He moved toward her.
Natalie wasn’t retreating. She wasn’t backing down on this, and she was not going to allow him to railroad her into agreeing that he could attack whenever and wherever he chose. If she didn’t put her foot down now, if she didn’t stop it now, then there would be no end to it. He would believe he could run over her anytime he wanted, however he wanted.
Start as you mean to go on, her mother had always warned her. She had tried doing that with Mike, tried to stay firm, and he had run over her. He had frightened her, her love for him had excused him, and she had spent three miserable years trying to make a marriage work that was doomed from the start.
“I pulled back for you,” he rumbled as he came closer. “I let the bastard go, because you said ‘please,’ because the pain in your voice for that piece of shit was more than I could bear. Did you see the look on his face when he gripped your arm, when he saw the pain it caused you?”
Natalie shook her head, denying the question.
“Oh, you saw all right, boo.” His lip curled in anger. “You saw the satisfaction, the glee in his eyes, and I smelled it. I smelled it, and I swore I would kill him for it.”
“You can’t just go killing people over something like that.” She smacked her hands against his chest, tried to push him back.
His hands lifted then, smoothed down her arms, and a shiver raced across her flesh.
“He still breathes,” Saban snarled.
“Barely!” she bit out. “Do you think that makes what you did okay?”
“I think it made it very dissatisfying,” he said softly, dangerously. “Killing him would have been preferable at that time, but losing you over it wouldn’t have been worth it. That doesn’t mean I’ll allow him to get away with it. He’ll be more careful in the future, and so, mate, will you be more careful. The next man that comes at you in anger, get the hell out of my way. Because the more harm he causes you, the greater his chances of meeting his eternal maker.” Each word shortened, roughened, until he finished with a harsh, furious growl.
Natalie opened her lips to blast him, to argue further, though the words tumbling in her head refused to find coherency. Before she could speak, his head lowered, his hands jerked her to his body, and he nipped at her lips.
It wasn’t even a kiss. He nipped at them, then licked them, watching her through narrowed eyes as her tongue jumped to the lower curve of her lips to taste him. To savor the spicy, stormy essence that lingered there from the hormone that infused it.
A broken little groan came from her throat.
“You taste me.” He licked her again. “You feel me, Natalie. Tell me, tell me you know I’d do nothing to harm you. Including killing that miserable little bastard unless he actually endangered your life.”
“You’d hurt him.” She tried to shake her head, tried to fight the need beginning to burn in her blood.
“Oh, boo, for sure I would. I’d hurt him bad.” The Cajun slipped free, lazy, guttural, spiked with hunger and dangerous intent. “I’d make him run crying to his momma for daring to harm, to believe he could ever take what is mine alone. And you know, cher, you are mine alone.”
His.
Her lips parted, and his covered them, a weak, whimpering little moan leaving her lips as she tasted him fully. As he sucked her tongue into his mouth and then gave her leave to play. To lick at him, to tease until his tongue came to her, until she could suckle it, sweeping her tongue over it, drawing the taste of him into her mouth.
“No!”
Natalie jumped around him, ignoring the little growl that sounded behind her.
“Don’t tell me no, mate,” he retorted heatedly. “I smell your need, and even more, I smell the fact that you know I’m right. You’ll not run from this or from me.”
“I’ll run whenever or however I want to.” She pushed her fingers through her hair and backed out of the kitchen. “Leave me alone, Saban. Just leave me the hell alone.”
She turned and stalked to the steps. She had to make sense of this; she had to find a way to balance the things she was learning about him.
He couldn’t just attack people. This mating heat stuff was bad enough. How would either of them survive it without some control? Without one of them thinking sensibly, and it was real damned clear that the one thinking clearly wasn’t going to be him.
All she had to do was get away from him, just for a little while. Away from the sight of him, the remembered taste of him, the aching need for him.
She hit the stairs almost at a run, aware, so very aware that he was behind her, moving with lazy speed, gaining on her, his expression taut, hunger burning in his eyes.
Her breath hitched in her throat; a ragged moan left her lips as she felt his hands grip her hips halfway up the steps, stopping her as his hands moved quickly to the front of her jeans and began working the snap and zipper loose.
“What are you doing?” she screeched, scrambling to capture his wrists, his hands, to stop the quick release of her clothes even as he jerked the material over her hips. “Dammit Saban…”
She went to her knees as a large hand pressed into her back, pushed her forward, and he came over her, dominant, forceful, his lips covering the wound he had left on her shoulder the night before.
Natalie froze as pleasure streaked, exploded, tore through her from that single caress. The area was so sensitive, so violently receptive to his lips, to his stroking tongue, that it stole her breath.
“This won’t solve anything,” she gasped as the head of his cock pressed between her thighs, slid through the slick moisture there, and found the entrance it sought.
He didn’t move his lips; instead, he growled against the wound as his hips pressed forward, burying his erection inside her as Natalie felt needle points of ecstatic pleasure begin to attack every nerve ending he stroked.
“This doesn’t change it,” she panted, fighting the pleasure, fighting her inability to refuse it. “It doesn’t make it right.”
Her back arched as a mewling cry left her lips, and his cock pressed to the hilt inside her, filling her, overtaking her.
“Tell me you’re mine.” He nipped at the wound, causing her head to jerk back against his shoulder, one hand to reach back for him, clamping on his hip as he held her to him.
“I won’t let you control me.”
“Tell me,” he snarled, licked the bite mark, sucked at it with a hungry growl.
“I won’t let you do this.” Her cry was weak, a pitiful, pathetic attempt to defy what she knew, even now, was the truth. A certainty as nothing else in her life had ever been.
His hips flexed, causing his cock to stroke her internally, to rasp against her inner flesh, the swollen, flared head caressing, enflaming tender, sensitive flesh with small thrusts. His lips grazed the wound at her neck once more, then his teeth raked over it, sending violent shudders to race down her back as her senses became overwhelmed, her common sense lost beneath the rush of pleasure.
“Tell me.” Insidious, flavored with dark sensuality, rough and primal, his voice stole through her mind, as his touch stole her reason.
“Yours.” Her cry was rewarded, her submission accepted, and the animal within him broke free.
It was burning, pleasure-pain; each thrust was hard and heavy as control was lost for both of them. As though her admission of his conquest was all he needed to allow his own pleasure free rein.
It was more pleasure than she could process; it was heated and liquid; it burned through flesh and bone and filled her soul where she hadn’t known she had been cold. Cold and lonely and searching for that something more, that reason to give her inner self to another.
She didn’t have a reason, but that didn’t matter. She felt it melting, felt it flowing through her body, pouring from her cells, wrapping around him and drawing his essence into her. And breaking her heart.