A Perfect Storm (32 page)

Too much brightness illuminated Sophie’s gaze, but she didn’t back down. “No, Lucien, I’m not. I’m just looking beneath the many things you’ve told me this week.” She reached out to touch him, but he reared at first contact. Lifting her hands in surrender, she gave him physical space but trapped him in the unwavering confidence of her stare. “You can’t forgive yourself for going away to boarding school and leaving Josh to take the brunt of your stepfather’s twisted beliefs. You told me you should have come home more often and that you should have seen how Josh was changing. You hinted at not knowing what to do when you did get him away and that you battled with indulging him. You don’t really think Royce killed Josh. You think you’re responsible for creating the monster Josh became under your stepfather’s sick tutelage, and then you think you completed the job when you got him under your care and didn’t see quickly enough what he had truly become.”

The layers and layers of guilt, some of it buried so deeply he hadn’t felt it since childhood, punched at Lucien, battering him inside in its demands to get free. “No.” He shook his head with vehemence, fighting against the onslaught of emotions within struggling to take over his sanity.

“Yes.” Sophie took his face in her hands. This time when he tried to wrench away, she held on to him, making him see and feel her words. “Yes.”

The fissure inside cracked through into a full-on breakdown of his foundation, and Lucien fell to his knees. His voice breaking as much as the rest of him, he looked to Sophie, who’d fallen to the wet ground with him. “It should have been me,” he confessed, for the first time facing the truth he’d buried so deeply inside him. “I’m so sorry, Josh.” The once-trapped pain and regret screamed through Lucien’s system on its way out, tearing him to shreds. “I was always stronger. I was older. I could have resisted the conditioning that bastard put Josh through.”

Whispering “No, baby, no,” and tunneling her fingers through his hair to hold his face close, Sophie forced him to stay with her. “This is what is wrong in your thinking. You need to hear yourself speak these thoughts aloud so you can understand that the terrible things you’ve been living with in your head all this time are not correct.” Pausing, she brushed her lips against his over and over again, just letting him feel her; the caring in those soft touches crushed him even more.

After grazing kisses across his cheeks and forehead, she drew back enough to once again lock his stare to hers. “If that man was truly that powerful, and if you’d stayed, he very well might have created two people who lacked the ability to feel; he would have turned you both into his likeness and then released you onto society. Him, Lucien. He did this. Donald. That animal.” Still clutching his head, she jarred him with a firm shake. “Not you. You could not have known. You weren’t to blame for how Josh’s life came to an end any more than Royce was.”

Claws of responsibility within Lucien dug in and mingled themselves with Josh’s face. Neither would release Lucien from their prison. “It is my fault. When I got him away, I sensed there was something wrong with him. I didn’t want to know though, so I told myself he was just selfish and that I was spoiling him too much. I added to his sense of entitlement, and I turned away too many times when I saw little things that I knew weren’t quite right or sane.” Lucien shuddered with the ugly lies Josh had told about Emma in an effort not to claim his part in Owen’s conception.

With her forehead plastered to his, Sophie shook her head. “No. You can’t do that to yourself. I heard Magnus hint that you finally understood about Josh’s problems. You’d started becoming more disciplined and tried to get him help.”

Raspy as hell, Lucien said, “By then it was too late.”

“No.” Sophie untangled her fingers from Lucien’s hair and twined their hands together instead, squeezing with that surprising, sure strength of hers. “You gave him a chance, and he chose not to take it.”

“He wasn’t capable of taking it.” Strident, certain of his blame now, Lucien yanked his hands out of Sophie’s, knowing more than ever he did not deserve her in any way. “The nastiness, the coldness, was in his blood. I should have forced myself to accept what he was sooner and moved to protect him from himself, and others from him, accordingly. Josh couldn’t ever get our stepfather out of his head.”

“But you did not put your stepfather in his head in the first place, Lucien,” Sophie argued, grabbing him again. “You could not save Josh from Donald. That long ago, when it first started, you were just a kid yourself.”

Like oncoming traffic, moments from Lucien’s adolescence started flashing faster and faster, each one battering him anew. “The fucker started out focused on me.” The more Lucien let himself see, the more it sliced him up inside to accept that once he’d left, Josh had become that bastard’s only target. “I should have stayed. If I could have split his attention, it wouldn’t have been so bad for Josh. He would have turned out okay.”

