A Night I Couldn’t Be Honest - Chapter 1.1 - A Sweet Poisoned Chalice

They say no one can see even an inch ahead in life, but everyone still carries some kind of blueprint for the future. Nowhere in Azelin’s already thoroughly tangled plans had she ever imagined this very moment.

She carefully tucked her trembling hands beneath the pillow so he wouldn’t notice. No matter how hard she tried to appear calm, her feelings kept spilling over, refusing to be reined in.

Azelin didn’t know what to call what she felt. The way her heart had hammered from the very first moment they met, it seemed like the giddiness of love. But it was also the kind of feeling she could never let him discover, which made it seem more like dread: anxious, restless, afraid of being found out.

“Ah…”

The moment his fingers grazed her slender waist, a moan escaped her like a gasp, and heat rushed to her face. Everywhere his hands touched, a shiver coursed through her, as if she were being born anew in each spot, and it rocked her pounding heart violently.

Fear and anxiety were slowly pushed aside by the pleasure building inside her. The faint hope she had carried since recklessly luring him to this bed began to swell, heating her body from within.

“Azelin, are you trembling?”

The man who had been dragging his nose lightly along her skin, savoring her, raised his head.

His eyes, dark with arousal, fixed on her intently.

She could see herself reflected clearly in his gaze, and he had unmistakably said her name.

His body, bared through the open collar of his shirt she’d fumbled open with clumsy, urgent hands, was enough to make anyone’s breath catch.

His sleek physique, muscles filling every line of it, exuded a primal, intimidating aura that was utterly at odds with that almost too-beautiful face.

Like a predator coiled to strike its prey, every inch of him was taut, alive only for her.

The moment she recognized the mutual desire between them, the heat already boiling inside her surged straight to her head, and her heart clenched so tight she could barely breathe.

“Ngh…”

Pinned by his gaze as if bound all over, she couldn’t move. She curled her fingertips inward and barely swallowed the sob rising in her throat.

He watched her pitiful shyness with a slow curling at the corners of his eyes. The gaze glittering through his narrowed lids held surface warmth, but the way he studied her reactions with such relentless focus was unsettlingly cold, entirely at odds with the heat filling the room.

The moment his warm breath melted the tension in her skin, her tightly shut eyes missed that flicker of chill.

The intoxicating pleasure he gave paralyzed her mind and sank her completely into the swamp of emotion he had made.

His soft lips came down again and again on her clean skin, light as stamps, and the small sounds of those kisses rang in her ears loud as thunder. The large hand cradling her goosebumped, achingly sensitive inner thigh moved slowly, steadily further inward.

Wherever his lips and hands passed, trembling cries broke from her. She felt like an instrument being played, and she didn’t care.

Every time her hips arched, the half-stripped dress and sheets twisted together beneath them, hopelessly crumpled.

They swallowed each other’s ragged breaths between their pressed lips—whose breath belonged to whom, she couldn’t say. The terrible heat had her reason swaying on the verge of snapping.

She gave him every part of herself she had never allowed anyone before, opened the door for this beloved intruder without the slightest resistance.

His fingers pushed inside her where she was already soaked from the melting heat. She had always thought those fingers elegant and precise, but the way they drove through her clenched walls, rubbing against the tender inner lining, was reckless almost to the point of roughness.

“Ah—ngh! Mm…”

A sob-laced moan burst from her in a voice she couldn’t recognize as her own. Her spread legs shuddered and flinched.

Pleasure spread so fast it was almost unbearable, its depth impossible to gauge, frightening, even. All Azelin could do was cling desperately to his kiss as it teased her tongue and traced every wet corner of her mouth.

What had started as careful and shy had shifted by now into open, raw, unadulterated desire. The number of fingers inside her had increased, and the wet, slick sounds of his hand working quickly filled the room above them.

Every time his fingers drove deep, arousal spilled out and the sheets darkened beneath them. Azelin’s toes had curled, pushing against the sheets, then her whole body arched and locked. Her inner walls clamped down hard around his fingers, the convulsing flutter traveling straight into his hand.