Without consummating the damn kiss, he pulled back, making her grasp at his shoulders like someone dying of thirst, scrabbling for purchase, power, a drop of control. Then he was back. Just his nose, skimming hers, pulling in her scent as surely as she was his, lips following in its path, up, to kiss her eye, then back down, with the slow, calm patience of a man who’d lived alone for a decade. A man with no expectations.
But she wasn’t like that. She craved million-mile-an-hour winds, sought adrenaline like a drug, and jumped from airplanes, all while wishing for more, more, more. Nothing had ever been enough.
He backed up, forcing a muted scream from her throat until his hand wrapped around it, loose but secure, and—oh no, oh no, this was it, what she’d needed all these years. Her sex went heavy, flooded with warmth and wetness, and she wanted to scream at him to move.
This glacier-slow control was the steady bass to her wild treble. It should have been discordant, but it only grounded her, kept her in her body when she’d always sped her way to completion.
“Slow down, Leo. Let me do this my way,” he rumbled, like something older than the earth’s crust.
When she shivered this time, it wasn’t from the cold or even from stimulation, but with recognition. This…him…together. The primitive rightness of this man’s touch was like hydrogen and oxygen coming together to make water. More than the sum of their parts.
***
In this world, there was nothing as soft as Leo Eddowes, nothing half as sweet. The most fearless woman he’d ever met, who faced her own death with humor, whose spine was strong as diamonds, while her brain was just as sharp, had somehow opened up, giving him her soft, tender core.
And he was in absolute awe.
With reverence, he took her mouth, her heat, this emotion filling the air between them and gave her everything he had.
Though, really it wasn’t much. Rough hands, tired muscles, bones that felt worn down to nothing.
With chapped lips, he explored her soft cheek, the straight line of her jaw, the tender skin beneath her ear. The noises she made were incredible. Low and sexy, breathless with wanting.
Wanting him.
And fuck if he wasn’t hard enough to plow through the damn bedrock beneath them.
“Do it, Elias.Kissme for God’s sake.”
Her words surprised a laugh from him, along with something else—something not quite so bright and sweet. Something feral and animalistic. A bestial desire to make her do things his way.
He threw a leg over hers—startled to realize in an offhand way that Bo had left their nest a while ago—and pinned Leo to the hard ground.
“No,” he whispered right into her ear.
When she tried to move her hands only to find her wrists trapped, her surprise was palpable, vibrating through his chest as surely as her long, thready moan. She reached with her hips, her breasts, tried to bite him with that mouth, and for a few, drawn-out seconds, he could do nothing but shut his eyes and breathe. That or he’d embarrass himself all over her belly.
Which was probably the way this would end anyway, given how long it had been. And how badly he wanted her.
Once he’d gotten as much control as he could on the situation, he let his hungry inner beast take over, let his blood thicken and his pulse slow.
With the speed of lava easing from the earth, her wrists tight in one of his fists, he lowered himself back on top of her, let her feel his heavy erection, and then rose when she tried to kiss him again.
He could get addicted to this power—the power of a strong woman wanting him, showing him, and fighting him just enough to prove it.
“More,” she demanded. “Come on, Elias. Let me feel you… Give me a…”
She opened her legs wide and his body reacted like he’d been electrocuted.
He was the one who grunted this time, the sound punctuated with a quiet “damn” when he encountered all that wetness. The very real possibility of slipping inside her made him go very, very still.
Not because he didn’t want it, but because he needed it so bad.
If he didn’t kiss her again, didn’t get his fill of her taste, then he’d do something irrevocable.
He bent, put his mouth to hers, and lost his ever-loving mind.
Chapter 31
