Storm's Heart (Elder Races #2)(66)

That could only mean one thing. He still wanted her.

She said, “So you like the dress.”

He glared at her, the picture of startled offense. “That’s not a dress.”

Delight tasted like honey mead and turned her drunk. She started to smile. “Then what is it?”

“It’s–it’s—” His gaze ran compulsively down the length of her body and grew ravenous. He had to swallow to clear his throat. He said, his voice gone husky, “Young lady, that thing barely covering your body is cause for a street riot.”

Her smile widened. She took one of his hands in both of hers. His hand was huge and filled with killing strength. Veins patterned the expansive back and ran down long calloused fingers. She ran his hand down the sequins that covered the dress. “It feels good, doesn’t it?” she murmured.

He had taken countless lovers throughout his long life, and they had all been strong-limbed warrior women who could take a good pounding. They hadn’t expected anything afterward except to walk away. Niniane was such an exotic creature to him, with her love of feminine fripperies and the lush delicacy of her body. With the shabby storeroom as a backdrop, she looked shocking and glamorous, like shadowed lightning, and the bright, tiny dangling things as they ran over his fingers felt cool and hard like shards of ice. Entranced, he fingered one and breathed, “Hell, yeah.”

Her smile faded, and her huge gaze gathered the shadows from the room around her. “I’m sorry I sent you away like that,” she said.

His hand turned and he squeezed her fingers. “I’m sorry too, faerie,” he said. “I knew about your past. I should have been more careful, and I wasn’t. There’s no excuse. I was thoughtless and I f**ked up.”

She reached up and laid her fingers against the warm, carved edge of his lips. For someone who could look so brutal, his mouth had a severe elegance, stamped as it was with both temper and sensuality. “I thought you might have gone back to New York,” she said. “I missed you so much already.”

He opened his mouth and took her forefinger between his teeth. He nipped at her with such sensual enjoyment it sent pleasure rippling down her body. “I already told you once.” His voice had darkened, turned gravelly. “I’m not leaving.”

He said the lie with such conviction her truthsense tried to convince her to believe him. She closed her eyes and explored his face with her fingers, reading the strong, heavy frame of his bone structure like Braille. His lips moved feather-soft against her palm. She felt like someone was dropping stones, one by one, on her chest, in a slow-building pressure. It was getting hard to breathe. Soon the weight would become intolerable and crush her ribs.

In the main room somebody finally got the music back up. It roared back on with a suddenness that made her eyes pop open. She looked so surprised as she tottered on her four-inch heels that Tiago laughed and yanked her against his chest. The Black Eyed Peas came over the speakers and rocked it out. The walls of the building vibrated as lyrics careened headlong through the air.

Still laughing, he picked her up, turned and put her against a wall. He held her up at a height where they were face-to-face. He made it look effortless, with one arm under her hips to brace her. With his face alight and his black eyes sparkling, he had such a barbaric beauty it took her breath away.

Then his Power mantled over her, and she felt a need for him that was so terrible it drew her knees up and sank into her DNA, and she knew in that moment she would never be free of it, or him. He was carving himself into the deepest, most secret places inside of her, and she felt herself reforming in response. She was Galatea, made of stone, coming to life as he fashioned her.

He nudged his hips between her knees and took hold of one of her ankles to draw her leg around his waist. She wrapped her other leg around him and locked her ankles behind him. She ran her hands across his broad-muscled shoulders. My God, she had to take an anatomy class. Every single one of those muscles had its own name.

She wound her arms around his neck and watched as that sparkle of laughter in his eyes turned dark with a different kind of savagery. He widened his legs and pushed his pelvis against her. Her head fell back as she felt the thick arch of his c**k through the fabric of their clothes. She rubbed herself against him, whimpering, and he hid his face in her neck as he swore under his breath. The massive weight of his body as he pressed her into the wall was exquisite, as excruciating as everything else was between them. He wouldn’t fit easily, she knew. He was too big, and it had been too long since she had last taken a lover. They would have to work to get him in, and it would burn so good as her muscles stretched tight to accommodate him, and then—and then—

She ground harder against him, aching for the burn. Gasping, he bucked his hips in response. He ran his free hand under the short hem of her dress, searching for and finding the thong she wore. He muttered something unintelligible as he shredded it, his hot breath blasting her cheek. He reached farther, curving his arm under her ass as he probed her plump, slick labia with gentle shaking fingers. She reached between them as well, arching her back against the cold concrete wall as she dug to locate the zipper of his fatigues.

He bit her neck, her ear, in sharp, stinging nips. He gasped, “You deserve slow, but oh f**k, I don’t think I have it in me.”

They couldn’t do slow. Time was too precious, each irrecoverable moment arrowing into the past. They couldn’t waste a single one.