“Lift up your hair,” he murmured, though she did not mistake it for anything less than another command.
And in any case, she would have done anything he asked. Anything at all to keep his hands moving all over her like this, spreading heat and warmth inside and out and making her rethink her historic dislike of sunlight.
That was what it felt like. As if Constantine was sunshine and more, he was rubbing it straight into her bones.
“Turn around,” he ordered her after a time, his voice gruff, and she didn’t even think about it. There was no bracing herself now. No desperately trying to lock herself away somewhere inside her own head.
Perish the thought. All she could think about was more of that sunshine.
She turned again, and then everything seemed to ratchet up to such a high intensity that on some level, she was sure she had to be dreaming this.
Though she had never known a dream to be so tactile.
Constantine sat back down on the chair before her, picking up one of her feet and resting it on his broad, hard thigh. She had the strange notion that in this position, despite her nudity and all that was splayed before him, she should have felt regal, superior. Because she was not missish about being looked at, by any stretch of the imagination. He was below her, and surely she should have reveled in that.
But the truth was, she felt as if she might as well have been laid out before him on the ground, shuddering and boneless. She felt like a sacrifice. Yet for the first time in her life, she found herself questioning what that word really meant.
She had always used it in a passive-aggressive sort of way, particularly when it involved her mother and her scrapes. The sorts of angry sacrifices that a person made out of obligation, for example, meaning annoyances. Some larger than others but still, only annoyances.
But this man, this devil there before her, was running his hands up her slender calf, his attention seemingly so fixed on what he was doing that it made her feel hollowed out with a kind of shivering within.
And Molly found herself contemplating the notion of sacrifice in a new light. Everyone had seen those movies of girls dragged screaming to terrible deaths in the clutches of horrible monsters that heroes would then ride in to vanquish. But what about the other girls? she asked herself then, almost dreamily.
The ones who woke in the night, hot and desperate to wear a crown of flowers and a white dress. The ones who felt their very cores run hot at the notion of walking, of their own volition, away from the lights of the village, into the dark. The ones who shivered in delight at the idea of surrendering themselves wholeheartedly to the monster who waited there.
Why didn’t they get any songs or myths? Why did no one tell their stories?
But she already knew the answer. No one mourned the girls who flirted with their own disasters. Mourning was for the good girls, the ones who behaved properly on the way to their deaths. All this time, Molly had been certain she was good.
But Constantine’s hands taught her otherwise.
He did not look up at her, almost as if her reaction to what he was doing was incidental to him. And for some reason that made everything...tighter and hotter and wilder, until she felt molten straight through.
He is preparing your body for his pleasure, a voice inside her that sounded far too much like her own whispered then.
Molly should have been horrified. And yet she...was not.
She would not describe the breath she couldn’t catch, or the way her nipples stood proud, or even that slickness between her legs that she was half-terrified and half-hopeful he would see as...horrified.
If he noticed her obvious arousal, he ignored it, moving with a certain briskness up the outside of her thighs. Then over her mound, ignoring the way she jolted as he made sure to rub lotion to cover all she kept bare, save for a tiny strip. Surely now he would shift everything over into a sexual place. Surely now he would make some kind of claim.
But instead, he sat forward. And took another age to move his slick palms over her belly, below and then above her navel. Eventually he made his way to her rib cage, where he climbed the length of her torso as if he could do so all day, and only stopped when he reached the under slope of her breasts.
Now her breath was coming in shallow little pants, and Molly should have been ashamed. Deeply ashamed. She should have held her breath until she passed out rather than show him how he affected her.
But it was as if her body was going to do as it wished. Or maybe he was simply that talented, even when it was something as small and seemingly nonsexual as the application of sunscreen.
It had never crossed Molly’s mind that the man might actually have earned his reputation.
Constantine took his time putting more lotion on his hands, and then he moved again, standing once more so he could slick his hard palms over her breasts.
And then...he played with her.
Either that, or he was under the impression it took a remarkable level of detailed touching and caressing to protect her breasts from the sun. Not that Molly could really remember the sun or her usual aversion to it at this point or the world they both lived in.
There was only Constantine. There was only his touch.
He massaged her breasts with his palms, teasing her nipples into even stiffer points. Until she could do nothing but arch her back, let her head fall as it would, and press herself into his hands.
She’d never
