Seduce Me in Flames (31 page)

Rush took a long moment to simply absorb everything. As hasty as the rest of him was clamoring to be, he wouldn’t rush this. He wouldn’t cheat himself of a single thing, and he most certainly wouldn’t cheat her.

It would be a much harder ideal than he realized as her hands strove to stroke over him anywhere she could reach. He closed his eyes for a moment, simply feeling the caress of her hands over all the tautly distended muscles of his arms, shoulders, chest, and belly. He had settled his stance against the side of the tub, directly between her smooth thighs. He seized her around her hips and dragged her right to the lip of the tub and right into secure contact with him, his hot and hard sex to her hot and soft one. The connection made her breath hitch in her throat, made her hands dig into his forearms where they were settled at that moment.

Rush smiled, not realizing just how supremely wicked the expression was. He let himself lay nestled in the channel of her sex’s outer lips, but only for a moment. He immediately had to give in to the urge to rub himself against her, over and over again, wetting himself in the
precious fluid of her aroused body. His intention at first had been perhaps to touch her with his hands, explore her slowly like that, familiarize himself with her wet and sensitive tissues, but that plan quickly went out the window and this particular contact grabbed deeply at him, held him prisoner and a slave to the open heat of her body.

It most certainly didn’t help when she reached down and feathered curious fingers over his painfully tight erection. He gripped hold of her thigh when she maneuvered her hand fully around him and, without much seeming patience herself, guided him straight to the cusp of her body’s entrance.

“Ah damn,” he breathed as they both worked with sudden haste to readjust and better align their bodies. “I suppose there’s time later for the little things.”

“Yes. Later,” she agreed urgently.

He chuckled at that, but was hardly even giving any attention to his humor. What held his entire focus was the way she felt as he pressed for entrance into her body. She was tight and resistant, yet the wet of her was everything welcoming that it could be. It took only a moment’s persistence for him to start intruding into all that fierce heat and snugness.

And just like that, in a blinding flash, the urge to thrust was gripping at him violently. He couldn’t control it, it came on him so suddenly and in such a driving, instinctual way. In all his years of knowing just how to pace himself, of knowing when to toss out ordnance so he had just enough time to get free of a blast radius, or to wait until just the right moment so his team was protected as best they could be …

But all that skill and patience abandoned him. As the burn of need settled around his brain, he tried to remind himself that she was no doubt going to be scared, or perhaps it might even hurt her if he didn’t keep command
of himself. Yet none of that held him back from thrusting hard into her, trying to arrow into her tempting but tight little channel. Before he knew it, he was halfway into her, listening to her gasp and pant for breath, feeling her legs gripping him like a vise as she held him tensely. He wasn’t sure if she was waiting for him to continue or waiting for the moment she would kick him away, and he was willing to bet she wasn’t sure either. He was aware that it shouldn’t be a question, that he shouldn’t have come this far without making sure she was as relaxed and as ready as she needed to be. However, even if he wanted to, he couldn’t go back and fix what may or may not even be a problem. That wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was to take away her residual fear and insecurities the same way he wanted to take away his own. The same way he had always pushed through them. Straight ahead. Firmly forward.

When he thrust deeper into her, she gasped and cried out all at once. Her nails suddenly gripped his flesh, a reflection of the pain she was feeling. It was enough to give him a moment’s pause, to remind him to have better care with her, to slow down his selfish pace.

“Easy,” he said softly to her, bending over her to look down into her eyes as they grew wet with the light touch of tears. “Am I hurting you, Blue Eyes?”

“No,” she exhaled quickly. “It’s just … it feels … I never thought I would ever get to feel like this.”

“This is barely the start of it,” he said. When she lifted a brow, he had to chuckle sheepishly. “Or so I’m told.”

