“Now, Princess, didn’t I tell you to lie still?”
I nearly screamed in frustration. In the two hours since Rhys had cleared away the food, he’d stripped me of my clothes and brought me to the edge of climax so many times I’d lost count.
“I can’t,” I managed to say through heaving breaths. “Rhys, please. I can’t take it anymore.”
“You can. You can take whatever I’ll give you.” The sting of his teeth on my inner thigh caused me to gasp. “Won’t you?”
I couldn’t answer. There weren’t any words left inside of me that didn’t include more, please, harder, or his name. The only thing I wanted was him, but it was the one thing he wouldn’t let me have. It was like he knew how to give me just enough to make me want more, beg for more, but deny me just when I was nearly satiated. It was maddening. Fever stole over me, smoldering and suffocating. It blotted out everything but the shadow of him crouched, waiting between my spread legs.
The mark on my neck pulsed in time with the furious tattoo of my heart. It, too, wanted. Needed. The thread connecting us both had never been clearer. He alternately tortured and tempted me, and each time, I got flashes from him. Of how I looked from his point of view, spread out much like the dinner we’d feasted on. I’d heard him say without words how much he wanted to feast onme.
The longer he’d drawn out the seduction, the more the walls between us dropped, the clearer the connection between us had gotten. It thrummed like a constant hum inside me, wanting, needing me to make the connection complete. I didn’t know how to do whatever it wanted me to do. Rhys seemed to be working toward something with ruthless intent, but I was mindless to anything but when he would touch me again.
“Won’t you?” he repeated.
My head thrashed back and forth against the pillow as his mouth hovered over me, his breath lightly playing over the overstimulated intimate flesh. When his mouth latched onto me, and his tongue unleashed a relentless assault, I cried out and my feet dug into the quilted patchwork of muscles on his back, so I could lift my hips to meet what felt like my own damnation.
He paused and when he spoke his lips brushed over me with each word. “Can you take it? Do you want me to stop?”
The thought was so abhorrent, I reached down with a guttural cry that sounded nothing like me and pressed his mouth back to me, using my grip on his hair to keep him in place.
But of course that didn’t stop him. He merely spoke directly to my mind. “I can keep this up all night, pet. I can bring you to the brink of pleasure and deny you. Again and again until you give me what I want.”
“What do you want?” I asked, my voice breaking with force of desperation.
“I want you to tell me you’ll take it. Take it all. You’ll have me, in every way, just as much as I’ll have you. I want you to be my mate in all things as long as you’ll have me. Claim me as I have you.”
I couldn’t have stopped the wave of pleasure if I’d tried. I crested, seized underneath him, his fingers digging into my hips, my feet scrabbling on the bed for purchase as it overtook me. It was like he called it forth by words alone, like he understood and played my body better than I could. But the orgasm didn’t satisfy me. If anything, it only intensified the hunger.
He crawled up my limp and throbbing body, a god in his own right, this man who’d pledged himself to me, came to my aid. This man who wanted to be mine as more than just in name only. Sweat sheeted his body, glinting in the moonlight shining through the bare windows that peered out into the open night. Candlelight flickered in his brilliant gold eyes as he came to rest on top of me, the brunt of his weight on his forearms.
“I need you, Elena.”
I could hear the truth in his words, see it through our bond. The pleasure I took from them was almost as great as the pleasure he’d given my body. He needed and wantedme. Not just because I was a princess, not because I could give him something in return.He wanted me forever, without restraint.
For that reason, I shifted underneath him and reached for the heavy length of his erection and guided it to where I waited, empty and aching. He rolled his hips in one graceful movement and the feel of him gliding inside me stole my breath. There was something so explicit about the first breach, something so carnal and primitive. If I had a shifter form, I knew it would be clawing at me to shift, to mark him in some way that he would have visible signs of our union.
Rhys’s dragon hadcome out to play. There were light red score marks over the pearly white of my flesh from when his fingers had lengthened into claws. He used them over the tips of my breasts, down the sensitive skin of my sides and on the inside of my thighs. Not enough to draw blood, but enough that it came rushing to the surface to sensitize me to every touch in those areas.
I wanted things I’d never wanted before. To draw blood, to give into an animalistic state I hadn’t even been aware existed.
I wanted to lose control.
I wanted him to lose control.
It was both terrifying and exhilarating.
Alluring and horrifying.
I didn’t even have a choice in the end. My body made the choice before my mind could catch up. I screamed in pain as a great heat seared my neck. At first I didn’t understand what was happening, but then I heard Rhys’s voice inside my head, talking me through it, his tone soothing and I followed it out of the pain until I resurfaced.
His face was the first thing I saw.
He brushed the damp hair out of my face. “Shh, love, everything is fine.”
For a moment, I fought him, reacting on instinct, then I relaxed underneath him. His stroking hands, his calm voice allowed my heartbeat to slow and my muscles to unclench.
“What in Goddess’ name was that?” I gasped, when I calmed down enough to speak.
