Then she took it all out of his hands, her hand trembling over his back in entreaty, its power absolute.
He surrendered, moved between her shaking thighs, pressed her shuddering breasts beneath his aching chest. Then she conquered him, irrevocably.
Her lips trembled on his forehead, his name a litany of tremulous passion and longing as she enveloped him, clasped him to her body as if her life depended on his existence, his closeness, on knowing he was there, as if she couldn’t believe he was.
Tenderness swamped him, choked him. He had to show her, prove to her, that he was there, was hers. He’d already given her all he had. All he had left to give her was his passion, his body.
He rose on his knees, cupped her head in one hand, her buttocks in the other, tilted one for his kiss, the other for his penetration. He bathed the head of his erection in her welcoming wetness, absorbed her cries of pleasure at the first contact of their intimate flesh, drank her pleas to take her, fill her.
He succumbed to the mercilessness of her need and his, drew back to watch her eyes as he started to drive into her, to join them. Her flesh fluttered around his advance, hot and tight almost beyond endurance, seeming to drag him inside and trying to push him out at once, begging for his invasion while resisting it.
He tried again and again, until she was writhing beneath him, eyes streaming, her whole body shaking and stained in the flush of uncontrollable arousal and unbearable frustration.
His mind filled with confusion and colliding diagnoses.
“Please, just do it, Rodrigo, hard, just take me.”
The agony in her sobs was the last straw. He had to give her what she needed, couldn’t draw his next breath if he didn’t.
He thrust past her resistance, buried half of his shaft inside her rigid tightness.
It was only when her shriek tore through him that he understood what was that ripping sensation he’d felt as he’d driven into her. And he no longer understood anything.
It was impossible. Incomprehensible.
She was a
Eleven
Rodrigo froze on top of Cybele, half-buried in her depths, paralyzed. A virgin?
He raised himself on shaking arms. Her face contorted and a hot cry burst from her lips. He froze in midmotion, his gaze pinned on hers as he watched her eyes flood with the same confusion, the same shock along with tears.
“It shouldn’t hurt that much, should it?” she quavered. “I couldn’t have forgotten
“No” was all he could choke out.
She digested that, reaching the same seemingly impossible explanation he had. “Then you have to be…my first.”
Her first. The way she said that, with such shy wonder, made him want to thrust inside her and growl,
Something far outside his wrecked restraint-probably the debilitating cocktail of shock and shame at causing her pain-held him back from that mindless display of caveman possessiveness.
“I remember I wanted to wait until, y’know, I met…the one. I assumed that when I met Mel…But it-it seems I wanted to wait until we were married. But…”
He’d been trying to get himself to deflate, enough to slip out of her without causing her further pain. He expanded beyond anything he’d ever known instead. His mind’s eye crowded with images of him devouring those lips that quivered out her earnest words, those breasts that swelled with her erratic breathing.
“But since there are ways for paraplegics to have sex, I still assumed we did one way or…” She choked with embarrassment. It was painfully endearing, when their bodies were joined in ultimate intimacy. “But it’s clear we didn’t, at least nothing invasive, and artificial insemination is essentially noninvasive…”
He shouldn’t find her efforts at a logical, medically sound analysis that arousing as she lay beneath him, shaking, her impossible tightness throbbing around his shaft, her torn flesh singeing his own. But-curse him-it was arousing him to madness. He wanted to
He couldn’t. He had to give her time, for the pain that gripped her body to subside. He started to withdraw. Her sob tore through him.
He froze, his own moan mingling with hers until she subsided. Then he tried to move again. But she clamped quaking legs around his hips, stopping him from exiting her body, pumping her own hips, impaling herself further on his erection.
“I’m hurting you.” He barely recognized the butchered protest that cracked the panting-filled silence as his. “Yes, oh,
He roared with the spike of arousal her words lashed through him. Then, helpless to do anything but her bidding, he thrust back into her, shaking with the effort to be gentle, go slow. She thrashed her head against the sheets, splashing her satin tresses, bucking her hips beneath his, engulfing more of his near-bursting erection into her heat. “
He growled his capitulation as he rose, cupped her hips in his palms, tilted her and thrust himself to the hilt inside her.
At her feverish cry, he withdrew all the way, looked down at the awesome sight of his shaft sinking slowly inside her again.
He raised his eyes to hers, found her propped up on her elbows, watching too, lips crimson, swollen, open on frantic pants, eyes stunned, wet, stormy. He drew out, plunged again, and she collapsed back, crying out a gust of passion, opening wider for each thrust, a fusion of pain and pleasure slashing across her face, rippling through her body.
He kept his pace gentle, massaging her all over with his hands, his body, his mouth, bending to suckle her breasts, drain her lips, rain wonder all over her.
“Do you know what you are?
She writhed beneath him with every word, her hair rippling waves of copper-streaked gloss over the crisp white sheet, her breathing fevered, her whole body straining at him, around him, forcing him to pick up speed-though he managed not to give in to his body’s uproar for more force.
“I
He again obeyed, strengthened his thrusts until her depths started to ripple around him and she keened, bucked up, froze, then convulsion after convulsion squeezed soft shrieks out of her, squeezed her around his erection in wrenching spasms.
The force, the sight and sound and knowledge of her release smashed the last of his restraint. He roared, let go, his body all but detonating in ecstasy. His hips convulsed into hers and he felt his essence flow into her as he fed her pleasure to the last tremor, until her arm and legs fell off him in satiation.
He collapsed beside her, shaking with the aftershocks of his life’s most violent and first profound orgasm, moved her over him with extreme care, careful to remain inside her.
She spread over him, limp, trembling and cooling. He’d never known physical intimacy could be like this, channeling into his spirit, his reason. It had been merciful he hadn’t imagined how sublime making love to her would be. He
He encompassed her velvet firmness in caresses, letting the sensations replay in his mind and body, letting