“But here I stand.”
“I don’t know what that means,” he said.
Truly, neither did I. My entire being was a constant whorl of fear and hope, of anguish and desire.
“I need to be certain you’re okay with this. With me ... touching you.”
Flippantly, I arched my brows, though what I felt was so far from casual, it wasn’t even in the same mirror world. “Oh, is that all you plan on doing to me? Just touching? Or are you more in the mood to look and not touch at all? With how fast you got over here, I figured by now you’d be buried deep?—”
Mostly animal, he growled. The rumble dragged out until I felt it vibrate against my skin, which pebbled all over.
I squirmed. He caught the slight movement, his stare yanking down to the apex of my thighs.
His attention remained there for so long, I prompted him: “So? What’s it gonna be, big boy? Are you gonna give in to the craving and whip out your sacred, bejeweled wand? Or are you?—?”
“After what I did to you, I need to hear you say it.” The words were jumbled and mushed together, as if his tongue were already a single breath away from slipping between my parted lips. “I need to be sure. I can never risk hurting you again.”
“So you keep saying.”
I shuffled a few inches closer, and the man—the fierce warrior and drake, who was head of an entire clan—actually whimpered.
With a grunt of effort, he pulled his depthless eyes up my body, till they met my own, and held. “Are. You. Sure? Sure you want me, sure you want me to make love to you, sure you still want me as your mate, sure you?—?”
“Just shut the fuck up, already.”
I slid forward, splayed my breasts against his bare chest, and tangled my hands in his hair, tugging his face down to mine.
His response was instantaneous. When my mouth touched his, his lips were already parted, his tongue sweeping along the seam of mine to seek entry.
He immediately set to devour me while his hands swept up and down my arms, my back, my behind, attempting to touch and squeeze me everywhere at once.
My own fingers ran across his shoulders, chest, stomach, sides. For the first time in my entire life, I wished for an extra set of arms. The man was beyond stunning, beyond lovely. He wasfucking amazing.
As his lips and tongue feasted on me, he groaned, and when they finally pulled away from my mouth to drag over my neck and down across my collarbones, I whined. I wasn’t sure why, really, only that I wanted him inside me now, now, fuckingnow—even as I also wanted to draw out his frenzied exploration that had me panting as if I’d sprinted the entire distance from the Wilds.
His strong fingers tugged on my hair, better exposing the column of my neck to him. He sucked, licked, and nipped.
This time, it was I who growled.
“Easy, tigress,” he said, a playful tease riding his words when all I could think about was him riding me.
I blamed Zako. All thatmaidenhood this, maidenhood thathad left me starved. I could have behaved like a normal woman in the presence of a veritable god. But no, instead desperation made every one of my reaches insufficient, feverish.
“My tigress,” he breathed along the swell of a breast, a moment before he latched on to my nipple and sucked, drawing a cry from me that had the spying ear zooming down to hover a few feet from our combined heads.
When I growled again, it was with that fervent desire to ride Rush like he was my personal steed, yes, most fucking definitely—but also to set everything tainted by the queen on fire until it blazed. Until she was the one to vanish in a cloud of ashes from this world and any other forever.
Rush dragged his tongue in a hot line below my scar, on his way to my other breast, and the queen might as well have disappeared already. At once, I was back there with him, and when he sucked my other nipple into his mouth, I squirmed and arched my spine like a rutting animal—like the tigress he’d accused me of being.
When he curled his fingers into soft claws and trailed them down my back to cup my ass, I hopped up into his arms. I was wrapping my legs around his hips when Itskedin loud annoyance.
Instantly, he pulled back to study my face. “What is it? Are you okay?”
“Seriously, Rush, I love that you asked me that, but now stop fucking asking me that. And no, I’m not okay. I won’t be okay till you’re out of those stupid, ridiculous shorts and so far inside me that?—”
I stopped to giggle, a carefree sound that shocked me as much as my wanton behavior. This wassonot what Zako had trained me to be. And yet I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt more freely myself.
Rush managed to juggle my weight and step smoothly out of his shorts in three seconds flat.