Spank me? I gasp and try to turn, my heart exploding in my chest, but he holds me easily, his fingers wrapping my wrists. One of his hands goes to my breast, cupping it, holding my back to his chest. “Easy baby,” he murmurs. “I won’t spank you unless you ask me to.”

The rough, deep quality of his voice is frighteningly arousing considering the topic. “That’s never going to happen.”

“It’s not about pain, baby. It’s erotic pleasure and the kind of complete escape that leaves nothing but the moment. And the trust you give me because you’re mine. It leaves no room for anything but you and me and the moment. You need that. We need that.”

Any fear of the threat of a spanking evaporates. Yes, I whisper in my mind. I need that. Take me. Make me yours. I squeeze my eyes shut and he surprises me by turning me to face him, so I snap them back open. His eyes meet mine, hold me spellbound, the air thickening around us. He presses his fists into the wall by my head and tenderness settles over his face as he adds, “But what we need more than anything, Amy, is each other. I need you, baby. I need you alive and well and in my bed and my life. The idea of losing you is torture and it affects me but I know you aren’t my property. You’re the woman who changed me in ways I don’t even fully understand.”

Suddenly, I realize I might be bared to him when he is fully dressed, but we are both naked, exposed in ways I do not believe we have ever been with anyone else. The raw honesty in his eyes, the torment and fear, the vulnerability I sense and feel in him, speak to my soul. He speaks to my soul. And suddenly I get the sex games, and his need to control something when everything seems to be spinning and cracking.

I wrap my arms around his neck. “You’re right. We do need each other. I need you, but Liam--”

“No buts.” He slides his fingers around my neck, dragging my mouth to his. “Say it again. I want to hear you say it again.”

My heart squeezes with the vulnerability and need beneath the sandpaper rough command. His need for me. Mine for him. “I need you, Liam.”

“And that is everything to me, Amy. You are everything.” He kisses me, his tongue parting my lips, and when mine reaches for his, when that first sensual connection happens, it is as if a band of tension snaps between us. This is not a kiss, but an unleashing of wild heat. We are suddenly clinging to each other, touching each other, my arms wrapping his neck, my legs around his waist.

In an instant it seems, I am sandwiched between him and the wall, and his pants are to his knees, his shaft pushing into the slickness of my sex. He drives into me, stretching me, filling me, burying himself deeply, completely. I pant with the feel of him inside me, our foreheads settling together, another little thing that has become familiar, a sweet bond in the middle of absolute passion.

“You aren’t even undressed,” I whisper.

“We’ll do it in reverse next time,” he promises, and I laugh at the idea of such a purposeful transition, but he lifts me off of the wall, taking all of my weight, angling my hips and his cock for a deep, hard push, that has me moaning instead.

Clinging to his neck, I have a fleeting moment of worry about how he is holding my full weight, but it is gone with another pump of his cock, lost to his sexy, guttural groans. Curling into him, burying my face in his neck, I forget everything but the way he moves, the way he grinds into me. Time stands still for the push and pull of our bodies that lands me on my back on the mattress, legs over his shoulders, and yes, oh yes, his cock is deeper inside me, and he is driving harder and harder, faster and faster.

Tension returns to me in the form of a tight knot of muscles in my sex, burning with the promise of something sweet and wonderful. “Liam...I...I...” He leans in and kisses me, somehow still managing to move, to seduce me with the thick pump of his cock. All too easily, he chooses when to push me to the edge and over into a waterfall of sensations so intense the pleasure borders on pain. Reaching over my head, I grab the blankets beneath me, grasping for anything to hold onto, trying to stay in the moment, willing it to last but it escapes me, leaves me panting, drugged with the impact.

It is gone, but Liam is not. I come back to the world with another deep thrust of his shaft that has him shuddering from head to toe, and the intensity on his face, the primal beast that he is in that moment, is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. He collapses on top of me, completely drained, but I feel the way he is careful not to crush me, how aware of me he is even in his own escape.

Seconds pass and he doesn’t speak and neither do I, but we don’t need to. It is good and right between us. When finally he moves, rather than pull out of me, Liam adjusts his pants enough to stand. I wrap myself around him without questioning his intentions.

We enter the bathroom to the flicker of automatic lights as he sets me on the counter and grabs a towel, pressing it between my legs as he pulls out of me.

His hand goes to the back of my head and he does that now familiar thing he does and rests his forehead against mine. I nestle my fingers in the soft, springy hair of his broad chest and I breathe with him, a deeper intimacy blooming between us.

“About earlier tonight,” he begins.

“It’s okay--”

“No. It’s my turn to say it’s not okay.” He eases back to look at me and those sharks he claims swim around his feet are swimming in his eyes. “I was an asshole.”

“You’re worried and you’d just been handed the VIP invitation to fatherhood you hadn’t planned for.”

“A VIP invitation to be a better man than my father, Amy.”

I suck in air at the unexpected answer. “Oh Liam--”

“Hear me out, baby.” His gaze flickers over my bare chest and he grabs a navy blue cotton robe from a latch behind the door and slides it over my shoulders. “It’s hard to think, let alone say what I have to say, when you’re naked.”

Cheeks burning, I stick my arms through the huge sleeves while he tugs the robe shut and ties it, his hands lingering on the knot at my waist. He lets out a heavy breath. “Okay.” He hesitates, then seems to push himself to confess, “When I was a kid my father got drunk and beat my mother.”

My eyes go wide and I open my mouth to issue words of sympathy, but I read the way he seems to wait for the bullets they would represent, and instead ask, “Did he hit you?”

“Oddly no, but for years I was the small child hiding in the closet while he played monster. I would shout and try to hit him but my mother begged me to stop. I was little, only eight, and she was sure I’d be hurt. Thankfully, the SOB disappeared. Him leaving was the best thing that ever happened to my mother. Then when I was thirteen, he came back for a night and my mother let him in her bed to wake up to a beating.” His expression turns all dark lines and haunted shadows. “At already six feet tall, I had listened to one too many brutal attacks, and I’d had enough. I put my fist into my father’s nose.”

Pride wells inside me at the bravery of a young boy who’d been through too much, too soon in life. “What happened?” I whisper, reading his tone as a resolution, not a nightmare to follow.

“He left. The end. And that’s where I was at today when I said it was my way. I knew standing up to my father was right, and I know hiding you and hiding you well is the answer now.  The only thing my father ever taught me worth learning was that I can’t do nothing, Amy, and I can’t ignore my own instincts.”

“Nothing is exactly what I’ve done for the past six years, Liam.”

“No. You survived and that says a lot.”

“That’s not enough. We’ve had this discussion.”