No matter how much she wanted exactly that.
Melody was wearing loose workout pants and a close-fitting T-shirt, because she and Fen had agreed that there was no point raising suspicions by bringing any actual, formal gear. And it had been so interesting to train like that, in light, stretchy fabrics that allowed her a different understanding of the things her body could do.
And now, that same performance fabric offered no barrier whatsoever to the man who lifted her up, held her high against his chest, and then pulled her legs around his waist to settle her there. Wrapped around him like the vines that circled the columns in her parents’ atrium.
Never once lifting his mouth from hers.
For long, desperate, drugging moments, it was like a battle. Melody fought him, though she hardly knew why. Only that she liked the familiarity of a fight. And she wanted to get closer. Deeper. Wilder.
She wanted things she couldn’t name.
Griffin bore her across the room, toward the furniture that she and Fen had pushed back into the embrace of the plants, the way they always did when they trained in here. Then he took her down with him, so her back was pressed into one of the low couches.
But he came down with her.
Her legs were still wrapped around him. Her mouth was still fused to his. And as he settled, hard and huge between her legs, that relentlessly masculine part of him pressed tight against the place she ached the most, something in her...
Changed.
Surrendered, something in her whispered, though she wouldn’t know. She never had before.
But she shifted, so quickly it made her dizzy, from the kind of fight she’d always known and loved and considered a part of who she was to...a melting thing.
A sweet, wildfire burst of molten release all through her body.
“Hold on, Princess,” Griffin growled, his mouth moving from hers to find its way down her neck, finding her pulse and toying with it until she shuddered. “You might know how to fight. But this is my game, and I know how to win.”
And then he took her over.
There was no other way to put it. No other way to feel. She was melting and melting, and he conquered her.
Thank God.
His hands moved with skill and certainty. He pulled the shirt she wore up and over her head, pausing to shrug his off, too. Then he pressed his naked chest against hers, and that...was a delight. A mad, careening bloom of sensation.
Her nipples hardened at the contact, and then he used his palms there, as if he was trying to see the expression that she would make.
And her breasts responded, the proud ridges standing tall.
He laughed at that, a wicked sound.
Then he used his mouth.
And Melody...lost track of herself.
There was only sensation. There was only fire and need. He stripped her, pulling off her loose pants, and making a deep noise in his throat when she was naked before him. He took a moment while she shook, lying there before him, and it was only when he returned to her that she realized he’d taken his own remaining clothes off, too.
And then...it was a symphony. His body was so different from hers. His hair-roughened chest, so heavy and solid. The lean, hot weight of him, bigger and broader and all of it somehow delightful and perfect and alien and right.
He took his mouth and his hands to every part of her. Every last millimeter of her flesh, until she was thrashing, her head back and her fingers gripping whatever part of him she could reach.
Melody was already moaning when he got to that slick place between her legs. He traced her wetness with his fingers. Then he tasted her with his mouth.
Then he claimed her, completely, burying his head between her legs, eating her whole until Melody exploded.
She hadn’t understood.
And she was sobbing, so she couldn’t tell him. She writhed and she bucked, and all Griffin did was hold her down and lick into her, until she exploded once more.
She hadn’t understood. It had been like colors, the things she’d read about flower petals blooming and little deaths and a great many waves washing over and over and over a person who was likely shaking while it happened. She’d comprehended the idea. She’d known the concept.
But what Griffin did to her was not a notion. It was flesh. Blood. It was her bones like jelly and her body no longer hers, no control and no desire for any. It was yes and more, salt and tears, and a joy so intense it took her breath.
And then, as he found his way up the length of her body again, he used his fingers. It was a revelation made of flame and steel. No longer testing her wetness, but this time, finding his way inside her. Melody felt the stretch. The faint burn.
But she couldn’t analyze it. She couldn’t catalog the particular sensations the way she always did, then file them away with the rest.
Melody didn’t want to learn the shape of him. She wanted to lose herself in him, or she already had, and there was nothing to do but allow it.
To glory in it.
To surrender herself completely and worry about it later.
He began to thrust in and out of her with his fingers, and that was so amazing, so astonishing, that Melody didn’t know what to do with herself. She was making noises she didn’t recognize. She flushed, hot and red, like a fever—but this one felt almost too good to bear.
But her hips seemed to know things she didn’t, rising to meet those hard, seeking fingers. His mouth was at her neck. She felt the graze of his teeth on her collarbone.
And everything was this. The rise, the fall. The thrust of his fingers deep into her body. Steel and fire, flesh and blood. His mouth a hot demand. Her own sounds a betrayal and a song at once to this rough,
