Daughter of None

8

Lex

We burst from the club like champagne from the bottle—fizzing, half-feral, the night peeling off our skin in sheets of rain. The mist wasn’t kind. It kissed, it clung. It slid along the edges of my soaked dress and painted Brian’s shirt to his torso like a second skin. I was practically panting from the heat we'd built, but the air was ice, and I welcomed the burn.

Under the awning, time hiccuped. Cas leaned casually against the wall like a man who’d just discovered the secrets of the universe and found them delightfully raunchy. Kelsi, now fully revealed in the light, was silver-wrapped sin and sweet almond eyes. Her laugh sounded like champagne flutes tapping, and she slid easily into the crook of Cas’s side, his jacket engulfing her small frame.

I offered my hand, trying to cling to politeness. “I’m Lex.”

“Beautiful name for a goddess like you,” Brian growled behind me, and when his hand rested at the small of my back, I felt it in my teeth. My body tightened on instinct. I was electric, aware of everything—my soaked hemline clinging to the inside of my thigh, the hum of the city, the fact that I hadn’t yet asked his name even though my body already knew how he’d taste.

“Brian,” he said, and oh God, he knew. Knew what I was thinking, knew what I was wanting. That husky rasp of his voice scratched down my spine like a matchstick.

The cars pulled up like fate answering a call. Cas and Kelsi peeled off first, and I caught his devil-may-care grin as he dipped into the backseat. “Don’t have too much fun now,” I teased, slipping into the second car with Brian at my heels.

He didn't even try to hide it—his desire was molten, and it poured off him in waves. When he settled beside me, I could feel the thrum of his pulse like a countdown to detonation.

“Your place or mine?” he asked, voice velvet and vice.

“Mine,” I said, without a blink. I was done pretending I didn’t want to be devoured.

His hand found my thigh and settled dangerously close to the inferno between my legs. He leaned in, slow, calculated, his breath warm and mint-laced with the ghost of that golden elixir. Our lips brushed and—

He hesitated.

So I obliterated the hesitation.

I claimed him like he was my last breath on Earth. My fingers tangled in the hair at the nape of his neck, pulling him into me, and he matched me—force for force, breath for breath, desire for desire. His hands explored with no shame, mapping the curve of my waist, the swell of my ass, the outline of everything. My dress was the only thing that separated his hand from my need, and it was quickly becoming a problem.

The car slowed. Somehow, impossibly, we were here. Brian threw bills at the driver like a man possessed, and before I could so much as adjust my dress, he had the door open and me pinned to it.

Our mouths only parted long enough to stumble toward my building. He lifted me like I weighed nothing, carried me up the stairs, both of us clumsy with urgency and lust. My laugh was breathless, tangled with moans and gasps as he nipped at my collarbone, my shoulder, my jaw.

When I whispered “third door,” he groaned like a man being tortured by the very thing he wanted most. He shoved the key into the lock—finally—and we crashed through.

My apartment blurred into nothing.

All I could focus on was his fingers unzipping the back of my dress. Slowly. Deliberately. The fabric peeled away, and the cold hit my bare skin just as I yanked his shirt over his head.

Sweet mother of muscle.

I ran my hands down the ridges of his abs, the line of his hips, until I reached the button on his jeans. I popped it with one hand and palmed him with the other. God, the heat. The size. The promise.

He gasped, a deep, masculine sound that went straight to my core.

Then he was undoing me—literally unraveling me—as he bent his head to my breasts, his thumb circling, flicking, teasing. His other hand slipped between my thighs and—

Oh.

Oh.

My knees buckled, but he caught me, steady and strong, his fingers working magic between my legs. I was drenched, desperate, aching. And he knew. He knew.

We tumbled onto the bed like thunder rolling over the sea. My legs wrapped around him, and I reached for him again, pumping slow, steady, guiding him to where I needed him most.

“Please,” I whispered, eyes wild.

He didn’t hesitate. With one hard thrust, he filled me, stretched me, wrecked me. My body arched like a bow, and I cried out, nails digging into his back.

He held there for a beat, just to feel, just to own that moment. Then he moved. Hard. Deep. Relentless.

My orgasm built like a storm, rising with each thrust, each slap of skin on skin, each groan that rumbled from his throat like a growl. I clawed at him, hair wild, body alive, riding the edge of something massive. My walls clamped around him, and with a cry, I shattered.

And then—glass exploded.

I blinked. The water glass on my nightstand had shattered. Cracked straight down the middle like it had felt my orgasm too.

“What the f**k?” I breathed, eyes wide.

Brian grinned, panting above me, sweat slick on his skin. “That... was a first,” he said, his voice gravel and s*x.

I laughed, half-crazed, half-sated. “Same.”

Then the world went black—soft, spinning, euphoric black. And all I could think, as sleep swallowed me whole, was:

What the hell just happened to me?