The leash on his inner beast snapped.
This was his woman. Nothing, starting with him, would ever harm her again. He was taking her, hiding her inside him.
She met his ferocity halfway, the same horror driving her, the same need to protect, to claim. She sank her teeth into his lips, thrust her tongue inside him, occupying him, draining him. He twisted his fingers in the silver-gold silk of her hair, imprisoning her for his invasion. She fought him for dominance until the stimulation of their mouths mating became distress.
When they tore apart, she stared back at him, body heaving, eyes storming through the spectrum of fire before slamming back into him, an impact that would have shattered the minds of most creatures.
He still held back. He’d never unleashed his full power other than to destroy. Feeling his reticence, she bit into his deltoid, broke his skin, her fingers sinking into his flanks as she crushed him to her. He growled the pain of his pleasure, tentatively raised her five. She raised him a hundred.
Something unyielding and bleak shattered inside him. Isolation. Loneliness. He was no longer alone.
It was true. Her strength and resilience rivaled his. Her unbridled power pulsed in his arms, dueled with his, almost equal. And the freedom of letting go, going all out with another, was unprecedented. Undreamed of.
When they’d met, it had eaten through him, craving her so much yet believing her a breakable human. He’d leashed his impulses until he’d bloodied them. He’d thought that, even if he ended up taking her, he’d give her pleasure but never attain true release himself. And all along she’d been suffering from the same misconception. Now this. Reward beyond measure.
“Bed…Desi…where’s your bed?”
“No…here…I need you inside me…now.”
Her keening sent his beast howling. It wanted to mount her, invade her, defuse their overwhelming need here and now.
He held it back. She might be able to heal quickly, but with all the jagged edges and splinters of rock and wood around them he’d shred her to pieces by the time he pounded her to the first orgasm.
He threw her over his shoulder. She screeched her protest, sank her teeth into his shoulder blade. He almost stopped to take her against the nearest erect surface. He thundered out of her dungeon instead, seeking somewhere with yielding surfaces, pulverizing one door after another on his quest.
The moment he felt his feet sink into something thick and soft—a rug—he hurled her down, knowing she’d relish his urgency, that she’d been born and built to take it, that it would fuel hers. As he flung himself at her, she sprang up, met his descent halfway, brought his momentum and passion crashing into hers.
Then she was all over him, tearing at his clothes, possessing his lips, sinking into him, all hunger and teeth and nails.
Response rocketed through him as he answered in kind, his fingers filling with tatters of the bloodred creation she’d worn to meet him tonight intent on overloading his reason. And how she had. Madness expanded now as she rewarded each rip with a fiercer cry, a more violent tug on his hair, a harder grind of her core into his erection, a more blatant offering of herself.
He rolled her beneath him only for her to reverse their positions. The struggle to get closer, take first, give more, raged, over and over, buffeting them in a frenzied tangle of straining flesh. He heard crashes, felt things splintering around them until the refuge of the rug-covered floor became as dangerous as her war-zone dungeon. Then an obstacle broke their momentum. He blinked, found them intertwined at the foot of a huge couch.
He exploded to his feet, hauled her up with him, thrust her back down. She bounced onto the couch, riding the movement, undulating her voluptuous body in carnal offering.
He’d feast on every inch later. Now…now…
He descended on top of her, crashed his lips onto hers, rumbling incoherencies, grasping at thighs that only wrenched wider and engulfed him, meeting his assault with hers. He didn’t need to make sure she was ready. Her arousal scorched his senses, slashed away the man’s skin and left only the beast in the grip of mating frenzy.
He tore inside her, swallowed her scream, let it rip inside him as her flesh yielded to his shaft, sucking him into an inferno of sensation. The carnality, the reality, the meaning of being inside her was too much to process.
He’d been waiting a millennium. Hadn’t known he’d been waiting. For this. For them. For her. He’d lived endlessly, yet he hadn’t lived at all. Not until her.
The one. Made to need him, to take him. All of him. He needed to cede his all to her, to pierce her essence and consume hers.
The need broke through his daze. He withdrew, his shaft gliding in the molten heat of her clinging folds, then pummeled back.
And doubt registered. Why had penetration taken such force? Why was her body a bow of tension? Her scream hadn’t sounded of excess pleasure but of…pain? He’d hurt her?
