Then her head fell back onto the pillow, and she cried out as she climaxed. He felt it ripple through her inner muscles. Her tiny, delectable clit pulsed. Fierce emotion roared through him.

He had given that to her, no one else, and in giving it, her climax became his. He claimed her pleasure, owned her response in that moment.

Mine, he thought. Mine.

He forced himself to wait, wait, wait, until the rhythm of her pleasure began to subside. Only then did he rise up to cover her body with his and unleash his own need. Kissing her, biting at her mouth, he took his cock and rubbed it against her entrance.

Reaching down between their bodies, she welcomed him and helped to guide him in. Then he slipped in, just the tip, and as he broke through her entrance and felt her body grip his most sensitive place, a groan broke out of him. Unable to move forward, unable to pull away, he froze.

She whispered, “What is it?”

“I’m back in that place again,” he said between his teeth, resting his forehead on hers. “I don’t know if I can be gentle any longer.”

She laughed, and it was a completely joyous sound, as she threw her arms around his neck, her legs around his hips and hugged him with her whole body. Putting her lips to his ear, she gasped, “You need to go, let’s go. Do it, Nikolas, cut loose, I want you to fuck me so hard right now.”

She incited him to riot, and he had no brakes, no barriers left, so riot he did.

The fire in his body took over. He plunged into her, all the way, to the hilt, and she was so hot, so tight, just exactly what he needed, he had to pull out and plunge all the way back in again. She met him thrust for thrust, rocking up with her hips as he hammered down, and it was so damned perfect he didn’t know how he could ever stop. Gripping her by the hip, by the breast, swearing in her ear, he fucked her while the blaze inside him built and built until it peaked in a fiery gush.

His climax roared up the base of his spine. Helpless in the grip of it, he thrust and thrust again with every new spurt. She ran her hands down his back, holding him to her, rocking with him until the rhythmic jerk of his cock began to subside.

Either he was shaking, or she was. His lungs pumped hard like bellows, while she stroked his back, his shoulders, and he buried his face in the crook of her neck until finally his climax began to subside.

For a moment he was gripped with the strangest compulsion. He wasn’t done, he wasn’t done. He needed more, to pin her down and claim her until there was no doubt left anywhere that she was his. His cock still felt hard as a spike and as agonized.

He tensed, frozen on some kind of precipice.

Then, as she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him, the moment passed. “This was wonderful,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

The words grounded him, not much but just enough. Carefully he backed away from the internal precipice as he withdrew from her even though every muscle in his body screamed at him to stop, change course, claim her until they both knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was his alone.

He paused long enough to kiss her lingeringly on the mouth, down her throat, and finally he pressed his lips against the scar above her left breast, where her heart beat strong and true.

“You are so beautiful,” he told her in a quiet voice. “What a surprise this night has been. You’ve given me more pleasure than I’ve known in years. Good night, my Sophie.”

He shouldn’t say those words. She wasn’t his Sophie. As she had said earlier, they both knew what this was. This was a stolen night of pleasure, nothing more, nothing else. They were little more than strangers, their lives lived on two separate trajectories.

This was not a mating. There would be no claiming her for his own even if she would have welcomed such an outlandish proposition. Yet his Wyr side didn’t understand logic and reason. It pounded through his blood, urging him to take her again, to mate with her.

But Wyr mated for life, and he had no room in his life for that kind of commitment. He had already given his life to his people. The thought of taking a steady lover was laughably inappropriate. The thought of mating, utterly impossible.

He had never been gifted with such an experience. He had never felt such a driving compulsion to mate with anybody before, and he accepted the rare gift for what it was—an arrow through the heart.

As she realized he didn’t intend to stay, the light in her eyes dimmed, and it was another arrow to the heart. She deserved to be held, in that moment more than ever, and she deserved to explore the new realm of pleasure he could give her as he brought her to climax over and over until she fell into exhaustion. Every instinct in his body told him to go take her in his arms and refuse to let that light in her eyes die.

Without another word, he turned his back on those instincts and on her, picked his clothes off the floor, and shut the door on his way out.

* * *

Well, it was a good thing they’d had a clear understanding of what they were getting themselves into when they had sex.

Otherwise, Sophie would be feeling let down and disappointed that Nikolas chose to walk out the door rather than stay and enjoy more time together. If her vision blurred with wetness, it was because she was so tired. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that he chose not only to leave her bedroom but to leave the cottage as well.

Almost as if he couldn’t get away from her fast enough.

As she heard the cottage door close, she rolled over to hug a pillow. Gah, she would never understand men. As far as she was concerned, they’d had a pretty spectacular time. He had been…