Never breaking eye contact, he moved inside of her, guiding her over him.
She clung to his shoulders, loving the width and strength of them, letting her fingers caress the intriguing rock-hard muscle she found there. He held her hips in his capable hands and slowly, deliberately, he built the fire within her—stoking the embers, fanning the flames.
Bethany felt the tension she’d just released roar back, coiling with twice the strength inside of her. His thrusts were long, slow, deep, driving her mad with a need far greater, far more encompassing, than what had come before.
She could not think, she could only feel. His mouth on hers, his face against her neck. Her breasts pressed against his chest, his strong arms encircling her. She was swept away in his demanding rhythm until all she could feel was his possession.
Deep. Slow. Devastating.
Her head fell back, and his mouth was like a brushfire against the sensitive skin of her neck, hot and electric.
“Do not close your eyes,” he ordered her, his voice low and sensual. It vibrated against her, through her. She could feel it deep in her core, where he slid into her again and again, so hard and hot where she melted all around him. “You have been away from me for three years. Stay with me now.”
She forced her eyes open and met his. She could feel the air sizzle. Dark need arced between them, filled her vision, became the world. The fires burned high within, turned white-hot, and still he continued to move so slowly, so deliberately, so surely, each thrust almost more than she could bear until the next. And the next.
He was killing her.
“Leo …” she whispered, desperate, her voice strangled and her eyes bright with heat. “Please …”
As if he’d been waiting for exactly that plea, as if he’d planned it, he smiled and his thrusts grew faster, less measured. Wild and hot. Perfect.
“Now,” he murmured, his voice a dark, deep command, and she shivered.
But that was not enough.
Leo reached between them, found the center of her with his sure fingers and then, as he licked her neck and took her mouth in a frank, carnal kiss of possession, he catapulted them both over the edge.
She came back to herself slowly, to find his mouth against the skin at her neck as she lay boneless against him, draped across him, her heart still pounding in her chest, her limbs, her ears.
He looked up as she stirred and she felt herself flush, whether from embarrassment or something far deeper, far more vulnerable, she could not say.
She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. He was still inside of her. She could feel the coarse material of his jeans against the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. She could feel his hard chest against her, his maleness deep within her, his strong arms all around her. There was a part of her that panicked at that stark evidence of his possession even as a darker part, a part she wished to deny even as she became aware of it, gloried in it.
If I taste you, I will take you, he had promised her.
And he had kept his promise.
“That was …” But her voice trailed away and she realized she was still spinning. From a single kiss she had not planned to give, to him buried inside of her. She had no idea at all how to make sense of what had happened.
It felt cataclysmic. Life-altering. And, then again, perhaps it was simply Leo.
“Yes?” he asked; teasing her, she thought.
There was a smile in his eyes, if not on his lips, and she could not have said why seeing it made her chest ache. She only knew that it hurt, that she hurt. She knew she desperately needed to think about everything that had just happened in a critical, logical, unemotional way—which was unlikely to occur while they were joined like this, in the middle of the day, outside where anyone at all could happen by and see them on the banks of a lake that should never have been made in the first place.
Her discomfort grew, skittered through her, made her stomach clench and her breath come faster.
He only gazed at her, those eyes clear in a way that made her want to pull away, shield her own eyes, hide from him. But she could hardly do such a thing in this exposed position, so she was forced to simply gaze back at him, feeling that itchy flush work its way over her skin, her discomfort made real and red on her flesh.
She felt him move slightly, deep within her, and realized with a kind of amazement that he was becoming aroused. Again.
“But you …” Her voice was too high, too breathless, as if she was someone else. She felt like someone else, someone she was not at all sure she should permit herself to acknowledge, much less embody. Someone as silly and as profoundly thrown by him as she had once been, years before. “How can you …so soon?”
He laughed then, his hands moving along her back as if he was soothing her, settling her, using his touch to calm her. She had a vague memory of him doing this long ago, gentling her with that tremendous power he unleashed only when he chose to share it. She had thought it patronizing then; she had believed it an attempt to control her.