“I wear a tunic,” he pointed out through nipping, sucking lips that rimmed her large areolas, one after the other and back again. “And a weapons belt. You can’t see my ass.”

“Oh, yes, I can. And you take your tunic off when you are in the training hall. Then not only can I see you, but I can smell you all the better.”

Grasping her h*ps in hand, Magnus suddenly surged the rest of the way into her, a savage sound of satisfaction stuttering out of him as he threw back his head and let himself simply burn within her. She gasped and moaned at the masterful intrusion, her entire body from hands to legs to pu**y reaching to clasp him ever tighter into her embrace.

“The smell of lemon oil, sword polish, and the clean sweat of a hardworking warrior. Your skin,” she breathed, her mouth opening against the crest of his neck and shoulder, teeth scraping and tongue and lips stroking, “gleams like glazed toffee, and all I want to do is taste you over and over again.”

Magnus had to reach out and brace a hand flat against the wall as his balance was affected by her seductive words and lips, not to mention the heavenly tight heat of her sheathed around him. She was so tight, in fact, that it forced him to remember she was still quite new at this, despite her ability to make him feel like he was in the arms of a well-trained seductress.

“Are you still tender from earlier?” he asked roughly, his entire c*ck throbbing with eager need for friction as he forced himself to await her answer. He hadn’t even properly prepared her…

“No. Not at all,” she assured with an enticing wriggle that bathed him in wet, wet heat. “Please,” she begged softly, her body and hands urging him to move. “Fuck me, Magnus. Hard. Fast. Deep. I need to feel you like that.”

“Such language,” he teasingly admonished, even as he pinned her tight to the wall and surged as deep into her as he could manage.

“You like it,” she countered breathlessly as he began to grind himself against her, the pressure rubbing her cl*t with maddening results, as it was intended to do. “Magnus!”

“Right. Hard. Fast. Deep,” he echoed just as he began to obey her with passionate diligence.

Daenaira simply couldn’t believe he was even there. She had thought she would never feel this sacred, stunning connection again. She had feared he would never want to touch her again. But he did touch her, and touched her deeply. Her whole body strained to take him in, to join them as tightly as possible, and the pleasure of it bolted through her in time to her racing heart and the fire rushing over her sensitized skin. It was a raw joining, no preliminaries, and she liked it that way. So did he, by the feel of him, so heavy and thick with excitement inside her. This was absolution, she realized. The glory of this feeling and of having him so powerfully alive and in need of her was the ultimate in forgiveness. But it should be punishing, and it should be hard, and it quickly became both as Magnus’s need intensified and his territoriality finally released to rise to the surface.

The civilized man of the gods had kept control, had managed her with logic and exoneration, but the dominant Shadowdweller male would be satisfied with nothing less than a claiming that marked her as his once more.

“I’m yours,” she whispered into his ear, her teeth nipping at him hungrily. “None but you will ever have me.”

“You’re goddamn right about that,” he hissed as he shoved himself deep with a crash of pelvises. “You’re mine, Daenaira. Drenna gave you to me and me alone. I’ll never share you. I’ll never release you.” He growled roughly as he began to speed his tormenting stroke inside her.

Dae realized then that it wasn’t just a possession he spoke of, but a promise and a commitment. He was flooding every statement with an emotion she’d never heard anyone use toward her before. She felt it resonating through her mind like a clear bell.

I will always need you.

I love you as I love life and my gods.

One day, probably quite soon, I know I will come to hold you above Sanctuary itself.

“Never that much,” she whispered against his shoulder. “I would never deserve that much.”

“That much and more,” he said heatedly, the thrust of his fervent body into hers making them both moan in a deep chorus of surging desire. “Gods, Dae,” he gasped, his hands shaping and framing her head and face reverently as he slowed to a lusty, meaningful cadence inside her. Golden eyes bored into hers with nothing short of adoration and painfully undeserved admiration. Daenaira reflexively shook her head, but he held her still and forced her to watch and to feel the raw need and pure love he felt for her.

