The Black Room: Door Six Read online

  “I knew you weren’t asleep.”

  I’m on my side, facing away from him. I remain motionless, for the moment. Waiting. Wanting his touch, but wanting more to know his desires and make them truth.

  His fingers brush and pluck at the thin fine wool of the shift and, bit by bit, it finds its way upward, and more of my flesh is bared for his hands. First my thighs, then my hips, then my belly, then my breasts, and then his hands are skating down my thighs and gently tugging at them. I allow him to part them enough to fit his fingers to the crevice between my thighs, as if I’m still too sleepy to capitulate to his touch. I’m fully awake, though, and aching to be touched.

  He wiggles closer, and now I feel him. All of him. Ohhh….there’s so much to feel. His lips on the side of my neck, his hand between my thighs, burrowing closer to my core, and his huge hard body behind mine, a wall of heat and muscle. And his cock, thick and throbbing, nestled between the globes of my ass.

  “You think I don’t know you’re playing at sleep, Hannah?” His voice is at the shell of my ear, breath warm, words amused.

  He curls his hand around my thigh and lifts my leg, spreading me wide. I gasp, then, because he’s touched the tip of his cock to my entrance, and he’s teasing me. Nudging, teasing.

  I turn my head and blinking, my eyes open, ready to end my game, but he’s already plunging into me.

  I’m wet, slick, ready for him. But still I gasp in surprise as he drives into me, thrusting deep without warning. “Conrad—Jesus…”

  “Oh, you’re awake now, are you?” His voice is laced with heated amusement.

  “I am now,” I whisper, my eyes finding his.

  He pushes deep, and his palm scrapes over my breast, cupping harshly as he fills me. I’m spread open, split, stretched. He’s too big, too hot, too hard, too much, and it was so sudden and I’m gasping, eyes watering at the sweet burning ache of him inside me. Too much. God, too much. I want to weep from it, but it’s not tears of pain, they are tears of overwhelming pleasure, feeling so much so suddenly. God, his cock. So fucking huge inside me, stretching my pussy so wide I can’t breathe, so deep inside me I’m glutted on him, unable to feel anything but him, but this, his cock inside me is everything, everything.

  I can’t even whimper, I’m so breathless.

  There’s nothing but him, but this connection, his body inside mine, his hand griping my breast, his breath on my nape.

  And then he moves.

  Sinuous, slow, gentle. A nudge, little more. And then a bit harder.

  “I need to come, Hannah,” he whispers. “I rode the whole way fighting arousal. I’ve but to look at you, touch a fingertip to your skin, and I’m hard as the mountain stone.”

  “Come, then, Conrad.” I manage this much, gasping each word.

  “Right now?”

  I push back against him. “Right now.”

  He grunts as he buries himself deeper. “Don’t ask for what you don’t mean, Hannah.”

  I writhe, then, coyness abandoned, needing only to feel that release, to feel him give himself to me. To take his pleasure as my own, to take his cum inside me and squeeze him as he throbs.

  “Conrad…I need to feel you come.”

  He rolls with me, pivoting to his back so I’m laying on top of him, my spine to his belly, his cock still impaled deep inside me, but now his hands find my inner thighs and spread me wide apart. I draw my heels up against the backs of my thighs, though there’s no need, because he’s got my legs pinned as wide as they’ll go. He thrusts deep, his breath on my neck, his teeth nipping at me.

  “Can’t promise it’ll be gentle, Hannah,” he whispers.

  “Don’t want gentle,” I breathe.

  He releases my legs, plants his feet in the mattress so his knees point at the ceiling, propping my thighs wide. I hook my legs around his, moaning as he withdraws and thrusts in, slowly, teasingly. His hands cup my tits, rough and callused palms scraping my sensitive nipples.

  “Touch yourself, Hannah,” he says.

  And I do.

  I spread my fingers around my clit, pulling apart the folds, and then use my other hand to circle two fingers around the hypersensitive bundle of nerves. It’s an immediate zap of ecstasy, that simple touch, and it has me writhing on top of him.

  “Oh fuck, Hannah. I feel you clenching around me when you do that.”

