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Nic slid off the chair and onto the floor before him, the robe he’d bought her in Ophiel billowing in bronze velvet folds. It should be comfortable for her while the morning air remained cool, but he should get her something lighter. As spring waxed into summer, it would be far too heavy.
“Gabriel.” Nic cupped his face in her hands, nails scratching lightly over the beard stubble he had yet to shave that morning. “You must banish this guilt. You’ve done nothing any Convocation wizard wouldn’t have done, and—”
“That’s not exactly a high standard,” he pointed out wryly.
“Andyou’ve dealt with me far more kindly than any of them would.” She kissed him lingeringly, the taste of fresh oranges bright on her lush lips. The craving in him leapt to the touch and taste of her, wanting to seize her and push her to her back, spread her slim thighs and plunder her luscious sex.
He groaned into her mouth, viciously restraining himself even as his cock rose, hard with greedy desire. “Again, not a high standard,” he ground out.
Breathing a laugh, she pressed light kisses over his face while he kept his hands firmly off of her, wrapped tightly around his drawn-up knees. “You’re not going to go back to refusing to bed me, are you?”
He’d strongly considered it. If he were any kind of gentleman, he wouldn’t take advantage of her magically induced willingness. But the sexual frenzy of the bonding ceremony the night before had uncorked a bottle that could not be stoppered again. On all the long journey from Wartson, he’d managed to restrain himself, thinking that perhaps they’d find a way to come together as equal partners. Or, failing that, that she could go back to her life. Neither was possible any longer. Nor was it possible for him to stop wanting her with all the savagery of his black wizard’s heart.
Nic growled, pushing him onto his back and straddling him. With him pinned under her slight weight, she deftly unlaced his sleep shirt, spread it open to bare his chest, and scraped her nails over his skin. His self-control frayed under her caress. Helpless to resist her, he drank in how glorious she looked, even with her lopsided curls, glossy black and catching the morning sunlight. As much as he’d loved her dramatically long hair, the shorter cut showed off her strong face, the high, sculpted cheekbones, her green eyes dominating with the force of her intelligence and potent charisma.
“You made me a promise,” she reminded him, gaze raking his body along with her avid touch, lips curving wickedly as she toyed with one of his nipples, making him shudder. “Remember? One of the happier benefits of this relationship we find ourselves locked into.” She bent to replace her fingers on his nipple with her mouth, laving it tenderly, then nipping with kitten teeth so he jumped.
Trying to focus his thoughts, he nevertheless combed his fingers through her thick curls, savoring the tensile silk of them. “I am quite certain I made no such promise.”
“Fidelity,” she purred, drawing hard on his nipple so he arched his back. “You said you wanted us to be faithful to each other. A marriage in truth, despite our startling lack of marriage vows to reference.”
They needed to take care of that, have an actual wedding, no matter how much Nic might declaim the need for one. She’d transferred her avid mouth to his other nipple, and his mind had lost all ability to think logically. A bright haze of need obscured the conversation from the evening before, but he was sure they’d ended the argument with him agreeing to the bonding. Certainly he’d formed a plan to establish an equal footing between them so he wouldn’t feel quite so predatory with her. “I will be faithful,” he gasped, her scorching sex grinding against his erection. “But I refuse to take advantage of you.”
She paused, lifting her head, a gleaming black riffle falling over one eye as she gazed at him in shrewd amusement. He tucked it back behind her ear, using the recess from her determined seduction to catch his breath. “You do realize,” she purred, “how ridiculous that sounds given our current positions?”
“The power imbalance is larger than this moment,” he replied quietly, “and exceeds the physical.” He gripped her wrists, moving them easily with his greater strength. “I could do anything to you and you couldn’t stop me. Worse, you wouldn’t even try.” And how terrible was it that the words aroused him further even as he spoke them?
Proving the point, Nic yielded utterly in his grip. “That’s true. Better, I want you to.” She rubbed her groin against his, eyes half closing in sensual surrender. “Do your worst, wizard.”
