He could do normal activities, but his surgeon had not yet cleared him for strenuous flights or battle.
A scar like a starburst covered the middle of his broad chest.
She stroked it. The intensity of his silent grief broke her composure. Her face crumpling, she leaned against him and pressed her lips to the shiny scar.
“I’m always going to be grateful to him,” she whispered. “Every single day of my life, I’m going to thank him for what he did for you.”
A shudder rocked his powerful frame. Breathing raggedly, he gathered her close and kissed her.
Everything he couldn’t say poured out of his fingers, his mouth. She felt his pain and need as keenly as if it were her own.
He kissed her so hard and deeply, he bruised her lips. She welcomed the discomfort, kissing him back, meeting his need with her own. His hands roamed her body with restless urgency, cupping her breasts, running down the curve of her spine, gripping her hips.
She pulled away, only to take him by the wrist, fall back on the bed and tug him down with her.
He came eagerly, covering her body with his. His welcome weight settled on top of her, she parted her legs and wrapped them around his hips until his large, heavy cock pressed against her pelvis.
The need drove them both. As she reached between them to grasp his hard erection he lifted up on his elbows, and she guided him to her opening. This wasn’t about sensuality, or taking their time to explore each other’s pleasure points. This was something darker and so much more necessary.
Despite the taut urgency in his body, he pushed in gently, rocking deeper with every thrust, until he had seated himself all the way inside her, filling her completely, not just physically but emotionally.
“I don’t know how I lived without you,” he whispered into her hair, as he moved inside her. “I know I did. There’s a full, complete set of memories in my head of a very long, complicated life. But it’s almost as if those memories belong to another man. A man very like me, but still someone else.”
“I know what you mean,” she murmured stroking the back of his head, his shoulders, the broad, long line of his back. “I have been needing and wanting you for so many centuries, before we even met, I just didn’t know that what I needed and wanted was you.”
He cradled her head in the palm of one large hand, leaning his weight on one elbow as his hips flexed. The hard length of his cock was so big.
He was almost too big, stretching her as far as she could go. It was a deep, good ache that obliterated the cold, empty spot that had existed in the depth of her soul for so long.
She never wanted him to stop. She wanted them to always be joined just like this, moving together, in a rhythm so ancient, so essential it consumed them. They were each among the oldest of their kind, yet this need—this drive—still ruled them.
Gradually, he picked up the pace, and she lifted her hips to meet each thrust gladly. A deep, burning pleasure tightened her body, until it became a high, piercing spike of need.
He reached between them to stroke along the soft petals of flesh at her stretched opening where he penetrated her. Whirls of sensation cascaded through her at each stroke, until he found the tiny bud of her clitoris. When he massaged that small, unbelievably sensitive spot, an explosion rocked her body.
Crying out, she clutched him, shuddering as the ripples of the climax rippled through her nerve endings. He was so beautiful to her—even in the midst of his own grief and need, he gave, he didn’t take.
Rocking his hips so that he kept fucking her gently, he didn’t stop massaging her, drawing out her pleasure until her sensitivity grew so great, she couldn’t bear it any longer.
Pulling his hand away, she pushed at his shoulder and urged him softly, “Roll over, my love. Let me come on top.”
Readily, he complied. Keeping them joined by wrapping an arm around her hips and holding her to him, he settled back against the pillows.
Straddling him, she settled into place. With him inside her, this position made him feel even bigger than before. Spreading her hands on his flat, muscular stomach, she braced herself and began to move.
The look in his eyes. His tight, raw expression.
She wanted to cry for him. But that wasn’t the kind of release he needed. He needed to break free himself. She picked up her tempo, undulating her torso as she gripped his cock as tightly as she could with her inner muscles. Massaging him, working him, silently urging him to cut loose.
Bowing her head, she held his gaze, and her dark hair fell forward covering him like a silken tent.
As she fucked him, he stroked her breasts and fingered her hair. “I love you,” she told him. “I love you.”
Her words seemed to break him out of a trance. Gripping her by the hips he thrust up, and up again, until he pistoned inside her. The friction grew unbearable, and while she had wanted to make this about him, her own pleasure skyrocketed again, until another climax slammed into her body. She flung out her hands and cried out from the force of it.
He grabbed her hands, gripping them tightly, as he shoved into her. His careful tenderness splintered and the expression on his face turned feral.
Then he arched his spine and ground his pelvis bone against hers, groaning. She was stretched so tightly inside, she could feel when his cock began to pulse. He spurted inside of her, shaking.
This time, she knew what to expect. Even as his climax slowed, his face twisted. He growled, “It’s not enough. It can’t ever be enough.”
“Come on,” she invited softly. “Give it to me. Give everything to me.”
He lifted her off his body. Rising up to his knees, with one hand on her back, he urged her onto her hands and knees.
Eagerly, she settled into place, bracing herself for him. It was a frank, carnal position, everything she could possibly want it to be. She had thought he needed to cut loose. She hadn’t considered her own needs, or that she needed to cut loose as well.
He came over her from behind, covering her, and before she could reach between her legs to help guide him in again, she felt the broad, thick head of his cock probing at her entrance. This time, when he slid in, she was slick from both of their pleasure, and she felt him enter her in one long, luxurious thrust that shoved her forward onto her elbows.
She groaned, shaking everywhere. The large muscles in her thighs quivered. Everything civilized that she thought she knew about herself fell away, as he wound both big hands into her hair and pinned her down.
“You’re mine,” he growled. “Say it.”
“Yes,” she gasped.
“I fought for you. I waited for you. I’ll live for you. I’d die for you.” With each sentence, he thrust into her again. “You’re my heart, my soul. Mine.”
“Don’t let me go again,” she sobbed into the bedspread. “Don’t ever let me go.”
“Never.”
He would never give up, never let her go, never stop wanting or needing her. He would always be faithful, always welcoming. The emotional reality of that began to sink in.
Finally, after all the issues that had darkened her life, this devotion, this adamant dedication, was what lay at shadow’s end.
The last of the cold, sharp pain that had haunted her for so long shattered. Tears spilled down her face. She couldn’t climax again. She was spent. But still the pressure built, as he kept up such a patient, steady and oh my gods relentless pace.
Then her gentle, adorable, dangerous lover came down over her back and bit her at the back of her neck, and it was such a possessive, animalistic thing to do, it shocked her right out of her exhaustion and hurtled her into a third climax.
Sounds came out of her. Sounds that she had never heard herself make. She was no longer in control of her body. He was.