Firebird (The Firebird Trilogy #1) Read online

  Their mouths coupled, tongues entangled. They separated for breath, then repeated the act, longer and deeper each time. Her hands in his hair, on his cheeks, on his waist, a newly blind woman relearning her beloved’s features. Her lips, her fingers, each part of her as she touched him created all over again by his love. “Alex, it was always you, and I’m so sorry—”

  He crushed his mouth to hers, his kisses merciless, and his tongue insistent, voracious. He grabbed her shoulders, gripping her as though she were an illusion that would break apart as soon as he let go, and pushed her against the wall. Her framed Starry Night print dislodged, then crashed to the floor, where a corner of the wooden frame splintered and a crack spiderwebbed through the glass. She flinched, though sex with him after so long was bound to be as primitive and pure as she’d envisioned. A maelstrom of emotions their bodies had longed to express, a tacit agreement to succumb to the rawness of their eight-year famine in whatever forms it took.

  Cradling her head in his hands, he assailed her with another ferocious kiss, his tongue demanding hers. She reciprocated with equal savagery, biting his succulent bottom lip until she drew blood. Then recoiled, horrified by the urgency of her need.

  Alex licked the blood away. “Is that how you want it, baby?” His mouth twitched into another smile. “I can take a little pain.” He roamed his hands, rough with calluses yet long-fingered and graceful, from her face to her hips and back again. Each caress seared a permanent impression of him into her skin. Alex lobbed her tunic across the room and trailed kisses down her neck, her throat, an arc of fire. He kissed the swell of her breasts and between them, then unhooked her bra. Imprisoning her in his warm hands, he suckled each nipple, ran his tongue along the contours.

  His erection prodded her through too many layers of fabric. She unfastened his belt buckle and pants and fondled the rigid shaft constrained only by his underwear. He sucked in a gasp. He pressed her arms over her head, binding her wrists, and kissed her again fiercely despite his bruised lip. She tasted blood.

  She took her time undressing him, unveiling him button by button. She pushed his pants down and spared a moment to let her hands rove over his heavenly ass. When she pulled off his underwear, his erection bounced up from the black fur between his legs. The first time she’d seen it—thick, pink, and angled upward—in the light. His foreskin had retracted, and the tip of his cock glistened. She wetted her palm with her tongue, then closed her hand around him, stroking, fondling, and inciting him to stiffen more. Iron in a velvet glove.

  Alex, his forehead against hers, ran his thumb over her lips. “Do you want me inside you?” His tumid, veiny cock pulsed in her hand. “Say it.”

  She gazed into the eyes that had looked at her the same way all those years ago. That had loved her no matter what. “I want you inside me.”

  He lifted her and pinned her to the wall as if she weighed nothing. She’d fantasized about a man strong enough to fuck her like this. About Alex. Always and only Alex. She hooked an arm around his neck, fastened her legs around his hips, and cried out at the sharp but brief pain as he opened her, stretching her to accommodate his width. His cry when he penetrated her was of someone who had discovered a beloved family heirloom in a tornado’s wreckage. Something irreplaceable thought long destroyed, lying unscathed before him. She sank her nails into his shoulder blades. His eyes were shining with equal parts heartache and devotion. It hurt, always wanting. It felt like dying. And finally living.

  His skin scorching her, his breath a hot breeze against her ear, he was made of fire. She wanted to burn with him, with the pain of being alive as they had only ever been with each other. He pumped harder, deeper each time, a savage grunt interposing each lunge. If he had wanted to make love in the forest or in his condo, he wanted no such thing now. And she could not get close enough to him, could not get enough of him though each thrust pushed his full length into her. He and she were not meant to be two separate things.

  Alex carried her to the kitchen counter, bent her over it, and with his hands on her hips trailed kisses down her spine, her buttocks, over the angles of her hipbones. He cupped her breasts with both hands as he kissed her neck, her shoulders. A delicious chill chased each caress. He rubbed his cock between her folds, then reentered her from behind. His tempo redoubled, violent and merciless. Alex gripped her shoulders, snarled his fingers in her hair. Raw, brutal, animal lust infused each thrust, the culmination of eight lost years, of longing and grief and bitterness. Not what they had envisioned but what their bodies and some dark part of their souls required. Life was love, and love was pain. Their love had been so strong, it made sense it should be the greatest agony they had ever known.

