“Half an hour,” he said.
Her sleek eyebrow rose slowly, and the expression in her eyes turned assessing.
She was surprised? He didn’t buy it. “Oh come on,” he said. “You can’t tell me you haven’t been thinking the same thing.”
“That’s a double negative,” she told him.
Even though he knew she did it on purpose to needle him, it still drove him crazy when she turned pious. If there was anyone who had no room at all to pull off that attitude, it was she.
He put a hand at the back of her neck, a deliberately possessive hold, and pulled her even closer to him. He did it to needle her back, but she allowed it. Look at how far they had come in such a short time.
Not far enough. They had so much farther to go, the end of the road lost in a tantalizing, mysterious distance.
“Admit it, sunshine,” he growled. “You want another bargain too.”
She yawned a little and scratched at her ear.
Wasn’t anything straightforward with her? The reason why it didn’t matter that he knew she was trying to rile him? Because it was working.
His gaze focused on her fabulous mouth. The image of her sucking on him flared in his mind, as searing as a flash fire. Those lips, closed over the thick rigidity of his cock, her throat working to take him in.
His entire body pulsed with urgency. He pulled her the last of the way toward him and fastened his mouth over hers, succumbing to the urge to ravish and take.
She met him halfway, and they ate at each other. She gripped his hips, and he ground his heavy erection against her as he circled her neck with one hand. She felt as if she had a fever, she was so hot. As he lifted his head to look down at her, a violent tremor shook through her body.
He could not keep his lips off of her. He ran them along her cheek, amazed at how soft her skin felt, and sucked the tender lobe of her ear into his mouth. He told her telepathically, I want to put a collar on you.
A leather collar, with a buckle. It would show darkly against her light skin. And her hands chained behind her back. She wouldn’t be able to shapeshift in that position. Her wings would have no room to materialize. All that wildness, that fierce freedom, claimed and owned by him.
Mine. Mine.
Her answer was a telepathic snarl. Dream on, motherfucker.
Where’s your spirit of negotiation, sunshine? He hadn’t even gotten the chance to feel her wetness last night. The lack disturbed him greatly. He pulled the hand from her throat and ran it down the front of her body to cup her between her legs.
She hissed and arched her hips, rubbing against his palm. She said, I don’t even know what you would have to give up in order to make that happen. Maybe your soul for all eternity.
He laughed, the sound rough in the early morning air.
I wasn’t joking, she told him. Her telepathic voice had turned uneven.
Of all the things they should be doing, this was not on the list. His hand slid upward to the fastening of her jeans. He didn’t know why she had chosen to wear jeans on the trip instead of her usual fighting leathers, but he didn’t pause to ask.
She growled at him in warning, but he was beginning to read her nuances and could tell it didn’t have much heart.
He unbuttoned the jeans, unzipped the fly, then whispered in her ear, “Take off your backpack.”
She shook her head jerkily. Both of them were panting as though they had been racing a long time. “We should keep going.”
Going and going and going, hurtling forward down that dark, unknown road.
But that wasn’t what she had meant. “We won’t stop long. Take it off.” He licked the shell of her ear. She tasted like every addictive drug ever named. “Consider this a little something to sweeten the pot on our next deal.”
“We haven’t made a deal.” But her hands moved. She unbuckled the strap at her waist, and shrugged out of her backpack. It fell to the snowy ground.
He pressed his mouth to her pulse. It beat a rapid tempo at the side of her throat. She felt it too, this hectic, crazy rush.
Then he straightened, spun her around and pulled her back against him. He moved so fast that she cried out, and reached over her head. She tried to get a hold on him by gripping him at the back of the neck too, but he jerked his head to one side. She grabbed the collar of his jacket instead and held on so tightly the tendons in her wrist stood out.
He pulled her hips back so that his cock was nestled between the cheeks of her ass. Then he pushed her hair to one side and bit her at the nape of the neck. They both stood frozen like that for a long moment.
He took one hand and slid it from her hip to the open fastening of her jeans. And inside. Underneath her underpants into a tangle of her damp, warm hair.
Do you know what I imagined the first time I consciously thought of you in a sexual way? he asked telepathically. He held her in place with an arm clamped around her ribs, and his teeth at her neck.
Her ragged breathing sawed at the chill air. “What?”
I thought of taking you in the ass too. Pinning you and taking you. Clearly we have been thinking along the same vein.
“It’s a dominant thing,” she whispered.
It’s a sexy thing. He probed deeper, wiggling into the tight space, and his fingers plunged into silken, wet flesh. Holy gods. They both groaned.
He stroked her, a slick slide along a small, stiff nubbin of flesh, while he bit her hard. She shuddered and cried out a second time.
Now her lean, strong body was arched back against him. He put his head on her shoulder, stroking her with a hard, steady rhythm. “My cut healed,” he said into her neck. “I hated it when you marked me. I was so pissed at you I almost kicked you in the face. Now, it’s strange. All I can do is think about how it’s gone. Half an hour each, sunshine. You can’t be done. Admit you want it too. Agree to it. Do it.”
“Yes, goddammit!”
He stroked her hard, and she clamped both hands over his to hold him in place as she sobbed for breath. He felt the quivering of her soft, private flesh, the rhythmic arching of her pelvis as she pushed against his fingers.
There was his climax, the one he should have claimed from her last night.
It wasn’t enough. He needed to climax again, himself. He wanted and needed to be buried inside of her when she came.
But it was enough for now.
When she was finished, her fingers loosened. He pulled his hand out and let her go. She staggered but caught herself before she could fall. He strode away without looking back.
As he walked, he licked his fingers.
They tasted like her; warm, wet and wild.
Quentin was a bastard, but she already knew that. Honestly, it was part of why she was beginning to like him in spite of herself.
Her thigh muscles were shaking so that she could barely stand upright. She watched as he walked away. Was he licking his fingers? Even though she had just climaxed, the thought made her pulse.
She had come into existence at the beginning of the world. Maybe she hadn’t been one of the most analytical of creatures for a while—like most of the truly ancient Wyr, the original harpies had lived as instinctively as animals, and had learned language and culture some time much later—but she did remember that bright, new beginning.
And the point was that she was old. She’d had sex in every imaginable position and variation. She was experienced, and she knew what she liked. A lot. And being dominated was not part of that mix.
So why did she find that bastard’s moves and his dirty talk so sexy?