My Twin And Faincé Betrayed me...So I Married His Rival

Chapter 30

*Eliza's POV*

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He kissed me like he had been waiting for me for ages.

Like I was the only thing in the world.

His hands moved slowly .... deliberately — like he was relearning something he had been trying to forget. Down my shoulders, across my collarbone, and then lower, and I stopped breathing entirely because Alexander Steele's hands had always been my undoing and nothing about tonight was going to be different.

He pulled back just enough to look at me.

His eyes were dark. Unguarded in a way I had not seen in months ....the walls he fully let down, the distance he always put between us was gone, just him looking at me like I was something he needed at that moment.

"Alexander..." His name came out soft and broken at the edges.

"Shh." He pressed his lips to my jaw. My neck. The curve of my shoulder. "Don't think."

I wasn't thinking. I couldn't think. Every coherent thought I had dissolved the moment his hands found me and his mouth moved against my skin like he had all night and intended to use every second of it.

He was different tonight.

I noticed it ... how could I not. The urgency in him, the restless heat, the way his hands couldn't seem to stay still. The drink was working. I knew it was working. And I told myself it didn't matter how we got here. Only that we were here. Only that his arms were around me and his heartbeat was against mine and for once — for once ... he was not somewhere else.

"Say my name," he murmured against my collarbone.

"Alexander."

"Again."

"Alexander." Breathless this time.

He made a low sound that unraveled something in my chest completely.

He laid me down against the sheets like I was something precious, slowly, carefully, his eyes never leaving mine — and for one suspended moment he just looked at me, and I looked back at him, and the moonlight lay across the bed between us like a third quiet thing.

Then he lowered his head to my legs. He brought out his tongue and was licking the area around my core. Gosh, his cold tongue made my core wey and I was already dripping.

I pushed my head backwards and tried to hold myself together but it wasn't working.

He finally found my core and nibbled at it with his pointed nose, gosh...I was losing myself.

Then he sucked passionately and hungrily on my juice and that single act made me lose control....

"Yesssss

..yessss right there Alexander!!" I moaned so loudly.

"mmm...you like it El?" He replied while still sucking on my core like it was the only food he had eaten the whole day"

"yes...yes...I..I lo..oooveeee ittt" my speech was incoherent now.

I don't know how much time passed.

Time had stopped making sense somewhere around the moment he pulled me close and the rest of the world went entirely quiet. There was only this room and this bed and his hands and his voice saying things against my skin that I was going to carry with me for a very long time.

He gave me everything tonight.

Every part of him that he had been withholding for months... the warmth, the attention, the tenderness, all of it came pouring out in the dark like something that had been dammed too long and finally found a place to go.

And I took it.

Every single piece of it. I held on and I didn't let go and I told myself that this was real. That this was ours. That whatever it had taken to get here didn't matter anymore because here we were and he was holding me and that was enough.

That had to be enough.

Afterward, the room was still.

The kind of stillness that only exists very late at night when everything has run its course and all that's left is breathing and warmth and the soft sound of a heartbeat beneath your ear.

My head was on his chest.

His hand was in my hair slowly, absentminded, the gentle back-and-forth of someone completely at ease. I lay there and listened to his heartbeat and felt something I had not felt in so long that I had forgotten it had a name.

Safe.

I felt safe.

His chest rose and fell. His breathing was slowing, deepening, the drift toward sleep already pulling at him. His hand kept moving through my hair ...slower now, heavier.

I closed my eyes.

And then he spoke.

Softly, the voice of a man hovering at the very edge of sleep, where the guard comes all the way down and the mouth says the things the waking mind keeps locked away.

"Tonight was everything," he murmured. His hand stilled in my hair. "I've missed you so much." A long, slow exhale. "I love you, Elena."

The room didn't change.

The moonlight didn't move.

His heartbeat continued ....steady, unbothered, already half asleep.

But I had stopped breathing entirely.

Elena....??!

The name sat on my chest like something with weight. Like something with edges. I lay perfectly still beneath his hand and stared at the dark ceiling above me and felt the warmth of the last hour drain out of the room one slow degree at a time.

He loved her.

Even here. Even now. Even in the dark with his arms around me and his lips still warm from mine, it was her name that lived in him. Her name that came out when there was nothing left to hide behind.

It was always her.

I lay on his chest in the dark and said nothing.

Because what was there to say.