beneath his collar. His eyes go unfocused for a moment, and he touches a finger to the device in his ear, and then looks at me. He reaches in past me, twists the key up to the PH—penthouse—and then pulls me out of the elevator.

“Down the stairs.” He pushes open what I thought was a fire escape. Locked, equipped with a siren or something.

Just a crash bar and the markings of an emergency exit. No siren wails when I push the door open. A stairwell beyond, grayish-white walls, metal handrails, blue rubber-treaded stairs in a descending square spiral. Shoes in hand now, I run down the stairs. I trip and miss a step, hear Thomas’s voice, can’t make out the words. Lurch and stumble down the steps so fast my breasts jounce painfully. I miss another step as I reach a landing, trip, crash into the wall opposite. Pause to catch my breath, arm, elbow, and hip aching where I smashed into the drywall. Below, I hear a voice.

“She’s coming down the steps.” A male voice, nasal and unfamiliar. “Thomas alerted her, I think. Yes, sir . . . I’m on the way up from floor seven. Alan is on the ground floor. We’ll find her, sir, I promise. Yeah. I’ll update you when we have her. Unharmed, got it. Crystal, sir. Not a scratch.”

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