But instead of pulling away, she tackled him. Stunned for seconds before relief burst inside him, he let her ram him to the ground, needing her to take her revenge, expend her rage, cause him permanent damage as he’d done to her. Hoping he’d finally atone for a measure of his crimes against her, he opened himself completely to her punishment.
She only crashed her lips over his.
Going limp with shock beneath her, he surrendered to her as she wrenched at him with frantic, tear-soaked kisses that razed whatever remained intact inside him. Then she was tearing at his clothes, clawing at his flesh in her desperation, bathing him in her tears, her pleas choking.
“Give me...everything...I need it all...now, Richard...now.”
That was what she needed? To lose herself in him, to ameliorate her ordeal and douse her pain?
This was an offering he didn’t deserve. But it was the least of her dues. To have everything that he had. He’d give it all to her, now and forever, to do with what she would.
The barbed leash he’d been keeping on his need snapped. He completed her efforts to tear his clothes off, ripped her out of hers and surged to meld their naked bodies, squashing her against him as if he’d absorb her.
Nothing, starting with him, would ever harm her again. Or Rico. Not while he had breath left in his body.
She met his ferocity halfway, the same remembered horror reverberating in her every nuance, the same need to extinguish it driving her. She sank her teeth into his lips, whimpering for his reciprocation. Giving her what she needed, he twisted his fist in the silk of her hair, imprisoning her for his invasion. She fought him for more, urged him deeper until the stimulation of their mouth mating became distress. Tearing her lips away, she bit into his deltoid, broke his skin as she crushed herself to him. Growling his painful pleasure, the bleakness of despair shattered inside him as her unbridled passion pulsed in his arms, dueled with his, equal, undreamed of. He’d do anything...anything...to make it permanent.
He heaved up with her bundled in his arms. “Bed— Isabella...where’s your bed?”
“No...here...I need you inside me...now.”
Her keen sent the beast inside howling to obey her. Running to the closest horizontal surface, he lowered her there, flung himself over her even as she dragged him down. Madness burgeoned between them as she rewarded his every nip and squeeze with a fiercer cry, a harder grind of her core into his erection, a more blatant offering of herself. Her readiness scorched his senses, but it was her scream for him to fill her that slashed away his sanity, made him tear inside her.
He swallowed her scream, let it rip inside him as her unbearably tight flesh yielded to his shaft, sucking him into their almost impossible fit, hurling him into the firestorm of sensation he craved. The carnality, the reality, the meaning of being inside her again... This was everything.
And he’d always cede everything to her, the one he’d been made for.
He withdrew, his shaft gliding in the molten heat of her folds. She clung to him, demanding his return, her piercing cry harmonizing with his tortured groan.
Sanity receding further, he thrust inside her once more. She collapsed beneath him, an amalgam of agony and ecstasy slashing across her face, rippling through her body, hot passion gusting from her lungs.
“Give me all you’ve got... Don’t hold anything back...”
Her need rode him, making him ride her harder. The scents and sounds of her pleasure intensifying, her flesh became an inferno around him, more destructive than everything he’d ever faced combined. And the one thing that made him truly live.
With every squeeze of her flesh welcoming him inside her, needing what he gave her, another fraction of the barrenness of his existence, the horrors he’d seen and perpetrated, dissipated. The poignancy, the liberation, sharpened until he bellowed, pounding into her with his full power. Crying, begging, she augmented his force, crushed herself against him as if to merge their bodies.
Knowing she was desperate for release, he sank his girth inside her to the root. She bucked so hard, inside and out it was like a high-voltage lash. It made him plunge ever deeper inside her, sending her convulsions into hyperdrive, suffocating her screams. The gush of her pleasure around his thickness razed him, the force of her orgasm squeezing his shaft until her seizure triggered his own.
His body felt as if it detonated from where he was buried deepest in her outward. Everything inside him was unleashed, scorching ecstasy shooting through his length and gushing deep inside her as if to put out the flame before it consumed them both.
At the end of the tumult, she slumped beneath him, unconscious, her face streaked in tears. He could barely hang on to his own consciousness enough to gather her and go in search of her bedroom.
Once there, he laid her on her bed, every vital piece of him that had gone missing without her back in place. She’d tell him when she woke if they were back for good, or only temporarily. If she’d bestow another chance at life, or if she’d cut it short.
* * *
Isabella felt for her phone before she opened her eyes.
Finding it on her nightstand, where she didn’t remember putting it, she grabbed it in trembling hands, sagged back in a mass of tremors, tears overflowing. There were a dozen messages from her mother and Antonio throughout the night, the latest minutes ago. Rico was perfectly fine.
Before she could breathe, another blow from her memory emptied her lungs again. Richard.
She’d almost attacked him, made him take her...then she remembered nothing. The
explosive pleasure his possession had given her had knocked her out. Afterward he’d put her in bed and...left?
Before mortification registered, a silent movement did, making her sag deeper in bed. Richard...in only pants, walking in...with a tray. The aromas of fresh-brewed coffee and hot croissants made her almost faint again. She was that hungry.