“Zayna…”

I lunge for the ax handle when she won’t listen this time. She tries to swing at me sideways, like she’s trying to chop my body in half. I dodge her swing and the ax lodges in the cabin wall. The force throws Zayna back a little and she’s surprised by her own strength. I grab the ax out of the wall and she shrieks as I throw it aside — over ten feet away.

Before Zayna can get a hold of herself, I grab her by the waist and drag her into the bedroom. She screams as I lift her off the ground with one arm wrapped around her waist. The fighting only gets worse from there. First she tries dropping her weight, like she isn’t light enough for me to throw over my shoulder.

“PUT ME DOWN!” she shrieks, trying to pry herself away from my grasp. I haul her through the door she damn near chopped down. Zayna digs her nails into my forearm and follows up by biting down on me like I’m a Klondike bar in the middle of summer. I wince and grunt as I body slam her on the bed just to get her teeth off me.

“FUCK!” I yell as blood spurts from my forearm. “You bit me!”

“I’ll do it again too!” Zayna says, getting up on her knees on the bed, lunging at me like a pit bull on the run from Michael Vick. She jumps at me, but finds a wall of muscle that forces her back onto the bed. I grab her and try to hold her down. One knee on the bed and then the other as I wrestle Zayna’s forearms away from my face.

“STOP SCRATCHING ME!”

She knees me in the thigh. But I know she was aiming for something else. We’re going to wake Eden up messing around like this. I grunt and pin Zayna’s hands above her head. She screeches like a banshee and I do the only thing I can think of to shut her up. I kiss her. I expect her next move, but I let it happen. I have control here. Hands pinned above her head. Zayna’s soft, curvy body beneath my weight. She’s out of breath too.

I’m bigger than her, stronger than her, and I know all her weaknesses the same way she knows mine. Except I’m in control here. Not her. She lashes out with another kick to my thigh and I kiss her harder. Fury surges through her when her kicks don’t work and I don’t stop kissing her. She bites down on my lower lip hard. The heat and pain flow through me immediately, but Zayna doesn’t achieve her mission.

I let the blood flow into her mouth and I don’t stop. Her lips are so soft. So much better than any other lips I’ve kissed. Just having her like this gets my dick hard, even if she wants to chop me in half. She grunts miserably when her bite doesn’t work to stop me.

“Get off me,” she grunts.

“No.”

“I hate you.”

“I believe that,” I whisper, adjusting my hips and then moving Zayna’s head so I can kiss her neck. This only infuriates her more. She can feel my dick getting hard, which makes her panic more.

“I HATE YOU.”

“Good,” I whisper. “You can tell me that when you take my dick tonight.”

“RUGER. Get off me.”

It’s not that I feel high on my power. It’s that this is the only power I have over her. This stupid, useless physical strength. She’s the one who has my heart pinched between two of her fingers. She’s the one who can crush the life out of me with a word. With her absence.

“I need him dead,” I whisper. “I need you to be only mine.”

She looks at me with dead panic on her face. “That can’t be the only way to prove it to you.”

“Why do you even care about him?”

My dick stiffens with uncontrollable and downright absurd rage. I should be stronger than this. Better than this. But I’m not. I’m a jealous fucking psycho with blood on his hands and the worst part is that I just crave even more.

“I don’t,” she says, the honesty on her face giving me a smidgeon of relief. “It’s wrong to kill someone innocent. That’s it…”

That’s the line then?His innocence. It doesn’t feel like enough to me. Not if it means risking her changing her mind and leaving my side to go back to a man who doesn’t have blood on his hands. I can’t risk it. I can’t risk her leaving me. She has to understand that.

I hate her for denying me this one thing. I hate her for the very fact that her denial does nothing to stop my feelings. They surge in waves and crash against the walls I was supposed to put up. Her lips part eagerly for me even as her body thrashes against mine. I like her right where she is and my hands move to strip her clothes off. Zayna stops kissing me and sucks in just enough air that she can yell at me.

“Are you crazy?”

I laugh and keep working her pants off. No point answering the question at all. Zayna kicks my thigh again, but even her toughest kick barely hurts and I just get more excited about getting her naked. She gasps when I get my fingers past her underwear. My dick thumps aggressively against her thigh, raging with desire for this woman. She’s so soft everywhere and it’s downright unfair how good she smells.

My fingers slide between her lower lips and the sexy ass sound coming out of Zayna’s mouth almost makes me cum on the spot. Fuck, she’s wet. For all that fussing and fighting, Iexpected that I would have to work her up to this. But her juices slip all over my fingers and I struggle against my urges.

Control is the most important thing here. For both of us. I slow down and move my kisses to her neck while my fingers tease Zayna’s lower lips open. I find her soaked clit and keep kissing her neck with firm, even pressure as I tease just around the nub, careful not to give her too much.

“You can’t blame me for wanting to kill any man who ever touched you,” I whisper, sliding my finger in slow, smooth circles around Zayna’s clit. “I can’t imagine a man alive having you and not coming back for seconds.”