As if her words snapped some desperately eroding grasp on his better nature, he lost all reason and flipped their positions, pushing her onto her back and pinning her wrists to the floor as he straddled her. “Is this what you want?” he snarled, her magic filling him with the heady scent of red wine and hothouse roses.
“Yes.” She undulated in his grip, body writhing with need, hips lifting as she attempted to spread the lovely thighs he’d pinned together with his knees. “Please, Gabriel. Please.”
It shouldn’t be so exciting to hear her beg, but it was. Taking both of her slender wrists in one hand, he stretched her arms over her head, opening her robe to reveal her lushly naked body beneath. Her deep-rose nipples were taut, tipping her full breasts, her narrow waist a contrast to her generous hips. Tracing her curves with his free hand, he slipped his fingers into the sweet vee at the crest of her rounded thighs, the curls at her mons as glossy thick as her hair. Feeling as if he’d starved for her, he cupped that enticing mound, fastening his mouth on one delicious nipple, exulting in her strangled cry of desire. Turnabout was fair play, so he bit her nipple lightly, stretching her arms tighter as she thrashed beneath him, and parted her swollen nether lips. He groaned as her slick heat met his questing touch.
“Please, Gabriel,” Nic chanted the pleas. “I need you inside me. Please, oh please.”
He needed no further urging, any vague thought of going slowly fleeing in the face of the grinding need to bury himself in her. Releasing her wrists, he spread her knees wide, taking a moment to savor the sight of her open sex, an even deeper rose, unbearably erotically lovely with the twinned curves of her ass beneath.
Positioning his cock, he thrust into her, not going gently at all. And Nic screamed, full-throated, digging her nails into the rug as her back bowed, thrusting her full breasts into glorious profile. She was so beautiful, magic emanating from her skin like a mist that warmed the coldest, dampest, and loneliest corners of his soul. Burying himself in her felt like coming home to the place he’d longed for all his life and hadn’t known how to find. And as she wrapped her long arms and legs around him, her seeking mouth finding his and drinking him in, he felt embraced, somehow loved and accepted unconditionally as no one else ever had.
A great irony there, as he was the worst person in the world for her.
“You’re thinking too much,” she said throatily, then sinking her teeth into the side of his neck, galvanizing him with overwhelming need. “Stop thinking. Take. Have.”
She’d said that to him on the floor of the arcanium. And he’d obeyed. He’d taken everything she offered and more.
He took again.
Thrusting into her, pushing ever deeper, as if seeking out and devouring every drop of her being, he was barely aware of her incoherent cries in his ear, her nails digging into his ass as if trying to pull him even deeper. He flung himself into the frenzy of it, her magic flowing into him thick and hot as blood, nourishing and heady, filling him with power.
She convulsed under him, her thunderous climax seizing him by the throat and dragging him after. Helpless in her grip as her sex clamped on his phallus like a fist, he spent himself in her welcoming depths, then collapsed in a bloodred haze, momentarily dizzy from the utter loss of self. Nic’s essence of wine-infused roses filled him so thoroughly he didn’t know where he ended and she began.
Lying there, their skin slicked together as the sun grew ever brighter with the warming day, her body lush and yielding as a bower of rose petals, he wondered blearily if this happened to all wizards. The Convocation made much of the familiar submitting to their wizard’s will, but did other wizards also discover this drowning influence of their familiar’s aura?
Nic laughed hoarsely, her full breasts shivering with her amusement, crushed under him. Chagrined, he levered himself onto his elbows, shifting the bulk of his weight off of her. Her legs still vised around his hips, holding him tightly sheathed in her still. She gazed at him, sultry green eyes half lidded, full lips curving with sensual satisfaction. So beautiful, even with the half-healed abrasions and purple-green bruises mottling her collarbones and throat from the hunters’ collar. He felt as terrible about them as if he’d put them there himself. Observing his perusal, Nic raised a brow in inquiry.
“Why do you laugh?” he asked instead of voicing those thoughts, finding he had to clear his throat to get the words through.
