All I wanted now was his bite.
“Please,” I begged him, referring to the pressure growing between my legs and the ache in my veins. I needed him to finish this, to tie us together as one.
His lips feathered over mine, his hands tightening on my hips as he angled me to receive him even deeper. “You feel so fucking good,” he breathed.
“You, too,” I replied, unable to say more. I had my arms wrapped tight around his shoulders and my ankles crossed over his ass. The rasp of his jeans against my inner thighs heightened the moment, reminding me of my vulnerability with each stroke.
Yet I felt the tenderness in him, too.
The way he held me with care, his guarded energy as he monitored my reactions to his movements and actions. It hurt in the best way, and I made sure he knew that by gazing directly into his eyes and showing him what this did to me.
“Fuck,” he whispered, his mouth taking mine again in a brutal kissed underlined in promise. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you, Aflora, but I’ll spend every day thanking whatever higher power put you in my path.”
I arched into him, my limbs trembling with the intensity growing inside me. “I’m close.”
“I know,” he said, his tongue tracing a wet path along my jaw to my ear. “I can feel you clenching my shaft, pixie flower, trying to force me to come early with you.” He bit my earlobe, sharp enough to pause the mounting orgasm inside me. “Not yet, Aflora.”
“Please.”
“Soon,” he promised, his pace lengthening, smoothing, and drawing out the moment.
I wanted to scream, to beg, to howl in frustration.
But then I felt a burning twist in my gut that curled into the pressure already churning inside me, and power thrummed through my veins. “Ohhh…”
“Yes,” he replied. “That’s what I want.”
The sensation grew, causing my limbs to tighten around him, the ecstasy climbing with each measured stroke inside me. “Zeph,” I breathed, my world seconds away from exploding.
“Now,” he said, his teeth sinking into my pulse half a beat later and shooting me off into the stars.
My throat burned with the scream I released, Zeph’s palm closing over my mouth to silence the echoes of my ecstasy as he followed me into the pleasurable abyss.
His soul intertwined with mine, marrying us in a forbidden manner that felt deliciously right. I felt him enter me in every way imaginable, his mind becoming mine as mine became his. Connections deepened, his thoughts melding and firing signals inside my brain.
I couldn’t understand it, similar to my mating with Shade, but somehow I knew that if I tried, I could access whatever history or detail I wanted, just as he could do the same to me.
It was a level of trust and adoration reserved for mates.
A knowledge that I wouldn’t enter him uninvited, just as he wouldn’t penetrate my mind without my permission.
The door could be closed as well—I sensed it now—but rather than shut him out, I allowed him to see me, and he returned the favor in kind.
An opening.
A new beginning.
A relationship underscored in trust and equality.
He craved to dominate me yet desired my backbone and strength as well. All his lessons were meant to empower me, including the ones I hated. Zeph only wanted me to be safe, to be ready for the future, to be aware of my own abilities.
There’d been doubts.
Concerns.
Troubles.
Yet they all came from the right place—his heart.