She kissed him like he was everything. Like they were everything.
She was bolder now, which seemed surprising, since she had been quite the forward little thing even the first time. But now she touched him with the familiarity of what was being built between them.
Like she knew just how to set him on fire.
And she did.
And it was a strange thing, the sudden urgency that gripped him, to make love to his bride.
His bride.
And this was the old ways, the old sense of possession, of having. That was what overtook him now.
He stripped his clothes off, as quickly as possible, and naked, carried her into the bedroom.
She clung to his shoulders, her lips parted, her eyes wide with pleasure.
There were furs on his bed, plush and soft, and he laid her down there and looked his fill. He wanted to see her naked. Of course he did. But it was not what he wanted most of all. Not now.
What he wanted most of all was to have her in that gown.
He moved his hands down to where the fabric skimmed her ankles and pushed it up past her knees, up to her waist, exposing the white lace panties she wore beneath. He moved his fingertips over that flimsy fabric. And watched as her hips jerked up off of the bed.
Watched as she lost herself in the rhythm of his touch, as he devoted himself only to her pleasure. He slipped his fingertips beneath the elastic there, touched her, moved his hands over her wetness, found her slick and ready and desirable for him.
She flexed her hips along with the movement, and he thrust two fingers deep into her, glorying in that silken desire.
He pulled her panties off, leaving her bare, spread her legs wide and looked his fill. In that wedding dress. White and for him. Only him.
A virgin. His virgin bride—though she may not be a virgin now, she had been when he had taken her, and it stoked a beastly fire in him, spoke to the savage at his core that he had not fully realized existed.
That she carried his baby.
It was a thunderous instinct. A wild demand. A testosterone-fueled fury.
His woman. His. His child.
All of the things that he had sworn that he didn’t want. That he had sworn he would never take for his own.
And somewhere in the center of it was that little house. That little house with smoke coming out of the chimney, surrounded by snow. This was heat, but at its center was warmth, and they were two very different things. And it was the warmth that he denied. The warmth that he pushed away as he allowed himself to be swallowed whole by the flame.
He kissed her thigh, and then her very center, meeting his fill as he embraced the intensity of his arousal. As he lost himself in the pounding, swirling, never-ending need.
Oh, but how he wanted this woman.
Most of all.
He wanted to claim her profoundly. Wanted to be skin to skin, and yet, he would deny himself that now.
Because this was his moment to have his wife on their wedding day, in that glorious symbol of her purity, while he brought her down to the depths with him. She was not an angel. She was better than that. Sharp, determined, brilliant. And his.
This intoxicating, seemingly incompatible mix of things that electrified his soul.
There was nothing easy about this, and he had to laugh at what she had said about human nature. People would always want the easy thing. But this... This threatened to peel his skin from his bones. To carve him into something entirely new.
He rose up onto his knees, and fisted his arousal, bringing it to the slick part of her, and driving home. She arched up off the bed, her silk-covered breasts heaving with the force of her desire.
He gripped her hips and pumped into her hard, fast, running away from something. Some demon, some unimaginable force that felt like it was chasing after him as the hounds of hell.