by Nalini Singh
She gave a startled cry and then her body went taut. Liquid heat covered his fingers, scenting the air with a sharp wildness. He continued to stroke her as she shuddered several times before her body went soft and sated. Even then he didn’t stop, indulging his need to pet her with long, easy movements as she lay quiescent.
When she finally attempted to turn, he withdrew his thigh and let her, but kept his fingers where they were. She nuzzled at his throat, ran her fingers over his chest. It was no longer an odd feeling for him to be touched by her, but the sexual context changed the tone of the caresses, gave them a different weight. He liked the result.
“Where did you learn all this?” she murmured. “You’re a virgin.”
He almost halted. “I suppose you’re right, technically speaking.” Sex had effectively been wiped out by Silence. Oh, his race had continued practicing it for the sake of procreation—until technology had made that unnecessary—but it had become a mechanical, passionless act. In the present time, normal Psy considered sex an impractical and worthless “animal” exercise. His brethren didn’t value the beauty of bonding with another being on such an intimate level.
Brenna was kissing a line across his chest. “Technically speaking?”
“I’m very good at research—some might say I was obsessed with this particular topic.” He slid his fingers up and out to rest his hand on her abdomen once again.
She ran her teeth over his skin. “Exactly what kind of research did you do?”
“An Arrow never divulges his sources.” Using the hand under her head to tangle in her hair, he kept her in place as he claimed a deep kiss. She responded with pleasure but below that was a strange tension that he knew she probably wasn’t aware of.
Scars from the abduction.
They’d take time to heal. He didn’t allow himself to think ahead to the moment when he’d enter her body. That would be the most difficult part, connected so profoundly were the sensations with the nightmare. “Do you want to be on top?” he asked against her mouth, recalling her lack of fear when she’d straddled him in the armchair.
“Will that interfere with your master plan?” She smiled and he felt rather than saw it. Her hand began to slide south.
He pushed it back up. “There is a degree of flexibility built into the plan. But you don’t get to touch me yet.”
A sensual feminine laugh. “I’m okay, baby.” Her hands gripped the sides of his waist. “I’ll let you know when I need something other than what you’re doing.”
So she was aware of her anxiety, unsurprising really, given her will. “Don’t scratch too hard.”
Another laugh. “I’m not the dangerous one in this bed. You’re driving me crazy, you know that.”
“Good. My research tells me that that is my job as your lover. I hear predatory changeling women are tough critics.”
“Believe me, you have nothing to worry about.” She licked at the skin of his neck.
Breaking the contact, he fit his body over hers, alert to her reaction. She didn’t withdraw, so he braced himself on one arm and brought the hand of the other up to close over her satin-covered breast. She sucked in a breath. And when he nudged at her with the painful hardness of his erection, she didn’t hesitate to wrap her legs around him. “Kiss?”
He fulfilled her request, already addicted to the taste of her. His male instincts bucked at the reins, wanting to go quicker, deeper, but he held fast, helped by the very skills that usually kept him coldly distant. As they kissed, he massaged her breast, testing what made her moan, what made her wriggle. Brenna, he discovered, liked it when he was firm in his touch. Soft caresses just made her complain with feminine impatience.
He was very, very glad for his lover’s preference. He knew he could do gentle—he had the control for it—but tonight he wanted to love her with everything in him. “Off,” he ordered, pushing up her slip. The plan had called for this to come later, but he hadn’t factored in the seduction of this particular woman so lush and welcoming beneath him.
She raised her arms and he pushed the material over her breasts with every intention of pulling it over her head…but found himself unable to move any farther. The mounds of her breasts thrust upward in pure temptation, the nipples hard and tight. He wanted to see them properly. Not thinking, he tried to use Tk to flick on a lamp but, of course, nothing happened.
Reaching across, he manually turned on the small light integrated into the headboard. It emitted a warm, almost hazy, glow. Brenna gasped but didn’t say anything, letting him devour her with his eyes. Her nipples were a dark strawberry color, the upper curves of her breasts creamy…but for a scatter of freckles that taunted his analytical Psy mind with their wild abandon.
“Judd?”
The thick desire in her voice was the last straw. Dipping his head, he sucked one tight bud into his mouth. Her hands gripped his hair as her body twisted under him as if to escape. But when he released the nipple to switch his focus to the other, she protested.
The sensations inside him were pure chaos. Fire and need and erotic heat. But blending into that dark male passion was something gentler, an emotion that didn’t dull the jagged edges of his hunger but which made him aware of Brenna’s reactions on an almost subconscious level. Tenderness. It was a strange feeling. So raw, so powerful, and yet it engendered the most intense care.
He let her nipple slide out of his mouth. She pulled him back, but he was more interested in running his gaze over the sheen of wetness on her breasts, wetness he had caused. A surge of possessiveness gripped him by the throat. Yes, she was most definitely his. Spurred to see more of her exotic female body, so unashamedly curvy, so different from his, he dragged the bunched-up slip up over her head and threw it aside.
“Keep them there,” he ordered when she would’ve lowered her raised arms.
