Alexandria might have resisted his dominance, but she could not resist his burning need. The intensity of his feelings swept through her mind, and her body caught fire with his. She pushed back against him, consenting, enflaming him further. She was laughing softly, teasing, but her breath caught in her throat when he thrust forward in intimate invasion. Her body tightened around his, holding him, clutching him, rippling with life and heat.
One powerful arm tightened possessively around her waist, his body all at once protective over hers.
“Are we crazy, we two?” he murmured.
“You’re the crazy one,” she gasped, moving with him, beginning to spin out of control again that fast. “I have work to do, yet you keep me here, locked to you, a prisoner of your passion,” she said, panting. He was building the fire fast, with sure, hard strokes, surging into her, his hands holding her beneath him. “I can’t believe I’m letting you get away with it.” And she couldn’t. It seemed impossible that she would be kneeling on a bed stained with her own innocence and loving this man’s possession of her, wanting more, wanting him again and again.
When they finally collapsed, holding each other, a fine sheen of perspiration coating their bodies, they were drained, spent, satiated. “I heard you chanting in my head, the first time we…” She trailed off. “The words were in your native language, weren’t they?”
“I ensured our bond again,” he admitted. “The thought of losing you through my own stupidity was too much. I recited the ritual words as I took your innocence, to bind us together for eternity.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Those words make an unbreakable tie for our males. Once said, the bond is eternal.”
She rolled over and blinked up at him. “What are you talking about?”
“When a Carpathian male finds his mate and knows for certain she is the one, he can bind her to him with the ritual words even if he has not yet claimed her body. It is like the human marriage ceremony but much deeper. Our souls and hearts are one half of the same whole, incomplete when apart. The ritual words bind them back together as they were meant to be.”
Her gaze narrowed in speculation. “I thought the two were bound by chemistry, by blood.”
“They are destined, true, and the bond is begun.” He pushed his long hair from his face and retreated to one side of the bed, as if uneasy with the conversation.
“So the woman can still escape if the man doesn’t actually say the ritual words?”
He shrugged his broad shoulders, his golden gaze all at once unreadable. “Why would he be so stupid as to not speak them when he knows her destiny lies with him? He would be a fool.”
“Perhaps it would be nice if he asked the woman what she thought. Human men at least ask the woman if she chooses to spend her life with him. Perhaps Carpathian women would also like to have a choice.”
He shrugged again. “It is the choice of destiny, fate, whatever you wish to call it. The law of the universe. The law of God. We were made this way. The words cannot be revoked. No Carpathian male is going to allow his woman to run around unprotected and unclaimed.”
“You people are living in the Dark Ages! You can’t just take over someone’s life without their consent. It isn’t right,” she argued, appalled.
“A Carpathian male cannot survive without his lifemate.”
“Well, just how many years do you want to live anyway?” she demanded hotly.
His golden eyes flashed briefly with amusement, and his palm slid up her calf to her thigh. “I would go for another century or two as long as all our nights were like this one.”
His voice did something funny to her heart, starting that curious melting sensation she so often experienced around him. She wanted to be angry with him, but the truth was, if she could have more nights like this one, she wanted a century or two with him herself.
“I am reading your thoughts,” he teased, his voice a deliberate caress.