  I squeeze harder, clamping down with every ounce of strength I have, and he grunts wordlessly, and I know he’s gone, then. His grip on my tits is mercilessly rough, and now his hips begin to move, pumping slowly at first. He uses my breasts as a handhold, only his hips moving. I lay my head against his shoulder, turn my face to the side, and find his cheek with my lips. His jaw. The corner of his mouth.

  His thrusts are measured, the pace increasing slowly. Each slide out drags a moan from me, each thrust in a gasp, and I try to find the rhythm, my fingers swift at my clit, now, bringing my orgasm nearer and nearer, until my hips are moving on their own, and his are, too. We thrust at odds for a moment, his push timed to my withdrawal.

  He takes over, then. Knocks away my fingers, guides my hand to my breast, and I pinch my nipple and toy with my breast, feeling the luxurious sensuality of the weight of my own tit in my hand, my erect nipple. His fingers at my clit begin to move in sync with his thrusting hips. I’m groaning, gasping, whimpering, and I’m helpless in his thrall, taking his thrusts with my legs still spread wide apart so he can bury himself as deep as possible.

  I feel something clench inside me. Heat coils, tension tightens to impossible tautness. And his thrusts go mad in a wild pounding.

  He’s grunting, hips driving with a crazed rhythm, each thrust slamming his cock into me with enough force to bounce me on top of him.

  I need nothing else, then, but this, but him.

  I kiss his jawline and quest closer to his lips, and seek his hands with mine. His thrusts pound into me, squelching wetly, sliding slick. I find his hands, his palms, twine my fingers through his, and when his hands close around mine, something shifts.

  We cling hand in hand, and I feel his body arch beneath mine as he moves. He thrusts, pounds, his voice growling wordless snarls as his thick wet cock slides into me.

  The intimacy of his hands in mine doesn’t last long.

  He slides his arms behind my knees and tugs my legs apart and flattens them against my body, opening me further, and my hands develop desires of their own, one slithering down to my pussy, finding my clit and swiping, circling, and my other hand clutches at my tits, one and then the other, grabbing and kneading and pinching my nipples. His cock is slamming into me, and I’m lost.

  He’s growling as he thrusts, arching off the bed, fucking me with utter abandon.

  And then his face turns, and his eyes meet mine, and something crackles between us, sparks. I feel as if this thing we have between us has always been there, but now there’s also something new, this meeting of his eyes on mine, the blaze in those hard brown chips, the knowledge of something new thawing there.

  He fucks me, as he’s always fucked me. And I take it, as I’ve always taken it, because he fucks me so good, so perfectly I cannot exist without his body, without his hands on my flesh, without his cock inside me, without these thrusts, the ones he’s giving me right now, hard and brutal and beautiful, slamming so hard each slap of his thighs against my ass is loud in the small room and his cock fills me and pounds into my cunt and stretches me wider.

  “Oh fuck, Conrad, yes—yes—” I murmur. “Fuck me. Please, Conrad, don’t ever stop fucking me, just like this.” I’ve no control over these words, no way to stop them from slipping out. “Yes, god yes, fuck me, baby. Fuck me so hard.”

  He snarls and his thrusts increase to a manic, unsustainable pace, the slick wet sucking, squelching of his cock driving in and out of me wild and loud, and I’m groaning, whimpering at each crashing thrust. “Like this, Hannah?” He grunts. “This is how you like me to fuck you?”

  “Just like this…�
� I breathe, and then I can’t manage any more words because I’m coming, three of my fingers strumming my clit hard and fast to the rhythm of Conrad’s tireless fucking. “Oh—oh—oh—God, Conrad, oh god—”

  The moment I come, he does too. The way my cunt squeezes his cock is too much. My climax is his, and his is mine, and he’s grunting savagely as he fucks me to completion, and something seizes me deep inside my soul, demanding something new, something—

  I claw at his jaw and wrench his head over to face me, and his eyes drill into mine as we lock gazes. “Look at me while you come inside me, Conrad.”

