With no preamble or warning, he slid one testing hand between her legs, up through the curls at the juncture of her legs, and stroked. Her breath snagged in her throat when a lightning jolt of pleasure arced through her. Her stunned sob of pleasure evolved into a low moan when he did it again and again. Fierce satisfaction surged in his features.
And then his hands were expertly parting her thighs and she gasped as he guided his cock into her.
It felt at first like a shocking invasion. Utterly foreign. She knew a split second of stark loneliness as she met his eyes, knowing that all this could mean for both of them was an urgent appeasement of a furious appetite. A mutual vanquishing. The faster they got what they wanted from it, the better.
And then his hips moved and it became wondrously clear that of course this was exactly what she wanted: every thrust ramped up the pleasure gathering, threatening to burst the very banks of her being.
She slid her hands under his shirt, her palms savoring the play of muscles under his hot smoothskin as he moved. His eyes flared hotter still when her hands slid down to fit into the scoops of muscle in his hard buttocks, and she gripped him, rising up to meet every thrust. He groaned and muttered a low oath of pleasure as she locked her legs around his hips.
And then all was abandon: the swift collision of bodies, her own sobs of pleasure as he drove her closer and closer to something glorious she could sense, but could not name. He knew what it was. Surely he knew. Surely this was what he was racing toward. Sheprayedhe knew.
And then, because she was beyond pride, beyond anything other than need, that word at last rushed past her lips.
“Magnus...please...”
“Tell me...” His voice was a rasp.
“Oh God... please Magnus... I need... I want... I don’t know I don’t know...helpme...”
He reached down and stroked her hard and expertly where they were joined.
Bliss unimaginable snatched her from her body and hurled her into the heavens like so much blazing confetti.
A scream was torn from her; she heard it as if she were miles away, floating somewhere over London, drifting, drifting. Her body bowed up beneath him.
She was quaking as if lightning-struck.
And that moment he went still with a groan.
He withdrew from her quickly.
He spilled instead on her thigh.
They collapsed, and lay side by side for a time on the carpet like two people flung haphazardly across the road after a carriage accident. She had a new appreciation for the word “sated.” She could not move if she tried. Her body felt thoroughly and properly used for the first time ever.
Some absurd, latent reflex toward modesty made her pull her dress down over her hips. It was still furled around her waist.
And that was when Magnus bestirred himself to sit up.
And so she did, too. He’d found a handkerchief in his pocket. He gently, matter-of-factly cleaned her thigh where he’d spilled. He rearranged his shirt; he pulled his trousers up.
She watched all of this, a little abashed. But still dazed and reeling from her trip into the heavens via an orgasm.
And then they regarded each other as if seeing each other for the first time.
Tentatively, he reached out, and cupped her face. “Alexandra...”
He’d made her name sound like a question. One tinged with faint regret.
She looked up at him and saw silver and gold. His eyes, his skin.Gold is a soft metal, she thought dazedly. He seemed to her, in the firelight, gilded, and dangerously, deceptively soft. A great, battered, beautiful, pagan beast.
And her heart gave a sharp kick that felt perilously like joy.
Oh, she was very afraid of what was happening to her.
The ultimate punishment for her original crime would be to fall in love with a man she had likely already lost forever.
Perhaps her expression reflected her sudden fear. Because he dropped his hand from her quickly. As though in touching her he’d somehow transgressed.
