Instead he crossed the space between them and pulled her into his arms. “What is it you want exactly?”
“You,” she said, moving her hand down to cup his arousal. “I don’t need you to be on guard. I only need you to be Ragnar.”
She could see him fighting a battle inside of himself. She could see that he wanted what she was offering. That he wanted to surrender to her. To his need.
She could also see that he was desperate to hang onto that guarded component of himself.
It wasn’t just a sense of self-protection. It was more than that. It wasn’t only about being there for his country. The way that he had depersonalized himself was essential to his survival, and she could see that in the tortured lines of his face.
She craved his surrender. But she did not crave his destruction.
He was strong. He had cultivated that strength over years of being the man his country needed. Of being the man those around him needed. A myth. A legend.
And yet there was more to it.
She sensed it now; she just couldn’t figure out exactly what it was.
But he was a man with razor wire around his heart, and she had identified that from the beginning.
When he had accused her of manipulating him, it had been coming from a place of self-preservation. But why?
Yes, there were so many reasons in his past, but she didn’t think that they were the reasons that he had given her.
She didn’t think he was lying. But she did think that he was an incomplete man. A man missing pieces of his past, a man who didn’t know how to embrace the future. Not apart from duty and honor.
Slowly, she reached out and put her hand on his chest. A short growl escaped his lips, and then she reached up and touched his face. Stroked his cheekbone, down his jaw. “You don’t have to fight a war right now. Just be mine.”
She was wearing a pair of purple high heels, and matching underwear, and she watched as his gaze darkened. As desire propelled him forward.
“Ragnar,” she said. “All you have to be with me is you.”
It was as if he lost control entirely then. His growl was deeper, more feral, more sustained as he reached out and wrapped his arms around her, drawing her up against him and kissing her with all the ferocity of a man on the front lines of the battlefield.
He claimed her. Forced her lips open then thrust his tongue deep. There was an honesty to this that soothed something inside of her.
But perhaps it had always been that way with him.
Because he might be a man who didn’t know himself, he might be a man who didn’t know how to explain all of the things he’d been through or all of the things that he believed in, thought and felt, but he was a man of integrity. A man who did exactly what he said he was going to do. A man to be proud of.
She had never been proud of any of the men she had ever known. She found them selfish. Manipulative. Diabolical.
Men who sowed lies and acted like they might grow something other than a poisoned crop.
But not Ragnar.
He was a man who had survived. A man who had fought, all for the good of others, and never for the good of himself. It made her want to worship him. To give him everything. All of herself.
It made her want to fling herself upon his altar and worship.
So she did. With her lips, her tongue. She offered him supplication in the form of her neck exposed for him, to kiss, to bite. In the form of kisses that she spread across his chest, as she worked to remove his clothes, as she dropped to her knees and took him deep into her mouth.
As she gave him all of the evidence of her longing.
All of her desire.
She needed him.
And she wanted him to know that.
