She was so close to breaking, so close to the point of no return where I needed to put her in order to rebuild her the way she'd always been meant to be. Anger pulsed in my body, uncontrollable and all consuming, but with her hollow eyes on mine and the sight of her lips quivering in my face, I lowered her to the ground more gently than I might have.
I wanted to shove her body into the tree and ravage her, to show her everything I would take and all that she would give me willingly. Instead, I placed her on the ground carefully and sealed my weight over hers.
The lights of the village twinkled out slowly as my people went to bed for the night, forced into their homes earlier than they might have planned because of Isa’s moonlit run.
She couldn’t possibly know they’d been celebrating my return with my bride to be in tow. That El Diablo would finally have his heirs to continue the Ibarra legacy and give them the stability I’d been unable to provide without Isa.
I touched a hand to her hair, brushing it back gently as I pushed her legs wider and settled my hips between them. She flinched back from the touch, her body able to feel the violence barely restrained in me.
The time would quickly come when I showed Isa what it could mean to be with me. If she didn’t want to accept the man, then the nightmare would fuck her in the dirt and break her body into submission.
The choice was hers to make.
"I knew the moment I saw you that you would be my wife," I murmured. Her eyes widened at my words, and I wondered how they could come as a surprise. My intention to get her pregnant should have been enough to communicate to Isa that this was not a temporary situation for me.
"But I don't want to be your wife. I just want to go home." The words faded, the melancholy sound like that of a woman as she realized her home was gone. That it had been destroyed, and in a way it had.
It would never be her home again.
The shorts clinging to her sweat-slicked body kept me from touching what was mine. I grasped her around the back of her thighs, lifting her legs and ass off the ground to rest against my body. Sliding my hands into the elastic waistband, I pulled them down and over her ass while she stared up at me.
"You will never try to leave me again. I am sure you can see that it is pointless now," I said, watching as she nodded slowly. The movement was as hesitant as I would have expected, as if she was barely there.
Drifting away in the ocean, lost to the tide of my possession.
It would take the flames of Hell to bring her back to life, to resurrect her as Mi Reina so she could withstand the fires to stand by my side.
I dragged the shorts up and over the tops of her thighs as she watched me, blinking up at me in her shock. Tossing them to the side, I shoved her legs back down to part around me so that I could lean forward and pull the collar of her tank top down until her breasts spilled free.
I placed her bandaged hands on my chest, longing to feel her bare skin on me. To feel the torn flesh of her hands as she touched me and know that the marks on her skin were mine.
That they were part of us, for better or worse.
Even as I wanted her to look at me as if I was the man she'd fallen in love with in Ibiza, I couldn't deny the appeal of knowing she saw the darkness in me. That she stared in the face of the nightmare and held her ground where others might have continued to run. Isa could play innocent all she wanted, but she'd always seen hints of the darkness in my eyes.
She'd seen it, felt it against her skin, and she’d welcomed it with open arms. Like coming home to the place her soul was always meant to belong.
She didn't speak, just stared up at me with teary eyes as she shook her head from side to side. I knew there was nothing left she could say as she tried to work her way through the inescapable nature of her life with me, but accepting it was the first step in our battle toward happiness.
I reached between our bodies, dragging the waistband of my pajama shorts down until my cock sprung free in the gap. I notched my head against her clit, dragging it through her pussy and rubbing up and down through her until I was wet with the arousal she wouldn’t want to acknowledge.
The brokenness faded from her eyes, the little demon rising in response to my attempt at sweet seduction. Isa had never been one to simply let me make love to her, instead preferring to push me until I couldn't resist the temptation to take her roughly. To push her past the limits she'd probably thought she had for herself.
But there were no limits to what I would do to Isa. No parts of her that I wouldn't claim as mine.
Even understanding that the defiance came from a place of not wanting sweet and romantic from a man she was determined to hate, that it was a defense mechanism as strong as any, I still felt nothing but frustration as I met her glare with one of my own.
"I did warn you what would happen if I caught you, Princesa," I warned as I lined my cock up and drove inside her. She screamed as I filled her, crying out into the
