With arms wrapped around her low back, Tallis held her flush and tight. He kissed her, diving deep, relishing her moan that walked a delicate line between surprise, pleasure, and protest. The protest dropped away as she drew her hands up to clench his hair. She was divinity—soft of skin, firm of flesh, eager of spirit. She didn’t back away when he deepened their kiss. The angle of his head allowed him to push farther with his tongue. His teeth scraped her lower lip. Kavya repeated the motion. Her dainty teeth abraded thin, wet skin, shocking him with physical pleasure. More shocking was how he responded to making her wild.
This would be no soft initiation. Whatever softness he possessed, he’d given that to her with his mouth, there beneath a blinding blue sky. She made her harder passions known with every pinch of her fingernails against his scalp, and the way she hooked her heel behind his calf. The rock of her pelvis against his shot white sparks through his blood.
He palmed both of her shoulders and pushed her back. Kavya struggled once, again, but he had her upper body pinned. Rather than question him or try to melt him with a pleading look, she scowled. Her expression was that of a child whose present had been snatched away. He grinned. He would not be her present, but her tool.
“If I ask for patience,” he said roughly, “it’s important. Look in my eyes. Tell me what this pause is costing me.”
She sucked her lips inward, then licked them, as if she needed to take more of him into her mouth now that she’d been deprived of the source. “You’re half wild.”
“Yes.”
“If we’d been preparing to fight and you held your seaxes, you’d be murderous.”
“Yes.”
“Instead . . . the beast wants to use that power with me.”
“Yes.”
“I’m happy you’re not trying to talk sense into me. But why stop?”
“The door.”
He pushed away and tossed towels onto the floor. Tallis wedged the wire shelf under the door’s handle. The precaution wouldn’t hold if someone was determined to get inside, but it would give Tallis enough time to arm himself.
Kavya stood where he’d pressed her against the wall. The sight of her made his mouth go dry. Yes, she was stunning, but the hunger in her amber eyes revealed how much she wanted this moment. Softness and tender caresses would wait for another time, if they had another chance at all. The quick lift and fall of her chest, which hefted and lowered her breasts in an erotic rhythm, was almost as exciting as her nudity.
I’m not going to stop.
“Good,” she whispered.
Tallis closed the scant distance between them and brought his mouth down to her neck. “Don’t do that again.”
“I can’t help it if you’re screaming.”
“Don’t do it again,” he simply repeated. “Stay with me.”
She nodded. “Right here, Tallis.”
She was clean and warm, delicious and intoxicating. He let his mind slip down to where he savored the elemental. The raw. The crazed. She responded with restless hands that skated over his chest, around his ribs, and down to his ass. As she had when she’d used the towel, she laid her palms flat. Only now, she grasped handfuls of muscle. He replied with a thrust. His cock rubbed between their lower bodies, nestled against the firm muscles and soft skin of her abdomen. Kavya gave him a long, mind-numbing exhalation.
He repeated the thrust every time she squeezed her fingers. His power was hers—for the moment.
Her breathing was sharp and uneven when he returned to kissing her lips. Taking those puffing exhales into his mouth was more proof of her excitement. Every hair and every pore and every deep clutch of her fingertips wrote erotic poems.
He sucked her tongue between his lips and bit the fleshy middle. The urge to use more force would’ve been enough to crush the bones of lesser men, but Tallis was still in charge of his inner frenzy. He only wanted to give her a sample of the aggression he withheld. Kavya slipped her taut hands up his back. She held on to his shoulders, bracing her weight against his, and accepted his testing assault. Only when he released her tongue and licked it, soothing, did he pull away to see her reaction.
Her eyes revealed every color of fire. “Again.”
Tallis recaptured her mouth. She forced her tongue between his lips, between his teeth. A dare. He clasped harder, holding the bite as if he’d sunk his teeth into the sensitive skin at her nape. The thought of claiming her in the Pendray way shook his control. That manner of claiming symbolized permanence among his clan.
He didn’t lose control. He didn’t bite deeper. But he realized that an imagination was a bad thing when he was already so overwhelmed. To picture him bowed over her body, both of them on all fours, was an invitation to ruin her first time by default—not because he would hurt her, but because he’d be some untried lad who came before sinking home.
He released her tongue, then traveled lower. She seemed to like his hair, because she threaded her fingers into the thickest locks at his crown. Her touch didn’t guide him, but as when he’d licked and sucked her pussy, she offered tiny flinches as signposts. She liked slick tonguing kisses on the undersides of her breasts, and she liked a hint of teeth across the tips of each nipple. She liked the way he breathed against her damp skin, and how he slid his caress down each gracefully strong thigh.
He knew, because she was one of the most articulate lovers he’d ever taken. She spoke with the unconscious language of her body. A week and a ream of paper wouldn’t have been enough to transcribe what he learned from dipping his tongue in her navel. She offered praise and encouragement with goose bumps, panting breaths, and restless hands across his upper body. Everywhere she touched, she trailed flame.
Kavya’s skin. Tallis’s skin.
They still had names. They were still contained in separate bodies.
Time to change that.
He knelt on the ground with one knee on the hard concrete and one accidentally padded by a strewn towel. Only once did he glance up. Kavya had lowered her chin and was staring at him with more of that unspoken fire. She smiled. “I like this part,” she said, the words full of husky teasing.
Tallis tasted and teased her honeyed sex. Every lick dragged him closer to the moment when he would need to be inside her. Somehow. Anyhow. He could become addicted to her as easily as he’d become a supplicant to his dreams.
But no.
He stood abruptly and kissed her again, sharing the taste of her by plunging deeply, giving no quarter. This was no dream. He was with Kavya. She moaned. The sound reverberated down his throat and his chest, until that humming excitement ratcheted his arousal. This was real because it was imperfect. A laundry room? The basement of a hotel he’d broken in to? Imperfect, yet just what he needed when the perfection of Kavya’s responses raised his suspicions that she was too good to be true. Too much like his dreams.
Her slender hand grasped his cock.
“Bathatéi!” He snatched her wrist and pinned it against the cinder block. “Don’t do that again.”
She held his gaze, flames watching flames, and smiled. “I have before.”
The shock of her other hand was just as powerful. Only this time, Tallis didn’t pull her away. “Fine,” he ground out, closing his fist around hers. “If you want to play, play.”
Her rhythm was more assured this time. Long strokes down. Long pulls up. Tallis pressed harder so that their hands became overlapping vises to torture his engorged flesh. He’d taught her the rhythm he liked, the speed he liked, but he hungered for the closeness of his closed fist around hers as they pumped.