senses. Talk to me. Touch me. Let me hear you with my ears and feel you with my skin. I want to keep tasting you until I’ve memorized it beyond anyone’s ability to fake. Ground me in what she couldn’t know. Be the free woman you described. Be Kavya. Be my real woman.”
—
His words were too much like an endearment for Kavya to bear. There was nothing to be gained from this man other than the physical: safety and gratification. Yet she couldn’t help a new, unfamiliar affinity adding weight to her soul while lifting her shoulders—as if he’d used that same physical prowess to alleviate unseen burdens.
“You know I’m real,” she said matter-of-factly. “You know the difference now.”
A glimmer of his usual humor returned. “Then by all means.” He stretched back on the bed, hands pillowed behind his head. “Continue.”
Kavya didn’t know where to start. At the start of each new encounter, she repeated the same phrase.
He was already firming beneath her hands as she loosened the fabric. The bulge of his erection shaped his briefs, tempting her to reveal him to her greedy eyes and curious touch. But it was too soon. She had bared so much of his beautiful body. Time to return the favor. She stood and unwrapped the rest of her sari’s overlapping layers, not to tease him but to keep it from tangling as she crawled atop him. Wearing only her undergarments, she forged a path of discovery from the waistband of his briefs to his throat, using only her mouth. Then her fingernails. She licked and kissed and scratched, absorbing as many details as she could. Salt. Silk. Musk. Sleek hair and firm—Dragon damn, such firm muscles.
He watched her perusal with little remaining of his dark suspicion. Instead he smirked with a knowing expression. He knew that she wanted him, so she shot the same knowing expression right back. Had she been able to talk to his thoughts, she would’ve told him,
She stopped mid-lick along a ridge of muscle bisecting his abdomen. Why wish for what she couldn’t do? She couldn’t communicate with him that way, and he’d specifically asked for speech. Her voice. Something he could hear with his ears and know was real.
She swallowed thickly. “You can’t wait to be inside me again.”
Tallis flinched.
He grabbed her head with both hands. The flare of fire in his deep topaz blue eyes turned nuclear. “And since we’re in the mood to try new things, take off the rest of my clothes.”
Tipping her head, Kavya frowned. “You’re in charge now?”
“New territory to explore.”
She held his gaze a little longer—an abject dare. “Lift your hips.”
Within a minute, she’d dropped the cargos and his briefs to the floor, revealing his impressive body to the late afternoon sunlight that slanted through the room’s small window. Slats of wood over the window lit stripes across his stomach and down his legs. His thick cock lay heavily on his low abdomen, with the head reaching for his navel. That massive organ had filled her. She didn’t know exactly how, because the physical dimensions didn’t make logical sense. But she remembered the fullness, the completeness of having taken that length deep inside. She wanted that as much as he did.
“Come here with that curious mouth.” His voice was dark and low again, but without the worrying suspicion. He was entirely aroused, which reflected so plainly in his tense ligaments, his stiff limbs, and the heavy power of his ravenous stare. “I want your lips here.”
Kavya looked on in shock as he took his prick in hand and smoothed the head with his palm. The rhythm was just as she remembered, how he’d loved to grip her fist in his, setting a pace that should’ve been painful. She knew better now. It was glorious.
She’d accepted his dares and challenges from the beginning. No way would she stop now, especially when he was right—new territory.
She straddled his naked body, with her knees bracketing his calves.
“Hold your hair out of the way,” he said. “I want to watch.”
A shudder of desire shook up her spine and out across her shoulders. With deliberate care, she twined her hair and handed it to him as she leaned into place. “You hold it. I’ll be busy.”
The first touch of her tongue was the most pure. The most shocking. He jerked. She flinched back. His salty spice lingered in her mouth. She bent down for another taste. He was hotter there than anywhere else on his body. In fact, the only heat that matched the throbbing head of his cock was the sweet ache between her legs. They matched in that fiery impatience.
She did everything by instinct. Tongue swirling. Mouth sucking. Lips moving up and down his steel-hard length with a light mimic of the rhythm she’d already learned to be his preference. Tallis tightened his hand in her hair and added his encouragement with whispered curses, endearments, and raunchy commands.
“Just . . . Shit, just like that. Ah, Kavya. Yes. Yes, suck me.”
Kavya become bolder as her awkwardness melted away. There was no time for awkwardness when presented with such an unexpected thrill. She took him in hand and matched the pulse of her mouth to the pulse of her strokes.
“See?” His taunting word was said with a smile and a gasp. “I’m back inside you.”
As if to punish him for being insolent, she tucked her teeth behind her lips and nipped at his sensitive head. He moaned, thrust, twisted her hair.
“Again?” she asked innocently.
“Yes. Again and again.”
She indulged him because he wanted it and, more powerfully, because it pleased her. She was ready to straddle higher up his body and sink onto that magnificent length, but she lingered. The deliberate prolonging of pleasure was the most beautiful torture. Not teasing. Not promising something she wouldn’t deliver. This would make fusing their bodies even more powerful. She was still a novice, but that much she knew.
A drop of fluid slicked across her tongue. She tested the potent essence with closed eyes. Her breasts grew heavy and full, aching, needing the urgency of his hands. Her thighs trembled.
“Enough,” he said with a growl.
An honest, soul-rending
Kavya’s world spun when she found herself on her back with the ceiling above her. Then Tallis’s face. He was half-crazed. How had he hidden that so well, with his body nearly motionless during her exploration? However he’d managed, he held nothing back now.
“You.” That one word was a sharp burst from her lungs. “
His jaw bunched. His nostrils flared. His blue eyes were lost to the commanding authority of his gift. He still held her hair in a tight fist, whereas his other hand gripped her hip with equal ferocity. He’d paused at the most provocative moment, with his cock poised to enter her with one unrelenting thrust.
“Hold on,” he gritted out. “This is going to get rough.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Tallis let himself go. He let himself become what they both wanted, wild yet contained. His goal was not to hurt Kavya of Indranan, but to pleasure her in a way that satisfied his deepest, most brutal instincts. The gift that gave him power as a warrior gave him prowess as a lover.
With a precise stroke, he angled into her body and buried his cock until their abdomens pressed flush. He groaned in the ecstatic relief of having his urges appeased. Her wide-eyed surprise fueled a second groan. She
