Feral Hearts

68

She's still asleep but lukas didn’t. He couldn’t have slept, even if he’d wished to.

Too many thoughts rioted in his skull. He lay awake, keeping one arm curled protectively around her shoulders and watching the smoke from the fireplace draw upward and disappear into the darkness overhead.

It was done now. There could be no undoing it. Now he was resolved to give her everything she deserved. As close to it as he could manage, anyway. Beside him, she stirred, rousing halfway from sleep.

She rolled toward him, nestling close and throwing her arm over his chest. Her fingers toyed idly with the hair there, sifting through the springy tufts and lifting them playfully.

Then her touch swept downward. If he hadn’t been already hard before she started petting him, he was rock solid now.

She whispered, “Make love to me again Lukas?” He stared at her, amazed, and stroked a wayward lock of hair from her face.

Was that what they’d done, just an hour or so ago? Make love? She’d certainly uttered the word enough times, like some kind of incantation. The idea was in him now, and he didn’t know what to make of it.

He rather liked her phrase for bedding, though: “make love.” It made the emotion sound concrete.

Comprehensible. Like a product that could be manufactured from whole cloth.

Take two lusting, yearning bodies and rub them briskly together, and this substance called love would simply result—simple as striking two flints to make a spark.

Unfortunately, Lukas didn’t think it worked quite that way. Love is mysterious and it will only appear for someone special.

“It’s too soon,” he said. “You’ll be tender. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I am tender, I’ll admit. But aren’t there other ways?” He lifted a brow, skeptical.

“What could you know of other ways?" She laughed.

“You should know about that Lukas. You're a man, a wild werewolf and a king to be exact.”

Lukas choked back a derisive noise.

"You even told me once, about those books you've read."

She thought he was reading bawdy stories that taught him about some genteel, delicate imagining of lust—she's challenging him by the way she trailed light, sweet caresses up and down his stiffened c*ck, thinking that he will go easy on her. He fought the urge to take her hand, take control.

He could show her how to grip him tight.

He could guide her into stroking him hard and fast, relentlessly, until he snarled and bucked like a wild beast. He could put her on all fours and take her like an animal, savagely pumping her from behind.

He doubted any of those scenes were in risqué novels which she thought he was reading.

They certainly had nothing to do with “making love.” His own crudeness concerned him, as it never had in the past.

Unlike any other woman he’d bedded, Victoria had a way of demolishing his self-control. When he’d been inside her, pushing closer and closer to release—he’d felt himself slipping closer and closer to some precipice, too. He folded his arms behind his head and laced his fingers together, just to forbid them from wandering.