“Why?” she almost sobbed as he overwhelmed her physically and emotionally.

“For the same reason I have my faith and my devotion to the tenets of my gods and my place on this earth. Fate has demanded it of me, jei li, and my heart needs you to complete its will. Don’t you see?” He broke off to heed the spiking need rushing through his body, a soulful groan erupting out of him that she felt all the way to the heart of her womb. Every move he made, every passionate word he spoke drove her higher and faster toward release.

But it also drove her into a panic like nothing she had ever felt before.

“No!” She tried to shove against him, even as her whole body screamed in protest at her disruption of her focused bliss. “Let me go!”

“Never!” he spat in breathless countermand.

“Stop! Stop it!”

With a furious roar of masculine dominance, he turned them, holding her struggling wet body tight until he was climbing the steps out of the bath, every step pounding vibrations into the core of her body until she made a pitiful sound of resisting need. Magnus dropped her back onto the chaise even as he knelt on the floor, never once decreasing the depth to which he penetrated her. She immediately tried to gain purchase, but he easily subdued the attempt by pulling her h*ps up high to meet him, her knees almost draped over his shoulders as his hands locked to her h*ps and pinned her for his pleasure.

His next thrust was brutal; without the water to act as a buffer for the impact, it resonated through her every bone and made every muscle quiver. Her head hung back limply over the opposite side of the chaise, the position exposing and submissive in the extreme as she became completely quiescent to his pistoning hips.

“Bituth amec,” she groaned, in no way meaning it against him so much as it was meant against the desperate need of her own hungry body. The whole of her flesh tautened, an arching and bowstring tightness snapping her back tighter and tighter as he pumped his beautifully thick c*ck deeply into her.

“That’s right,” he all but snarled at her, “you take it, K’yindara. Take it all. None of it gets left out, none of it denied. You will not shut me out.”

Every word brought him to a harder pitch, until all she felt was the impact of their bodies reverberating through her and the sound of their wet flesh slapping heavily together. His relentlessness stole her will and her resistance in a sweeping wave of uncontrollable release. Her orgasm came through her like a berserker rage, obliterating everything until all she felt was heat and the passion of their struggle against one another. She burst into a fury of spasm and arched high and hard against the chaise and his strong body. He plowed through her as she strangled him in muscular contortion, giving no quarter to her until he thrust her so high into mindless ecstasy that she could do nothing but scream, vibrate, and clutch helplessly in his hold.

She seized so hard, milking his c*ck so violently that he dove through Light to maintain his control. But even as sweat dropped into his eyes to reflect the agony his denial caused him, he gritted his teeth and forced her to understand that there was no coming down from this particular high. There was no escape. No hiding. Nothing. It was raw and frightening beyond belief, but he wasn’t going to pretend it wasn’t there just for her comfort.

So he reflected that in the way he controlled her body. He had quickly figured out that she naturally arched her body to bring him across the most sensitive spot within her vagina, and by dropping her back over the chaise he forced her to hold the position to perfection. Now he added the use of his fingers against her tender clit, and she cried out. She tried to push and pull away from the renewed stimulus, but he only used her movements to circle himself around inside her. Soon she was clinging to him so tightly with her legs again that he could feel every tremor and shiver rushing through her. She jerked her h*ps up to meet his in mindless need, the rhythm setting him so deep he was biting back uncontrolled groans of joy.

Her second orgasm took them both by storm. She gasped in, long and deep, her body bowing back. Her exhale was a sharpening keen of release reflecting the pleasurable agony of where he had forced her to go. This time the wrenching spasms of her walls around him were his total undoing. With a monstrous bellow he pumped himself and his jetting seed into her until they both dripped thick and wet with their combined fluids. His arm locked tight around her h*ps as he sat back hard on his heels. He dragged her off the bench and sat her straddling his lap, half on and half off the chaise behind her. She was limp and gasping, not caring what he did to her. She had no control over her limbs and didn’t want any. She left her body to its own devices as it rushed and shivered in the aftermath of his blissful abuse of her.

