Chapter 141: Chapter One Hundred-Forty-One: The Blizzard Prayer

//CLARA//

The cold from the terrace still clung to the wool of his coat.

I closed my eyes and felt him move, his lips tracing the arch of my eyebrow. He lingered at the tip of my nose, tracing the line down to the corner of my mouth, deliberately avoiding my lips.

The stubble on his jaw caught against my skin as he drifted to my cheekbone.

His mouth trailed along my jaw, the rough-soft texture of him raising gooseflesh across my skin. When he reached the hollow below my ear, he found that impossible, sensitive spot before tracing the shell of it with a slow, wet lick.

I let out a moan, an instinctive sound that cut through the silence of the room. Immediately, Casimir’s thumb was there, pressing firmly over my lips to stifle the noise.

"Shh," he whispered against my ear. "You cannot be loud, little bird. The walls in this house have ears, and tonight, they are hungry for a reason to turn our disgrace into a funeral."

I took a shuddering breath against his thumb, my heart hammering against my ribs.

"You should go," I breathed, the words sounding weak even to my own ears. "The snow will cover the stone. It won’t be safe for you to climb down. You’ll slip."

He pulled back just enough to look at me, his storm-grey eyes swirling with hunger.

"Then let’s pray that the snow will be thick enough to cushion my fall."

I reached out and punched him in the shoulder, just enough to let him know I wasn’t amused. My spine arched involuntarily as he ignored my protest, nipping at the pulse point on my throat with a possessive ferocity.

"I’m not joking, Casimir," I gasped, my fingers knotting in his damp hair.

"Neither am I, wife."

His hands sliding down to my waist to pull me flush against the iron of his frame.

"I’ve been deprived for five days. I have been a ghost, and a liar. Please... do not ask me to be a saint tonight. Don’t deny me the pleasure of having you."

There was a jagged edge to his voice that stripped away his marbled mask. It has been five days since the door locked.

The counting of hours had become a physical ache, a hollowness that no touch of my own hand could fill.

We had both been left starving, and now I felt my resolve crumble, melting away under the heat of his gaze.

I surrendered. I let him take over, my body sagging into his as he pushed me gently back toward the mattress. The plush velvet pressed against my thighs and I had nowhere else to go but down.

The counterpane cool through my nightgown, and he followed, kneeling over me with his knees bracketing my hips. His morning coat hung open, his shirt untucked from trousers that strained with evidence of his own deprivation.

I reached for him, but he caught my wrists, pressing them to the mattress beside my head. His mouth was on my skin again, kissing, licking, siphoning the blood through the surface with his lips.

"Well then," I whispered, arching my throat toward his mouth, offering everything he had already taken and everything he hadn’t yet claimed. "Start praying for a damn blizzard, husband."

I felt the sharp, wicked curve of Casimir’s smirk against my collarbone.

He didn’t say another word, but the way he moved spoke volumes. He began to kiss the swell of my breast through the thin lace of my nightgown and I felt the wet heat of his tongue through the fabric, the pressure of his teeth testing the boundary between pleasure and pain.

"I want you naked," he murmured against my skin, his fingers finding the gold chain hidden beneath my collar. "Wearing nothing but my ring around your neck."

"That sounded dangerously hot," I managed to choke out, my breath hitching as his fingers hooked into the silk of my collar. "It’s a very heavy reminder that I’m tied to a madman."

"A madman who is currently wondering if he should just forget we’re legally married so we can start over as sinners."

His hands released my wrists to gather the hem of my nightgown, pulling the fabric upward in rough, impatient handfuls. He made short work of the silk, the sound of it sliding over my skin the only thing competing with the howl of the wind outside.

The thin gold chain settled against my collarbone, the ring itself dipping into the hollow between my breasts, glinting against my bare skin.

It looked like a leash, a shimmering golden tether that bound my soul to his.

"My wife," he whispered, tracing the ring. "My beautiful forbidden wife."

He leaned down, his mouth following the line of the chain as if it were a map back to his own sanity.

My thighs parted for him without conscious decision.

"Every time I saw Aunt Cornelia smile at your misery this week, I imagined the look on her face if she walked in right now."

"She’d drop dead." A genuine laugh escaped me. "Which, honestly, would save us a lot of headache. But let’s keep the homicidal thoughts for another night."

He shed his own clothes with a frantic sort of grace, the cold air of the room hitting his bare skin, but he didn’t seem to feel it.

When he returned to me, the heat was absolute.

"I thought I’d lost the taste of you," he whispered, his chest pressing against mine, the friction sending sparks through my nervous system.

"The air in this house... it smells like dust and old secrets. I’ve been breathing it for five days, waiting to get back to this."

"Then breathe me in," I said, pulling his head down to mine.

Our lips finally met.

His hands were everywhere, tracing the curve of my hip, the dip of my waist, the arch of my foot. He moved like he was trying to prove to himself that I was still made of flesh and bone, not just a ghost he’d dreamt up in his lonely study.

"Clara," he groaned against my mouth. "Tell me you don’t regret me. Tell me the cage hasn’t made you wish you’d never let me in."

"I wouldn’t wished it otherwise, Casimir."

My fingers digging into the muscles of his back.

"I’d rather be a prisoner in your house than free in a world where you don’t exist. Now stop talking like a tragic hero and remind me why I married a man with such a reputation."

He chuckled, moving between my legs, his mouth descending to my breast, down to my ribs, to the soft curve of my belly, to the place where I was already wet and wanting.

"Casimir—"

His name came out as something between prayer and curse, my hips lifting toward his mouth before he had reached me, desperate and shameless.

"Quiet, love."

The command was gentle, spoken against my inner thigh where his teeth marked me, another bruise to join the collection he was leaving across my body.

I bit my own lip and nodded.

His tongue found me then, broad and flat, dragging from entrance to clit. My back arched off the mattress, my hands finding his hair and gripping hard enough to hurt, but he didn’t flinch.

He settled in, his shoulders wedging my thighs wider, and began to consume me with the focus he brought to everything.

His tongue circled my clit, avoiding direct contact, teasing until I was whimpering, biting down to keep from crying out. When he finally closed his mouth around me and sucked, I felt it in my spine, a lightning strike that traveled the length of my body and left me trembling in its wake.

Then he surged upward, his mouth finding mine in a kiss that tasted of both of us, his tongue sliding against mine with the same rhythm he had used below. I felt the heat of his cock pressing against my thigh where I was slick and ready.

When he finally entered me, it wasn’t a gentle transition. It was a homecoming. He pushed inside me in one long stroke, filling me until I felt him in my throat, in the arch of my feet, in every place where nerve endings gathered and sang.

I was already close, the deprivation and the teasing and the sheer relief of having him inside me after days of emptiness combining into something that threatened to shatter me immediately.

Casimir immediately leaned down, his forehead against mine, his ragged breathe fanning across my face.

"Look at me," he commanded.

I opened my eyes, my vision blurring.

My core fluttering around him, the involuntary clench of muscles trying to draw him deeper. He groaned, the sound torn from his chest, and began to move with the urgency we had both been denying.

"Not...gentle," he warned, his hips snapping forward, driving me into the mattress. "I can’t be gentle, Clara, not after—"

"Don’t be."

I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, meeting his thrusts with my own desperate rhythm.

"I don’t want gentle. I want the madman. So come on, husband. Ruin me."