To keep it away, I thrust harder into her body and a breath whistled out from her lungs. I pounded between her thighs, our flesh slapping togetherhard, filling thevolikiwith the sounds of mating and lust and anger.
“Davik,” she breathed. I growled when I felt her hands clasp my face and I tried to shake her off, not meeting her eyes. But she pulled me to her as I drove mercilessly into her until I was forced tolookat her and look deep. “Gentle. Please. I know you can be.”
My chest expanded with a long draw of air. I stilled inside her, leaning forward to press my forehead to the side of her neck, my shoulders shaking. Her hands were stroking down my cheeks, drifting towards my jawline. Then down my neck, my chest. So soft and sweet.
I can give her this, I thought.
I decided right then that I wouldn’tfearthis, that I wouldn’t fear her.
With a deep huff against her skin, I stood, still deep inside her body. She gasped, clinging to me.
I brought us down to the furs on my bed, tugging up her tunic until she was naked underneath me.
“You touch me like no one else has before,” I rasped quietly to her, pressing a kiss to her collarbone, reaching down to widen her thighs. I withdrew from her, holding my breath, the feel of hersublime.
She gave me a shy smile that thudded deep in my chest.
“I…I like touching you,” she said as her palms trailed down my chest. “Is it okay that I do?”
“Lysi,” I hissed, feeling like her hands were stroking every inch of me.
She gasped, a lush cry falling from her lips when I thrust forward slowly, filling her, stretching her.
“Good?”
“Yes,” she whispered, her eyes falling shut when mydakkepressed against the bundle of nerves between her legs.
“Gentle,” I murmured, pressing more kisses to her flesh. Her neck, her breasts, before finding her lips. “Lysi?”
Her eyes met mine as I kissed her slowly.
“Yes,” she whispered against me.
I wondered if this was how wildpyrokifelt before they were tamed. I thought of Nillima, my ownpyroki, how I’d found her in the wildlands, injured, alone, scared, rejected by her mother. I’d brought her back and though she’d nearly tried to kill me in her fright in the days afterwards, I cared for her until she learned to trust me.
I had the strangest sense that Vienne was doing the same thing to me. Taming me with her gentle touches and her gentle, knowing eyes and her soft smiles. I was rebelling against her, lashing out at her, fighting against what I truly wanted: to give in, to findpeace.
I found Iwantedit.
I wanted her to tame me.
So, I stroked her body with mine. I slid deep, I groaned into her skin, I felt her hair and her nipples glide over my chest, I tasted her lips and her tongue and felt her gasp into me, filling me with her breath.
Before long, I felt her tightening. Her little claws were beginning to dig into my shoulders and I huffed, my pace increasing, giving her long, full strokes of my cock.
When she began to come, I pulled back to look down at her features, knowing what I would find. There was a brief smile—that smile that sizzled in my blood—before her lips parted, her eyes closed, and then she was deep in the pleasure of her orgasm.
That smile triggered my own. She took me deeper inside her, pulling and demanding my seed, and I gave it to her, bellowing out my release, feeling it burst from me.
Pleasure from sex had always been fleeting but this continued for long, long moments and when it was finally done, I dropped down beside her, pulling her against me, shuddering.
I waited for the restlessness to come, as it always did. I waited for my blood to feel like it was bubbling under my skin, as it always did.
Only it didn’t come.
Chapter Thirty-One
“What arethesper?”
