burning hot. Flames licked over his skin and ignited like gunpowder in his veins. It seemed that every time he woke now, Flambé beside him, his body woke first, already in a state of need. He always savored the buildup of heat and fire. He let it happen rather than trying to suppress it the way he had for years. Now, there was his woman.
She lay curled up in a ball the way she did, making herself so small in the middle of their bed, that red hair of hers already spilling out of its braid, proclaiming to him that she couldn’t be tamed. She always turned on her side, away from him, as if she could get away in her sleep, but he slept with his body around hers, his arm anchoring her to him, one leg thrown over her so there was no way she could possibly escape.
He enjoyed lying awake while she slept, imagining her tied in various ways. Seeing erotic images of her with the different ropes against her skin. She had such perfect skin for ropes, for the various colors and textures of ropes. She was extremely limber and she had done what he’d asked and stretched every day, several times a day, taking care to get her body into the best shape possible for the rigorous demands needed to be a rope model.
With Sevastyan, she wasn’t just his rope model. She was his partner in bondage and sex. He would demand all kinds of difficult erotic things from her that meant she needed to be in top physical condition. He took her training seriously and he was very grateful that she did as well. He studied her face for a long time while she slept. She’d been very quiet, nearly falling asleep in the bath the night before.
Sevastyan had insisted she eat, and she had, but very little. She had been seductive as she readied herself for bed, but he had been aloof, settling himself in a chair across the room from the bed with a book until she finally gave up. She threw herself on top of the covers and almost immediately fell asleep. Denying himself had taken discipline, but she needed rest and he needed time to figure his woman out. He also knew that he had to be the one controlling the sexual situations between them at all times. He was missing something big and if he didn’t figure out what that was soon, he might lose her altogether.
There was a problem with her leopard—or with her. He couldn’t decide which one it was. Her female was in her first cycle. Male leopards were known to their male counterparts almost from the moment they were born, but it wasn’t the same with most shifters. Often, women had no idea if they even had a leopard until she made herself known when their cycles united and she was ready to emerge. That was an intense time for the human female and extremely disorienting, at least based on everything he had observed from Ania’s experience.
Flambé’s leopard had retreated so far that Shturm couldn’t seem to reach her. His male was furious and getting more and more difficult to handle. That meant he was having difficulty controlling the building rage inside of him. Something was very wrong and he had to figure out what it was as quickly as possible.
It was very possible, even probable, that the female leopard was terrified of Shturm. Quite frankly, he was a brute. He would terrify any female leopard, let alone one as small as a strawberry leopard. She had no idea what to do or what to expect, and her human counterpart didn’t either. Flambé’s body was hypersensitive, so her reaction to the feeling of the female leopard coming close to the surface was distressing. That could suppress her rising.
Or . . . he didn’t want to think about the other possibility . . . that Flambé was the one terrified and was somehow stopping her female from rising. Was that even possible? He didn’t know. He’d never heard of such a thing, but if he didn’t find out soon, Shturm was going to tear him apart to get to the female. The fact that Flamme had come close to the surface around three other males and then retreated when Shturm came close had turned the big male wild.
Sevastyan resisted touching Flambé’s face, tracing her high cheekbones with the pads of his fingers. There was a strange