“No.” Shaking her head, Sophie petted his face over and over again. “You can’t know that.”

So certain, his throat raw, Lucien said, “Which means my presence could have made a difference.”

“Or maybe things would have turned out exactly the same,” Sophie shot back. “You have to release this, Lucien.” Tears mingling in with the soft rain, Sophie clung to Lucien, her lips against his. “For your sanity”—her chest heaved, brushing her breasts against him, as if she too struggled to breathe—“you have to let Josh go.”

Lucien parted his lips, but at first nothing could get out through the thickness. Finally, clutching his hands over hers where she held his face, Lucien, so fucking gruff, said, “I can’t.”

“You can.” She cried with him, yet the strength Sophie somehow still infused in her words reached deep inside Lucien and took hold of her piece of his soul with a firm grasp. She looked into his eyes, and swirled within the pure blue of hers was an open invitation to grab hold of her heart too. “You just have to give yourself permission to care about something else more than a lifetime of guilt and revenge.”

His chest paining him to the point of burning, Lucien scraped his lips across Sophie’s and then bit when he needed more. “Right now,” he admitted gutturally, “the only other fucking thing that matters to me in this world is you.”

Sophie pushed Lucien’s hand over her breast and the pounding of her heart. Her gaze steady and true, she said, “Then have me. Right now. Have me.”

A terrible, awful noise full of pain and longing tore through Lucien, and then he crushed his mouth down on Sophie’s in a stealing, needful kiss.

Chapter Fifteen

Lucien kissed Sophie with such aggression he bit and cut her lip, but Sophie didn’t care. His fingers dug into her arm and breast, clutching with so much strength it felt as though he thought she would hurtle over the edge of the cliffs if he let her go. Sophie kissed and held him back with equal need, hoping with everything in her he would absorb how deeply she already cared about him and that it would be enough for him to step out of the shadows haunting his existence.

The mist of the morning fogged the air around them, but the body heat they quickly generated swirled them within an even more humid and cloudy cocoon. Lucien generated the warmth of a furnace, and suddenly even Sophie’s few pieces of clothing felt as if they clung to her body and suffocated her. She wanted only him, as bare as the day God had put him on this earth, blanketing her and keeping out the cold.

Sophie moved to shove Lucien’s sweater off just as he pressed all of his weight into her and lowered her to the ground. Thick, wet grass cushioned her back, but the pure nature of this moment only fueled the hunger in Sophie for this complicated man. He took over the task of removing his sweater, and as he reared over her on his knees to toss the material aside and then go for his jeans, Sophie throbbed between her legs. Roped in sinewy muscles, Lucien stared, and his pale skin glistened like moon-spun silver among the dark storm clouds rumbling as a backdrop to this tumultuous coupling. Dark amber colored Lucien’s eyes, and Sophie shivered with the understanding that debilitating loss, pain, and anger still fueled his need.

Right then Lucien shoved his jeans and underwear down to his hips, and his thick, beautiful erection pushed with full rigidity against his lower belly. “Walk away now.” The raw vulnerability in him ripped through Sophie with the devastation of a tornado. “I do not know how to be gentle anymore.”

Sophie had asked him to bring all that turmoil to her, and nothing, not even the dangerous edge in his gaze, could make her walk away. “I won’t leave you.” Not breaking eye contact, she reached up and ran her hands over his firm stomach and chest, absorbing the blaze heating his flesh and the shudder racking through him. She kept going until she curled her hand around his neck. As she pulled him down to her, she added, “Not ever.”

Releasing a hoarse noise, Lucien swooped down the rest of the way and captured Sophie’s mouth with a rough kiss. Forcing her lips to part with a bruising hold on her jaw, he thrust his tongue inside repeatedly, dominating without any finesse, almost daring her to change her mind and leave him. Instead, Sophie moaned in welcome of the attack and shoved her hands between them, desperate to get rid of her clothes. She needed skin-on-skin contact.

Sophie worked the first button on her shirt, but Lucien shoved his way in and ripped the fabric straight down the middle, sending little mother-of-pearl buttons flying left and right. With one more stinging bite to her lips, Lucien scraped his teeth down her chin and throat, leaving a shivery line of tingles in his wake. He didn’t stop until he parted his lips over one of her breasts and sucked deeply on her tit through the thin fabric of her bra.

