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And when she broke apart, it was against his mouth. He groaned back as if he was consuming every last noise she made. As if she was his, and the sounds she made were his, and he was branding her mouth and sex alike.
But it was not love, he would claim. It was only sex, this mad possession.
Tarek moved over her and she could feel his hands working between them. A tug here, and adjustment there. Then the broad head of his hardness found her slick folds.
He waited.
Anya opened her eyes to meet his, stark and commanding.
“I love you,” she whispered.
Tarek made a rough noise, then he was thrusting inside her, deep and hard. Reward or punishment, or both wrapped in the same shock of connection and belonging, hunger and dark delight—it was hard to tell.
She’d had him so many times by now. She knew his body so well. She knew his scent, his weight, the glory he could work with a twist of his hips or that merciless mouth of his.
She knew too much.
And this was different from what had come before. This was a storm all its own, a wildly different claiming.
It was raw, untamed, and just this side oftoo much.
It was like a fever. It was all those things she’d felt all day, whirling around and around, all of them a crisis.
And still he pounded into her, braced there above her, as he made her his in a new way to suit the new things they were to each other.
Husband and wife. King and Queen.
This.
He could call it what he liked. Anya knew better.
But still, when the explosion came rushing at her, she wasn’t entirely sure she would survive it. Or even if she wished to.
Tarek let her fall apart first, but he kept going until she sobbed. His name, maybe. Or a cry for the mercy she both did and didn’t want. Until her fingers dug so hard into the back of the robes he still wore that she felt a nail break.
Still he continued.
Proving a point, she was sure. Driving them both wild. Making her shake and shake, sensations roaring through her with such intensity it almost scared her.
“I love you,” she cried out as she hurtled off a cliff she hadn’t seen coming.
And only then did Tarek follow, with a roar she felt shake through her all over again, like a new kind of shattering.
And there was no drifting off into bliss. There was no oblivion.
Tarek lifted his head, shifting his weight to his elbows. Anya was too aware of how he was covering her then, that rangy body of his, heavy and muscled everywhere, pressing her down into the bed.
Another claim, she knew. Like the rings he’d put on her hand today. Like the title he’d bestowed upon her, the throne they now shared, the palace that was to be her home.
He had never looked more like a predator than he did then, the lanterns throwing odd shapes onto the walls of fabric all around them. He was stone and hawk, carved from granite and cast in metal.
And the way he looked at her broke her heart.
Tarek moved to wipe moisture from beneath her eyes. He used his thumbs, touching her carefully, but there was nothing gentle in the expression on his face.
Something inside her rolled over hard, then sank.
“That is a pleasurable duty,” he said, horribly. Deliberately. “But it is a duty, Anya. Everything I do, everything I am, is that duty. Sex to me is about succession before it is anything else.”
