“During.” He smiled a little. Then smiled a lot. “You’re hot when you’re all ordering me around and grrrrrrr.”
“You like that?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Well, then kiss me again. Right now.”
She didn’t have to ask twice. Even though Balthazar clearly had other things in the back of his mind, he returned to the mouth-to-mouth, and it was so good for them both, the way he dominated her, penetrating her with his tongue, pushing those hips against her. Under his body, she was alive in ways she hadn’t ever been—alive in a good sense, as opposed to the twitchy, paranoid awareness she usually operated out of.
When his lips eventually left hers once more, it was not because he was rethinking anything anymore. It was so he could go down to her throat with soft brushes that made her feet arch into points and her thighs tremble—and she could have sworn she felt a sharp point dragging over her skin. The idea it might be his fang—and come on, did she think he’d packed a pocketknife in between his eyeteeth or something?—made her arch into him, and as her breasts came up against his hard pecs, he groaned.
What a sound. The kind of thing she felt inside her own body.
Before she was fully aware of what she was doing, her hands slipped back down to the towel, and man, that thing came off like it had been hanging by a thread. Balthazar took care of tossing it to the floor—and oh, God, the heat in that erection of his.
He was so damned big.
Things got hotter and hotter, their bodies moving together in a wave pattern, surging and retreating, a preamble to what was going to come. And it was so good. So good—
Until she felt one of his hands go to the bottom of her t-shirt.
The sweep of that palm to her waist and then the warmth of his skin on her own was not a record-scratch, stop-everything kind of thing because she’d been expecting it. But it pulled her out of the sex.
She didn’t want him to see her scars.
Not because she was embarrassed or ashamed of them. But because she didn’t want the spell to be broken with all that shit from her past: He would inevitably ask about them, and she would feel compelled to explain, and then he would get that look on his face that people did, that sorrow that was on the knife-edge of pity.
And suddenly, once again, as always, it would become about what had happened to her and her family, that single, defining night, taking this single, electric night away from her.
She was tired of being cheated of normal things like a sex life that was about pleasure and nothing more. A work life that was uncomplicated. A leisure life that wasn’t tainted by the chance a documentary was going to be made about her tragedy.
“Can I keep that on?” she asked roughly as she put her hand on his to stop him.
His head lifted from her neck. There was a passing shift in his expression, like he didn’t understand why she wouldn’t want him to see her breasts or touch them or kiss them. But then he nodded.
“Of course. Do you want the light off?”
He was so concerned as he asked the question, as if he would have done anything to make her feel comfortable.
Funny, how the simplest things could make someone feel cherished.
She stroked his face and had to blink a couple of times. “No, because then I can’t watch you.”
That smile of his came back, that naughty, sexy smile. “Good. I want your eyes on me.”
On that note, he eased back, his weight lifting from her. As his enormous chest retreated, she did what he approved of and looked down his ribbed abdomen. His erect sex hung from the front of his pelvis and the sight of it made her moan and shift her knees up so she was even more open for him.
Except he eased her legs back together.
Just so he could take off her boxers, though.
Lifting her hips to help, she brought her arms over her head, one of her hands finding her mouth, her fingertips brushing against her lips. Arching again, she felt uninhibited and free thanks to keeping the top half of her covered—and she had a thought that she was glad he hadn’t made a big deal out of the request.
Compatibility had a lot to do with mutual respect.
And holy crap were they in lockstep with each other.
* * *
As Balz let Erika’s boxers drop to the floor, he was totally into the sex—and yet aware that his heart was breaking.
It was a strange duality, being stretched between the extremes of wanting to fuck his woman so good she cried from the release… to wanting to hold her so she could tell him herself exactly what was under that shirt she wanted to keep on.
He had accessed her memories before. He knew that her skin carried the legacy of all that physical and emotional pain. And he wanted to know her origin story firsthand because she chose to tell him.