There was no gentleness in her when she tore impatiently at his trousers, pulling loose the buttons one by one until he was free. She did not wait to take him into her hands, and the jolt of her fingers there was beyond any previous sensation. Distantly he knew there had been others, some skilled in their lovemaking—but none, none had made him so utterly helpless. Now it was she who dominated, who demanded, who teased to a sweet, agonizing fever of hunger. She needed no skill to bring him again and again to the brink, always stopping before he could lose control. And he dared not lose control—not yet. Not before he had made her his.
Somehow, in her fragile strength, she had tugged him down, straddling him, her glorious nakedness a vision filling his sight. After the final barrier of his trousers was discarded and forgotten, she paused to gaze at him, the delicate oval of her face flushed with passion, her eyes wide and wild and bold as they raked over his body. And then she followed her gaze with her mouth and caressed him, her gossamer hair brushing his belly to the point of madness, taking him in so deeply that his fingers gripping her arms sank with bruising strength into the soft flesh.
Joey felt his grip, a pain indistinguishable from pleasure. The delightful response of his body, the firm, unyielding length of him, was a temptation she sampled again and again. She paused once to watch his face, so completely abandoned that the taut grim lines of it had relaxed and reformed into tension of a very different kind. She felt her power over him, gloried in it and in the raw, wild savagery she controlled, knowing in this instant it was she who held dominion.
At the moment that she was most confident of her mastery, that she had him tamed to her will, she lost the fragile victory. He pushed her back with undeniable strength, as if she were no more than a creature of firelight and heated air, back across his thighs until her body lay once again open to him. He held her there so tightly that she could not move, and his eyes caught at hers with such feral madness that for an instant she was almost afraid. The moment passed quickly, for there was no room for fear in what followed.
Somehow, in a movement too swift to perceive, he had eased her back onto the abandoned sleeping bag, kneeling between her thighs. His hands were burning brands against the most sensitive skin as he pushed and lifted them, had she wanted to deny what would follow, she would have been utterly helpless to do so. There was no humanity in his eyes. She tried to reach up to him, to gentle the ferocity, but he pinned her arms to her sides and lowered himself atop her. He hovered there, and for a brief instant the blackness that had swallowed up the pale green-gold of his eyes receded, so that she recognized what she saw there, he recognized her, he remembered who she was. Remembered the time before.
There was a single suspended moment when she believed he would abandon her again, jerk away, deny her and himself. He shut his eyes and flung back his head, a soundless cry seemed caught in his throat, his jaw working in silence. And then he met her eyes again, and there was nothing but passion and uncomplicated desire. And acceptance.
She did not understand, but there was no more time for understanding. Only sensation as he descended, caught the soft skin of her shoulder between his teeth, pulling her against him as his surging hardness unerringly found its mark. She cried in pleasure and relief as he entered her, sank so deeply within her that it was only then she realized that the void had been filled at last. When he began to move, she felt her fingers clutching the fabric beneath them in time to each thrust, heard her gasping breaths caught up in the rhythm until there was only that one primal beat in all the world.
Luke could hear the tattoo of her heartbeat under his, her breasts under him firm as they rose and fell with each ragged breath. She was more deliciously hot and tight than he could have imagined, made so perfectly to fit him that he knew then it had been destined. The thing he had been fighting had been as inevitable as the flow of seasons and the coming of snow.