“I’ll be better able to protect myself, yes, but each exchange makes it harder to think of anything but you. If we exchange again and you’re taken away, it will be harder to live without you.”
A hardness settled over his emotions—something I’d noticed Kyros did when he wanted to guard me from something.
“Can you say you’re immune to the drive to continue the mating exchanges?” he eventually asked. “That your entire being isn’t desperate to intertwine with mine?”
The urge to blame the urge on the blood bond stalled on my lips. Because that excuse wasn’t true anymore. Even if I hated that lines were blurring, feelings were becoming tangled.
He crowded me against the wall, threaded his hand through my hair and tugged until my head was tipped back to see his face. “When will you admit how you feel for me, my beauty?”
My breath hitched.
“You drove off a cliff for me,” he whispered, trailing his nose from jaw to temple.
My hands shook. His were in the same state.
“I…”
His growl slipped between us. “The thought of claiming you as my mate keeps me up at night. I want to bite and fuck you through the three remaining exchanges back to back.” He leaned in for a kiss that I could tell would leave me legless.
I placed a hand on his chest, mind scrambling. “Is losing Ingenium a possibility? You said winning was a certainty a few weeks ago. Why the rush to jump into the fifth exchange?”
“There are no certainties in life,” the vampire purred, slipping his leg between mine.
“Kyros, I can literally feel when you’re downplaying shit,” I said angrily.
I needed this to happen and didn’t expect Kyros to come out with it so soon. Yet I was putting up more barriers than security at a Justin Bieber concert.
In response, the vampire tapped my ear gently, his eyes sliding to the left.
Oh, right.
“Time is always slipping away. If the opportunity is now, who am I to fight my instincts?” Kyros trailed kisses between my pushed-up breasts, pulling up my thin T-shirt to continue down.
I clamped my thighs together.
He undid the front of my jeans, dragging down the zipper.
My insides clenched and I clutched for his shoulder as everything disappeared; sound and smell and sight, gone.
“Can I touch you, Basilia?” He sounded almost furious.
He wasn’t.
We were as desperate as each other.
I needed him to touch me. Just another fucking line blurred that I couldn’t bring myself to care about.
Looping an arm around my waist, Kyros held me upright, hovering his mouth just over mine. “Tell me.”
In answer, I grabbed his hand and slid it down my stomach and beneath my panties. “It won’t take long.”
Like, one touch. Seriously.
His eyes flared and his fingers unfurled under my panties, making me jerk.
I slapped my hands back on the wall. “Please hurry.”
Kyros hummed, watching me as he supported my weight entirely. “No.”
One thick finger entered me, pressing in with agonising slowness. I cried low as my body tightened from my toes to my fingertips, my insides drawing in to the tip of his finger.
“Fuck,” Kyros whispered, his rapt focus on my flushed face.
His thumb circled my clit once. And the tightening catapulted to the peak with unfathomable speed.
Twice.
White obliterated my senses as Kyros’s hand moved rapidly.
Kyros’s thumb was circling.
His finger moving. So fast.
I couldn’t make sense of anything but the weightless bliss being wrung from my body.
His forehead was against my shoulder as he milked my orgasm for all it was worth.
Pleasure turned to pain as he continued.
His name lodged in my throat and I wiggled to dislodge his thumb from my sensitive flesh. It was so much. “Ky—”
He growled, unrelenting. The pain morphed to a slow heat that built, spreading through me again.
My shocked gaze flew to the ceiling. I was…? The pleasure jumped up and up again, bowling through my shaking frame.
Oh my god, I was.
This time I heard the scream that tore from my lips as my body tried to implode around his hand. He didn’t let me collapse and curl into a ball, keeping up a steady pressure until the hazy grips of my second orgasm left me.
After one last pulse, he slid his hand free.
“I need to set you down.” His voice was strained, and I shivered. Blurring me to the futon in the middle of the wardrobe, Kyros raced from the room.
Pure possessiveness rolled through him. His mind shook with the need to claim me again.
And I was in no position to help matters.
Sprawled on the futon, I