her.
There was no other word for it.
His kiss was a slick addiction. A wild, impossible ride, and she couldn’t get enough. He held her against him and he angled her head where he wanted it and he simply feasted.
And Amaya loved it.
The more he took, the more she gave, meeting every slide of his tongue against hers. She arched into him, pressing her aching breasts against the dizzying wonder of his hard chest, reveling in the sensation of that strong hand of his on her bottom, kneading her. Guiding her.
Driving her crazy with need.
He pulled his mouth away from hers, letting out a very male sound of satisfaction at the small, disappointed noise she couldn’t keep herself from making.
“Be patient, azizty,” he said in that dark way of his, and she didn’t know how she knew that he was teasing her. That he was deliberately drawing this out to make that ache in her intensify.
Or that he would continue to do it until he felt like stopping; that what she wanted would have nothing to do with it.
She loved that, too. She had the sense he’d known she would.
Kavian took his time, lazily tracing a path down her neck to taste every inch of her collarbone. Then he dropped his head to play with her breasts again, making her moan and shake against him as he tested the plumpness of each of them, then tasted and tugged each proud peak.
This time, he didn’t let her topple over that edge. This time, he had more on his agenda. He swept her up and then he laid her out on that big, wide bed, stretched himself out beside her, and kept going.
He licked his way over her navel, then lower, laughing as she bucked against him, lost somewhere between desire and delirium, and she didn’t much care which as long as he kept touching her. Tasting her. Making her feel more beautiful, more precious, than she’d had any idea she could feel.
“Kavian.” She didn’t mean to say his name. She hardly knew what she was doing as he took her hips in his big hands and held her there before him as if she truly were a feast and he was nothing but hungry. “Please.”
“I like that,” he said approvingly, and she could feel his voice against that most private part of her that was molten and aching and already his. It made her shudder, deep within, the feeling radiating out everywhere, coursing in her veins and washing over her whole body. “Beg me.”
And then he licked his way straight into the core of her.
Amaya exploded.
She thought she screamed his name, or maybe that was only what it felt like inside her, and either way she was lost in the storm of sensation. Lost completely. It swept her away. It altered her very being.
It was like dying, and the crazy part was how much she loved it. All of it.
She felt like someone else entirely when she came back to that bed with a jolt and found Kavian propped up above her and entirely naked, holding his weight on his elbows while the hardest part of him probed at her entrance.
He looked harsh. Unsmiling, as ever. And incredibly, impossibly beautiful.
Amaya couldn’t seem to breathe. She was falling, she realized—tipped off the side of the world and tumbling end over end without any hope of stopping, washed out to sea forever in that dark gray gaze of his.
He looked at her as if he wanted to eat her alive. He looked at her as if he already had done so.
She wanted to say a thousand things. She wanted to tell him of that mess inside her that was all his doing, that she hadn’t known could exist. She wanted, and yet she couldn’t seem to do it. Instead, she held that terrible and wonderful gaze of his, and she only reached up and slid her hand along his proud jaw, holding his lean cheek in her hand.
His gaze burned. And then he pushed himself into her, easy yet ruthless at once, sheathing himself to the hilt.
For a moment—or a year, a lifetime, more—they only stared at each other, stretched out to near breaking on the edge of all that impossible sensation.
“Last time, I hurt you.” His voice was gruff. Raw. Not apologetic in any way and yet it made a wet heat prick the back of Amaya’s eyes. She pressed her hand that little bit harder against his face.
“Only for a moment,” she whispered, as if he’d asked for her forgiveness. As if she was giving it.
And more, it was true. It had only been an instant of pain, easily forgotten and soon forgiven in the wild tumult that had followed. Even if she still didn’t understand how any of that had happened. One moment they’d been talking while officially betrothed; the next their mouths had been fused together as if there was no other possibility, and the moment after that her skirts had been pulled up to her waist and he’d been buried deep inside her.
Inside her.
Amaya had understood with a vivid shock that she had no control around him—over herself. She’d managed not to have sex for twenty-three years because she’d never felt that kind of connection with anyone, and then Kavian had come along and wrecked that in a day and a half. She’d been as shocked at herself for allowing it as she had been at what had actually happened.
He was inside her again now, and this time she was far less shocked. But no more in control of either one of them. He waited, still propped there on his elbows, an enigmatic curve to that hard mouth of his.
“Go on,” he murmured, as if he knew that she didn’t know what to do with herself and didn’t know how to do it anyway. Any of it. Last time had been like careening over the side of a cliff into a brilliant, cataclysmic explosion. This was no less vivid, no less overwhelming. But the explosion hovered out of reach. She thought perhaps that was his doing. His iron control. Because it certainly wasn’t hers. “Find out what feels good to you, azizty. I want to know.”
Dimly, Amaya thought that she should find this all deeply embarrassing. He seemed to read her far too well. He seemed to know too much.
He always has, a little voice whispered. He always will.
But Amaya ignored it, and took him at his word. She circled her hips, tentatively at first. Then, when Kavian growled in stark male approval, with more deliberation. It made a whole new fire sear its way through her as she tested out the deliriously hot sensation, the drag and the friction. She ran her hands along those delectable ridges in his torso, learning the flat, hard muscles and the carved perfection of his form, crossed here and there with scars that spoke to a life of action, lived hard. She tested the shape of his strong neck, teased his flat male nipples and licked the salt from his skin.
She pulled back, then surged forward, testing his length deep inside her, so hard in all her quivering, melting softness. Again and again and again. Until she shivered all over with a new crop of goose bumps, and looked to him, feeling something like helpless. Vibrant and electric, and still unsure.
“Allow me,” Kavian said then, his voice hoarse and dark, and rich with satisfaction.
And then he dropped down closer to her, slid his hands beneath her bottom and took over.
It
