Mirror of My Soul by Joey Hill (book club recommendations .TXT) 📕

something, another way to punish her, a way to take her, invade every part of her, make his claim one that could not be denied.

“You haven’t…” Her voice was thready, such that the words almost weren’t

coherent to her own ears. “Taken me there yet. Put your cock there.”

His fingers stilled on the crease of her buttocks, his other hand resting on her back, over her scars. His reaction made her wonder if Komal had told him that one shameful thing.

“No.” The roughness of his voice hadn’t abated, but the tone gave her the answer to the question. Her heart was shattering and only he could pick up the pieces. “I won’t punish you that way. No.”

She pushed against her hands and rolled to her back to stare up at him. He was standing over her looking angry and anguished all at once. And so terribly dangerous and sexy.

“I need you to. I want to feel you’ve been everywhere in me, that your come has scalded his away. It’s an illusion, but if you do it once, I can make it real.” She caught the waistband of his jeans, pulled herself up so her chin was resting on his hard flat stomach, her fingers digging into his thighs. “Don’t ask. Don’t ever ask me for anything again. Take me. Your slave is begging you. Punish me when I need it, never make me doubt whose Will I have to obey. Whose love will protect me from the darkest shadows, especially the ones I carry inside myself.”

As if the hands of conscious time had stopped, Tyler stared back down into those wide, frightened eyes and knew that this was that moment Komal had warned him

about. The moment of triumph and greatest vulnerability. She’d cracked open,

everything ugly as well as beautiful there for him to see. She was offering it all to him and there was no going back.

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He didn’t want to go back. He wanted her. Every tragic, beautiful, amazing,

dysfunctional, exceptional, infuriating inch of her.

“Open my jeans,” he ordered, closing his hands into fists to keep him from cradling her face in his palms, kissing away each tear. She needed to know he did care enough to be angry. He needed to impress upon her in an irrevocable fashion that she answered to someone in her life. He told himself she needed that more than he needed to relieve the aching pain in his heart that felt as if it were infecting his soul.

Her fingers moved over him, took the zipper down. Stepping back from her, he

shoved them down his thighs. “Take off the rest of your clothes,” he said gruffly. “Turn around on the bed and get on all fours, on your knees and elbows. I want your ass in the air so I can more easily fuck it, see how I’ve strapped it.”

She obeyed, tossing her white hair forward in a way that had his mouth watering, the well-toned, lithe body stretching out in the position he proscribed like a fabled white she-tiger, her back arched, head down on her elbows. She was shaking. So was he. He’d believed she was his submissive, his slave, from the beginning, this great Mistress and strong woman who had been through so much, but until the moment of this reality there’d always been the possibility he’d been wrong. This was the turning point, even more than the night at his Gulf home had been.

“Lubricant.”

“In the armoire in the corner. Where I keep all my Zone things. It’s unlocked.”

He discarded the rest of his clothes and strode across the room. Marguerite watched him, a pure, virile male animal completely in control of the situation and of her. A deep quaking was going on in the pit of her belly. She needed him to ease it. To assuage the hunger and the pain. She needed to bite and claw and fight him and have him win.

Needed to know he would claim her, make her submit to him, not because it was a game or Zone requirement, but because they were mated together. Belonged to each other as he said.

So when he came back she tried to roll to her back. He caught her elbows, flipped her, held her down with a hand on her neck and a growl, bringing her back onto her knees with her hips in the air. She was so slick that he rubbed his fingers in her cunt and used that to initially oil her rim.

He also used the lubricant, slid his slicked-down fingers into her ass with deliberate efficiency. No hesitation, firm, not brutal but not gentle, underscoring his right to use her body, take and give pleasure to it as he chose. She moaned softly, rocking against his touch. At his growl to be still, she hissed a challenge, struggled for her way, but at his hard slap on her abused buttocks, she went still again.

From his vantage point Tyler could see her night drawer. A portion of the black scarf she normally would have used under the belt was not tucked all the way in, goading him further. Though he recognized it as the same type of anger a wolf would show toward his mate for endangering herself, he did not deny the animal drive to it.

When he’d seen the mark on her neck, he’d known she’d deliberately defied him. She’d 106

Mirror of My Soul

thrown down the gauntlet, perhaps not knowing why herself. Within Marguerite the woman, the abused child still sought answers and peace. He wanted to give her both.

Give her everything. And paddle her until she cried for scaring him so badly. And fuck her until she couldn’t imagine any day without him.

As he slid his fingers in her tight rear passage he spoke, commanding the answer he’d not gotten from her earlier. “Did you climax when you did it?”

“I… Yes.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“You.” Her head was pressed to her forearms now. Reaching forward, he caught

her hair