She waited for that.

Had she ever entertained fantasies of how she would lose her virginity, she might have imagined tenderness. Care and comfort and soft touches. Her nightmares shoved violence into the picture, where giving herself was not an option. She would be taken—just another street girl assaulted or dragged into the underground sex trade. Just another Indranan woman valued as breeding stock and as fuel for continued warfare.

Nothing included this level of eroticism, where a sense of gorgeous control was woven with the knowledge that Tallis could steal that control at any moment.

Would he?

Would he hold back?

She didn’t know what she wanted more. If he took her, she wouldn’t have to make the decision.

But no, deep inside she knew that if she didn’t tell him otherwise, he would stand there naked and motionless, with hands ready to do damage to a sink rather than to her. They might don their clothes and pretend the incident had never happened.

Kavya returned to drying him. She pushed the towel around his sides to dry his stomach and chest. She smoothed the terry cloth around the tense caps of his shoulders, then down defined ridges of triceps, biceps, and stone-hard forearms. Only when she’d tended to everything else did she venture to the place that would end her silent, overt flirtation and take the moment past the point of no return. She traced his flanks once again, around, slowly, until she rubbed the towel between his inner thighs and up along his hard shaft.

Tallis groaned a curse.

He turned so quickly that Kavya stumbled away. She hit the wall at her back. A surge of air jumped from her lungs. Part of that was from surprise and the impact of her body against cinder block. Part of it because Tallis was tall, vital, intimidating, so very male. The light in his eyes was viciously blue, as if the color could burn down the whole city. Instead it burned into her and melted what little remained of her hesitation. His cock jutted up and toward his navel at an angle that suggested the upward thrust of what would be his initial penetration—and every tight thrust that would follow.

Kavya still couldn’t breathe. She was wet between her legs. So hot. Her skin was shrinking. Tension made her ready to burst free of that confinement.

Again she was drawn to the sight of his erection, which was even more intimidating than when he’d lain prostrate in the field. His body was worth admiring and worshiping with everything she had—her hands, her lips, and the clench of her untested sex.

“We’ll dress and find a room,” he growled.

The berserker was in him, not controlling him but certainly fueling him with urges that touched her primitive core. The Indranan were not primitive people—at least they didn’t like to think so. Mind above body, no matter their thousands of years of violence. At that moment Kavya knew without doubt that such pride and pretense was a lie. She was as deeply primitive as Tallis. She wanted to rise to that challenge, that dare, that shocking desire.

“No.” The word was a tight squeak, but she continued with assurance. “No getting dressed. And no room. I want you. Here. There’s nothing to stop us now. Show me, Tallis. Show me what I’ve never had.”

—

Tallis took the naked, brazen temptation of a woman in his arms before his next breath. He could have played the gentleman. He could have tried to talk her out of making such a decision in a rash, hurried way.

He could have, had he been a different man.

She lived half a life, and that life could end tomorrow. That she hadn’t experienced the most transcendent experience of body to body seemed an insult to the Dragon.

With arms wrapped around her low back, Tallis held her flush and tight. He kissed her, diving deep, relishing her moan that walked a delicate line between surprise, pleasure, and protest. The protest dropped away as she drew her hands up to clench his hair. She was divinity—soft of skin, firm of flesh, eager of spirit. She didn’t back away when he deepened their kiss. The angle of his head allowed him to push farther with his tongue. His teeth scraped her lower lip. Kavya repeated the motion. Her dainty teeth abraded thin, wet skin, shocking him with physical pleasure. More shocking was how he responded to making her wild.

This would be no soft initiation. Whatever softness he possessed, he’d given that to her with his mouth, there beneath a blinding blue sky. She made her harder passions known with every pinch of her fingernails against his scalp, and the way she hooked her heel behind his calf. The rock of her pelvis against his shot white sparks through his blood.

He palmed both of her shoulders and pushed her back. Kavya struggled once, again, but he had her upper body pinned. Rather than question him or try to melt him with a pleading look, she scowled. Her expression was that of a child whose present had been snatched away. He grinned. He would not be her present, but her tool.

“If I ask for patience,” he said roughly, “it’s important. Look in my eyes. Tell me what this pause is costing me.”

She sucked her lips inward, then licked them, as if she needed to take more of him into her mouth now that she’d been deprived of the source. “You’re half wild.”

“Yes.”

“If we’d been preparing to fight and you held your seaxes, you’d be murderous.”

“Yes.”

“Instead . . . the beast wants to use that power with me.”

“Yes.”

“I’m happy you’re not trying to talk sense into me. But why stop?”

“The door.”

He pushed away and tossed towels onto the floor. Tallis wedged the wire shelf under the door’s handle. The precaution wouldn’t hold if someone was determined to get inside, but it would give Tallis enough time to arm himself.

Kavya stood where he’d pressed her against the wall. The sight of her made his mouth go dry. Yes, she was stunning, but the hunger in her amber eyes revealed how much she wanted this moment. Softness and tender caresses would wait for another time, if they had another chance at all. The quick lift and fall of her chest, which hefted and lowered her breasts in an erotic rhythm, was almost as exciting as her nudity.

I’m not going to stop.

“Good,” she whispered.

Tallis closed the scant distance between them and brought his mouth down to her neck. “Don’t do that again.”

“I can’t help it if you’re screaming.”

“Don’t do it again,” he simply repeated. “Stay with me.”

She nodded. “Right here, Tallis.”

She was clean and warm, delicious and intoxicating. He let his mind slip down to where he savored the elemental. The raw. The crazed. She responded with restless hands that skated over his chest, around his ribs, and down to his ass. As she had when she’d used the towel, she laid her palms flat. Only now, she grasped handfuls of muscle. He replied with a thrust. His cock rubbed between their lower bodies, nestled against the firm muscles and soft skin of her abdomen. Kavya gave him a long, mind-numbing exhalation.

He repeated the thrust every time she squeezed her fingers. His power was hers—for the moment.

Her breathing was sharp and uneven when he returned to kissing her lips. Taking those puffing exhales into his mouth was more proof of her excitement. Every hair and every pore and every deep clutch of her fingertips wrote erotic poems.

He sucked her tongue between his lips and bit the fleshy middle. The urge to use more force would’ve been enough to crush the bones of lesser men, but Tallis was still in charge of his inner frenzy. He only wanted to give her a sample of the aggression he withheld. Kavya slipped her taut hands up his back. She held on to his shoulders, bracing her weight against his, and accepted his testing assault. Only when he released her tongue and licked it, soothing, did he pull away to see her reaction.