“Javed…you’re my first…my only.” Her confession burned his ear, traveled up his nervous pathways, lodged into his brain with the force of a bullet. Her first. Her only.
The knowledge savaged him. Possessiveness seethed with exultation. His. In more ways than he’d thought. In every way.
He hadn’t known. He should have. He’d never known a capacity for passion like hers, but it had felt inborn, untried.
Selfish, callous, blind beast. Instead of initiating her with every cherishing care, he’d hurt her. It didn’t matter that she was built to take pain and heal any injury. What mattered was that he’d torn into her with a force that would have turned a vampire to ashes, had crushed her couch flat. Her core was throbbing around his invasion, her torn flesh weeping from the injury he’d inflicted, bathing his shaft in the red-hotness of her blood-mixed arousal, seeming to singe his flesh. And damn him, arousing him beyond insanity.
He tried to withdraw, give her respite, take himself the hell away before he rammed back into her. But her quaking legs held him prisoner. Then she pumped her hips up, impaling herself further on his erection. Sensation blanked out his mind.
He struggled not to thrust back, to groan, “I hurt you.”
“Still are…” He heaved up in horror. She clenched him, inside and out, her eyes flaring bluish then crimson purple, as if fluctuating between pain and pleasure. “I needed you to, this first time, to brand me. That’s why I didn’t tell you, so you wouldn’t go slow and gentle. All these months, I fantasized about how mind-blowing it would be. And that’s when I had no idea you were my match. If I’d known you could do this to me, I would have forced you to take me ages ago.”
“Desi…let me pleasure you some other way this time.”
She thrashed her head, her chin-length hair a fan of light framing her flushed face. “No. I was made for you, built to take you. Hold nothing back, Javed, nothing…”
He gave in, rose between her splayed knees, cupped her hips in his hands, tilted her. “Then watch me take you, Desi. Watch.”
She scrambled up to her elbows, eyes wild, swollen lips open on pants. He thrust halfway in. She bucked up to take more of him, her high cry harmonizing with his bass groan.
Madness riding him again, he drew out, thrust back, more this time, and she collapsed, breathing hot gusts of passion, opening wider for each thrust, an amalgam of agony and ecstasy slashing across her face and rippling through her body.
He bent, drank of her lips, infused her with his wonder. “Did you see how you capture me? How I invade you? How beautiful it is?”
She writhed beneath him, her hair a splash of sunlight in the dimness, her breath coming in gasps. “Yes, yes…I love it…I love everything you are, the feel of you, the idea of your flesh in mine…More, Javed…all…”
Her words, her need, rode him. And he rode her until her cries rang out again, shattering him with spikes of stimulation. She was a raging inferno beneath him, around him, more destructive than every threat he’d ever faced combined. She was the one thing that made him live, that could annihilate him, that could consume him.
Pleasure soared, the barrenness of his eternity of existence dissipating it its blaze, an accumulation of so much energy its release might be the one thing that could permanently damage them both.
He bellowed, forging deeper into her sheath, soaring higher on the scent and sounds of her intensifying pleasure. She augmented his force, drove her heels and shoulders into her support, crushed herself against him as if to merge their bodies, catapulting him into a frenzy. He pounded into her now, knowing that only his full power would unleash her pent-up needs, wring her magnificent body of every spark of pleasure it could yield.
The heat, the friction escalated until he sensed she couldn’t take any more, needed release before she burst from the buildup.
He sank his girth inside her to the root. She lurched like a flailing marionette, shrieked. He adjusted his position, thrust again, the deepest plunge yet, and she bucked so hard, she lifted them both clear into the air before they crashed, plunging him even deeper inside her.
The convulsions that swept through her would have broken a mortal’s spine. The gush of her pleasure around his thickness razed him, the force of her orgasm squeezing his shaft until he felt she’d engulf him whole. Her seizure triggered his own.
He detonated from his loins outward, unleashed himself into her. Surge after surge of scorching pleasure shot through his length and gushed deep into her as if trying to put out the flames before they consumed them.
His groans echoed her sobs as pleasure hit an almost agonizing plateau, left them straining against each other again, like they had in the closed circuit of destruction.
He could be right. They might not survive this.
He didn’t mind.