Keko’s lips curled up in triumph.

She lifted her hands and coiled her fingers around his wrists. Slowly, deliberately, holding his eyes with hers, she dragged his hands off the curves of her bare shoulders, sliding them over the ridge of her collarbone and down to her breasts. No bra, of course, just the thin layer of the worn white cotton tank top. She filled his big hands perfectly.

Griffin sagged, an unfettered low groan escaping his lips. Though he caught and righted himself, she’d seen it. She’d witnessed the crack in his exterior, the way this contact had freed him. She loved that almost as much as the way he was pressing his hands to her. Grabbing her with dire need. Dragging his palms over her hard nipples.

He was no longer looking into her eyes, but at her chest, at the way he was touching her. His bottom lip dropped open, and it was way too full and inviting to keep her coherent.

“Kekona,” he whispered, yanking down the strap of her tank top to expose one breast. His eyes snapped back up to hers. “Now look what you started.”

She was used to starting things. Back home, as general, that’s how clan rule laid it out. If she wanted to sleep with someone, she had to approach them and make the offer. Of course they could refuse, but she was used to being the aggressor, the pursuer. She loved it. That power had come with her high status, which she’d fought so long and hard for.

So when Griffin yanked her closer, a claiming hand sliding around her back to spin her toward the bed, she went into immediate general mode. This was her scene, her beginning.

But just because she liked the way he’d reacted when she’d smashed open his shell, she would let him think he had the better of her. For a second. Maybe two.

When he’d gotten her close to the bed, the hand around her back moving swiftly to her ass, she wrapped a foot around his ankle, slapped an arm around his shoulders, and used his shock to whip him around and throw his larger body onto the bed. He landed with a great bounce on the mattress, his limbs going tense in defense for a brief moment, then slackening as he watched her smile wickedly.

Hands on hips, she jutted her chin at his jeans and boots. “Take them off.”

He came up on his elbows. “I don’t take orders. I give them.”

“Funny, so do I. Tell you what, maybe I’ll give you a turn.”

No smile. Just a frenzied stripping. That Mediterranean skin covered all of him evenly. Born with it then, no sun lines to indicate he had any sort of time outdoors. Pity. She would have liked to trace a line between dark and darker skin with her tongue. Maybe she’d make one up in her mind and do it anyway.

She was right about him being a fighter. The hardness of his body and the lean lines of his muscles gave it away.

After he’d toed off his boots and kicked away his jeans, he leaned back on the bed and crossed his legs at the ankles. With a leader’s confidence, he looked at her down his prone body, over the beautiful erection stretching up toward his belly. “You’ll have nothing to tell them,” he said, “unless you tell them about this. And you won’t.”

With a single step, her balance perfect, she climbed up and stood at the edge of the bed, her ankles bracketing his.

Whipping off her tank top, she said, “Don’t want you for your words.”

She thought that maybe that would coax out a smile, but any emotion he harbored came through the hot glitter of his eyes and the way they were fixated on the zipper of her jeans. He wasn’t giving a verbal order, but she sure as hell was going to obey.

When she ripped open her jeans and stepped out of them, letting him know that not only did she despise bras but that she hated underwear just as much, he made a wonderful garbled sound in the back of his throat. Stomach muscles clenching, he rolled up to sit and wrapped his hands around her calves.

“Great stars,” he breathed, his eyes roaming up her parted legs, across her abs and around her breasts. “You’re fucking amazing.”

Bending, she pushed at his shoulders, laying him flat again. The tension in her thighs was overwhelming as she lowered herself to straddle his hips, the pulsing, needy place in her body hovering just above his erection.

Taking him in hand, loving the contradiction between hard and smooth in her palm, she whispered, “I am totally telling them you said that.”

Desire rattled through her body, a crazy, driving demand that wanted absolutely nothing other than for him to be inside her. She fit herself to him, making the initial entrance, then took her time working her way down. At her first curl, that first undulation of her hips, his eyes shot open and his fingers dug into the crease between her thighs and hips. He stared at where they were joined, low grunts set in time with her thrusts.

Hands planted on his iron pecs, she rode him as he drove up into her. Nothing delicate about it. Nothing remotely soft about this kind of passion.

In the back of her mind she was thinking that it was too perfect, the way they found a rhythm that seemed to mutually satisfy. Their movements were in sync, two musicians meeting for the first time who struck faultless sound on the first notes of collaboration. Like they already knew each other.

The angle was superb, where he was hitting her inside. Her fire magic was begging to be let out, building and building alongside her orgasm.

Chimeran sex was full of fire. It was a battle of wills, of flame and heat, both inside and out. Fire intensified everything . . . but Griffin was no Chimeran, and even though he was water, she feared the unknown. She feared what her body might do to him. She feared hurting him.

She feared learning firsthand why sex between two different elementals was kapu.

As though just to prove her wrong, he drove into her harder, the slap of their bodies drowning out all other sound. That’s when she lost it, when she came with such speed and such a powerful storm that she had no time to rein in the inner fire that always paralleled her pleasure. Tiny licks of flame rolled behind her closed eyelids.

Griffin cried out and she opened her eyes to see him gritting his teeth. Chimerans loved the burst of intense heat that accompanied orgasm, considered it the ultimate satisfaction, but she could not tell if his expression was pain or pleasure. She tried to lift herself off him, to protect him from the heat that must have been immense for someone uninitiated, but he grabbed her so hard she bruised, and continued to pump her body down on his. Asking for more.

The grit of his teeth was not pain, but rather that look that men got when they loved the animal intensity of certain kinds of sex. He came with a series of groans, his whole body shaking. She took it all in, thinking that, out of all the people she’d slept with in her entire life, she’d never watched someone come with such breathtaking awe. She’d never been this fascinated. She’d never felt this satisfied.

Even after he opened his eyes and the movement of his chest leveled out, neither one of them moved. Not even a twitch. He was still inside her, her hands still planted on his chest.

“What just happened?” he murmured, and she knew he wasn’t just talking about the sex or about the heat of her fire magic.

Something unseen shimmered between them. Something . . .

He reached up as if to touch her face and an invisible force slapped clarity into her brain. She pushed herself away and rolled off the bed. This was a fuck. Nothing more. She’d seen a challenge in him, she’d needed as good a release as he did, and she went after him. Mission accomplished.

There was nothing more to it. He was water. She was fire. And she had her orders.

Head on straight now, she turned around to find Griffin still lying there, muscled arms folded behind his head, one dark-haired leg cocked up. Watching her. Utter relaxation made the lines of his body soften, and there was a quiet tilt to his mouth, a warmth in his eyes, that made him seem like a new man.