She couldn’t want him still, after what he’d done to her.
Her teeth sank into his bottom lip, hard, breaking his flesh. The taste of his blood mixing with her taste, inflamed his every nerve. Her distress felt so real.
It was real, a firebomb of madness detonating inside him, blowing away the last of his disbelief, and his control.
He smashed his lips harder into hers, and her cry of relief, of exultation tore through him. The need to ram into her, ride her, spill himself inside her, with no finesse, no restraint, drove him. Her flesh buzzed with her distress beneath his burning hands. Her incessant moans filled his head.
She wanted an invasion. And he would deliver.
It had been so long without her...so agonizingly long. He’d thought it would be for the rest of his miserable life. But his banishment was suddenly over. She was taking him back when he’d thought it an impossibility. And he would take her as she needed him to, binge on her, perish inside her.
He swept her off her feet and she arched deep against the door, making a desperate offering of her core, her breasts, her hands behind his head sinking further into his sanity, speeding his descent into delirium.
He fell on her engorged breasts, starving, took what he could of her ripened femininity, where his daughters had suckled, insane with regret that he hadn’t been there to witness it. Tearing her skirt farther up in rough, uncoordinated moves, he spread her thighs wide around his hips. She thrashed, clamped him with her legs and need, her sobs sharpening. His distress just as deep, he held her with one arm, reached between her legs, pushed aside her soaked panties, opened her folds and shuddered, on the brink of release just gliding his fingers through her fluid heat.
Drawing harder on one nipple, then the other, he rubbed two fingers in shaking circles over the knot of flesh where her nerves converged. Once, twice, then he felt her stiffen, that soon. He gritted his teeth, anxious for the music of her release, even if he suffered permanent damage hearing it.
She came apart in his arms, magnificent, abandoned, her cries fueling his arousal to the point of agony. His hands shook out of control as he freed himself, the anticipation so brutal his grip on consciousness was slipping.
Fighting to focus, he snatched her thighs back around him, groaned as her wet heat singed his erection, even as her heavy-lidded gaze scalded the rest of him. Growling something not even he understood, driven, wild, his fingers dug into her buttocks. Her breasts swelled more at his roughness, her hardened nipples branding his raw flesh even through his clothes.
His vision distorted over lips swollen from his ferocity, quivering from a taut-with-need face. “Come inside me n—”
He drove up into her, roaring her name. But though molten for him, she was as tight as ever, her flesh resisting his invasion as he stretched her beyond her limits. But knowing their impossible fit only drove her beyond coherence with pleasure, he pulled out only to thrust back, again, then again, again, again, to the rhythm of her piercing screams as she consumed him in her velvet inferno, until he’d embedded himself inside her to the hilt.
Then he stilled in her depths, surrendered to her clenching hunger as it wrung him, razed him. At last. At last.
He rested his forehead against hers, overwhelmed, transported, listening to her delirium, to his. Her graceful back was a deep arch, granting him total freedom with her body.
Then it was no longer enough. The need to conquer her, finish her, end inside her rose like a tidal wave, as it always had, crashing and destroying everything, before building again as if it had never dissipated.
Blind, out of his mind, he lifted her, filled his mouth and hands with her flesh. He had to leave no fiber of her being unsaturated with pleasure. He withdrew all the way out of her then thrust back, harder, then harder still, until he was hammering inside her to the cadence he knew would overload her, until she convulsed in orgasm, her satin screams echoing his roars as he followed her into the abyss of pleasure.
Her convulsions spiked in intensity at the first splash of his seed against her womb, and he felt her heart spiraling out of control with his as a sustained seizure of release destroyed the world around them.
Then it was another life, where nothing existed except being merged with her, riding the aftershocks, savoring the plateau of ecstasy, sharing the descent.
It had been beyond control or description. Everything.
Yet it wasn’t enough. Would anything with Kassandra ever be?
He knew the answer to that. Nothing ever would. He’d never had enough of her. He’d been hers alone since that first time he’d laid eyes on her. He would have remained hers even if he’d never had her again. Even if she’d hated him forever.