She curled her fingers around the bars in the headboard, her eyes watching him with unconcealed interest. The position left her entire upper body exposed to his gaze and he took blatant advantage. Leaning in, he blew a breath across her nipples. Her body rose and fell in a sweet, soft wave and she held on tighter to the thin metal rods.
“It’s time for my bite,” he warned.
“Oh, God.”
The desire in that groan made his erection pound in time with his heartbeat. “Which side should I start on?”
Swallowing, she licked her lower lip. “Your choice.”
He cupped her left breast, shaped, stroked. And then he did what he’d threatened—he closed his teeth over one luscious side and pressed just hard enough to have her bucking under him. A long taste later, he did the same to her other breast. “Mmm,” he murmured, raising his head. “I think I’ll have seconds.” And he did.
Her chest fell up and down in ragged bursts. “Baby, are all your plans so detailed and slow?”
“Why?” He nipped at the underside of one breast.
She shivered. “Because I think you might give me a pleasure-induced stroke at the rate you’re going.”
Running his hands along her rib cage and to the dip of her waist, he kissed his way down the valley of her breasts and over her stomach. “Sometimes,” he said, “I’ll probably just pick you up, thrust you against a wall, and drive into you so hard, you’ll scream.” He used two fingers to pinch her clitoris in a firm grip as the last word left his mouth.
She exploded, her body arching so fiercely she lifted off the bed. Releasing the pearl of flesh that could cause such exquisite pleasure, he rose to kiss her neck as she shook with the aftereffects of her orgasm.
A feminine hand clenched in his hair. “You did that on purpose.” Husky, pleasured.
“What?” He began tracing a return path down her body.
“The image of you driving into me and then the touch.” She didn’t stop him when he began to lay kisses along the waistband of her panties. “Your way of proving the mind-body connection.”
He looked up with an internal scowl that he was sure had made it to hi
s face. “You’re supposed to be too sated to think.” Or worry.
She chuckled. “My gorgeous, sexy Judd, at this point my brains are pure mush.” She reached down to push sweat-damp strands of hair off his forehead. “But I know tenderness when I feel it.”
He moved and his shadowed jaw brushed over her skin. She made a feminine sound of pleasure. “I don’t think it’s possible to come three times in one session.”
Shifting further down, he rubbed his cheek along her thigh. “I love a challenge.”
“And I love what you said about pounding me into a wall until I scream.” A sensual confession. “When are you going to follow through?”
His erection seemed to get impossibly bigger, the blood vessels expanding to stretch his skin to bursting point. “Stop talking.”
“Why?”
“You’re derailing the plan.”
She put one leg over his shoulder as he lay cradled so close to the core of her. “I think it’s my turn anyway. I wanna touch.”
He bit at the inside of that shapely thigh. “No.”
She flinched but it wasn’t the bad kind. “No fair.” Her foot rubbed at his back.
He realized he’d have to move to get rid of her panties. “Are you particularly attached to these?” He fingered the lace around the crease where her thigh curved against the most intimate part of her.
“Wh-what?” Her hands dropped from his head to dig into the sheets.
He filed away her responsiveness when touched in that particular area. “I’ll take that as a no.” Gripping hold of the front, he tore the fragile fabric off her body. The scraps fell away like mist.
She made a shocked sound, then went completely still, as if conscious of how open she’d become to him. Sliding a hand up the inside of her thigh, he looked up, glad for the light that let him see the emotion flickering over her face. “Can I bite you here, too?”
CHAPTER 34
Her eyes went huge but it seemed to take her a few seconds to get the words out. “How”—she swallowed—“how do you know you’ll even like the taste?”
His changeling was playing with him. And tonight, he could play back. “Good point. Let me do a taste test.” Holding her gaze, he stroked a finger through her liquid heat, barely entering her body before withdrawing. Then he lifted that finger and sucked it into his mouth, aware of Brenna’s body flushing around him.
When he withdrew the finger, she said, “So?” A very sexual question.
He answered by dipping his head and using his mouth on her. Her cry was husky, arousing. The heel of her foot pressed hard into his back as she twisted. When her other leg came up over his shoulder, he spread her open with the fingers of one hand and continued to taste. Taste as only a man who’d been starved could taste. With everything in him, with absolute concentration and utter focus.
Brenna was trying to breathe, but it wasn’t working very well, her air coming in broken pants. Judd was—oh, Lord, he was destroying her with pleasure. For a man who had never done this before, he was blindingly good. It made her very curious as to just what kind of research he’d been doing.
He nipped at her with his teeth.
She whimpered and ordered herself to find some shred of control at the same time. Otherwise Judd’s arrogance would become impossible. Except that he was doing the most exquisite things to her with that clever mouth and control seemed a foreign concept.
His finger touched her entrance, circled, teased. But he didn’t push in. Then he did it again. And again. And again. By the time he did begin to slide that teasing finger inside of her, she was so crazy with anticipation that the spike of fear her mind associated with an invasion of her body was buried under an avalanche of sensation.
“You’re too tight,” he said, sounding completely and deliciously dominant.
She squeezed her inner muscles around his finger in retaliation. “Tight,” she managed to say, “is considered good.”
He began moving that finger in and out. “Not when you’re so tight, I might cause you pain.”