  “Turn me around so I can kiss you.”

  He pulled out. She faced him and he guided himself into her again, his breath shivering. “You feel so good,” he whispered.

  She ran her thumb over the scar on his cheek. He molded his body to hers, and their tongues flowed in and out of each other’s mouths.

  “I won’t leave. I won’t ever leave.” He held her hands on the marble. Though the edge of the counter bit into her back, she curled a leg around his hips and drew him deeper into her. His pulse beat beneath the skin of his throat. When he let go of her hands, she scraped her nails over his back, his skin slick with sweat, muscles flexing beneath her fingers. She existed only where he touched her, only when he touched her, and in between was no more substantial than mist.

  The apartment was silent except for their labored breaths and the slap of skin on skin. Time stopped. She pressed her fingers into his cheek. Their gazes locked in an act both intrusive and trusting in this moment of total vulnerability. She swore she could read his thoughts, though she could not have articulated how. Everything he had ever wanted to say was in his glittering, bottomless eyes, and she hoped he could decipher all the apologies in hers.

  “I love you, Alex.”

  He slid his hand down her thigh, cupped her ass. Spots of color appeared in his cheeks. He pounded his hips hard and quick against her. “Don’t look at me like that. Oh God…” He moaned and exploded into her with a hot, boundless gush. His muffled cry, his face buried against her neck, was both rapture and anguish. She sank her teeth into his shoulder and milked every drop.

  As he caught his breath, one hand strayed to her cheek as if to persuade him of her reality. She could still feel him inside her, the delineations between them no longer solid but shifting each time they touched, little by little becoming more of each other.

  “Ya lyublyu tebya,” he whispered. Then their mouths coupled again, and there was no more need for words.

  ***

  Aleksandr

  Steam rose and curled around them, fogging the shower door. He backed Stephanie against the tiles and assaulted her with his mouth, his hunger for her a ruthless necessity he could no longer control. Alex mauled her with his teeth and hands, leaving red welts on her tender skin that would bruise. He skimmed his lips over her throat, cradled her breasts, and suckled her stiff nipples. Her eyes slipped shut, her beautiful lips forming an O. There was no romance in it; he had fucked her, and he was going to fuck her again. Any number of women could have warned her to expect nothing more, or less, yet somehow he was on his knees, worshipping her.

  Alex kissed her belly, her thighs, traced her hipbones with his thumbs as water flowed over her skin. He opened the petal-like pleats below her golden curls, sucked and lapped at the hot, fragrant pool at her center. Soft, springy, like a ripe peach. So many little creases and crimps to lick and suckle. So many furrows for his tongue to explore. Stephanie shuddered against him, her thigh muscles constricting. She squirmed against the tiles and clutched his hair, then shoved his face into her until she overwhelmed all his senses. Her body convulsed, an earthquake. Her throaty groans hardened him more.

  He could not surmount his territorial urge to mark her as his. After all, she’d done the same to him, had long ago scored his soul far deeper than the scratches on hi
s back. He bent her over, her palms against the tiles. Her pink flesh glistened. He crouched, sucked at her pussy again; she jerked and cried out, and he ran his tongue along her slit before standing up. Gripping her hips, he slid into her, a wet smack against her ass with each thrust.

  She tightened around him, slick and hot, scuffed her fingernails along the wall and pushed back against him. “Fuck me,” she demanded, “like you said I needed to be fucked.”

  She’d never been assertive, but to be the medium through which she reclaimed her voice, her sexuality, delighted him. “Bozhe moy,” he groaned and scratched his nails down her spine. He pounded into her a few more times, then pulled out and worked himself into her snug little ass. She whimpered and compressed around him but didn’t resist or ask him to stop. “No one’s ever fucked you like this before?”