Relative silence ensued as they struggled to breathe and recover from the explosions their bodies had endured. Eventually, he cupped the back of her neck into his hand and sat her up tightly to his chest. Now he took the time to properly kiss her, paying a long and loving tribute to her. His sweetness made her heart ache, and she felt ridiculously shy as she raised her eyes to meet his.

“What happened?” she asked, obviously in a bit of awe from the wild tide of her adventurous night. It was almost over, daylight approaching quickly beyond the safety of the buried city, but still they both could sense its presence.

“We had a damn rough night,” he informed her on a soft chuckle as he trailed the kiss of his lips over her jaw, beneath her ear, and then with quickly renewing voraciousness, down the side of her throat. He hadn’t had nearly enough of a starting taste of her before all Light had burst in on them. Also, they were both very aware that this was their first truly private moment together.

“I meant…I can feel you,” she said breathily.

He lifted his head and eyed her with amusement. “I should hope so,” he remarked.

“In my mind.” She laughed, pinching muscle that refused to give under the punishment. “I’ve been hearing you in my head. I noticed it most for the first time when I was battling Nicoya. You yelled at me.” She frowned in consternation. “‘Easy,’ you said.”

“So I did,” he agreed. “It’s the Bonding,” he realized with no little surprise himself. “I didn’t even realize we’ve only been speaking aloud half of this time. It just came so…”

“Naturally,” she finished for him. “Does it always happen so quickly?”

“It’s actually a rare sort of thing. We speak of it like it is always possible, but we never truly expect it. Hera would know best, but I thought it took time and—”

“And?”

“Love,” he said cautiously, remembering how resistant she had reacted when she had realized his mind was flooded with the deep, abiding love for her he had never wanted and never expected to feel. Even now it intimidated him to feel it, just as much as it frightened her to be on the receiving end of it. Even more frightening for him was knowing she did not feel the same way for him. “I mean,” he clarified quietly, “reciprocal love.”

“Oh,” she said on a whisper.

Instantly he felt her rushing anxiety, her desire to break away from him and leave him. Though she could hear his thoughts on occasion, it seemed, he could not shed light on hers. But he could feel the powerful wrenching impulses of her emotions, especially her fear. He tried not to feel stung by it, but it was difficult when she said, “I don’t love you, Magnus.”

“I did not say I expected you to,” he returned with a frown.

“No. But you hope for it. You wish for it.” She swallowed as she squirmed uncomfortably in his lap. “But I never will,” she told him almost coldly. “I loved my mother, and she is the only one whom I will ever feel so deeply for. If you wish more from me, you will only be disappointed.”

Magnus’s hands tightened around her thighs, and he resisted the urge to shove out from under her. They were still intimately connected and it seemed somehow obscene to him to be having this exchange while he was still inside her. But he controlled the desire, forced aside the injured anger, making himself look into her as best he could with everything he could. His eyes, he realized, would have lied to him just as she was lying to him. She cared far more than she admitted to, though it was true she didn’t feel the level of consuming love that seemed to ebb and flow through every corner of his existence as he looked at her beautiful features and lying eyes. Despite her claims, he could feel the fear that fueled her denial. What would she do, he wondered, and what would she say, if he were to compel the truth from her and ask her the right questions? What could he force her to admit to herself?

And how much would she hate him for pushing her before she was ready?

“Don’t worry. I hear what you’re saying, Daenaira,” he said, making quite certain every thought remain placid and cloaked in the blankness of neutrality. “I do not expect you to be responsible for my feelings, only that you be open to the benefits of them.”

“The benefits?” she asked suspiciously.

“Yes. I won’t detail them, but it cannot hurt you to have someone like me love you, K’yindara.” He drew gentle fingers down over her wet hair. “I will not treat you badly. I will never demand more than you can give.”