Tease Me (Teased and Broken Book 1) (11 page)

“Come on, I want to show you something.” He bobbed in the water, his head just visible, as his dark green eyes invited me to fuck him immediately.
 

I was beside myself to get his mouth on mine again, so I slid into the water after him, and surprised him when I blew him a kiss, slipped beneath the surface of the warm sparkling red warm depths, and shot toward him like a rather clumsy, drunk dart. I found his muscular legs parted, crouched before me, and I exploded out of the water and splashed him playfully.

His mouth opened and closed in shock, water dripping down his face, dark brows raising in outrage.
 

I splashed him some more.

He did not splash me back.

Hmmmm, Mr. Serious, I mused, and instead knelt between his parted thighs and pressed my body against his, my arms seizing his neck roughly, and pulling his mouth down to mine, closed as it was in a firm, uncompromising line. The moment my lips touched his, I felt him relax, and give himself over to the kiss. Surrender. It tasted good on him.
 

His powerful thighs closed around my body, pinning me against him. I felt my hips slam urgently against his as I rubbed myself over his thickening shaft, feeling my pussy twitch and pulse for him to fill me. His hands moved to my ass and gripped hard, fingers digging right into the flesh, kneading and pulling. Pleasure and pain collided, and I liked it. I was literally going to have bruises if I survived the night with Thornton Darko. Meanwhile, his kiss was nothing like his touch; it was actually the sweetest caress, like silk brushing against my lips. I wanted more. I wanted the hard, urgent, hungry kisses we had enjoyed at the bar, but his tongue with the ring that had so maddened my pussy before, reverently traced the inside of my mouth and pressed gently to my tongue. This was so unlike him. I peeked at him, and felt myself pull back from him, then gave him a shy smile.
 

That tongue with the flash of a ring was running over his lips as he considered me. “What am I going to do to you?”
 

“I can think of a few things,” I sighed, and reached behind me, taking one of his hands on my ass and moving it to the front. “You started something, remember?”

“How could I forget? I want to lick you out. You were getting so wet– I was going to make a meal out of you,” Thorn poked his tongue out at me through a V in his fingers.

Oh,
now
he wants to be playful.
 

I laughed, but felt my bravado falter; the thought he had put in my head pushed a wave of bliss right down to the tips of my toes. I didn’t want to beg.

“You’re blushing. It looks so pretty.” His hand pressed the side of my face. “You would like that, though?” he smirked. “If I ate your pussy?”

“Yes,” I whispered. God, I was pathetic. “I would like that very much.”

His hands fell from me and he pushed me away from him roughly.

I spluttered when I fell backwards in the water, and choked on some of it.

He was swimming away from me.

Damn him. Not this again! Frustrated, I shot after him, and was within a breath of catching him, but he was already lifting his magnificent body from the water and sauntering out onto the moonlit beach.
 

I had to admit, the rear view was damn fine. I hesitated, just allowing my perverted stare to drink him in. His physicality, his round muscular ass pressing against the wet black briefs, that crazy muscular body, his formidable height, and that back – I hadn’t noticed the scars there before. What the fuck? But there they were, a mess of fine faded white and pinks lines.
 

He must have sensed me watching him, for he threw a questioning look over his inked shoulder. “Are you coming?” I hoped he didn’t see that I had been cringing at the the canvas of pain his otherwise beautiful back resembled.
 

I rose from the water and stepped right up to him, forcing a smile instead. “Not yet.”

“Is that so?” His dark green eyes flared with warmth and amusement. “My mouth can change that.”

I was threatened and aroused all at once.

Thirteen

Later, Thorn and I sat beside each other, a huge cashmere black blanket wrapped about us, before a crackling, well-contained, perfectly non-insane fire, with the surf pounding the wet stretch of sand before us. We fed each other the delicious Mexican tapas one of his many willing dutiful minions had thoughtfully left us. A nice impromptu picnic. We were enjoying a rather decadent bottle of red wine, but I noticed a strange emerald decanter with black glittering liquid inside – it sat innocently enough propped against the picnic basket with two pewter goblets. It looked badass. It looked like the drink of a death metal rocker.
 

