He froze, not quite believing what he heard. “You wouldn’t,” he growled. She couldn’t wait. She didn’t have it in her. Hell, he didn’t have it in him to wait either.

She put her arms around him and ran her hands down his chest. He looked down, compulsively, watching her hands travel down his body. His c**k was on fire along with the rest of him, and it jerked as her hands came closer to it.

“Have you ever been taken from behind?” she whispered.

He tilted his head back, astonished at his own crazed reaction to everything she did or said. He said roughly, “Men aren’t my thing.”

The pressure from her hands grew lighter as they reached his jeans. She passed them over the aching bulge at his crotch in a teasing caress. “Have you ever been taken by a woman wearing a strap-on? Using a dildo? Fucked from behind until you explode all over her hands? I doubt it. You’re probably too dominant, aren’t you?”

The images she created seared his mind, and his own reaction astonished him. He would never consider such a thing, never give himself over to someone else like that.

Except.

He thought of Aryal moving behind him, moving inside of him as she cupped his penis in both hands. The concept was so startling and strange, he nearly came right there in his pants.

It wasn’t as though he had never heard of a strap-on before. It was the thought of Aryal using one. On him. Everything she did was so goddamn sexy, it was breaking every rule he thought he had in his head.

He hissed, “Am I setting the alarm or not?”

Her hands flexed. He listened to her hard breathing, feeling it against his back. She wanted it bad. He could feel it in the rigidity of her body, smell it on the rich scent rising off her skin.

The bizarre thing was, he was starting to want it bad too.

Even though it wasn’t like him, and he never gave up control. There was something about her impetuous leaping into situations that was seriously screwing with whatever scraps of sanity he might have otherwise had.

She said, “Set it.”

He punched the button and stared at the screen as fifteen minutes began to scroll by.

He wore a belt with his jeans so that he could attach his knife sheath and the holster of his gun to it. He watched her hands go to the belt and unbuckle it. She yanked it out of his belt loops. “Take off your sweater.”

He straightened, yanked off his sweater and threw it aside. The air felt good on his overheated skin.

“Turn around,” she said.

He turned to face her, his longtime enemy and unexpected partner on this exploration that was rapidly becoming more intimate than any other exchange he’d had before.

Her expression was stripped of everything else except the same kind of hunger that was driving in his blood. He looked at the belt she still held, then up again at her face. She met his gaze. “Lie back on the table.”

He warred with his instincts that wanted to snatch at the belt, wrap it around her neck and haul her close for another one of those kisses that were so hot they seared him somewhere deep inside, in a place that was invisible to anyone else.

But she had struggled with her part of the bargain too, and met it, and part of what he had enjoyed about her was witnessing that struggle, and how she had overcome it.

Her gaze was sharp and steady. If he reneged on this, there would be no second chance with her, no opportunity to explore more of that which he had just gotten the merest taste.

He moved the iPhone to a chair, sat at the edge of the table and lay back. His torso covered the length of the table, from his head to his ass, while his legs spilled down to the floor. She took his legs and nudged him sideways until he lay with his head in one corner, the opposite corner ending between his thighs and causing them to fall slightly apart.

“I’m going to make this easier on you than what you did with me,” she told him. Her voice sounded shredded. “Hands over your head.”

His gaze went back to the belt. That’s why she still had it. It wouldn’t be easy, but a leather strap, no matter how sturdy, couldn’t hold him if he felt endangered or enraged enough to snap it. Still, he had to fight to control his instincts enough to put his arms over his head. He did it, watching her face closely.

She strode around the table and slipped a loop of the belt over his hands and fastened it to the leg of the table. Then, moving rapidly, she came back around, unbuttoned his jeans and yanked them down his legs. Just like that, within a matter of a few moments he was naked and spread out like a feast before her gaze.

His contradictory instincts grew more chaotic, and his body clenched. He hated the sense of vulnerability. He was not supposed to be the one on the table. He was supposed to be the one standing where she stood.

