Chapter Thirty-Three

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EVERYTHING WENT BLINDINGLY WHITE.

It all disappeared.

The need.

The heat.

The hunger.

Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch.

I was sucked into a vacuum of nothingness.

I died.

Is this what death is?

Just...emptiness?

Everything deleted, including you? Including all your thoughts and feelings, your triumphs and tragedies?

I tried to breathe, I couldn’t.

I tried to move, nothing obeyed.

Panic grew.

Terror overflowed.

And then...the white exploded in colour. A palette of bleeding pigments as if splashed on a virgin canvas, smearing and dripping, painting a masterpiece in its wake.

I blinked.

I struggled to understand.

I was in a cave.

An earthy, rustic cave with charcoal drawings of a mammoth and sabre-toothed tiger. A cave with damp coils from underground springs staining the walls. A cave with furs piled on the floor, a crackling fire in a stone hearth, a tower of hand-smoothed wooden bowls and utensils, and the scent of roasted meat almost ready to eat.

The moment I smelled the charred flesh, my heart bucked.

Smell!

I smelled everything.

The mustiness of the dirt floor. The sourness of tanned hides. The smokiness of the fire.

Along with smell came sensitivity.

I felt the warmth of the fire. I wanted to crawl closer, to soak up the flames because the cave was cold. Icy breezes kept sneaking in around the large fur pinned on a frame against the entrance to whatever landscape existed outside.

My eyes noticed every detail. The groves on the floor where sleeping holes had been dug with primitive tools. The broken chips from the cave walls from someone trying to create another entry. This place wasn’t made up.

It was real.

As real as the island had been with Sully Sinclair.

But the tropical heat had gone.

The scents of pineapple and salty sea no more.

The inherent sixth sense of knowing you were surrounded by water was replaced with the undeniable reality that I was now deep in some savannah. Surrounded by land, locked by plains and terrain.

But how?

How was I here when I’d just been there?

How could I bend and scoop up a handful of dirt and have it trickle through my fingers? How could the fire hiss and spit when I threw the remaining grains into it?

I stepped forward, panic plaiting with the horrible sensation that I’d lost my mind. That I’d had a stroke, and this was the most vivid dream of my life all while I lay in a coma somewhere.

Something stopped me.

The slither of leather against earthen floor.

I looked down.

A tear rolled down my cheek.

A heavy cuff latched around my ankle, trapping me to this cave. I followed the leather rope, picking up it and tracing its length until it vanished into the floor.

No.

I looked around for a knife to cut myself free. Suddenly very aware of the coiling desire still prominent in my belly. The wetness smearing my inner thighs. The hunger that’d been kind in a tiny reprieve of my surroundings had now returned in full force.

My breasts tingled and throbbed for touch. My clit begged to be played with so I could come. Walking caused friction. Friction caused desire.

Who cared if I was in a cave?

Who cared if none of this could be explained?

My body was hungry for something only a man could give. No amount of food or liquid could sate me. Only pleasure. Climaxes. Orgasms.

Sully.

I needed him.

He’d made me like this. He could fix me. He had to fix me because I couldn’t survive this again.

I can’t.

I can’t do it.

Already my heart galloped at an unsustainable beat. My stomach gnawed on emptiness, doing its best to chew its way to my core so I could come over and over again. To use the last of my reserves, hurtling me into death on a rain of climaxes.

My teeth ached as a full-body shudder tried to make me come from air alone.

My legs wobbled as I stumbled forward, tearing at my hair, wishing I could crack open my skull and pour out the elixir that broke me.

Stop it.

You can fight it.

I collapsed to my knees, moaning in despair as my hand went between my legs. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t fight it. My eyes rolled back as I played with my clit. I moaned as my tease became vicious and violent, desperate to eradicate the bubbling, pressuring lust.

“No!” I ripped my hand away, launching to my feet. The leather cuff almost made me trip as I paced wildly, trying to figure out a way to stay sane.

Another couple of minutes and I would revert to what I’d become a few days ago—a poor girl who sobbed in her villa, screaming in ecstasy over and over as she came a thousand times.

I need him.

I needed his cock.

I needed to be filled and ridden and—

Almost as if I’d conjured him with my explosive desire, a foot scuffed against the ground, ripping my attention to the mouth of the cave.

Sully—

My body melted further. My core clenched hard.

The fur was pulled back, and a man appeared.

A man I’d never seen before.

Not Sully.

Not the guest Grammer from the beach.

No one I had ever met.

Who...