As Thorn’s mouth took a miniature chicken enchilada from me, his warm lips sliding momentarily over my fingers, and sending a riot to my already rioting pussy, I asked, “what did you want to show me?”

He chewed thoughtfully, snuggling closer to me, wrapping an arm around my shoulder, and staring deep into my eyes. He swallowed. “You’ll probably think me strange,” he admitted.

I rolled my eyes, managing to stuff the laughter that threatened back inside of me. “Of course not.” I silently congratulated myself for keeping my voice even, and not laughing in his face. Because strange and Thorn were intimately acquainted, and that ship had sailed long ago. But it was cute that he was worried about me thinking of him in that way. Because really, wasn’t it he who so often said that he didn’t give a fuck what people thought about him? I watched him expectantly. “Why would I think that?”

“I want to take you to see my family,” he said quietly, his voice trembling slightly.

Nope. Not strange at all. Family dead, yes, but seeing them - not strange.

“Aren’t they buried some where on your grounds?” I remembered that not far from here, the act of mass suicide had occurred, and I was pretty sure Thorn owned the small forest reserve half the town-folk wiped out from the ‘sick drink’ had been buried in.
 

He nodded and rose, and then I screamed when he stepped into the flames licking at the driftwood, kicking them out with his bare feet.
 

“Thorn!”
 

He shrugged and sat back down, pulling out the strange emerald decanter with the two goblets.
 

“I meant really
see
them.” He poked his finger amongst the charred remains of driftwood that had been only moments before being devoured by flame. He took up some blackness on his fingers and rubbed it thoughtfully between them. His hands moved beneath my jaw and tilted my chin. “May I?” he asked, holding out his finger smeared with black residue.

“What are you doing?” I asked, confused.

“Have you heard of animal companions?” he asked.
 

As he began smearing the warm soot beneath my eyes, I was at a loss for words for a moment. I hadn’t thought about my old black carpet snake Moggy for ages. She had been struck with a pitchfork between the eyes, and thrown in the well at the edge of our property by a bunch of drunk, drug-fucked teens. I’d wanted them all dead. I may have even hissed and tried to take one of the kids’ eyes out when I set upon them in a rage. It was like I had shifted for a moment – channeling the energy of my beloved Moggy. I shivered. I had been so traumatized by the incident, I hadn’t been able to replace her with another snake again, which Brett had been eternally grateful for, since he hated snakes. Most folks did. I found them calming, even the poisonous ones. They never bothered me.
 

“Yes,” I heard myself answer quietly.
 

“Well my family’s was ravens. It was also our family crest,” he muttered, and his eyes dropped from mine, his lips turning down slightly at the corners, his whole body stiffened for a moment, and then relaxed as his cheeks puffed out momentarily as he exhaled.
 

“Your family had a crest?” I heard the judgment in my voice.

His brow arched at me. “You sound surprised? Who did you think my family were? A bunch of uneducated hicks?”

“Well… yes,” I admitted shamefully, and spread my hands helplessly before me as he continued to paint my face with his blackened finger.
 

“Hmmmm.” He didn’t sound pleased, but not entirely pissed off either.
 

“I actually come from very old money. Not that I think it makes me shit gold or piss rainbows.”

“Right.” I couldn’t help but smile at that.
 

“And as if that wasn’t enough,” he continued bitterly, “my family got
all
of the townfolk to sign over their money in their wills to the Darkos.” He paused, dipping his finger back into the burnt-out wood again and starting making some dramatic sweeping motions along my brow line, his eyes narrowed in concentration. “I have tried to give it back to the surviving families, but they won’t accept money from a warlock. They’re delusional and incredibly stupid. They believe the money is cursed.”

“So you as the surviving Darko got
all
their money?” I was mortified.
 

Thorn paused, finger pressed to the outer tip of my right eyebrow; he was breathing hard. This was obviously incredibly difficult for him to talk about. I was gratified and beyond flattered he was choosing to do that with me.
 

He rifled in the elaborate picnic basket and held up an antique hand mirror. “My Grandmother’s,” he said softly. “Check you out, Raven Goddess.”