That made her smile up at him, and Rush felt his chest tighten and felt his entire body wormed through with a feverish heat. Though her reactions had been enough to give him pause, he had needed to fight for every second of that pause. Whether they were ready for it or not, their bodies most certainly felt otherwise. And the liquidity of her grasp around his throbbing cock made
him feel very certain that he could speak for her as well as for himself. He reached to brush his hand over her face, his fingertips burrowing into her wet hair, his opposite hand pinning her at the hip as he shifted and thrust fully forward once more. Now he was firmly and fully seated inside her, somehow her smaller body accepting his bigger one with hardly a complaint. It seemed impossible for something as soft and elegant as she was to be so easily able to accept something as hard and uncouth as he was, but there it was, the perfect meshing of two bodies, and an uprising wall of need and heat in its wake demanding even more. He scooped her up at the shoulders, sitting her into his embrace, hugging her tightly to his chest as he took a moment to burrow his face against her neck and ear. She was panting in quick, heated breaths that just about drove him out of his mind, her hands flitting like a confused flit-flyer around his shoulders, his chest, and through his hair.

Rush felt a heart-stinging emotion that was too intense to comprehend, to mentally dissect. For a moment he couldn’t even breathe as it washed over him. All he could do was hold on to her, take deep breaths full of her, feel each of her laboring breaths shuddering through her and squeezing around him. His throat went so tight that it almost strangled him, and his feelings were so overwhelming just then that he knew he couldn’t speak even if his life had depended on it. Even if she looked into his eyes, as she was doing just then, and saw all of his soul laid bare and exposed, he could do nothing to shade himself, protect himself from revealing too much to her, revealing more than even he had realized.

So instead of acknowledging his vulnerability, he simply held her close and pulled slightly free of her so he could thrust deeply in return. Ambrea clenched around him, from the inside of her body to the clutching of her arms and legs, her breath a sensual-sounding hitch close
to his ear. When she shivered in his hands, her lips brushing against his whiskered cheek, he held her closer and repeated the movement, only this time drawing it out longer, more slowly, a deeper, more intense return. And somehow this time it felt even more intimate than it had the first time. She may as well have just crawled beneath his skin and wrapped herself around his heart, because the feeling was the same.

Easy, Rush
, he told himself.
Don’t let the newness of it all carry you away
.

But as much as he would like to blame it on that, Rush knew it went much further than that. He also knew it was a damned inconvenient muck of emotions that he couldn’t afford to get wrapped up in. Still, when he closed his eyes and felt her heat burning him, he couldn’t make himself close off any part from her in that moment.

Ambrea was making every effort not to cry. Her entire body was on fire, though there were no visible flames. Her skin practically vibrated with sensation. And that was speaking nothing of the overwhelming feel of him as he invaded her innermost core, writhed around inside her, pulled her closer and closer and clearly had no desire to let her go. She had never felt so thoroughly connected to another human being. She had never been touched so well and so deeply. That he aroused her was the purest of understatements in that moment, and as she watched the passion and indefinable emotion flowering in his rich red-brown eyes, she could only be overwhelmed by her own feelings. He would never understand what this felt like for her. He would never comprehend how deeply even the simplest of his touches affected her, never mind a touch as intimate as this one. But she suspected that the surest way to make him leave her, to make him want to put distance between them and
to guard himself, would be to show him the intensity of the emotions she was feeling.

So she fought it back, closed her eyes so she could protect them both from her rampant, girlish feelings, and instead focused on the pure carnality of the moment. Her breasts weighed heavily with her arousal, their tips thrusting into sensitive, hard points that screamed sensation back at her every time she brushed up against him. Her hands moved over him again and again, shaping around the contours of his well-developed muscle and the way it all came strapped together beneath his skin and making up this powerful body that now moved against her … moved deeply inside of her. She held back the sudden urge to scream out by biting into his shoulder. It was a strong bite, though not enough to break his skin. It was just strong enough to help her keep her sanity.

