Dark Promises(120)

Tell me who your lifemate is, he demanded, dragging her down the bed, kneeling as he threw her legs over his shoulders, putting her in a vulnerable position. He guided the head of his cock to her dripping entrance. Leave your hands where I told you, Gabrielle. His voice was a whip, hard and authoritative after he had pushed her so far from her comfort zone and she’d gone there with him.

“I can’t,” she said, her head whipping back and forth. “I have to hold on to you.”

She reached for him, or tried to. She couldn’t move her wrists from the mattress. Her gaze jumped back to his face. “Aleksei.” She breathed his name. Ragged. Panting. Writhing. He just held her there, suspended, his body against hers, and she tried to impale herself on him but he refused to allow it.

She fought for control, her breasts heaving, her lungs burning. “Please, Aleksei. Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to tell me who your lifemate is. And know it, Gabrielle. I am entering your mind when I enter your body. You had better know who you belong to.”

She licked her lips to moisten them. He was asking for more than her body. She knew that. She didn’t care. She might be the most fickle person on the face of the earth, but this man had found his way inside of her. Soul to soul. She would always love Gary. She knew that and accepted it, but she would love him differently, as the man who saw her and saved her when no one else could see her.

“You’re my lifemate, Aleksei,” she whispered. She gave him truth. She opened her mind to him. Let him see her. Let him see how she loved Gary and how, already, her love for her lifemate was so intense, so beyond anything she could have imagined, that she knew he wouldn’t be worried about her feelings for Gary.

“He is lost to you,” Aleksei said softly. “Beyond any emotion now. Perhaps his memories of you will keep him safe on whatever path fate has for him. But you are mine. Fully and completely mine.”

She nodded. She knew that. “Yours, Aleksei, and I’m burning up. I need you right now.”

He answered her the only way Aleksei ever answered—his way. He took her hard and fast and deep. Somewhere in the middle of her body coming apart again and again, she realized he’d given her back her hands and she used them well, holding on to him, digging her nails into him every time he took her over the edge and continued pounding into her until she was screaming, her cries echoing through the chamber.

She felt him stretching her more. Impossibly. Her breath caught so she couldn’t cry out, but her eyes never left his. She saw it moving over him, through him. She felt it, the crushing wave of pleasure, of bliss, that swept upward from his toes and downward from his head, to come together in a crashing wave so huge, it swept both of them away.

He buried his face in her neck, letting her take his full weight, holding her there for several long minutes before lifting his head to look down at her. He framed her face with his hands, using his elbows to prop him up. His green eyes blazed down into hers.

“You are good, kislány?” he asked.

Her heart turned over at the gentleness in his voice. “How could I not be good?” Her body was still rippling. She felt sated and loved and wrapped up completely in him.

“With us. Are you good? Do you understand the concept of a lifemate? Not just anyone would suit my personality, or yours. We fit. We belong. You to me. Me to you. Most women couldn’t possibly live with me.”

Gabrielle shook her head. “That’s not true.”

“Kislány. It is. I am from ancient times when a man protected his woman and was expected to go out hunting while she waited at home, protecting the family. More, the man expected his woman to see to his needs and be happy doing it. You see to my needs and you are happy doing it.”

“You make that easy for me, Aleksei.”

“And when we live near others? Will it be easy for you then, when your family and your friends expect you to challenge me at every turn? When I refuse to allow your mother to throw her tantrums around you? When I will not back down and make certain not one single thing hurts or harms you in any way? Not just physically? Because, Gabrielle, that is what you can expect from me.”

“I know that. I’ve thought a lot about you and the way you are.” She had, too. She rubbed her hands up and down his arms, feeling the defined muscles there. He was a beautiful man and once she’d gotten over being worried about what everyone else might think of her relationship, she began to think about what she could live with, what would make her happy, given her nature.

“The thing is, at first your arrogant bossiness made me crazy . . .”