I peered warily at my reflection in the glass, seeing the area below and above my ice blue eyes had been blackened, and tiny little lines trailed down to the top of my cheek bones like fractured eyelashes. There was a pattern along my brow bone sweeping upward to my temples – I looked like a tragic attempt at a rather misguided bird creature. I was still uncertain of what we were doing here. He had mentioned that he actually wanted to
see
his family. All of me didn’t want to really know what that meant right now. Out here, alone with an insane person and his army of witch haters. Not my finest moment.

I had long abandoned my glass of red, because I felt my mind turning to a warm senseless puddle of yearning, with my most base and basic urges and fixations threatening to leak. I didn’t mind tipsy. But blind drunk had always been a truly maddening and awful experience for me. I didn’t try to visit that place often. I was, as Aaron affectionately, and Brett (my heart cracked a little), not so affectionately, called me, ‘a functional drunk,’ but that didn’t mean I wanted to risk losing my wits entirely in front of this man whom I was only just now realizing as the coldest of reality set in, I didn’t really know Thorn at all.

“Lovely,” I said to my reflection. I didn’t sound at all convinced.
 

“Here, put this on,” he gently urged, and pushed a black raven’s head feathered head piece on me.

“Why?” I asked, not taking it from him.

 
He sighed regretfully, smiling sadly down at it. His hands shook on this beautiful, fine, and yet freakish thing. “It’s part of the ritual.”

I shivered and wriggled away from him. “What the fuck?”

Thorn threw back his head and laughed long and hard at me, intensely amused by my unease. My Mother always insisted a man who laughed at another woman’s genuine sense of unease was a ‘get out of there fucking quick job’. I was starting to feel every part of that sentiment right now. I felt naked which was stupid because I was wearing only lingerie after all, but I felt so irretrievably stripped bare, out here without my phone.
 

I was furious, but bit my lip and awaited his explanation.

“I just said I want to
see
my family;, they are, of course, all dead. I dress as a raven to honor their memory and that of our line. It is a rather beautiful walk. The forest is a very magical place.”
 
His eyes lingered on my face.

“Will you paint my face likewise?”
 

I nodded, and his large hands lifted me onto his lap. Oh no. I straddled him awkwardly, feeling my thighs jump at the sensation of him between my legs; the man was still hard, even with wet cold briefs on. I tried not to show my reaction as I bent around him and scooped up some of the soot from the fire he had just extinguished, and playfully began to paint his already dramatic eyes up with it.
 

I tried to be gentle, and felt him shiver beneath my touch. I avoided looking directly into his eyes, even though I felt them heating my face, drawing a blush into my cheeks. He wriggled a little beneath me, and lifted his hips ever so slightly so he let me know his magnificent cock was most definitely alive and throbbing. A moan strangled and collapsed in on itself in my throat, and I ended up grunting. I saw him smirk at that.
 

I took my art very seriously as I gave painstaking deliberation and attention to ensuring he had the best blackened eyes ever to be achieved by an unskilled makeup artist. I ever so carefully mimicked the fractured eyelash look that trailed down to the sharp planes of his cheekbones. When I was done, we simply stared into each other’s eyes, and his hips occasionally moved, and pressed his thickness right between my heated lips – I was no longer cold down there with the blistering hot Thornton Darko beneath.
 

“You need to stop doing that,” I threatened as I reluctantly slid off his lap.
 

“Why?” he asked, looking perplexed, a cute look for him.

“Because we will never get to see that beautiful forest, and…” My voice fell to a whisper. “Your family.”

“You still haven’t answered my question?” he reproached sounding amused.

“Because I might insist that you do that nice little hip flick thing you’ve been doing, and tease me with the press of that fat cock of yours against my pussy all night,” I shot back.

He cut me open with his smile. It was beautiful. There was no arrogance or smugness in it. He was, I realized, happy. I
liked
him happy. After all, he had endured in his life, and even tonight with that crazy ass fan of his, he deserved to be happy. I wanted to make him happy. I saw it as necessary as breathing, even writing; this was a big call for me.