It was getting impossible to have a coherent thought but she tried. “Judd, baby, do it before I lose what’s left of my mind.” She’d felt the rigid length of him against her, knew how much he wanted her. All that hot, hard flesh…“I want you inside me.”
“You need a little more foreplay.”
“I take it back!” she cried. “Foreplay sucks!” Why had she not realized that Judd’s icy control, when melted, would translate into endless patience in bed?
“I disagree.” Then he was kissing her again, tasting her most intimate flesh as if it were a delicacy he’d waited a lifetime to savor. The dark red of desire washed across her mind and when she surrendered, it was to the depths of her being.
Judd felt Brenna’s surrender within his mind, as if he were reading her innermost thoughts with some heretofore unknown sense. Raising his head, he pushed out of her hold, kissed his way up her body, and braced himself with one arm on the bed, the hand of his other still between her thighs.
When he kissed her, she threw her arms around his neck and gave him everything he asked for. And when he went to push a second finger into her, she didn’t protest, only breaking the kiss on a gasp and moving one hand to clench on his biceps. He spoke with his lips against hers. “Brenna?”
Her eyes fluttered open, bright and extraordinarily beautiful. “Come inside me now. I need you.”
The simple request shot his plan to hell. “I’m afraid of hurting you.” Not physically but mentally, psychically.
She pushed at his shoulders. “I want to switch.”
Understanding, he withdrew his fingers on her moan and moved off her onto his back. Ceding control was difficult for him but he trusted Brenna on a level he’d never before trusted anyone. When she sat up to straddle him, he was stunned speechless at the proud female beauty of her. He luxuriated in the feeling, conscious that he’d have to retreat as soon as his power regenerated.
Reaching down, she closed slender fingers around the painful length of his erection. He gritted his teeth and fisted his hands around the bars in the headboard but didn’t take his eyes off her. The play of emotions over her face was pure seduction. Pleasure, surprise, hunger.
“You’re right,” she whispered, examining his engorged flesh with those bright eyes. “I’m going to feel every inch of you going in.” She shifted to put her body in the right spot, then used her hand to guide the tip of him into her before letting go.
He stopped breathing for a few seconds as the pleasure traveled from the apex of his erection down the length of his body. Until that moment, he’d never realized the mind-blowing sensitivity of that bundle of nerves—how could his people have given up this incredible rush of sensation? When he opened eyes he hadn’t been aware of closing, he found Brenna on her knees above him, her head tipped back.
“Look at me.”
She obeyed with a shudder that vibrated through him, reaching out her hands at the same time. He raised his own and clasped them to hers. Pushing against his hold, she began to lower her body, accepting him centimeter by slow centimeter. Their eyes never broke contact and the intimacy was so intense, Judd knew that had the dissonance been functioning, it would have killed him.
She stopped suddenly, chest heaving. “You’re stretching me so tight, I can’t bear it.” Then she groaned and moved again. “Sweet mercy.”
He was close to begging for mercy himself, burned by the scalding heat of her, thrown into a sensory inferno more acute than anything he had ever before felt. His hands tightened on hers, but she didn’t complain. Instead, taking a deep breath, she squeezed her fingers around his and bore down on his erection, taking him inside to the hilt.
Pure sexual pleasure/pain.
His back bowed as he fought to remain conscious under the overload. For an Arrow trained to resist sensation at all costs, feeling this much was akin to being thrown into the most dangerous of flames.
It was Brenna’s touch that brought him
back from the edge—she surrounded him, a seductive mix of grace, female demand, and hunger. Opening his eyes, he found her sitting stock still. “What’s wrong?” His voice was scraped raw, as if he’d been screaming.
“I’m getting used to you.” Her eyes came closer as she leaned in, stretching out his arms until his hands lay beside his head. “You”—she brushed her lips over his—“fill me up.”
He groaned, straining not to rise up and take command. That she’d accepted the intrusion of his body was more than enough. This time. Because he was very definitely repeating this, no matter what he had to do to cause another flameout.
Brenna kissed him again and this time it was wild and furious and wet. “Move in me,” she whispered. Releasing his hands, she placed her own, palms down, on his chest.
He was incapable of speech so he just put his hands on her hips and began lifting and lowering her in rhythm with the movements of his own body. All his research had disappeared from his brain—what guided him was age-old instinct and an unrelenting tenderness toward his lover.
At first he kept it slow, letting her become accustomed to him as he drowned in the maddening ecstasy of her touch. Then she began to urge a faster rhythm and he responded by slamming into her, raising his body as she lowered hers. Crying out, she dug her fingers into his chest and rode him, wild and uninhibited.
When she made a frustrated sound, he caught her and flipped her to her back. She didn’t protest, twining her legs around his waist. Reaching down, he rubbed at the hard bud of her clitoris as he took over the driving rhythm, pounding them both into a pleasure that seemed impossible. Somewhere along the way, he lost the ability to think.
Brenna’s legs were jelly. “I don’t think I can move,” she mumbled into Judd’s neck, where her face was currently buried.
His response was a grunt. His hand stroked her bottom once before falling away—as if he didn’t have the energy to do more.