  “Hannah, fuck—I—fuck…”

  His words are lost in the snarl of his orgasm. I feel it unleash. I squeeze, clamping in spasms around his throbbing shaft, and feel his cock spitting seed into me. Wave after wave of hot wet cum spills into my cunt and he grunts and groans and snarls, but I have his face clutched in my hand and I refuse to blink, refuse to look away, and he doesn’t either, and some portal is ripped asunder as we stare into each other through this climax, my body seized by wracking, wrenching waves of climax, heat and pressure breaking open, ecstasy smashing through me as he comes, as I come, and I don’t know where his pleasure ends and mine begins.

  He fucks me through our united climax, and I fuck him back, writhe on him, undulating on top of his hard body.

  At the apex of our union, as I’m crying out and he’s snarling, we’re drawn closer, his movements pushing him closer to me, me to him, and the space between our faces narrows, and I know he’s fighting it, because I am, too.

  We don’t do this; I know this instinctively. This union, this merged clash of pleasure and vulnerability, it isn’t us. It just isn’t, and I know it, he knows it. We fuck. We don’t…mingle souls..

  We’re still fucking, but it’s more than that.

  And it’s turned into something else entirely when the wringing waves of climax shudder through us and begin to subside, leaving spastic quakes in their place, aftershocks that shake each of us into trembling gasping throes of sated bliss.

  And that’s when it happens.

  I fall into him, and his lips meet mine, and we smash together in a way we’ve never done before, his lips on mine, his tongue warm and strong and hungry in my mouth, and now a new need is born, and a fierce fury seizes both of us, and what was the end of fucking becomes the start of—

  “Goddamn it,” Conrad snarls, and rolls toward the edge of the bed, yanking himself out of me and away, stumbling off the bed, cock swaying and dripping strings of come. “Goddamn it, Hannah. What the devil was that?” His voice is low threatening snarl.

  “I—I don’t know, Conrad.” I speak quietly, fearful, shaken from the potency of the moment.

  “I feel…struck,” he murmurs, wiping at his mouth with the back of his wrist. “Struck down to my very soul.”

  “Me, too,” I whisper.

  He doesn’t take his eyes from me, his brows furrowed in consternation, as he wraps his tartan around his waist and shrugs into his shirt, stuffs his feet into boots, and then he’s out the door.

  …

  Heartache alone isn’t enough to keep me awake the whole night. Hope is there too, because even though my memory of our time together is hazy at best, I know that the kiss we shared was something totally new and utterly unexpected for both of us. Which means there’s hope for another kiss. And another after that.

  I want those kisses. The second, and the third, and the thirty-third, and all the kisses too numerous to count after that.

  Does he want the same thing? I don’t know. His behavior says not. But the remembrance of the kiss, its intensity, says something else to me. He lost himself in that kiss, for a moment or two, and Conrad is not a man to lose himself easily. Truly, he is a man completely assured of who he is, self-possessed, confident but quiet about it. Losing himself in something like a kiss? I am not at all surprised by his sudden departure, by the fact that he seemed so rocked to the core that he responded with anger.

  Not surprised, but hurt.

  So, yeah. Hope and heartbreak do not make the best bedfellows. They tend to keep a person awake all night, wrestling with a million unanswerable questions. Worry, too. He’s out there, somewhere. Still. It’s well past dawn and he’s not returned. He could be sleeping in the stable, but something tells me he’s not. He’s out there. Doing what? No way to know. Does he love me? Can he love me? Has he ever? Will he ever? If I were to kiss him again, would he curse at me and run again? Might he allow the kiss and collect another?

  He can fuck me, but he can’t kiss me?

  The fucking wasn’t as significant as the kiss, and the fucking was out of this world. Shockingly, violently perfect.

  I felt him. Not just his body, but him. And I want more. I want all of him. More of the vulnerability, more of the softening of his hard brown gaze.

  He’ll kiss my jaw, he’ll kiss my breasts, he’ll kiss my cunt. Every inch of me has felt his lips. Every inch, except the millimeters of my mouth. Until just now. Why did that feel so significant?

  I don’t know. Answers feel so far away. It’s as if I’m missing some essential part of myself. I look at Conrad, and I know him. I know his touch. It is as familiar to me as my own name, the sight of my hands, as real and vital to me as the blue of the sky, and the warm yellow of the sun, and the grass under my toes, and the taste of a long sharp winter wind with the tang of snow woven through it.