She stared at him with a wide, fixed gaze, her eyes dilated so that they were almost totally black. He felt it as a physical touch, as she lingered on the bulging muscles of his arms, down the angle of his chest as it narrowed to his long abdomen, to his erection where it lay heavy and thick on his stomach.

She yanked his legs wide apart, and a growl erupted from his throat. Before he could stop himself, he wrenched at the leather strap that pinned his arms. The strap held, and he managed to stop before he broke it. Pushing between his legs to hold them apart with her hips, she held up a forefinger where a single talon had emerged.

“I like blooding you,” she told him in a gentle voice. She ran the talon along the inside crease where his leg met his groin. An instant later, a line of fire flared where she had given him a shallow cut.

Goddammit, she had marked him.

The growling that came out of him then was feverish and wild. He sounded like he could savage her to death. He almost felt like he could. “What the f**k, Aryal.”

“A little memento for you,” she whispered. “It’ll heal fast, but until it does, every time you move or shift your position, you’ll think of this moment.”

He would get her for this. He would—

She came down between his legs, resting her weight on one elbow braced on the table, lifted up his stiff c**k and swallowed him whole.

Everything in his head splintered so thoroughly that there weren’t even fragments left. There was no pretty foreplay, licking or teasing, or looking up at him seductively. She just opened her throat and took him all the way in. Then she pulled back and suckled at the broad, thick, sensitive head. After a few moments, she plunged her head down again.

Her eyes closed as she concentrated on him, and her mouth and throat were so hot and wet and tight, and confident. She had known what she wanted from the moment the timer had been set, and she had gotten it, gotten him, with a minimum of effort and without any wasted words.

She f**ked him with her mouth, a tight pistoning. He f**ked her with his cock, shoving up and up, while the fire from the cut joined the fire in his blood. He hooked his legs around her back, holding her in place. She palmed his tight sac while she worked him, squeezing and molding the round, sensitive flesh. Then she put her hand down her own body.

It took a moment for him to understand what she was doing. She was working herself while she suckled at him.

Gods, his explosion was building, and it felt like it was a long time in coming. Years, definitely. Maybe his whole life.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.

They both froze. She pulled her head up from his penis to stare at him.

There it was in her face, that wild juncture from which anything might happen, anything at all. She was a nexus point, pulling all possibilities together into herself.

He roared, “IF YOU STOP I WILL MURDER YOU!–

Laughter broke out over her face, along with fresh heat.

While the electronic alarm jangled in the air, she bent and took him in her mouth again, squeezing on his distended flesh, and she didn’t stop until the fire poured out of him in convulsive spurts of lava.

She swallowed all of his se**n with such evident relish, it caused him to spasm further. He emptied everything into her until he had nothing left to spill, no internal whip or twist, and he felt completely hollowed out and clean.

He had nothing left inside of him when she finally let him go. She looked drunk, a little dazed. She didn’t untie him. She straightened and turned away, then abruptly disappeared from sight as she sat on the floor. A moment later, his iPhone sailed across the air and stopped shrilling when it hit the wall. He wanted to laugh, to take her by the hair and shake her, then kiss her.

Instead he lifted his legs and pulled with his arms, curling over himself until he somersaulted over his head and off the table. He worked quickly to loosen the belt from his wrists.

When he did, he stopped and stared down at his arms. The belt had marked his wrists when he had yanked at it, leaving reddened welts. He rubbed the area. It wouldn’t last, nor would the thin, bright line of fire at the juncture of his legs.

The last half hour had been the longest half hour of his life, and the shortest.

He hated that it was over.

TEN

Neither one talked much after their “experiment.” Quentin dressed quickly, then they moved around with care, giving each other plenty of space as they set the cabin to rights before going to bed. He went outside to relieve himself and rinse out the food cans before crushing them. Then he toured the immediate area around the cabin but found nothing to concern him.

