by Joey W. Hill
“Who’s tense?” she gasped. “Please Matt, just do it. I need you inside me now.”
He slid his arm under her waist, tilting her up to him, and nodded. “Hold onto my shoulders, then.”
She did, spurred by the hoarseness of his tone, the obvious desire for her expressed by every part of him, even parts she could not see, but could feel, surrounding her, empowering her.
Her passageway was ready for him, but he eased in, using small strokes. She felt in wonder the sensations of his flesh brushing her inner thighs, the hard flesh of his abdomen, his soft hair rubbing against her belly and chest. She slid one hand down, following the plane of his back, and curved her fingers over his buttock, digging her nails into him in reaction as he stroked her again.
He growled, his body tensing under her touch, and he came all the way into her in one inexorable deep stroke, a claiming she gladly welcomed, binding her to him.
She could hear her father’s voice in her head. It’s what all men want, Savannah. A woman’s capitulation to their desires. It’s a hunt, a game to us, a deadly game. Once they win, they may indulge you or even themselves that their emotions are involved, but that passes.
He’d never allowed for the reality of love, and so, being a good daughter, she’d never allowed herself to believe in it. But she knew now her woman’s heart must have protected some tiny spark of belief, like a fairy captured inside her hard ironclad soul, and kept alive all these years by the things she’d noted subconsciously. The old couple walking hand in hand in the park, not part of a slick diamond commercial, but real. The always painful sight of a young father in the office, holding his wife protectively and proudly in the circle of his arm as he introduced the new baby daughter to his co-workers. Or in the hospital, when her father was dying, she remembered a room where two men sat, one dying of AIDS, the other holding his hand, rubbing ice on his dry lips.
She’d only touched her father when he was in the final coma, beyond consciousness. She’d briefly held his hand, wondering if she’d feel a tightening of his grip. If she had, she knew it would have been a physical reflex only, but she could have pretended it was a response to her.
The flowers, the times Matt had called, the time at the funeral, those had been gentle insinuations into her life. A taming more than a hunt, teaching her patiently to trust him, so when he chose to claim her, she walked willingly into his arms, into his thrall.
“Say it again,” she said softly. “Say it so my heart will hear it.”
He had stilled within her to give her time to adjust, and he pressed his cheek to hers, his breath in her ear. “You’re mine, Savannah. Now and always.”
He withdrew slightly, then moved back in, and pleasure rippled through her abdomen. She raised her legs higher, tightening them over his hips, drawing him deeper. He filled her everywhere with this act of joining, and it was so easy, so clean. She wrapped her arms more tightly around his shoulders, feeling all his power, now all hers, as much as she was his, as he raised his hips, lowered, raised, lowered. Controlling her, sliding along her passage, building up a fire that had the power of a detonation. He was deliberately teasing it to the surface, making her cling tighter, her breath growing harsher against his neck. Her nails dug in again and her teeth as well, tasting his heated flesh, the cord of muscle along the line of his broad shoulder.
“That’s it,” he muttered. “Let it go.”
What had occurred earlier was earth-shattering, on the field of matter. This was a feeling beyond anything she had ever known or imagined, this incredible emotional and physical coupling. She had no experience to know if casual sex felt like this, but if so, she was sure sex done in love would kill the participant. This had to be love. Had to be. In their entire relationship, she’d never known Matt to lie to her about anything.
If he said he loved her, he did.
“Let go, honey,” he urged again. “Trust me. Let go. You’re mine, all mine, and I’ll never let you go.”
Her arms held him tighter.
“You’re so strong and fragile both,” he said. “So delicate. Such soft curves, your hair against my face, your perfume. I’ve never been so aware of a woman.”
“Never?” She thought of the many she’d seen him with, though she knew she’d been out with a similar number of men and they’d meant nothing to her.
He raised his head. “Never, Savannah. This is the way it is for a man in love. You’re in control of my destiny now. You’re a goddess to me, but you’re also terrifyingly mortal. I couldn’t stand losing you.”
“But what if…” She bit her lip as he moved, and his eyes gleamed with amusement and lust, as she struggled to get the words out, to meet his playful challenge. “What about in five years? When you know everything about me?”
He groaned, half chuckled as she tightened muscles on him, testing her own power. “How could any woman think that revealing herself to a man would destroy her mystery, her allure?” He bent, caught her lips, touched them with his tongue, spoke against her mouth. “Love has a million rooms to discover, sweetheart, and I’ll spend the next ten lifetimes and not know everything about you. I’ll only crave more.”
