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I watch and see in real time as the last of Lukas’s self-control crumbles away. He growls wordlessly, then stoops down to capture my mouth in a savage kiss.

Then he rises up and—well, “takes his clothes off” doesn’t do it a lick of justice. He rids himself of everything he’s wearing like it offended him, or burned him, or spoke an ill word about me and deserves to be punished for it.

The buttons of his shirt don’t stand a chance. When he seizes the fabric with two hands and rips, they scatter across the dusty floorboards. His belt follows, ripped from its loops with a poppingwhipthat makes my thighs clench. Then his slacks and his boxer briefs, all of it shredded and cast aside, instantly forgotten.

When he’s finally naked above me, I stop breathing.

Oh.

My.

God.

I knew he was big. I’d felt him through his clothes and felt him in my mouth, butseeinghim—actuallyseeingwhat he expects to put inside me, just before he does it—is something else entirely.

He’s massiveeverywhere. Shoulders like granite slabs, chest covered in silver hair, defined abs that have no business existing on a man his age. My eyes keep drifting lower, to where he juts out from his body, incredibly thick, the head of him already glistening and straining toward me.

At the sight of it, fear slices through my arousal.

Lukas sees it immediately. “Listen to me.” He cups my face in both huge hands, thumbs stroking my cheeks. “It’ll fit. I’ll make sure of it.”

I gulp, but my mouth is so dry suddenly that my throat just bobs painfully. “Let me just… let me just touch you first,” I plead. “To… get acquainted.”

Lukas chuckles, but when my fingertips graze his chest where it looms over me, that laugh turns into a hiss. You’d almost think I’d scorched him.

He lets me pull him down to lie next to me. Propping myself up on my knees, I let my fingers start to wander all over him.

I touch his chest first. Hard muscle beneath warm skin, softened by that dusting of silver hair. My fingertips trace the ridges of old scars, thin white lines scattered across his ribs, sporadic and ugly. Some are faded almost to invisibility. Others are raised and rough beneath my touch.

“What happened here?” I whisper, following one that curves along his side.

“Old business,” he murmurs. “Nothing that matters now.”

I don’t push. Instead, I let my hands drift to his shoulders, then around to his back. He rolls away to let me keep exploring.

What I find there makes me gasp.

The scarring is catastrophic. It’s the strangest pattern I’ve ever seen: a huge grid of puncture marks, each one ringed with mottled tissue, repeated over and over. When I saw him shirtless from across the kitchen in Bordeaux, I thought they were straight lines, but I’m realizing now that it was simply so many repeated stab sites that they blurred into endless mountain ranges. He looks like he was pierced again and again and again by something with deep talons. Shoulder blade to shoulder blade, nape of his neck to the base of his spine, like someone plotted out the exact contours of his vertebrae and kept coming back to extract more and more.

I want to ask so badly. But it’s not the time. It’s obvious from the way his breath freezes that he doesn’t want to discuss it.

So my hands slide lower, past the dip of his tortured spine, then around to his front again. He rolls onto his back once more to face up at me. I circle over the rippling muscle of his thighs, the divot of his hip bones, the deep V where his abs swoop low. His breath is taut and his eyes never leave me.

I get the feeling he’d let me spend hours like this, if that was what I wanted. If that was what I needed.

But I’m too turned on for that, and now that I’ve gotten “acquainted,” I’m ready for more. I need something from him,yes, but it’s not just these feather-light touches while I swallow down my fear and inexperience. It’s something else. It’s…

This.

“Fuck, Rae,” he groans as I wrap two hands gingerly around the base of his cock where it rises straight up in the air. “I’ve never… You’re going to…Fuck.”

I’m almost deliriously giddy. I never in a million years thought I’d hear Lukas Lazarev like this: stuttering, drooling, at a loss for words. All it took was my two hands on him and he’s falling to pieces.

It’s the most intoxicating high I’ve ever felt.

I stroke him once, slowly, marveling at how it feels. Like velvet skin stretched over iron. He pulses against my palms. He’s so hot to the touch that I half-expect my hands to come away singed.

“You’re going to kill me,” he rasps, head thrown back against the pillow, throat exposed. “Death by virgin hands. What a way to go.”