Bucking her hips as zinging lines of pleasure wound their way up from her pussy to her nipples, Sophie keened and delved her fingers into Lucien’s wet hair, desperate for more of that suctioning pull on her breast. Moaning against her, taking more of her into his mouth, Lucien ground himself into the V of her thighs, making them both cry out when his rigid cock met the resistance of her panties and skirt.

Lucien uttered “Get those off” in a rough tone while tearing Sophie’s bra apart at the flimsy tie between her breasts.

At the exact same time, Sophie pushed her skirt to her waist and shoved the crotch of her panties to the side, into the crease of her thigh, confessing, “I need to feel you inside me.”

With a ragged sounding curse, Lucien shoved his hand between their bodies. Just as the tip of his penis kissed Sophie’s entrance, he jolted and curled his hand around to cover his cockhead. Harsh lines ruled his already severe face, and his lips thinned to almost nothing. His volatile stare shifted from being locked on Sophie to the glint of a gold foil square that had fallen to the grass.

Visible within the stalks of rain-tipped green was the condom Sophie had tucked into her bra before going to Lucien in his study such a short time ago.

The muscles roping Lucien’s arms strained taut, and when he looked back up to her, a gut-wrenching nakedness brightened the hard chips of canary ice in his eyes. “I have no right”—sandpaper coated each word on its way out—“but I need to feel you bare right now more than I’ve needed anything in my life.”

Magnus had shared with Sophie that, in Lucien’s drive toward revenge, he’d researched her for such a long time that he likely knew her more completely and intimately than she could possibly understand. That knowledge twirled itself in Sophie with the certainty that Lucien kept so much of himself private that he probably hadn’t even engaged in sex in a very long time, let alone ever made himself vulnerable enough to request unprotected sex. Just in looking into Lucien’s eyes, the certainty of her safety, and the very rightness of this moment, wound itself around her core and easily guided her to the only answer she wanted to give.

Sophie moved Lucien’s hand away from his cock and put his fingers against her cheek. Looking up at him, she let him see every ounce of tender and passionate emotion it shouldn’t be possible for her to already feel for him, yet inexplicably somehow did, shining in her eyes. “Then have me,” she said again and this time added, “in whatever way you need me.”

Upon her words, Lucien’s pupils flared, and he crushed his mouth down on Sophie’s. He stole her breath with a bruising kiss and drove his cock into her to the root.

Shouting Lucien’s name as his thick length filled her sex, stretching her walls so wonderfully, Sophie met the aggressive need in Lucien’s kiss and mating with equal fervor, as desperate to merge with him as he was with her. “Lucien…” She twisted her fingers in his hair to hold him close for another kiss and thrust her hips up to meet the hot slide of his cock. “You feel so good.”

In response Lucien bit her lips and then braced his weight on his hands, separating the crush of their bodies. His lips parted as if to speak, but nothing came out. Groaning, he dropped his focus to where they were still connected, and Sophie followed too, watching in tandem as his rigid, reddened length split her nether lips open to claim her body again and again and again. The sight of Lucien’s bare cock filling her so completely, and seeing the topaz in his gaze heat to liquid gold as he locked in on himself taking her, tugged sharper lines of pleasure from Sophie’s core and slickened her cunt even more.
Oh God. Yes
. Sophie’s channel pulsed and clutched at Lucien deeply, beyond her control, and they both jolted and ripped their gazes up to eye contact again.

Her pussy milked him with another strong contraction, and Sophie moaned and parted her thighs for him even wider. “You do this to me, Lucien.” She rocked herself into the stab of his cock, taking him to the base, and they both jerked once more. “You own my pleasure.” Lifting up against him, she rubbed the pointed tips of her nipples against his chest, forcing him to feel what his proximity did to her. “It’s never been like this with anyone else.”

Lucien growled and came down on her with a rough kiss, fire igniting his gaze even brighter. “No one else ever again.” Twisting his hand into her hair with a rough tug, he pinned her to the saturated earth and drilled her with a laser stare. “We watch together, but I own this.” He skimmed his other hand down the side of her body and then veered to between her legs where he had his cock buried in her to the hilt. He ground himself against her sensitized flesh and vowed after another hard kiss, “Nobody touches you again but me.”