Her body trembled on the precipice. In her mind, she saw the old couple again, the young parents, the gay couple soon to be parted by death. People bound together willingly, to share all the moments good and bad. Because that was what life was about. Not strategies and concessions, deals and coups. She saw her father’s face, saw its coldness and lack of understanding. Saw it at the end, crumpled in pain, the shields that had kept him from the knowledge of love the only thing left intact.
What Matt offered might be Purgatory or Heaven, but she was willing to risk either to escape her cold, emotionless room in Hell.
“Enough talk,” Matt whispered, and he began to move in her again. Long, slow strokes, one arm beneath her body, holding her to him so she felt him pressed all along the length of her, his thighs rubbing the inside of hers. She pressed her face into his neck, heard the rasp of his breath against her ear as he lifted and lowered his hips, and her hands crept down, felt his buttocks clench, release, clench, release with each slow pump into her. Her body trembled, swept by heat, and her breath began to match his rapid rhythm.
“Your pussy knows its Master, doesn’t it, Savannah?”
“Yes…yes…” She couldn’t hold her head up, dropped it back, and his mouth took her throat as she felt her hair brush her shoulder blades. God, he was so powerful, so all-consuming. Ah, God…
“Take me, Matt. Please make me yours, all yours.”
His strokes grew stronger, his gaze more intent, never leaving the clasp of hers, and as the pleasure swept up through her, inhibitions left and she said the words he’d said she’d say, words she wanted to say, just as the climax began to break over her.
“I am yours, Master. You’re my…Master…”
It was a swirling tornado of images and emotions and physical completion, all spinning her up into the relentless fist of the orgasm. His relentless body stroked her without breaking rhythm, nothing to stop the flow of a tidal wave up through her pussy and lower abdomen, spearing out through her limbs, making her clutch him even more tightly, cry out against his skin, seeing their bodies bathed in the flickering light of the muted television sets. The screens had picked up this moment, so she saw the two of them on the couch, the muscles rippling along his back, buttocks and thighs as her slender legs clamped around him, her fingers digging into his shoulders.
“Yes, baby. Let me hear you.”
Her voice was a long, smooth utterance, like a wolf howling in low, urgent demand, her need for her mate calling him to her. Everything she longed for was in that one, prolonged note of desire. And as her hands tightened on him, Matt’s body stiffened and then slammed forward into her urgently, over and over. His grip shifted to the couch arm so he did not shove her head into the arm with the force of his movements, his rapid pistoning into her, the hot spill of his seed inside her womb.
He came to a gradual slow halt, keeping up slow strokes that made her mewl with pleasure, until at last he stilled, laid his forehead against hers. She reached up, cupped the back of his head in her hands, felt the damp line of perspiration on his nape.
Her heart was so full, she wanted to give him something, something he’d know she was giving to him, sealing her belief in his words, his desire for her.
“I read it last year.”
Matt raised his head, looked down at her. He curled her in the crook of his arm, turned them so he was lying on his back and she was in the shelter of his arm on the wide couch. He touched her faintly smiling lips and she saw it coaxed a smile from his own. “What?”
“The Grinch. That’s how I knew about the Who Mouses. I was Christmas shopping and there was a storytelling hour going on in the corner of the bookstore. I lingered in the shelves nearby and listened to it. So I guess I didn’t technically read it. I heard it read.”
She reached up, surrounded him with her arms and squeezed. A hug. A basic, wonderful hug he reacted to by closing his own arms around her and hugging her back.
With a groan, he hauled them both to a sitting position, moved her so she was cradled against his lap, her bottom down against his wet cock, which stirred against her as he snugged her down on it.
“You’re…” A faint blush rose in her cheeks.
“Getting hard for you again.” He tipped her chin, held it so she looked directly into his piercing eyes. “I have so much need stored up for you, I’m probably going to have to close down the whole damn fortieth floor for a week to preserve your reputation while I keep you here, ravishing you over and over again.”
She didn’t know how to respond to that, but her body did. She saw by the intentness of his gaze that he registered the shudder that ran through her.
“So,” he said lightly. “You’ll marry me, then?”
“You’re giving me choices, now?” She narrowed her eyes. “If I changed my mind, would you invite your team back in for a renegotiation?”
He laughed then, a male sound of appreciation that coated her with heat, and she pressed against him instinctively, making his eyes darken with renewed desire.
“From now on, I think we’ll keep our negotiations strictly a two-person executive session. Kiss me. And for once, don’t be afraid of anything.”
