As if, despite everything, he was still at her mercy.
God help her, she wanted him to do things to her.
Anything he wanted.
What madness was this?
She was terrified of these feelings for a dozen reasons. Chief among them: the power the two of them seemed to possess to hurt each other.
“God, yes,” she replied, sincerely, on a whisper.
It was too late for her. The wanting was beyond the reach of reason. Her body was already his. She’d gone pliant. Her thoughts dissolved, scattered; she would not need them for what she was hopefully about to do.
As his lips moved in a slow curve his hand slid down, down to cup the curve of her arse.
Her breath snagged in her throat when he urged her abruptly up against his cock.
Which was already hard.
This is what you do to me, was the message.
Her heart kicked inside her.
She shifted her groin against him. Testing herself. Testing him. Teasing him.
He hissed in a breath.
And she found his cock was so hard now it nearly hurt to move against him.
The battle between pride and need drew his features taut. His breath shuddered shallowly, hotly, in and out, against her lips. Mingling with her own.
Her eyes were going heavy-lidded from desire. She fought it, in vain.
It remained a contest of wills.
What if he let her go? Dropped his arms? Decided this was a bad idea? She felt, in that mad moment, that she would crumble into ash if he did. She felt it would destroy her.
Her lips trembled toward each other, desperate to form the word that meant surrender, that word that would let him know he’d won, that would betray to him that she would do anything he wanted:please.
He knew. Because she could see the exultation in his eyes.
And when his control snapped it was with a low groan, the sound of someone at last unchained from a dungeon wall.
It vibrated through her body as his mouth at last touched hers.
The rich heat and singular taste of him were aheady shock. The kiss was at once a carnal siege—the sensual glide of his lips, then the silken stroke of his tongue—the object clearly to arouse her past endurance.
She hadn’t known a kiss could do this: inebriate like whiskey, render useless the bones in her knees. Obliterate her will.
His hands gripped her arse and he brought her harder up against him just as her knees began to buckle; she fastened her arms around his neck, held on for dear life, and following his lead, they kissed each other to the brink of madness. Until they were forced to lift their heads, their breath bursting from their lungs in hot gusts.
They dragged each other down to the carpet like two people competing to drown each other.
Once their knees were on the floor, he took startlingly swift, efficient command. His arms went around her and he quickly had her on her back in an almost alarmingly businesslike fashion. Getting her into rutting position, because that’s exactly what they were about to do. She looked dazedly up at a big man whose eyes were burning like a marauder’s, feeling powerful as a sorceress to have so inflamed him. And freshly frightened, too, by her own anarchic desire, her willingness to fling herself into the unknown.
She clawed up her dress to abet him and felt a sense of unreality as the cool air of the room met her bare thighs. With one dexterous hand he managed to free all the buttons on the fall of histrousers and hurriedly dragged them down his thighs, shoving the great swaths of shirt aside.
His huge erect cock curving up toward his belly from its nest of curling dark hair was the most aggressively masculine, primitive thing she’d ever seen, and it nearly shocked her out of her lust fog.