“Don’t,” she pleaded roughly, feeling another tear as it tracked down her cheek and his hold shifted, lowering her further back in his arms as he leaned over her.
“I have to, Scheme.” One hand moved below the quilt, flattening on her bare stomach. “Don’t you see, pretty girl? I can’t fight it. Can you?”
“I’m not weak.” The shudder that raced through her body belied her declaration and she knew it.
“Never weak,” he agreed, his voice roughening, rasping. “So strong. Show me how strong you are, Scheme. I can’t defeat you, can I? No matter what I do.”
No matter what he did.
Her lips parted as his brushed against them again.
“Be strong for me,” he growled. “Because I don’t know if I’m strong enough to survive knowing what he did to you.”
Her cry lacked fear; it lacked strength. It was filled instead with hunger. With need. Her lips parted fully, her arms reaching for him, curling around his neck as pleasure began to swamp her.
“Yes. Fuck yes. Take me, Scheme,” he growled again between nips to her lips. “So strong.”
And she was devouring him. Had any kiss ever been so good? Enraptured. She could taste his arousal, smoky and dark, causing her senses to reel as she reached for more.
Her tongue twined with his, drew it in and savored the wild taste that filled her senses. It was so sharp, so deliciously intense that when he filled his hand with the heated weight of a swollen breast, it felt natural—his fingers on her flesh, surrounding her nipple, pressing in on it and sending fiery shards of sensation to tear through her pu**y.
She needed to be touched. Sweet God, from the inside out, she needed his touch. The hunger for it, the overriding desperation was ripping through her body, making her not just need, but crave.
“I’m going to make you scream for me,” he growled as his lips pulled from hers, his teeth scraping over her jaw before moving to her neck. “Beg me. I want you to beg me to hold you, to take you. Beg for my c**k pushing inside you.”
Her head fell back on his arm as his explicit demands sent spasms of destructive need to attack her vagina.
“I don’t beg,” she moaned.
“You beg.” He moved suddenly, twisting until she was beneath him, her legs spread, his hard body stretched between them. “I watched you,” he snarled. “Hours where that bastard assassin touched you, made you beg. Made you come. You’re going to beg harder now. You’re going to come harder.”
She should have been embarrassed. Humiliated. He had watched her have sex. He had watched her search for something she had come to believe didn’t exist. Something she had found with Tanner. Satisfaction.
But she wasn’t embarrassed, or humiliated. It was exciting. Enthralling.
“Touch me. Don’t let me think, Tanner.” Her nails raked down his shoulders and her fingers came to the buttons of his shirt.
She gripped, ripped, her breath catching in excitement as the buttons popped from the shirt, scattering around them, revealing his hard, bronzed chest.
“I’ve dreamed of doing the things they never did.” His lips peeled back from his teeth, revealing the sharp, wicked incisors at the side of his mouth. “I made lists.”
Hands still gripping his shirt, she stared back at him in shock.
“Years.” His head lowered. “I watched you for so many years, aching, dying inside because I couldn’t have you.”
Her lips parted, but not for his kiss.
“Why did you watch?”
“Because I needed to know you,” he whispered. “To see you. I needed to assure myself, each time, that even though they touched your body, those bastards didn’t own you.”
She saw it in his eyes. He might be lying about many things; he could very well be the spy her father fought to control. But in this, he was telling the truth.
She shook her head slowly. “No man owns me.”
“I do.”
CHAPTER 11