  “No,” she grunted.

  “I like being the first. That you saved this sweet ass for me.” So close now, the friction unendurable. “Did you, baby?”

  “Yes.” She bit her lip.

  That did it despite the obvious lie. The pressure was building deep inside, the tingling in his scrotum discharging currents into his legs and arms, each muscle tense with the sweetest pain. Only with her had he ever felt the world was ending and beginning all at once.

  His cock contracted. He gushed into her and emitted a wordless sound of absolute relief and rapture. His entire body released, his legs going numb and his ears stopping up, and a gentle ache pulsed from his balls to his prostate. Sharing a piece of his soul the way he could with no one else. His legs shook with each spasm, the last of his strength draining away.

  Stephanie straightened, faced him, and pressed herself to the tiles. Her thighs were still quivering. Alex fit his body to hers, skin on wet skin, and glided his tongue past her lips as he caressed her athletic body. “Did I hurt you?” he asked when he remembered his mouth had functions other than kissing her. He had wanted to on some level, for rendering him unable to forget her all these years. For having absolute power she didn’t know she wielded, and for her lie of omission. “I’m sorry.”

  She gazed at him with tearful blue eyes. “I love you. Please believe that.”

  His breath caught. When words failed him, his mouth sought hers and explained what speech could not.

  ***

  Stephanie

  Ingots of gray light slanted through the blinds. Stephanie, her back spooned to Alex’s chest, linked her fingers with his. Seven a.m., the air heavy with the perfume of lovemaking, charged with possibilities. The sex had transformed at some point in the night, a subtle evolution from the vehemence of their first encounters, their atavistic need to fuck satisfied, to a tender exploration of each other in their adult bodies. They had become something else, both more and less because they were one. Waveforms whose only match was each other, crest to crest and trough to trough. Atoms entangled in an unconditional bond.

  She turned over, her forehead and nose touching his, hiked the blankets over their shoulders, and trapped their warmth beneath it. Alex smiled though his eyes remained closed. He traced his fingertips over her hip, her thigh, and their mouths tangled again in a drowsy kiss. She wished she could freeze time and live in this moment forever.

  He rolled her onto her stomach and pushed the covers away so he could straddle her lower back. He kissed her neck, her shoulders, edging all the way down her spine, licking where he had kissed. His cool breath seeded her flesh with delicious goose bumps. She arched her back, lifting her ass a little, and he eased into her. They moaned in a powerful burst of frictional pleasure, bodies tailored to each other in a rhythm they alone knew how to dance.

  Alex grasped her hips, kissed her neck and ears as he ploughed her in time with their clipped breaths. She pushed back, ensuring she’d receive every inch of his silken cock. Stretching over her, he fit his fingers between hers, then spilled into her with a raspy moan and a deep, hard thrust. She drank him like the last beads of water in a desert.

  “Good morning,” he whispered with that cheeky smile.

  For a little while that did not last long enough, he laid his head on her shoulder and she twirled his hair, absorbed in the vividness of its texture, in the scent and weight of him, the sound of his breathing. In the fragility that had always haunted their relationship. She did not examine this perfect joy for too long, lest it crumble beneath her dissection. She concentrated instead on Alex’s somnolent toying with her nipple and the pleasant soreness between her legs, an anamnesis embedded in her skin.

  After they showered and dressed, Stephanie accompanied him to the door. They stared at each other, Alex in his rumpled suit and his hair in uncharacteristic disarray. In the gravid silence, each dared the other to speak first.

  He scratched the back of his neck. “I didn’t ask if you were on…”

  “I’ve been on it for years. Ever since…”

  “Yeah.” He blinked away the thought. “I’m clean. I get tested, and I use condoms. I just wanted to feel all of you.” His unexpected blush was the cutest thing she’d ever seen. “So I’ll call you tomorrow? Maybe we can do something after the team meeting. What do you like? Flowers? Sunsets? Long walks on the beach?”

