Page 20 of Bound By Dance and Desire

She paused, lowering her gaze to the floor in the way I was learning she did when thinking. Or avoiding thinking. Bits of her dark hair had escaped the tail she'd scraped it back into, the flyaways framing her face.

“Time,” she said. “That's all I want. I need more than physical attraction, which is complicated for me. It's always been about the mental connection.”

Was that so? Then I was about to deliver her the mental connection of her dreams.

“And if it turns out we don't like each other,” she added, “then?—”

“I'm not letting you go.”

She glared at me. “That's not a healthy attitude. What if we're not compatible at all?” Her eyes flickered again.

What was she hiding?

“Oh, we're compatible.”

I decided to reward my good behavior, and using the leverage of her hand clasped in mine, yanked her onto my lap.

She squeaked, then cut the sound off as if she realized it made her sound like an indignant kitten.

“You could say our souls were made for each other.”

Hasannah wriggled on my lap in a show of temper. I leaned my head back, closing my eyes and biting back a groan.

I clenched my teeth, reminding myself that her ass grinding against my cock probably wasn't a subtle flirtation. If she didn't take me to her bed soon. . .well. We would see what I was truly made of.

“Can I go back to my seat?”

“No.”

“Andrei—”

“I can find something else to do with those lips if they insist on saying things that displease me.”

As Heir to the High Lord of Casakraine, and a High Lord in my own right, I could claim anything or anyone I pleased as long as I was willing to bear the consequences.

“Droit de seigneur,”she muttered, and I didn’t tell her she was already partially reading my mind. It would only scare her.

Before now I'd never understood why some males succumbed to the rutting spiral and took what should be freely offered. I still didn't understand, but I was beginning to fear the day I might. I was too young to surrender my honor to cruelty.

“And what are you going to do with me when you get me home?” she demanded. “Are you going to force me?”

I stiffened. “Is that what you think I am? A man so weak he has to destroy a woman to bind her?”

“No,” she said after too long a pause.

“Then stop saying things that displease me,” I said through gritted teeth.

I bent my head and sank my teeth into the side of her neck, not hard enough to break skin, but hard enough to make my point.

I flexed my fingers, wanting to cup her breasts, learn their shape and heft, twist her nipples until she cried out, but if I touched her like that I wouldn’t stop until I had her naked on my lap, wet pussy squeezing my cock.

She wasn’t ready.

She needed to take more care in how she handled me. I didn't want to savage her because my restraint snapped.

“It’s too soon,” she said, voice pitched a little higher.

“What does that even mean? Too soon?”

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