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She wasn’t going to let him see her tears. She wasn’t going to cry about something she had no hope of fighting, no way of changing. She had learned better than that years ago.
“I can’t let you go.”
His voice, the guttural roughness of it, the spike of need and emotion that filled her, had her fighting hope. And she had never been good at fighting hope.
“Mercury.” Her breathing hitched, the emotion nearly strangling her now. “You’ll mate, someone, sometime.”
“That time is past,” he ground out.
“And she was your mate,” she flashed back at him, the anger at that tearing through her. “You loved her so desperately you nearly went insane when you lost her. I’ll always be second.”
“You’ll always be first,” he snarled in her face, silencing her, the blue highlights in his eyes increasing, glowing, as his voice thickened with his hunger. “Always, Ria. Always first.”
He pushed his hips between her thighs, spread her thighs, and before she could do more than gasp, he tore her gown down the center with strong, powerful hands.
“Tell me you don’t want me,” he demanded, the thick head of his cock pressing against dampened folds between her thighs. “Tell me now, Ria, that you could want another man as desperately as you need me right now.”
She couldn’t possibly desire anything in life as much as she desired Mercury. She couldn’t ache, need or dream of anything as much as she did a life in his arms.
As she stared into his eyes earlier, while the feral rage consumed him and he fought to shield her nakedness from the others, she had known that nothing mattered but Mercury.
“I wasn’t crying for Dane,” she admitted. “I was crying because I was afraid.”
He paused. “Of me?”
The first tear slipped free. “That they would try to steal you again. That they would see your protectiveness as the feral displacement. That I would lose you, Mercury. And I couldn’t bear losing you.”
Silence stretched between them, his hard body covering hers, his cock throbbing at the entrance to her body.
His hips shifted, parting her folds further, pushing inside her, slowly, until her flesh surrounded the thick, throbbing crown.
“I need you more than I need freedom.” He lowered his head and whispered the words at her ear.
And more tears fell. Because she knew the Breeds’ need for freedom, and she suspected his need for it was fiercer, stronger than any others’.
“You are my mate, Ria,” he growled at her ear. “In my soul. You are my mate.”
He moved inside her, burying himself deeper into the desperately clenching flesh awaiting him. She surrounded him, arched to him and let a cry fall from her lips.
“This is freedom.” His growl was tight, thick with hunger. “Right here, buried inside you, racing through pleasure with you. This is my freedom.”
Ria wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held on to him. Once he was deep inside her, she wanted nothing more than to feel him moving, thrusting.
He stilled instead, buried full-length, stretching her, burning her.
“Look at me, my sweet Ria.” His lips brushed over hers. “Look at me, baby. See how much I need you. How much I want you.”
She opened her eyes, her gaze blurring with the tears that ran from the corners of her eyes.
“No tears.” He kissed them away. “Just you and me, Ria. Would you deny us both this? Would you walk away and return to the cold, when I could be right beside you, warming you?”
She couldn’t. She could never return to the cold and she knew it. Not willingly. Not without hurting, without feeling the parts of her that Mercury owned now crying out in agony.
“You’ll miss your mate,” she whispered.
“How can I miss my mate?” He kissed the corner of her lips, licked at the lower curve. “She’s right here, in my arms. I won’t miss you, Ria, because I won’t let you go.”
He kissed her. His lips covered hers, his tongue slid inside and she tasted something wild, untamed, in his hunger. A subtle flavor that was there and gone just as quickly.