He soon discarded the excruciatingly slow way he was moving into her, reaching instead for a more instinctual need, a deeper rhythm. Ambrea was stretched to her limits every time he sank into her, and every time he withdrew she felt devastated, as if she had been abandoned. But soon he was moving too quickly for her to distinguish between the two states of being. She felt simply as though she were along for a ride that she had no power over, no way to maintain focus on, no way to gain any semblance of control. Before long her teeth relinquished their hold on him and she began to cry out in uncontrollable bursts. She couldn’t help herself. It was the only way she could withstand the fierce sensations bolting through her body. It was like having a storm build, only to have it break fiercely and suddenly. But feeling the storm break was a false sense of relief, because in fact the break was only the beginning. It rapidly whipped itself into another fury, shuddering along her nerves, weakening her muscles until she was upright
only because of the strength in his hands and the ferocity he used to hold on to her.

Suddenly lightning seared through her, and she threw back her head and screamed. She wasn’t even aware of his hand fumbling to cover her mouth until she found herself with his fingers between her teeth. And just when she thought the feeling might finally release her, might finally send her crashing down, she heard him grind out a savage cry of his own. She was somehow more aware of his orgasm being what it was than she was able to label her own. Perhaps it was because of the way he flexed into a being of tightly tense muscle, the hardness of his whole body like holding on to a man made of stone. Or perhaps it was because he suddenly pulled free of her and sent hot stripes of ejaculate shooting across her stomach and thighs.

They clung to each other as the briskness of their physical sensations slowly regulated to something manageable and coherent. Ambrea felt him huffing hard for breath in the crook where her neck met her shoulder. Her legs had gone lax, her calves dangling into the water that should have felt cold in contrast to the heat of her body, but was instead superheated. The realization sank into her pleasure-addled brain slowly but impressionably just the same. She peeked around at the water and was aware of the steam rising off it. Not until that moment did she remember that Rush had, indeed, used his power in the water once before. When she’d nearly drowned, there had been a sudden streak of light.

Did he remember that? Had he done it on purpose, or had it been something instinctual? Did he even remember doing it?

Regardless, if he looked around himself and took note of the heated water, he might well lose all sense of calm and control. True, it was after the fact, and, as far as she could tell, she had come through it unscathed and unburned.
But she knew by now the way Rush’s mind worked. He would call an immediate halt to any further contact between them.

And that simply would not do.

The fact was, there were thousands of reasons why they shouldn’t be lovers. Some of them were crucial to the future of her empire, some were crucial to the safety of her simple woman’s heart. But none of it mattered to Ambrea. None of it mattered to her any more in that moment than it had ten moments earlier. She had made more than enough sacrifices in her life because of the blood she had been born with, and so had Rush. It was time they started making choices that took care of their hearts and their souls and let their blood flow in its own directions.

It would be only a matter of minutes before the waterfall and cycling water would refresh itself, regulating its temperature back to what it had initially been. Ambrea took advantage of those minutes by holding his head close against hers. When he lifted away from her, she turned his attention back in her direction with the swift, gentle employment of her mouth against his.

Rush felt her kisses like the sweet, stunning rush of a narcotic, the dazing strength of it so erotically overwhelming. He lost himself in her kisses, savoring the incredible flavor of her mouth, using it to draw out the heart-pounding pleasure that his body had just experienced. He had never before comprehended how utterly different orgasm would be when taken inside the body of a woman. Even taking it by his own hand had been a rare occurrence, something more frequent in his youth and even then not often at all because of the uncontrollable nature of his mutation.

But where it had been easy to deny himself and his sexuality before, he was struck with the inalienable understanding that he would never be able to do so again.
How could he? How could he know something so exquisite and think it would be within his power to return once more to the state of denial he was used to?

He separated from her lips so he could look at her face. He couldn’t believe how easily he was able to read her, even though they had really known each other for a very short time. But in that short time he had come to know she was not very good at concealing her emotions. And although the lazy, sated expression in her eyes was easy to decipher, he was also aware of a shaded caution within them.