“What’s wrong?” she asks, glancing up as we stop a few feet from the bed.
I drop my hand and step back. “Nothing.” But even to my ears, my voice sounds off, all hoarse and shell-shocked.
And I feel shell-shocked, blasted apart by the realization mushrooming in my mind.
How have I not seen this before?
How could I have been so blind?
“Love,” she told me the other weekend when I asked what more her cats needed after she’d fed them, changed their litter, and played with them. As far as I was concerned, all their needs had been met, but Emma knew better. She knew they needed what only she could provide: warmth, caring, affection.
Love.
“Seriously, are you mad at me?” A worried frown creases her smooth forehead. “I can take the cats home right now, before they can do more damage. And I’ll reimburse you for the sculpture. I know it’s probably crazy expensive, but I can make monthly payments until—”
“Fuck the sculpture.” My voice is low and savage as I step toward her. My face must also reflect the turmoil inside me, because her eyes widen and she starts to back away. Only it’s too late. Catching her upper arms in an iron grip, I drag her against me and, bending my head, claim her mouth the way I need to claim her heart.
Totally. Completely. Without giving her a choice in the matter.
Her lips part on a gasp as her head falls back, and I feed from her mouth, reveling in her taste, her feel, the sweet, addictive warmth that’s obsessed me from the beginning. I inhale her breath into my lungs, coveting it, coveting her. All of her. Her small, luscious body and her clever mind, her Salvation Army sense of style and her stubborn independence. Her compassion, her redhead’s temper, her love of animals—all the delightful, messy parts that make her so wrong for me, yet so perversely right.
Her hands come up to grip my sides, and her body melts against me as she returns my voracious kiss, her tongue pushing against mine, invading my mouth as greedily as I invade hers. She kisses me like she can’t get enough, like I’m the only man in the world for her, and as more blood surges to my groin, I lose the last shreds of my self-control, turning into that most primitive of all beings.
A man dying to claim his woman.
And she is mine. All mine. Every lush, delectable inch of her. I tell her that with every burning kiss I lay on her pale throat, with every greedy stroke of my hands over her supple curves. I brand her with my mouth and teeth and tongue, leaving pink marks on her tender skin. Her clothes rip in my impatient grasp, as do my own in the next few moments, and then we’re on the bed and I’m surging into her, taking her with a violence I didn’t know lived inside me.
A violence that should terrify her, but that she chooses to embrace instead.
Mine, I tell her with every brutal thrust, and she answers with a clenching of her inner muscles, with wet heat and silky softness, with her lips on mine and her arms looped around my neck. Her legs fold around my ass, her hips lifting to take me deeper, and it’s the closest thing to paradise I can imagine in this world. My mind is blank, my vision blurred as I drive into her, over and over again, propelled by a need that knows no bounds, no restraints.
I don’t know if she reaches her peak first or if I do, if it’s her orgasmic spasms that trigger my release or my convulsive grinding on her pelvis that triggers hers. All I know is we find ourselves in the eye of the same storm, caught in a sensual upheaval so intense that when it’s over, we’re both left completely drained, our chests heaving in the same rhythm as we lie tangled together, our hearts thumping heavily but in sync.
“Are you okay?” I finally find the strength to ask, lifting my head, and she nods mutely, looking dazed and shaken as I climb off her.
The bed is a mess of twisted sheets, the floor covered with our torn clothes, but for once in my life, I don’t give a fuck. Gently, I scoop up Emma and carry her into the shower, where I wash us both, noticing as I do that I once again forgot to use a condom. We’ll need to get another morning-after pill tonight—tomorrow, at the latest—but right now, an unintended pregnancy is the least of my worries.
All my life, I’d been driven by ambition, pursuing wealth and power because I thought that was what I needed. I took pride in my possessions, my social status, everything I’d achieved—and all the while, I’d been missing the one and only thing I truly wanted.
Like Emma’s cats that evening, I’d had all my needs taken care of except for one. And like her pets, I can’t get it from anyone or anything but her.
Love.
I want that from her. I need it.
I have to have it because I’m no longer just obsessed with her.
I’m in love with Emma Walsh, and the knowledge scares me shitless.
23
Emma
Something’s changed. I can feel it in the way Marcus holds me, the way he looks at me as he carries me back to the bed after toweling me off like a doll. Our sex life has always been intense, but he’s never taken me the way he did tonight, with a dark, almost savage desperation… a hunger that seemed to go beyond the physical.
What happened didn’t feel like sex.
It felt like a mating.
I’m still trying to gather my endorphin-fried brains as he carefully sets me on my feet next to the bed and straightens the tangled sheets and blankets. The luxurious bed looks how I feel: like a tornado touched down on top of it.
A tornado named Marcus, whose gloriously naked
