he frowned when he saw she was wearing something else underneath it—something white that covered her breasts. She laughed again, but as he looked up, her eyes were happy. She put her hands behind his head and brought him down to her.
They kissed for a while longer, him following her lead and quickly learning what she liked by the way she moaned and pressed her body into his. He loved the taste of her tongue. The way it was soft and wet and twisted with his. He loved the feel of her, so much smaller and more delicate than he was. It made him want to protect her and fight for her.
He wanted to do whatever she told him to do. From that moment until forever.
He brought his head down to between her breasts and inhaled there, her true smell even stronger. It made his head dizzy. It made him want to thrust and take.
He let his instincts lead him then, he couldn’t help it. He removed her clothes, needy to know her, to smell her every secret place, to have her. He didn’t want her to keep secrets from him. He wanted to know them all. To take, and then take more and more and more. To feed himself until he was finally full and then sleep and feed himself some more. On her. Animal instincts, he reminded himself. I might scare her. Woman is sacred, he whispered in his mind, the quote from the notes her mother had written about the book he hadn’t yet read.
Sacred. Something that was a treasure. To him, she was. And he was still hungry for her. He didn’t know how to balance the two sides of himself. Not when she was lying beneath him, making sweet sounds and running her fingers over his arms, through his hair.
“Jak, yes,” she moaned when he removed her boots and then her jeans, sliding them down her legs and tossing them on the floor. He came over her again and her eyes showed a flash of fear then. He hesitated, trembling. Please don’t make me stop. But she reached for him, bringing him back to her.
He moved down her body, sniffing all the places he wanted to know, going back over her belly when she gasped. He licked her skin, tasting the sweet and the salt, nipping at it lightly so her backside came up off his bed.
He could smell the place between her legs, and the scent of it so close to his nose made him growl from the pleasure—pain—of the way his body swelled and hardened like he’d never experienced before. He ran his nose over the womanly mound beneath the cloth of her underpants and she gripped his hair in her hands, tugging. The need to smell her there was a hunger he could not ignore and with one quick movement, he brought the material down her legs and tossed them on the floor.
He nuzzled her with his nose and his mouth, inhaling, learning her scent so it became a part of him, and she jerked when his nose rubbed the spot below her mound.
She smelled like life, like sweet water, like fertile earth, and perfectly ripened berries that would take away the pain of hunger. Her woman scent was the beginning of everything and the place where he wanted to draw his final breath. She was meant for him, he knew that now. No other woman. Only her.
He paused, the fog clearing enough that he could focus on her sounds, the way she gripped his hair, and raised herself to meet his face. He moved more slowly, going lower, breathing her, his tongue darting out to taste her, to lick her sweetness. Mine, mine, mine, the whispers sang low and old like time and earth. She made a sound deep in her throat and gripped his hair more tightly, and so he lapped her again. Again. Again. He loved the way she tasted. It spoke to both sides of him—both the animal and the man. For that minute, it made him believe he could be both, that he didn’t have to choose which part of himself to turn away.
Her whimpers grew louder and closer together until finally she screamed his name, her thighs clenching around his head and then loosening slowly, her hands letting go of his hair.
He knew what had happened because it’d happened to him, that explosion of pleasure that made his skin prickle and stars burst inside his mind.