The Reclaiming of Ivy Leavold (Markham Hall Book 4) Read Online Free Page A

considered myself a sadist—I preferred control, not pain—but in that moment, where the cost of four months of alienation and longing finally reared its ugly head, there was something so deeply, deeply moving about her offering physical pain to me, about her letting me exorcise this on her willing body. It scratched an itch somewhere so deep inside that I’d hadn’t known it was there, and I felt drunk with the relief of it.
    I paused my work and took a deep breath, closing my eyes for a minute. Not because I was afraid of hurting her—she knew what to say to get me to stop—and because even as undone and raw as I was at this moment, I still knew her limits and my own strength. No, I needed a moment because if I kept going, I was going to abandon all of my plans and fuck her right now. And while I knew it would be delicious and healing, I wanted more than healing. I wanted renewal. I wanted rebirth.
    When I opened my eyes, they fell on the bottle of oil near the center of the table, kept for vegetables and bread, and I entertained the brief but intoxicating fantasy of drizzling that oil on her most intimate parts, of working it into her ass and then fucking her there in a fit of hot, slippery glory.
    I forced myself back. The monster before the husband, I reminded myself. There would be time for both.
    Instead, I bent myself over her body, pressing my rigid dick against her naked ass as I spoke low in her ear. “All this time that you’ve been lost to me, you’ve never spoken your signal.”
    My face was so close to hers that I felt rather than saw the confusion break through her mindless sensation. “What?” she asked, voice cracking.
    I let my fingers trail over her hip and then back down to her ass. I slid my hand between my pelvis and hers, finding the tight, dry pucker I’d just fantasized about, and then dropping farther down to her slick, swollen cunt.
    “Think about it, Mrs. Markham. All the times you shut yourself off from me, all the times in the past four months that you’ve laid back and became nothing more than an inanimate doll—why did you not simply tell me no ? Why not use your safe word, when you know that I’d always honor it?”
    “I…” Her voice was shaky and indistinct, as if she were struggling to formulate thoughts. “I…wanted to be a good spouse. I wanted you to get what you needed.”
    There …I found her clit, now a ripe little bundle, practically begging to be rubbed, pinched, plucked. I grazed a fingertip past her, so lightly as to barely touch her at all, and she moaned loudly into the table.
    “See, I don’t think that’s true,” I told her. “I think that’s what you told yourself. I think that’s maybe even what you still believe. But deep down, there is another answer. The real answer. Do you know what it is?”
    I shoved two fingers past the soft lips guarding her entrance, shoved them in deep. She moaned again, rolling her face against the table.
    “I don’t know,” she managed, her feet scrabbling adorably at the carpet in her effort to open her legs wider, raise her hips higher to me.
    “Yes, you do.” Leaving my fingers in her, I straightened and used my other hand to smack her ass again. She gasped, and then I took my fingers from her pussy and rubbed around her other entrance, using her own wetness to ease a finger inside, then two. She was trying and failing to catch her breath, her fingers turning into claws, twisting into the tablecloth. Wine glasses and vases of flowers were knocked over, and the sound of that coupled with the feeling of her ass like a scorching furnace around my finger was enough to break my resolve. Just a touch. That wouldn’t throw anything off, certainly, just a few strokes in and out to head off this desire and keep my head clear.
    I reached down and unfastened my trousers, my dick tilting forward, but still pointing almost straight up. In a moment’s work, I had the oil in hand and spread around the crinkled skin, my