Kinked

hands, hard enough to make him stagger back a few steps. With a smile that blazed across her face, she said, “My turn.”

Quentin was on fire. His body was ablaze, his mind hazed with smoke.

This small slice of power that Aryal had given him was the headiest thing he had ever experienced. It ravaged his senses like napalm, clinging to everything and transforming the landscape inside of him. She, who was normally so uncontainable, was under his control.

He looked into her uncommon face, twisted with agonized desire. The tendons in her arms stood out as she dug her talons into the wall and struggled to do as she was told. She had arched her torso away from the wall in an unconscious offering to him. It caused her abdomen to hollow out underneath the graceful arc of her rib cage. Above that, the curve of her slender breasts flared. The small nipple he had bitten and sucked had turned red as a ripe cherry.

Everything about her was racy, streamlined and built for speed.

Greed swallowed him whole. He gripped her with both hands, fingers imprinting on the canvas of her flesh, and thought, you are mine right now.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.

What? He shook his passion-fogged head.

Her head came up, dark eyes wild with some internal storm. Something hit him, knocking him back a few steps. A half second later, he realized it had been her.

“My turn.”

No. NO. He wasn’t ready to stop, to give her up.

“I need more time,” he said. He didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice.

“That’s another bargain.” She yanked down her tops and gestured with a shaking hand at the noisy iPhone. “Do something about that or I will.”

Dear Christ. He stalked over to the table and jabbed at the phone, and it stopped the incessant noise. Then he leaned both hands on the tabletop and struggled to get control of his breathing. The scent of her arousal was an aphrodisiac so strong he felt kicked in the teeth.

“I’ll set it for the next fifteen minutes.” He began to punch it in.

She moved up behind him, curving her long body along the line of his as she laid her cheek against the back of his neck. “What if I wait?” she said against his skin.

He froze, not quite believing what he heard. “You wouldn’t,” he growled. She couldn’t wait. She didn’t have it in her. Hell, he didn’t have it in him to wait either.

She put her arms around him and ran her hands down his chest. He looked down, compulsively, watching her hands travel down his body. His cock was on fire along with the rest of him, and it jerked as her hands came closer to it.

“Have you ever been taken from behind?” she whispered.

He tilted his head back, astonished at his own crazed reaction to everything she did or said. He said roughly, “Men aren’t my thing.”

The pressure from her hands grew lighter as they reached his jeans. She passed them over the aching bulge at his crotch in a teasing caress. “Have you ever been taken by a woman wearing a strap-on? Using a dildo? Fucked from behind until you explode all over her hands? I doubt it. You’re probably too dominant, aren’t you?”

The images she created seared his mind, and his own reaction astonished him. He would never consider such a thing, never give himself over to someone else like that.

Except.

He thought of Aryal moving behind him, moving inside of him as she cupped his penis in both hands. The concept was so startling and strange, he nearly came right there in his pants.

It wasn’t as though he had never heard of a strap-on before. It was the thought of Aryal using one. On him. Everything she did was so goddamn sexy, it was breaking every rule he thought he had in his head.

He hissed, “Am I setting the alarm or not?”

Her hands flexed. He listened to her hard breathing, feeling it against his back. She wanted it bad. He could feel it in the rigidity of her body, smell it on the rich scent rising off her skin.

The bizarre thing was, he was starting to want it bad too.

Even though it wasn’t like him, and he never gave up control. There was something about her impetuous leaping into situations that was seriously screwing with whatever scraps of sanity he might have otherwise had.

She said, “Set it.”

He punched the button and stared at the screen as fifteen minutes began to scroll by.

He wore a belt with his jeans so that he could attach his knife sheath and the holster of his gun to it. He watched her hands go to the belt and unbuckle it. She yanked it out of his belt loops. “Take off your sweater.”

He straightened, yanked off his sweater and threw it aside. The air felt good on his overheated skin.

“Turn around,” she said.

He turned to face her, his longtime enemy and unexpected partner on this exploration that was rapidly becoming more intimate than any other exchange he’d had before.

Her expression was stripped of everything else except the same kind of hunger that was driving in his blood. He looked at the belt she still held, then up again at her face. She met his gaze. “Lie back on the table.”

He warred with his instincts that wanted to snatch at the belt, wrap it around her neck and haul her close for another one of those kisses that were so hot they seared him somewhere deep inside, in a place that was invisible to anyone else.

But she had struggled with her part of the bargain too, and met it, and part of what he had enjoyed about her was witnessing that struggle, and how she had overcome it.

Her gaze was sharp and steady. If he reneged on this, there would be no second chance with her, no opportunity to explore more of that which he had just gotten the merest taste.

He moved the iPhone to a chair, sat at the edge of the table and lay back. His torso covered the length of the table, from his head to his ass, while his legs spilled down to the floor. She took his legs and nudged him sideways until he lay with his head in one corner, the opposite corner ending between his thighs and causing them to fall slightly apart.

“I’m going to make this easier on you than what you did with me,” she told him. Her voice sounded shredded. “Hands over your head.”

His gaze went back to the belt. That’s why she still had it. It wouldn’t be easy, but a leather strap, no matter how sturdy, couldn’t hold him if he felt endangered or enraged enough to snap it. Still, he had to fight to control his instincts enough to put his arms over his head. He did it, watching her face closely.

She strode around the table and slipped a loop of the belt over his hands and fastened it to the leg of the table. Then, moving rapidly, she came back around, unbuttoned his jeans and yanked them down his legs. Just like that, within a matter of a few moments he was naked and spread out like a feast before her gaze.

His contradictory instincts grew more chaotic, and his body clenched. He hated the sense of vulnerability. He was not supposed to be the one on the table. He was supposed to be the one standing where she stood.

She stared at him with a wide, fixed gaze, her eyes dilated so that they were almost totally black. He felt it as a physical touch, as she lingered on the bulging muscles of his arms, down the angle of his chest as it narrowed to his long abdomen, to his erection where it lay heavy and thick on his stomach.

She yanked his legs wide apart, and a growl erupted from his throat. Before he could stop himself, he wrenched at the leather strap that pinned his arms. The strap held, and he managed to stop before he broke it. Pushing between his legs to hold them apart with her hips, she held up a forefinger where a single talon had emerged.

“I like blooding you,” she told him in a gentle voice. She ran the talon along the inside crease where his leg met his groin. An instant later, a line of fire flared where she had given him a shallow cut.

Goddammit, she had marked him.

The growling that came out of him then was feverish and wild. He sounded like he could savage her to death. He almost felt like he could. “What the fuck, Aryal.”