She reached up, brought her lips to his and lost herself, and it was the easiest thing she’d ever done, to obey his command, now that she’d surrendered herself to him. She deepened it, played with his tongue, enjoyed the feel of his canines pricking. Shuddering at his growl, she whimpered in delight when he shifted his grip and put her under him once more, parting her legs and putting himself against the opening of her pussy, making it obvious that his cock was close to being able to take her again.
“Tell me what you want, Savannah.” His voice was harsh with lust, but his eyes were asking for more. For everything.
Cleopatra couldn’t ever give up being perceived as a woman of power. Be just a woman, and no man like Marc Antony or Matthew Kensington would want her.
That’s what you think, Daddy.
Tennyson Rule Seven: Never be afraid to face your destiny.
“I want…” God, she suddenly wanted everything. “I want to live somewhere else. I want to have a yard, and…learn to garden. I want to have mismatching pictures.”
His eyes told her he understood, which brought forth the thing she suddenly wanted the most. She pressed her face into his neck, her lips against his thudding pulse.
“I want to be your wife.”
His arms tightened around her. “Those rules, the ones Geoffrey posted on the wall of his office that you haven’t taken down? They come down tomorrow. From here on out, your life is governed only by one rule, the one I wouldn’t tell you at the beginning, but that I’ve told you several times now. Do you know what it is?”
His lips were very close to hers, sending spirals of pleasure through her lower extremities, making everything tighten with need for him again. She opened herself to him further, felt his cock slide into her tender opening.
“That I’m yours,” she whispered throatily. “Yours, forever and ever.”
And you’re mine as well.
“Close.” He looked at her, his sensuous mouth serious and firm, and she wanted it on her again. “Rule One, the first and last rule you’ll ever need, Savannah, to get through anything. Are you paying attention?”
“Yes,” she whispered. But instead of letting him say the words, she spoke them first against his lips.
“I love you.”
About the Author
I’ve always avoided interviews of favorite personalities because so often the person doesn’t measure up to the beauty of the art they produce. Their politics are distasteful, or they’re shallow and self-absorbed, a vacuous mophead without a lick of sense. From then on, though I may appreciate their craft, it has somehow been tarnished. Therefore, when I’m asked to provide personal info for readers, a ball of anxiety forms in my stomach as I think: “Okay, my next words may forever change the way someone views my stories.” Why does a reader want to know about me? It’s the story that’s important.
So here it is. I’ve been given more blessings in my life than any one person has a right to have. Despite that, I’m a Type A, OCD phobic paranoiac who worries I’ll never live up to expectations. I don’t like talking on the phone, I dread social commitments. Living in monastic solitude with my husband and animals, books and writing, is my idea of paradise. I love chocolate, but with that irrational female belief that weight equals worth, I keep it to a minor addiction. I adore good movies. I’m told I work too much. Every day is spent trying to get through the never-ending “to do” list to snatch a few minutes to write.
Despite all these mediocre and typical qualities, for some miraculous reason, these wonderful characters well up out of my soul with stories to tell. When I find that precious “stillness”, which calms all the competing voices in my head, I can step into their lives, hear what they are saying, what they’re feeling, and put it down on paper. It’s a magic beyond description, akin to believing my husband loves me, winning the trust of an abused animal, making a true connection with someone or knowing I’ve given a reader something special through those written words. It’s a magic that reassures me there is Someone, far wiser than myself, who knows the permanent path to that garden of stillness, where there is only love, acceptance and a pen waiting for hours and hours of uninterrupted, blissful use.
If only I could finish that darned “to do” list.
The author welcomes comments from readers. You can find her website and email address on her author bio page at www.ellorascave.com.
Tell Us What You Think
We appreciate hearing reader opinions about our books. You can email us at [email protected].
Also by Joey Hill
Chance of a Lifetime
If Wishes Were Horses
Make Her Dreams Come True
Nature of Desire 1: Holding the Cards
Nature of Desire 2: Natural Law
Nature of Desire 3: Ice Queen
Nature of Desire 4: Mirror of My Soul
Nature of Desire 5: Mistress of Redemption
Nature of Desire 6: Rough Canvas
Snow Angel
Threads of Faith
Virtual Reality
Discover for yourself why readers can’t get enough of the multiple award-winning publisher Ellora’s Cave. Whether you prefer ebooks or paperbacks, be sure to visit EC on the web at www.ellorascave.com for an erotic reading experience that will leave you breathless.
www.ellorascave.com
reading books on Archive.