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“Of you, or myself?” she asked him nervously, trying to skirt around him, only to come up short as his arm snaked out, wrapped around her waist and drew her to a stop.
She stared up at him, way up. Six-four was a hell of a stretch for her five-six. Her head barely topped his chest, and his height and breadth made her feel entirely too feminine.
“Why would you be frightened of yourself?” he asked her, using his other hand to stroke down her hair as though soothing her. His fingers threaded into the strands, caressed them, eased her head back until he was staring into her eyes.
Ria swallowed tightly. “We have enough problems here; mixing it with a sexual relationship between us isn’t a good idea.”
She could barely breathe. And focusing on all the reasons why a relationship was a really bad idea was getting harder by the second. By the stroke. The stroke of his hand over her long hair. She had never considered her hair particularly sexy until this moment, until she felt him caressing it, enjoying it.
“A sexual relationship between us is a given,” he told her, that growly thing he did with his voice sending shivers down her spine. “I think you know that, sweetheart.”
He called her sweetheart, and he said it in a way it had never been said to her before, as his hand tightened at her hip and pulled her closer to him.
She felt his erection beneath his jeans, thick and hard, pressing into her lower stomach.
“Mercury.”
His head lowered. His hand slid beneath her hair, cupped the side of her neck and held her in the most erotic grip she had ever known, as his lips settled against hers.
“Kiss me, Ria,” he whispered. “Don’t leave me alone in the cold. Warm me, as only you can warm me.”
And she was supposed to deny him? No man had ever asked her to warm him. Not to leave him out in the cold where she always felt she existed herself. Always on the outside looking in. Always left out in the cold.
But there was no cold here. As Mercury’s lips opened over hers, pressing into hers, there was only heat and pleasure; the feel of his hands stroking her, building the fire inside her as he soothed a part of her.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He h
ad already mated. He could never belong to her. Not really all-the-way-to-the-soul belong to her. But she couldn’t deny him either.
A whimper of surrender left her lips, met his kiss, and her hands lifted from his chest to his shoulders. Then to his hair. Coarse, thick, warm. She tightened her fingers in the strands and held him to her as he kissed her with slow, easy possession.
His tongue licked over hers. Faintly rough, just enough to cause her to jerk at the thought of what the lick of his tongue would do to other parts of her body. It was dominant, possessive; it stroked over her lips, her tongue, and when she trapped it and suckled it, she almost cried at the lack of the mating taste. A taste she had heard was wilder than the male giving it.
She let her hands dig into his scalp, lifted herself tighter against him, licked at him, her lips fighting for the kiss as her soul fought to possess some part of him. If even for a moment, to claim a part of him as her own.
And this was why she had fought the attraction building between them. As his hands controlled her, lifted her to him, she had to fight the need to give him parts of herself that no one else had ever touched before.
That wild center growing inside her, the one that wanted to shred his clothes from his body and mark him. That primitive stupid female center that couldn’t accept that he belonged to another, even if she was dead.
He growled as he tore his lips from hers.
Ria opened her eyes, staring into his primal gaze as his hands gripped the curves of her rear and clenched. She shuddered, her lashes dipping closed before she forced them open once again.
“I’m hurting you,” he said quietly, his hand lifting, touching her cheek as she stared back in surprise. “How am I hurting you, my Ria?”
She shook her head, tugging at his hair, trying to pull him back to her. “Don’t stop, Mercury. Kiss me more.”
His head lowered. A gentle kiss to the corner of her lips when she didn’t want gentle. The stroke of his hand along the hair behind her ear when she wanted the sharp bite of his fingers tangling in it.
“Why are you doing this?” she moaned. “Don’t tease me.”
“Tell me how I’m hurting you,” he demanded, and even his voice was gentle.
She closed her eyes against the knowledge that there would be nothing she could hide from him, and so much he could hide from her.
“Because I’m insane,” she whispered, opening her eyes again and gazing back at him. “Because I want more than I should.”
He paused, his expression somber, but his eyes watched her with primitive awareness, with desperate hunger.
