“Emin,” she moaned, a hypnotic smile on her face as she rode the wave of happiness and arousal that washed through her.
But he was still on the edge. Even her easy acquiescence hadn’t been enough to quell the racing in his chest.
“Now,” he growled, thrusting up into her as he banded her hips with his arm.
“What?” she asked, her eyes cloudy.
“Marry me now.”
She looked at him in confusion as he held her tight, and with his cock still impaling her, he moved quickly across his small cabin. He wrenched open the door of a closet and dragged a bath towel out. Ten came tumbling down with it but he didn’t care.
He held up the towel. It was a deep red with little autumn leaves printed on it, an old, tattered thing that he’d used for years. “Belarusian tradition, the woman drags towel to wedding. She ties around her wrist and then man’s. They are married together.”
Glory snatched the towel from him and instantly started tying it around her wrist. She scrabbled for Emin’s arm, but he couldn’t hold her up at the same time. He started to lower her to the ground but she stopped him.
“Outside,” she gasped. “I want to be married outside.”
So he stumbled across the cabin, burst onto the porch in the broad daylight. The forest closed in around them as the sun speared onto the small grassy front lawn. And that’s where he laid her, where she was supposed to be. The grass as green as her eyes as she frantically tied the towel to his wrist as well.
And then they were joined. Tied together. He looked down at her. And had to look away.
He lifted one of her legs over his shoulder and reared back, thrusting into her with the force his body begged him to use, inching her along the grass.
“Glory, god.” His eyes wrenched closed against her beauty. It was too much. He felt her arch and moan and scratch at him as he fucked her into the ground.
“Your hair is autumn,” he said, scrambling to put words to the thoughts that stampeded through his head. All he knew was that he needed her to know. “The same color as the leaves. God. That red. Your skin is so pale. So winter. It’s winter. And your spring eyes. Like a newborn. Spring. Starting over, reborn. I am reborn in your eyes,” he panted as he thrust into her. He could feel her body coiling up like a spring. “But your heart is summer. Your heart is summer. You are so warm. Hot and happy and bursting with sunshine. So joyful. So everything.”
He rolled with her, the towel yanking their arms as she rode him now. “You’re everything,” he told her over and over as he thrust into her from below.
The cool autumn sun kissed over them as she threw her head back, her free hand twisting into her hair.
“Yes,” Glory said, something flashing across her eyes. “I am your mate.”
She rose over him and fell again with a vicious stroke, nothing like the soft little pressing strokes she’d used when they had first started sleeping together. This was a woman seeking and taking.
Reaching down, she gripped Emin by the shoulders and pulled him up to sitting. She lowered her head and bit him fiercely on the neck. The pain of it rocketed through his body and he immediately twisted, grinding her back into the ground. Her nails scraped across his back and she gripped his hips, rolling them again.
Back on top, she twisted her hands in his hair and tugged. The gentle woman he’d known was gone. She was fierce and fighting and a warrior. It brought him rocketing toward the edge to see it. Her body was a taut, pale ribbon in the cool sunlight and she was marking him permanently. This was not a symbolic marriage ceremony. She was making it so that they could never go back.
She yanked at his hair again as she fell onto him, taking the lobe of his ear between her teeth.
Emin roared in pain and pleasure. He could feel the intensity of her feelings roar through him. Her feelings for him, her need to be tied to him, her fear and anxiety about her mother. Her arousal. He felt it all. The way a mate should.
So he rolled them yet again, on top as his back rounded and flattened with the force of his thrusts. He would make them into one pulsing, straining creature if it was the last thing he did.
She took his bottom lip in her sharp teeth and tugged. He tasted his own blood and looked down into her eyes. For one flashing second they glittered in the sun like a cat’s eye.
She shoved him back and came up off his cock. She flipped herself over, back onto her knees and he knew that she wanted it like an animal. Like two beasts in the wild. He was happy to oblige.
He thrust home from behind and gritted his teeth against the pleasure of it. She was so strong, so alive for him as he leaned forward, pressing his weight into her. She tumbled forward and buried her face in the crook of her own arm as she took everything from him.