Page 207 of Burn of the Everflame

He paused. “You want to stop?”

I leaned my chest against the tree and pressed my hips back. “I want to start.”

“Always so impatient,” he murmured. His hands skated down my arms and closed around my bound wrists, using them to pull me against him. His length slid between my thighs, coating himself in my wetness. “This is what you want?”

I nodded again.

“Tell me, Diem. I want to hear your voice.”

“Yes,” I moaned. “Fuck me, Luther.”

He slammed into me, and pleasure exploded through every nerve. The bond purred as the feeling of my mate inside me filled me with unrivaled bliss. I felt peaceful and safe and verging on happy.

And I fought against it with everything I had.

“Harder,” I insisted again.

His pounding picked up speed, though it only increased the feelings of serenity I was racing to avoid. Over the bond, I could feel Luther’s matching pleasure and the way his ever-present worry for me momentarily began to ebb. In moments like this, it was so easy to empty my head of every haunting thought and rewrite it with only this, only us, only now.

And then my mind flashed back to the Sophosian corpses, and guilt buried me in a field of their ashes.

“Harder,” I growled.

Luther clamped one hand on my shoulder and wrapped my braid around the other, tugging on both to bring me under his control. I encouraged him with rasping moans, but I still wanted more. I crushed myself against the tree, letting every powerful thrust of his hips grind my face into the trunk, then writhed until my breasts spilled fully free. The sensitive skin scraped over the coarse bark and turned an angry, irritated red.

I’d never shied from the boundary between pleasure and pain. My body responded in the most carnal of ways to the exhilaration of dancing too close to danger.

This was . . . something else. I wasn’t holding my hand to the flame to see how long I could stand it—I was dousing myself in kerosene and lighting a match.

Luther leaned in to kiss my neck, a tender reminder that there was more than lust at the heart of this, and I turned my face away. As my head dropped forward, his grip on my hair pulled tight. The prickle that coated my scalp did little to sate my malevolent hunger.

He jerked my hips back and bent me forward until he drove deeper and hit that perfect spot. Over the bond, his ecstasy surged, carrying me with it, and I frantically swam the other way. I stabbed my teeth into my lip to drown out the pleasure as heat built low on my spine.

His hips slapped hard against me. “Is this what you want?” he asked, voice gruff with desire.

“Harder,” I said, legs trembling. “Make it rough.” I pressed my face into the bark until my vision spotted. “Make it hurt.”

“You want me to hurt you?”

“Yes. Yes.”

Luther stilled.

“Is that what you want,” he said, his timbre dark and dangerously low, “or are you punishing yourself and using me to do it?”

Shame rolled through me. I felt seen in the worst kind of way. My gaze dropped. My cheeks burned.

Luther slid out of me, and the emptiness he left behind was world-consuming.

“Diem.”

“Release my hands,” I whispered.

His magic sparked against my skin, and the leather strap split and fell away.

“Diem,” he said again, more gently.

One arm clutched to my chest to cover my mark as I straightened my clothes, avoiding his eyes. “I think I need to take a walk.”