“Oh, yes.”
She was hot and wet to his touch—it would feel like heaven when he sank into her. But it would also hurt her. He’d had his fingers inside her as they lay alone and aroused on a sun-golden field one festival day and later in a dark corner of her father’s barn, knew how very tight she was.
His cock throbbed at the idea of the pleasure that awaited, but he would not have it entangled with her pain. “Lie down on the bed.” Picking her up before she could respond, he placed her on their simple bed, then—stripping off his own clothes—settled himself with his head between her thighs, pulling her legs over his shoulders.
Her fingers clenched in the sheets, but she didn’t stop him when he parted her soft folds to kiss her with a slow, intent ferocity he hadn’t dared unleash on her before they were man and wife. She screamed, squirmed, sobbed, but it was pleasure that colored her responses, pleasure that had her tugging at his hair with frantic hands.
Instead of stopping, he found that little nub of flesh he’d discovered the first time he slid his hand under her skirts, and he sucked. Her hands tore at his hair, but he continued the torment until the finger he’d inserted inside of her was drenched in the liquid heat of her need. “Now,” he murmured, rising above her, his cock a turgid length, “I will make you mine.” Fitting himself to the wet silk of her opening, he closed his hand over the curve of her hip.
Driving into her was the most excruciating pleasure he had ever felt. When she whimpered in pain, he tried to stop but he was young, his control shredded, and for an instant, he panicked that he would take her when she did not want to be taken. It froze the blood in his veins. Locking every one of his muscles, he tried to find his mind.
Her fingers on his chest, her hand on his shoulder, tugging him down to meet her mouth. “Don’t stop, Dmitri. Don’t stop.”
It was the only thing he needed. Pushing into her until he was buried to the hilt, her nails digging into his arms, he kissed her. And kept on kissing her as he began to move inside the hot, wet sheath that held him with such possessive tightness. She didn’t find her pleasure again before his own release thundered over him, arcing down his spine in a lightning bolt that had him spilling inside her, but he couldn’t curse himself for that. Not when his blood was seared with the liquid burn of pleasure. Not when he roused to find a woman with a wide smile lying under him, cupping his face with loving hands.
“I am now,” she whispered, “thoroughly debauched, husband.”
Dmitri’s eyes opened to see the wall of his Tower office. He rarely slept—it seemed a waste of time when he needed very little to survive. But after returning from Honor’s apartment, he’d sat down at his desk, his mind on the hunter who threatened to make him feel things that had long gathered dust in his soul. Minutes later, he was asleep and dreaming of the only woman who had ever owned his heart.
Though he had taken her as a man takes a woman on their wedding night, Ingrede had always been his, their families’ farms side by side. They’d tumbled in mud together as children, gorged themselves on summer fruit on lazy days gilded by the sun, and taught each other the things one knew and the other did not.
When she had smiled at him that day over the wildflowers, the emotion that had burst within him had been incandescent. And it had stayed true as the years passed, as they grew. Looking back, he couldn’t imagine he’d ever been that innocent boy who’d gotten up before dawn to clamber up a mountainside, except that his love for Ingrede still felt as deep, as true.
A woman’s husky laugh.
It wasn’t Ingrede’s.
Pushing off his desk, he stalked to the plate-glass window that faced out into the hush of a Manhattan caught between night and day, the steel buildings soft gray shadows rather than glittering bulwarks. It was perhaps the only time the city was quiet, a mere two hours between the end of the nightlife and the beginning of the daylight rush.
He’d lived here for hundreds of years, seen it grow from nothing to a city whose heartbeat spoke to millions far and wide. He’d considered leaving it at times, had done so during his sojourn in Neha’s court, young and still filled with an anger that had had no outlet. And then, of course, there had been Favashi. Lovely, gracious Favashi who had been a queen in the making, her home filled with music and art and warmth—the perfect trap for a man who had sought solace for centuries and found none.
Why have you never asked me more about Favashi? he asked the angel he could see coming toward the Tower, his wingspan distinctive, the gold filaments bright even in the dull light.
Raphael’s reply was brutally honest. It didn’t seem a subject you cared to discuss.