But defying comprehension, she didn’t. Not only didn’t she hate him, not only did she still want him, she seemed to have forgiven him. She’d given him her body again, her acceptance, her support with the twins, her ease. Her laughter. How was it even possible?
And he realized. He’d done that. When he hadn’t meant to.
All he’d meant when he’d let go of the act of stiffness and distance had been to end her fears toward him, neutralize her hostility, for her own peace of mind. He hadn’t dreamed she would not only relinquish her rightful hatred of him but seek his intimacy again, and with this unstoppable urgency.
And he realized something else. Even though she’d completed her descent from the peak of pleasure, she wasn’t pulling away.
He withdrew a bit, keeping them merged as he looked down at her. She seemed disoriented, her eyes slumberous, fathomless as they gazed up at him. A goddess of temptation and fulfillment, something every man dreamed of but never really expected to find. And he’d found her, not only once, but against all odds, twice.
Unable to stop himself, his hands dug into her buttocks, gathering her tighter to him.
Her eyes scorched him to the bone with the amalgam of pleasure and pain that transfigured her amazing beauty as he expanded even more inside her. Her core, molten with their combined pleasure, contracted around him, making him thrust deeper into her, wrenching moans from both their depths. Then slowly, her lids slid down.
In seconds her breathing evened. She’d fallen asleep.
Overwhelming pride that he’d pleasured her so completely, as he’d used to, it had literally knocked her out, burgeoned inside him. He hardened even more, that first explosive encounter only serving to whet his appetite. As it always had, during their past extended sessions of delirium. Visions assailed him, of taking her to bed, making love to her again as she slept, until she woke up on another orgasm.
But he couldn’t do that. He had to let her sleep.
Cursing his shoddy coordination, he gathered her in his arms and walked slowly with her precious weight. She’d left it all to his power in lax trust, testing his precarious balance. The trek to the bed felt endless. Placing her under the covers and adjusting her clothes, she stirred only to touch what she could of him with sleepy kisses and caresses, murmuring wonderful little incoherencies in appreciation of his caresses and coddling. He struggled up, heart thundering, brow covered in cold sweat. His control had one last notch before it slipped again.
One thing pulled him back from the temptation. The sheer regret and despair that pulverized the heart he’d thought had shriveled the day he’d pushed her away all over again.
This had been a terrible mistake.
For her sake, from now on, he had to leave her alone.
He couldn’t succumb to her need, or his weakness, ever again.
Kassandra woke up from an inferno of eroticism, on fire.
Gasping as her dream about Leonid evaporated and with it the impending orgasm he’d been about to give her, it took her a disoriented minute to realize where she was. In Leonid’s luxurious jet bedroom, fully clothed and tucked beneath covers that felt alive with silky touches and sighs.
Leonid had knocked her out with pleasure. As he’d always done. So even this hadn’t changed.
Barely able to move, she turned her head to squint at the digital clock pinned down on the bedside table...and gasped. It was seven hours since she’d shut down in his arms. They must be about to land. And he must have had things to attend to. Which was a good thing. She didn’t know how she would have faced him after what she’d done.
She’d almost attacked him in her arousal!
But once he’d made sure he knew what she’d been asking for, how far she’d wanted him to go, he’d...devastated her. She felt...ravished. Every inch of her felt fully exploited, delightfully sore and was screaming for an encore. Pushing away the covers that suddenly felt filled with hot thorns, she teetered barefoot to the adjoining bathroom.
It turned out to have a whirlpool tub, which she couldn’t rush to fast enough, taking her clothes off to sink in.
As the warm currents bombarded her ultrasensitive flesh, her condition worsened as the memories of her encounter with Leonid boiled over in her blood. If he’d been here, she would have lost her mind all over again, and again.
When she couldn’t take it anymore, she heaved out of the water and headed on trembling legs for the mirror, in front of which she shakily dried herself. She looked exactly like what she was. A woman who’d been possessed and pleasured within an inch of her sanity, and was now looking wild with her need for more.
But...would there be more? What would he say and do when she next saw...