He was tall. Exceedingly so. He was built like the predators of this prehistoric time with big arms, a flat, ripped stomach, and hugely muscular legs. Nothing about him said softness. He carried a spear, sharpened by fire and stained with blood. His naked chest held the meltings of snowflakes as he stepped fully into the cave and closed the fur behind him.

He shook like a dog, his long hair tangled and knotted with debris from living a rough and rustic life. His skin was weathered. His flesh scarred and well-used.

He looked as if he’d stepped from the history books and somehow stumbled into my world.

My coma.

My strange, erotic death.

He noticed me, standing crazed and cuffed to the floor.

Instantly, the aura in the cave changed.

Gone was the sensation of shock and pity. I no longer worried how I’d gotten here and what this all meant. I no longer pined for a man who was the devil incarnate. I no longer fought the treachery and betrayal of the elixir.

I’d reached my limit.

If I fought the basic instinct to mate another moment, my heart would explode.

All I wanted...all I needed—the only thing that would keep me alive was him.

I didn’t care who he was.

I didn’t feel shame that I wanted him or horror that I would willingly fuck a complete stranger.

I was done.

The moment I accepted my nightmare, my pulse calmed a little. It knew it would be rewarded soon. That the tingling, tangling, twisting coils in my belly would soon shatter outward in shards of light and lewd delight.

The man’s nostrils flared, smelling my need, reacting like a hunter who’d scented blood.

His chest rose and fell as he licked his lips.

I tried to look away.

I tried a final time to wake up.

But I had nothing left, and the same terrible, troubling pull inside me affected him. The same instinctual magnet to fuck and fuck and die in each other’s arms.

His large hands fell to the loincloth around his hips. A scraped and cured hide fell from his huge body, revealing an equally, terrifyingly large cock.

Flaccid but rapidly filling with blood, rising as if from a bow, standing to attention to please me.

My stomach melted.

I was a slave to the primitive urge to join.

I wedged a fist in my lower belly, biting down on a moan.

I didn’t want this.

But I did.

I didn’t want this man.

But I did.

I wanted to stop all of this.

But I also couldn’t deny if I didn’t have him touch me, fuck me, help me release this debilitating need, I wouldn’t exist.

It wasn’t a dramatic stupid promise.

It was the truth.

I would die.

Surely, surely die.

My heart raced, ricocheting more desire around my veins. My skin prickled to be touched. My hand raised in invitation, shaking and sweaty.

And the man nodded and came toward me.

He took my hand. Cold power. Calloused touch. Possessive control.

Even if I didn’t want this, I wouldn’t have had a choice.

In one touch, he showed me the truth—the truth that he might’ve just stumbled upon me. That he might have nothing to do with this strange fantastical world I was trapped in. But regardless of how he’d found me...he’d take me.

He’d take me even if I belonged to another. He’d fuck me even if I said no.

Blistering panic broke through my heady haze. Somehow, I shook my head, backing up a step. “No...”

His jaw gritted, and heavy eyebrows knitted over raging eyes. Jerking my hand, he wrapped it firmly around his now steely hard cock.

I flinched.

I shuddered.

I gushed more wetness.

Keeping my fingers around him, he yanked me forward by my wrist. He drank me in, sniffing my throat, licking my skin, pushing my hair away and sending a wash of electricity over my cheek with his scarred knuckles. He threaded his fingers to my nape, bringing our foreheads together.

“Mine.” His voice was guttural and achingly low, as if he’d only just learned how to speak. As if vocabulary was as foreign as walking on two legs. As if he’d transformed from a beast and shed his animal skin purely to come and ravage me.

I shuddered at the mental image.

Another trickle of wetness oozed down my thigh.

My inner muscles clenched around nothing, and I finally broke.

Sully hadn’t given me what I needed.

But this man...this overly endowed caveman would.

A wave of gratitude filled me. Displaced and manic, but it was gratitude just the same. Immense relief that someone cared enough to save me. To help me through this crippling pain.

His dark eyes sparked with a hunger that matched mine, and his hold on my hair became a fist around a rope. Without asking for permission or telling me his plans, he jerked me around until I faced away from him.

I suffered a full-body convulsion.

He wrapped my long strands around his wrist.

I cried out.

He pushed me down and down until I kneeled on the dirt floor.

I landed on all fours, digging fingernails into the dirt like an animal, arching my back, mewling in need.

He crashed behind me.

He bent and bit my hip.

His teeth sank painfully into my flesh.

I squirmed to get away only for his powerful hands to clamp around my hips and yank me backward.

He soared up behind me.

He positioned.

He mounted.