Lost King by Piper Lennox (best self help books to read .TXT) 📕

He slides close to me, our hands trapped between our stomachs, body heat multiplying.

“That’s exactly the kind of people my friends and I used to make miserable. And that’s why I stopped.” With his other hand, he pushes my hair from my face. “Why punish the people who try the hardest?”

My heartbeat fills my ears again. The truth, all of it, bobs in my throat, until I decide to set a tiny piece free. I hope it’ll be enough.

“Someone like you broke my heart once.”

“Like me?” he asks. “Or who I used to be?”

The caress of his fingertips, featherlight across my temple, my cheekbone, gives me the same hazy rush as his hand tracing constellations across my navel.

“The person you used to be.”

The rest coats my mouth like the poison it is. The destruction he brought. The heartache.

The quiet, consuming rage I’ve lived with ever since that summer, and the revenge plan that was dead on arrival the moment he kissed me in front of the Falls.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

I shut my eyes as he draws me in the rest of the way, fitting us together completely. I tell him thank you.

I tell myself that this apology, somehow, has to be enough too.

And when he kisses me, promising that who he is now would never break my heart like that, I believe him.

26

Theo moves the tablet to the nightstand and shuts it off, then clicks off the lamp. The darkness is profound and suffocating, until he tugs the shade on the window above the headboard. Moonlight floods the room, brighter than usual as it bounces off the snow.

While he works on setting the mood, my hands focus on him.

“Ruby, baby, slow down,” he laughs, after I’ve managed to get him hard as stone through his sweats. One spot is damp with pre-cum.

I can’t stop touching it. I can’t stop obsessing over what I do to him, the thrill of both partners wanting each other so completely.

As soon as he lies back down, I climb overtop him and grab his waistband.

“You’re sure?” he asks, when he feels my breath wash over his erection.

I look up. The moonlight tumbles across his hair and shoulders in beads of silver. From here, it looks like frost: clean and impeccable and impossible to resist ruining, once you’ve admired it long enough.

I am sure. The memories that stopped me before—cameras and bodies swarming me, that house in the Hamptons feeling more and more like a tomb the longer I was there—go flat now, like photographs in someone else’s history. Not mine.

Not ours.

Who we were then doesn’t matter. And who I am now wants Theo Durham, exactly as he’s laid before me in this moment. Split lips and dented pride in moonlight, and social skills he can’t quite fix, and a temper that proves he’s more like me than I thought.

As soon as I tease my lips over the head of his cock, he moans my name and drops to his elbows. When I take him into my throat, he drops back completely and shuts his eyes.

Through the hair falling over my face, I watch his hands. One stretches behind himself and grips the headboard. The other slides to his stomach and rests there.

I grab it and put it on the back of my head. My fingers press down into his until he takes over, setting the rhythm he needs.

He warns me in a stammer. “If you keep going—”

I don’t stop. I know what will happen if I keep going.

Theo will spill his release down my throat, not my face.

The door will stay locked.

This moment, this intimacy I was cheated out of so long ago by a different boy than the one in front of me now, will finally happen how it was supposed to.

Theo comes hard, breath hissing in his chest as his abdominals tense. I put my hand on them. I love the feeling of his muscles slowly unwinding as he finishes.

In the panting silence, I swallow and lift my head.

He pulls one arm over his eyes and smiles, breathing hard through his mouth. “God, baby.”

Baby. It certainly feels more right than Aria, and miles above Callum’s “babe.” Even more right than simply “Ruby.”

“Up here,” he orders with a smirk, jerking his head towards the window.

Straddling him, I move up his body, stopping at his hips. “Here?”

“Way closer.” His hands grab my hips roughly and guide me, so that I’m almost on top of his face. “Lean on the headboard.”

I drape my arms over the top of the ornate wood and feel him shift underneath me. His tongue teases in and out of me until my thighs shake.

“Sit.” He grabs my ass in both hands. “Relax.”

Slowly, I lower myself over his face completely, groaning in pleasure when his tongue fills me.

The glass of the window hovers an inch from my face. I feel its cold aura and adore the contrast—chilled air and a frozen postcard view before me; unbearable heat and filth underneath.

When he decides to lavish attention on my clit, I lose it.

My forehead drops to the top of the headboard; I whisper down to him that I’m coming. “Fuck, Theo, I’m coming so hard....”

One of his hands grips the back of my thigh and lifts me, just a little. Just enough for his other hand to position itself somewhere else.

The second my orgasm begins, I feel an earth-shattering fullness.

Theo pushes three fingers into me and moves them wildly. My orgasm, powerful but compact before, absolutely explodes.

I whimper his name and grip the headboard until my palms ache, the tendons in my wrists ready to snap. I wish we were alone in these mountains so I could scream into the darkness and