“Gryphon…” She dropped her head back against the mattress, tightened around him.
“Sotiria, look at me.” He wanted to see her eyes when he filled her. Wanted to know what she was feeling.
She blinked several times, then finally opened those dark orbs to focus on him. And as he pressed into her, he watched those eyes widen, watched them haze over with pure lust. Watched her give herself to him.
No fear. No pain. Just trust.
Warmth unfurled inside his chest as he eased out, as he pushed into her again. As she trembled beneath him. And for the first time in his life, he felt completely whole. Not empty. Not the shell of the man he’d always yearned to be. Not the broken soul he’d been since the Underworld. With her, here, he felt…complete.
Emotions rolled through him. Ones he couldn’t define and was afraid to try to. So many, the combined power slammed against his ribs. The connection he felt to her now…it was different from before. It wasn’t bathed in darkness. It radiated light. A light that warmed him from the inside out. A light that shoved aside the voice until he couldn’t hear it anymore. Until the buzz he’d lived with the last four months was gone too. Until there was nothing but the two of them, rocking together on this bed, losing themselves in each other over and over and over again.
“Gryphon.” She lifted her head, kissed him, slid her hands down to his ass and pulled him closer.
He knew what she wanted. The same thing he wanted. He braced his hands against the mattress and drove into her deeper, kissed her harder, pushed her to the edge with every thrust. And when her climax rocketed through her, when she broke free of his mouth and groaned long and low, he didn’t let up. He plunged harder, faster, drawing out every last spasm and shudder and ounce of pleasure from her that he could.
Only when he knew she was spent, that he’d given her ecstasy no one else ever had…then he finally let go. And shook from the sheer force of his orgasm as it exploded through every nerve ending in his body.
He was shaking when he finally collapsed against her. She wrapped her arms around his sweaty shoulders, her legs around his damp back. His head fell into the hollow between her shoulder and neck, and her warm breath washed over his temple as she pressed her lips against his forehead. Her heart raced next to his, and he knew he had to be crushing her, but he couldn’t move. His body wasn’t working yet. He thought that orgasm on the boat had been the best of his life? It hadn’t even come close to this.
Aftershocks rippled across his body, sent electrical jolts through his muscles, keeping him immobilized.
Her chest rose against his as she drew in a deep breath. Lowered as she blew it out. “Gryphon?”
“Yeah.” His brain was slowly coming back online, even if his limbs still weren’t responding. “I…I’m hurting you. I’ll move.”
“No, it’s not that.”
He braced his hand against the mattress, started to push off her, but she tightened her pelvic muscles, stopping him.
He grew hard all over again.
She smiled against his temple. “Mm…that’s what I was hoping for.”
Arousal and desire and need rushed through him. A need more demanding than before, because now he knew how to sate it.
He eased up on his arm and looked down at her. She tightened her legs around his back and clenched her sex, drawing him back deep inside her, then smiled up at him with a wicked, sinful grin that made his blood run hot.
Her cheeks were flushed, her lips swollen from his kisses, her eyes filled with the same hunger coursing through him. But there was something else. Something more. Something…
His chest cinched tight as she shifted her weight and rolled him over, as she flexed her hips, as she claimed his mouth all over again.
He slid his hands down to her slim hips and helped her ride. Dark hair fell in a curtain around their faces. He brushed it back. Let her take control. And gave himself over to her the way she’d done to him.
It wasn’t a mystery anymore. He knew what that connection he felt to her was. Could read it so easily, now that his mind was clear and the voice was gone. Would have known the first time he’d tasted her if it weren’t for that damn interference.
She was his soul mate. Everything he’d ever wanted. The only person who could calm him, who could make him feel again. The woman he would eventually lose when she finally got her dream and was accepted into Olympus.
“Touch me, Gryphon,” she whispered against his lips. “Anywhere. Everywhere. I just want you.”
He was wrong. He did have a heart. A heart that had reawakened, all because of her. And after everything he’d been through, after all the torture and agony and bitter misery he’d endured, he knew none of it was going to compare with what would happen to that heart when he finally lost her for good.
Emotions closed his throat. All he could do was wrap his arms around her, drag her as close as possible, and take what little she could give him now.
And give the same back to her tenfold.
The wind rustling the thin curtains through the open window brought Maelea’s eyes open.
Darkness pressed in, shards of moonlight illuminating the room in ribbons of white. As waves lapped gently at the shore outside, she glanced down at Gryphon, draped over her, his head pillowed on her chest as he slept, his legs tangled with hers beneath the sheet, his arm wrapped around her waist as if he never wanted to let go.
Warmth spread through her chest when she remembered how he’d touched her with those big hands, how he’d pleasured her so completely, how he’d looked at her not with dead eyes, as he had before, but with emotion-filled pools of blue, as if she was the only thing in the world he needed.
She ran her fingers through his blond hair, traced the puckered edge of a scar near his temple that she hadn’t noticed before. In sleep the lines on his face relaxed, the stress and anxiety he carried with him eased. He looked more childlike than warrior, more human than Argonaut. Cocooned here with him in this secluded house, in the quiet of the early summer evening, she wondered how she could ever have been afraid of him.
He was not at all what she’d thought. He wasn’t cold and unfeeling. Wasn’t the monster those females at the half-breed colony had talked about. Wasn’t anything but lost and alone, just like her.
Her chest tightened, and she drew in a breath to ease the ache around her heart. She’d accepted her lot in life long ago. Knew that being alone was part of the hand she’d been dealt. She just hadn’t expected to find someone who shared her feelings, who understood her, now of all times, when she was finally ready to make her move to Olympus.
Carefully, so as not to wake him, she eased out from under his weight. He grunted, shifted to his belly, tucked the pillow under his head, then resumed the steady draw and push of air as he relaxed back into sleep.
He was really gorgeous, asleep in her bed, looking so big and masculine against the feminine furnishings. The sheet lay angled low across his muscular back, the white of the cotton such a stark contrast to his olive skin and thick blond hair. In the moonlight the Argonaut markings on his forearms stood out, reminding her he was more than just a man who’d brought her to four—no, make that five—blistering climaxes in the last few hours. He was a hero, regardless of what had been done to him in the Underworld. One of Zeus’s appointed heroes.
Zeus.
There was a mood buster, if ever she thought of one. Her father. The King of the Gods. The male who’d sired her but had done nothing to help her over the long years of her life. The god who hadn’t once even acknowledged her presence. She knew why—because doing so would break the agreement he’d made with Hades, thereby ensuring Hades wouldn’t retaliate against her mother’s treachery—but it still stung. And now she was trying to get to his realm. Trying to prove herself to someone who obviously didn’t care about her. Was she completely insane or just slightly fucked in the head?