which he loved to see.
Walking to the balcony, she opened the blackout curtains, let the cool late November daylight in, looking over the sprawling, snow-covered grounds, trying to shake off the dip in her mood.
She was being too silly, too greedy, needing to reach as deep inside him as he had inside her. But she had to live with the fact that there was far more to him than there was to her. Or anyone else for that matter. What had made him this incomparable man that he was had to have been experiences and tests that she couldn’t even imagine. No doubt things he wanted to forget, might even regret. If he couldn’t let her in that far, probably thinking she couldn’t handle it, it shouldn’t bother her. That it did was her own problem, not his. A problem she should deal with, once and for all.
“Did I wake you up?”
She whirled around at Ivan’s vocal caress. She’d been engaged in such a struggle with her wayward thoughts that she hadn’t heard his approach. He was behind her, then around her, encompassing her in his cherishing power.
She met his heated smile with her own. “I just woke up because you were no longer beside me.”
“Now I am, and it’s the only place I ever want to be.” His breath flayed her lips, hot, virile, filling her lungs and being. “No one should wake up this beautiful. No one should be this beautiful, period.”
Starting to tremble with that urgency for him that never abated, she ground herself against his hardness. “Look who’s talking.”
He pressed her back against the French window, driving one pant-clad powerful thigh between her quivering legs where her robe opened to expose them. “Tell me, Anastasia.”
He always urged her to tell him everything she was thinking, everything she wanted. It was as if he needed access to her very soul, to her every whim and need so he could satisfy them. Which he did. Apart from that one huge part of himself he never let her near, he was giving her everything there was to give. While she held nothing back from him.
Now she gave him what he asked for, full capitulation. “I find everything about you painfully, distressingly, beautiful.” To accentuate her admission, she slipped her arms from around his neck, pushed his open shirt farther apart and covered the perfection of his chest in compulsive kisses. “Every inch of you, every move and word and touch, every callus and scar... It all delights me, drives me out of my mind, even more the more I’m exposed to you, the more I have of you.”
His gratification—especially when she mentioned calluses and scars, which must be trophies of that blacked-out time in his past—was so ferocious it burned her. Though it had always disturbed her to formulate theories how he’d acquired them, tracing them with her fingertips and lips, feeling them raking against her skin, had always sent her clear out of her mind with lust. She found them as arousing and beautiful, awe-inspiring as every other part of him.
He ran his fingertips down her arms, slowly, tantalizingly, until they reached her hands, and he untangled them from his shirt. Then giving her such a wicked glance, he turned away from her. She watched him sit down on the couch facing the balcony, amazed all over again how the fever of anticipation and urgency only increased with every sexual encounter. Her heart shook her as he sprawled back, spreading his great body for her to drool over.
Then he beckoned. “Show me, moya dusha.”
She called on all her self-control not to run to him but rather play the game of slow seduction he seemed to want. She undulated toward him, conscious of the robe slipping off one shoulder, exposing a generous swell of one engorged breast, and the effect that had on him. Black pupils ate up the emerald of his eyes, the rock hardness tenting his pants expanded, and the smoldering smile became purely predatory. Prolonging the moment and reveling in her ability to arouse him always and completely, she took her time to reach him.
But once her knees bumped his, she lost the fight. She collapsed over him under the weight of the seven years of unremitting craving she’d only started expending. Slowing her descent with shaking hands against his unyielding shoulders, she straddled his hips, her robe riding up her thighs. His eyes burned into hers with smug satisfaction until her lips crashed down on his.
He opened his mouth to her urgency, let her show him how much she needed everything he had. And she did. Her hands roamed his Herculean chest, his granite abdomen, until they reached his massive manhood, as she lowered herself to press her drenched core against it.
“I want you, Ivan. You just breathe, I just breathe, and I want you. All of you.” She reached for his belt buckle, eager to unsheathe the formidable length of him.
At her feverish moans he stopped her uncoordinated efforts. Sighing in ragged relief, she let him take the lead, luxuriated in his domination, what he’d so maddeningly made her work for.
His hands roved her curves, pushing the robe off her burning body, his every move loaded with the ruthlessness of a starving predator unleashed on a prey long kept out of reach. It didn’t matter that he’d spent the night feasting on her. Their fire consumed them only to rage higher.
His pupils flared and subsided, giving his eyes the illusion of flashing emerald. Then he bent to the breasts he was kneading, grazed and suckled her peaked nipples until he had her writhing, her breath fracturing, her arousal soaking his pants. After his devastating homage, he swept her around, spreading her naked on the couch. Opening her thighs wide, he took them over his shoulders as he came down on his knees between them. Before she could mutter a protest, he buried his lips in her flowing readiness. She shrieked at the feel of his tongue and teeth, opening herself fully to give him total access to her intimate flesh, what had always been his.
Then he nipped her bud, and the slam of pleasure told her that one more suckle or graze would finish her. And she didn’t want release this way, even if she knew he was addicted to giving it to her. She was addicted to him, to merging with him, feeling his potency invade her, fill her every emptiness and loss and need.
“Ivan,” she gasped. “I need you inside me.”
Growling, he heaved up, caught her plea in his savage mouth, sharing her taste on his tongue. In one fluid motion he rose, lifting her in his arms. But instead of taking her to their bed, he took only a few steps before he stopped abruptly, pressed her with her steaming back against the cool, smooth wall. Capturing her there with his massive body, he locked her feet around his buttocks, thrilling her again with his strength. Then he leaned back, freeing his erection.
As always, the potency she’d worshipped so many times, that had possessed her during so many long, devastating rides to ecstasy, had her mouth watering, her core clenching. The intimidating weight and length of it thudded against her swollen flesh, squeezing another plea from her depths. He glided his incredible heat and hardness through her molten lips, sending a million arrows of pleasure to her womb. But he didn’t penetrate her until she cried out.
“Fill me.”
Only then did he ram inside her. Pleasure burst from every nerve ending at his carnal invasion. She was addicted to this, the first almost unbearable expansion as he stretched her beyond her limits around his length and girth. It was always a shock so acute, so exquisite, her senses flickered.
“Every single time, moye serdtse, you feel even better,” he growled. “Anastasia...if only I could devour you whole for real.” And it felt he tried to, his teeth sinking into her shoulder like a wolf tethering his mate in the throes of a feral copulation. Then he withdrew.
It felt as if he was dragging her life force out with him.
