Fuck me.
A shudder drifts down my spine, leaving blooming warmth in its wake. "I want to know if you're trusting me with your virginity tonight."
My lips part with a shocked gasp. I swallow hard, my body flushed with heat and tingles.
But honestly? I appreciate the directness. So many men would dance around it, play games, pretend not to know or care. He just asks. Straight out. Like the answer matters to him.
He lifts his hand to cup my cheek, tracing the rough pad of his thumb over the fullness of my lower lip. "Tell me the truth, jungle flower, so I can prepare your body to take me for the first time or prepare you to take a man for the first time."
“Is there a difference?”
“There is,” he states simply. But the gentleness in his tone breaks long held beliefs inside my heart. Maybe not all men are assholes after all. Then again, I really shouldn’t measure everyone based on the limited number of men in my life.
I angle my head to meet his eyes. Behind the mask, they're molten. Patient. Hungry.
"Am I that obvious?" A different heat floods my cheeks, one that has nothing to do with arousal and everything to do with embarrassment. "Ugh. I knew I didn't really fit in here. All these women are so comfortable in their sexuality, and I'm just..."
"You fit right here." He tightens his arms around me, one hand splaying possessively across my lower belly while the other traces soothing circles against my hip. The heat of his palms seeps through the thin layer of paint, warming me from the outside in. His chin comes to rest against my temple, and I feelthe soft scratch of his beard against my skin, the warm gust of his breath stirring the loose strands of hair at my ear. "You're beautiful in my arms, and that is the simple truth."
The sincerity in his voice undoes something knotted deep in my chest. He's not just saying the words. I can feel them in the way his body curves around mine, protective and possessive all at once. In the way his thumb strokes absently against my skin like he can't help but touch me. In the way his heartbeat, strong and steady against my back, seems to slow deliberately, as if he's trying to calm mine with his own.
His smile is kind, but the sin glittering in his dark eyes hints at everything I hoped this night would be.
He returns to tracing the outline of my design, following a curving vine that Luna painted to tuck between my thighs. His finger moves with deliberate slowness, and I realize his intention.
He's going to follow it all the way down.
In the dimness of the room, only those closest to us can see what he's doing. A few men on nearby settees watch with hooded eyes as my stranger slips his hand between my legs and strokes his finger through the seam of my pussy. The thin silk Luna glued in place is the only barrier between his touch and my bare flesh, and it's not nearly enough to dull the burn of his fingertips.
I gasp. My breasts sway with the movement, and he groans with appreciation, the sound rumbling against my back. Heat spills from my core, soaking through the silk, and I wonder how long Luna's careful work will hold up under this assault.
He spreads my thighs wider in the middle of Scarlet Thorn, and he presses the pad of his finger directly over my clit.
"I want you to watch the men on the stage pleasure their lover," he commands softly. "Watch how her body bows and relaxes as they work her toward the edge. Watch her accept pleasure as she gives it. Let me give you the same."
On the stage, the woman writhes between her three lovers. One thrusts into her from behind while another feeds himself past her lips and the third works her clit with his tongue. It's overwhelming. It's everything. And behind me, a stranger with dangerous hands mirrors their attention on my body.
He strokes and teases, applying pressure in small circles that build a delicious tension low in my belly, a coiling heat that winds tighter with every pass of his fingertip, making my thighs tremble and my breath catch in stuttered gasps.
The men on nearby settees watch openly now, their own partners working beneath them, but their eyes keep returning to me. To us. To the way my mystery man plays my body like an instrument he's spent years learning.
It should embarrass me that I’m this easy. But you know what? It doesn't.
It feels like power.
"Just feel, beautiful jungle flower. Turn your mind off and let your body take over." His voice drops low in my ear and my whole body responds. "Feel the heat and the pressure."
My heart rate spikes. My breathing turns shallow and ragged. Pulse after pulse of need pumps through my veins as pleasure builds toward a peak I've never experienced at anyone's hands but my own.
Around me, other Scarlet Thorn members find their own release, moans rising and falling like waves. The whole room seems to move together, breathing together, cresting together.
"I need to touch you." His finger slips beneath the edge of the silk covering me, and I feel the adhesive give way. I don't care. Not when what waits on the other side is everything I've been craving.
Skin meets skin.
His finger finds my clit, bare and swollen and desperate, and my vision blurs. I grip his other arm, the one holding me upright, because my knees have stopped working entirely. On the stage, the woman screams her release, her body arching into her lovers' hands.
I scream with her.