There was still laughter all over his face, but he focused on me and he moved the head of his cock against all my heat, so I could feel him.
And as I opened my mouth to beg him to simplydo it—
He slammed his way home.
I came all around him, arching up into him, as that searing, impossible pain soared through my body. I felt split in half. I felt like flying. I had never hurt more, and yet even as I thought that, even as the words formed in my head, the pleasure came in behind.
Hotter. Darker.
Fueled by the shock of pain, it went on and on and on, spinning me out, taking me hostage, killing me again and again and again.
And all the while, he waited.
As I slowly shuddered back into my own skin, I could feel him braced above me, murmuring words I couldn’t understand. He held himself still, every muscle of his body tense, while he was enormous and rock hard inside me.
I realized that he had only just begun.
“Welcome back,curò,” he said. And when he traced a shape over my left breast, I thought I knew what it meant.My heart.
I felt inside out. I lifted a hand and traced one dark brow, then the other.
“That’s a different word. You never told me what the old one meant.”
“Baggiana,” he said. “It means ‘foolish woman.’ Appropriate, I think you’ll agree, but now.” He moved inside me, just a little, and we both groaned. “Now I think the time for foolishness is done.”
Then he gathered me closer, pulled my legs high over his hips so that I locked my ankles behind his back, and he surged in deep.
He did that a few times, sinking himself inside my body a little more each time. Then pulling himself back. And each time he did it, I could remember the pain of that first thrust less and less.
My body accommodated itself to him. I melted around him as he rocked into me, deeper and deeper, and I was determined to take all of him. I was determined to melt myself completely beneath him.
I knew I had managed it when he began to grunt with each thrust. When his head dropped down as his arms moved beneath us to grab my ass so he was controlling not only his own thrusting but mine, too. Then his mouth was on my throat and I felt him bite, then suck.
I wrapped my arms around his wide shoulders, tipped my head back, and let go.
Because for the first time in all my life, I felt free.
He thrusted harder, deeper. Each time he slammed inside, he scraped against me as he retreated and brought me closer and closer to that edge once again.
Until, finally, I was meeting those magnificent thrusts with the same intensity and we were both slicked with sweat, determined and mad with the same need that was in us both.
“You are mine, Rux,” he intoned, dark and forbidding, there at my ear. “You will always be mine, as long as we live. This I promise you.”
“You are mine,” I told him in return, though I could barely speak and I could hear my breathlessness in my voice. “You are always and ever mine. Always, Jovi.”
And on the next thrust, he turned me into fireworks.
Then, with a shout, he followed me into all those pyrotechnics.
I could feel him deep inside me, as if he belonged there. As if the entire purpose of our bodies was this joining, this melting, and the spectacular explosions that went on and on and on.
Even as I could feel that scalding heat of his, flooding me from within.
At some point, many centuries removed, or perhaps a few moments, he disengaged from me and laughed again when I made a small sound of loss.
Jovi was astonishingly beautiful naked, with the sun playing all over his body. He looked like a god, here on this island that I suspected had seen its share of them in its time. He looked like he’d stepped out of a myth when he reached down and hauled me up into his arms again, then carried me back into that ruined old house, up the stairs, and inside.
He didn’t take me to the room I’d woken up in, but led me in a different direction entirely, sweeping into a room on the other side of the house that I knew at once was his. There was what looked like a wardrobe in one corner, and the bed had a bed frame. Both exquisitely wrought. But I only registered those tiny hints of actual furnishings before he took me into a bathroom suite and directly into a shower that had been built for an army.