Mostly he enjoyed being out of the heat and closeness of the cabin. It was going to snow sometime that night. He could smell it in the chill, wet air. When he finished his patrol of the area, he stood staring up at the shadowed mountains swathed in clouds. He still felt clean, emptied out. It was remarkably, disturbingly peaceful.

As he moved about, the shallow cut at the juncture of his leg was a constant, irritating pain, even though it had already closed over. Every time he moved, he felt it. The sensation kept her words in the forefront of his mind.

Every time you move or shift your position, you’ll think of this moment.

Him, naked and splayed on the table. Her, standing between his spread legs.

His c**k was the most disturbed part of him. It stiffened again into a hard, insistent ache.

He didn’t want to obsess about what had happened, so he wouldn’t. He was just surprised at how hot Aryal was, that’s all. She wasn’t his type, in about any way that you could imagine. He felt like he was a sexual tourist, trying out a few things that were aberrant to his nature. Soon the vacation would be over, and they would go back to their real lives.

Until that happened, he was here and now, squarely in the middle of tourist season, hard again with hunger and already plotting the details that he would offer for their next bargain. If he wasn’t concerned about the guards who were supposed to be on watch at the passageway, he would have walked back inside and offered her new terms immediately. But he was concerned, and they didn’t have time to hole up at the cabin for a day or two and play.

Afterward, though. Dragos had given them a time limit of a month, and a lot could happen in that span of time.

When he went back inside, she had already moved her sleeping bag to the top bunk and climbed into it, turned to face the wall. In the dying light of the fire, he stood and looked at her sprawled figure. Here was another way she was atypical. They’d had sex, but there was no cuddling, no soft words, no clinginess or seeking reassurances afterward. Hell, she was probably already asleep.

He grinned, climbed into the lower bunk and fell asleep almost immediately too.

The next morning they ate a quick breakfast and headed out early. Snow had fallen, a good three inches. The snowfall wasn’t enough to do much more than slow them down slightly, as the ground was slick and wet, but it was pretty. The evergreens and the bare branches of deciduous trees were painted in white.

This time Aryal didn’t take to the air. She chose instead to hike with him, and he didn’t question her decision. She had finger combed her hair into some semblance of order, and her expression was distant and thoughtful. He wondered what she was thinking.

At first he was loath to break the silence and simply enjoyed the beautiful surroundings and the animal movement of his body as they hiked. Then the fact that she didn’t say anything started to irk him.

About an hour into the hike, the final irritation from the cut faded as it finished healing. Aside from his broken iPhone, there was nothing left as evidence of what they had done.

And his internal whip came back, always driving, driving him.

Since she had scouted out the area yesterday, Aryal had taken the lead in the hike. He quickened his pace to catch up with her and took hold of her arm. She stopped and turned to face him, her head angled in inquiry.

Not that long ago, she would have swung around fighting if he had dared to touch her.

He moved to stand right in front of her, just to get as close as he could to the heat from her body. It licked along the surface of his skin.

Her expression was closed, revealing nothing. A single black strand of hair blew across her eyes, and she raised a hand to brush it back. The angle of her slim wrist and those long, dexterous fingers pulled at the whip inside of him.

“Half an hour,” he said.

Her sleek eyebrow rose slowly, and the expression in her eyes turned assessing.

She was surprised? He didn’t buy it. “Oh come on,” he said. “You can’t tell me you haven’t been thinking the same thing.”

“That’s a double negative,” she told him.

Even though he knew she did it on purpose to needle him, it still drove him crazy when she turned pious. If there was anyone who had no room at all to pull off that attitude, it was she.

He put a hand at the back of her neck, a deliberately possessive hold, and pulled her even closer to him. He did it to needle her back, but she allowed it. Look at how far they had come in such a short time.

Not far enough. They had so much farther to go, the end of the road lost in a tantalizing, mysterious distance.