  I know his touch. I know the sight of his naked body. The hard muscles, the planes and angles and masculine curves. The taste of him. His skin beneath my lips, the salt of his skin, the musk and tang of his cum as it fills my mouth. I know this. But I don’t know how I know it. I just do. He’s as part of myself as my own sexuality. As necessary to me as breathing, as eating, as fucking.

  I don’t exist without him.

  But he won’t kiss me.

  And I don’t understand.

  I’m ruminating on Conrad and his inexplicable ways when the door slams open. Dawn is pink on the horizon through the doorway, framing the stout, burly form of Angus.

  “Best dress and quick, lass,” he says, sweeping in with the wind. “They’ve caught our Conrad, and will not long delay in separating him from his life.”

  “Who has?”

  He snorts as he throws a cloak on and buckles his belt around his torso. “Who do you think? Markham, devil take him. How he found Conrad here I don’t know. Maybe he has a tracker? I don’t know. Fact is, he’s got him, and we’ve got to get him back.”

  Angus is armed to the teeth within a minute. A basket-hilted broadsword on his right hip, his traditional dirk on his left, claymore unsheathed with the scabbard left on the table, a pistol hanging from his belt by a butt-hook, and a musket in his other hand.

  I’m still laying in the bed, blinking in surprise.

  Angus stomps a boot on the floor. “Well? MOVE! If you wish to see Conrad again alive, you’ll get your pretty arse out of that bed.”

  I scramble out of the bed, tug the now-dry cloak on, and follow Angus out of the house. His horse is saddled, and Conrad’s stands waiting beside Angus’s. I’m still shoeless, but now at least I have a shift on. Better than nothing. I swing up into the saddle, and Angus does the same. He hands me the musket to hold as he nudges his horse into a trot, and I find it heavy, alien, and frightening.

  He nods at me. “Now, ride hard, lass.”

  Another pell-mell gallop across the highlands, this one in the growing dawn. The storm of the night has passed, leaving a clear sky and sharp bite to the air, quickly turning my bare feet to ice. Exhaustion pulls at me, but worry pulls harder.

  Markham won’t be merciful, nor gentle. A quick death, I think, would be mercy enough.

  I don’t know where we’re going, but Angus seems to, so I follow close behind him, struggling to stay on my horse as we slant across a rolling hill and down, through a damp, fog-shrouded valley. Past low stone houses, flocks of sheep, which bleat and scatter as we pass. Smoke
wreathes from chimneys, and men stand in the grass here and there, watching our wild journey as they tend to their sheep.

  Thankfully, our flight is brief. We climb a rise, and as we reach the crest Angus slows so we don’t quite breast the apex. He dismounts, beckoning me to join him on the ground. He spends a moment staking the horses in place with enough slack to graze in a wide circle on the hillside, and then he sidles up the hill to peer over the edge. Watching for a moment, he carefully backs down.

  “Beat ‘em here, sure enough, but not by much.”

  “What did you see? Did you see Conrad?” My voice is shaky and I feel a kind of fear I’ve never felt before.

  He takes a deep breath. “Yes, I did see him but I’ve no time to talk. You just stay here, lass. This could get ugly. Keep watch, and if ought goes amiss for us, you mount and ride for my place. Lock the door and don’t let anyone in who isn’t me or Conrad.”

  He unhooks the pistol from his belt and hands it to me. “Have this in case you need it. Don’t use it unless you have to. It’s primed and loaded and ready, all you’ve got to do is haul back the hammer and pull the trigger. I don’t know if you’ve any experience with such things, but it’s only going to hit someone directly before you. So…be sure of your shot.” He has his claymore in one hand again and the musket in the other, an unwieldy arrangement if I’ve ever seen one, as the claymore cannot be swung with one hand, but he seems comfortable with it.

  He eyes me, nods, and then he’s over the hill. I shimmy up to peek over the edge, and watch as Angus quickly makes his way down the steep hillside, taking cover behind an outcropping of rock.

  I look into the distance and, after several long tense moments of waiting, I see Conrad in the distance, approaching on foot, driven by the black mouth of Markham’s musket barrel. Four men accompany Markham, those being Martin from earlier and three others I don’t recognize, each armed with a sword and musket.