  She laughed as he laced his fingers with hers. His eyes were her eyes reflecting to infinity back into herself, bemused and frightened and all the things that were the best parts of love, even the second time around. He took a breath as though he meant to speak, but the kiss was unwilling to wait any longer, and neither of them was inclined to disagree.

  “I think you owe me another run.” Alex smiled and glanced at the wreckage of the picture frame. “I’ll buy you a new one.”

  “No worries. Good luck today. I’ll be watching.”

  “Thanks. I’ll try to score one for you.” He squeezed her hands, then let himself out.

  Stephanie skipped—literally skipped; dear God, she was becoming every woman she’d ever mocked—to her office and switched on her Surface Pro. The vintage Pooh bear Alex had bought her on her seventeenth birthday sat on a corner of her desk, banished by Joe to the office when he’d declared her “too old” for stuffed animals. He hadn’t asked where it came from. She stroked the nubby fur, the green ribbon around its neck.

  Then she opened a new document, set the digital recorder beside the keyboard, and began to type.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Steph, this story is fantastic. Award-winning stuff.” Dave gave her his proud-papa smile. “This should be national. How did you get him to open up like this?”

  Stephanie folded her hands in her lap. Dave was a journalist too. He’d notice her body language and verbal cues if she wasn’t careful. She had to maintain eye contact. Hold it too long, however, and its meaning transformed. Contrary to popular belief, practiced liars looked their victims dead in the eye. “Volynsky was an exchange student in my junior year of high school. We reminisced and, uh, bonded—” by fucking her until she forgot her own name, “—over that, and I got him to talk to me like a friend.”

  “I couldn’t have asked for more. Congratulations.” He rose from his desk and circled around it to shake her hand. “I’m promoting you to senior staff writer.”

  Stephanie froze for a split second, her mouth hanging open in shock. “I…wow. Thank you, Dave. So much. I have to admit, that’s unexpected.”

  “It’s overdue, and you’ve earned it. Listen.” He cocked his head toward the door. “If Shawn gives you any trouble, let me know right away. My hands are kind of tied with him because he’s the CFO’s grandson, but if things get bad enough, I’ll take it up with the executive board.”

  Good old nepotism. With this one now out of Shawn’s grasp, Gramps would ensure him a promotion in no time. “I will.”

  “We’ll make the formal announcement this afternoon. Now get out of here and give me another great story.” He clapped her on the shoulder.

  “Thank you again, Dave.” Buoyant, Stephanie returned to her computer. She’d be getting an office. Her name
on the door. And Shawn would have to report to her. She leaned back in her chair and smiled.

  ***

  During the brief meeting to announce her promotion, Shawn had scowled at her and clenched his jaw. And as a token of his ill will, he ambushed her at her computer, having helped himself to her chair while she used the bathroom.

  “What do you want?”

  Shawn swiveled in the chair like a bored child. “Did your man call in a favor or something?”

  “Like your grandfather did for you?”

  He squinted, his eyebrows riding so low on his forehead, he could’ve joined the Neanderthal display at the natural history museum. “You think I didn’t earn this?”

  “I know you didn’t, sweetie.”

  “Well that makes two of us, then. At least I didn’t have to ride Aleksandr Volynsky’s dick to get where I am.”

  “Get the fuck out of my chair,” Stephanie snarled.

  He flashed a simpering smile, a chimpanzee baring its teeth. “Whatever you say, boss.” The chair spun around when he hauled himself out of it. “Give Aleksandr my love.”

  She sank into her chair, crinkled her nose at the fact it was still warm from Shawn’s fat ass, and rubbed her temples. A conflict of interest, yes. An ethical compromise. If she believed otherwise, she’d shout their relationship from the rooftops.

  So what are we going to do about it?

  ***

  Their first official date, and Stephanie had never fussed over an outfit so much in her life. Alex wouldn’t care what she wore; they’d end up naked anyway, but she cared more than she liked to admit. She decided on a pair of black stovepipe pants, a tucked-in striped T-shirt, a tuxedo blazer, and flats.