His erection seemed to get impossibly bigger, the blood vessels expanding to stretch his skin to bursting point. "Stop talking."

"Why?"

"You're derailing the plan."

She put one leg over his shoulder as he lay cradled so close to the core of her. "I think it's my turn anyway. I wanna touch."

He bit at the inside of that shapely thigh. "No."

She flinched but it wasn't the bad kind. "No fair." Her foot rubbed at his back.

He realized he'd have to move to get rid of her panties. "Are you particularly attached to these?" He fingered the lace around the crease where her thigh curved against the most intimate part of her.

"Wh-what?" Her hands dropped from his head to dig into the sheets.

He filed away her responsiveness when touched in that particular area. "I'll take that as a no." Gripping hold of the front, he tore the fragile fabric off her body. The scraps fell away like mist.

She made a shocked sound, then went completely still, as if conscious of how open she'd become to him. Sliding a hand up the inside of her thigh, he looked up, glad for the light that let him see the emotion flickering over her face. "Can I bite you here, too?"

Chapter 34

Her eyes went huge but it seemed to take her a few seconds to get the words out. "How" - she swallowed - "how do you know you'll even like the taste?"

His changeling was playing with him. And tonight, he could play back. "Good point. Let me do a taste test." Holding her gaze, he stroked a finger through her liquid heat, barely entering her body before withdrawing. Then he lifted that finger and sucked it into his mouth, aware of Brenna's body flushing around him.

When he withdrew the finger, she said, "So?" A very sexual question.

He answered by dipping his head and using his mouth on her. Her cry was husky, arousing. The heel of her foot pressed hard into his back as she twisted. When her other leg came up over his shoulder, he spread her open with the fingers of one hand and continued to taste. Taste as only a man who'd been starved could taste. With everything in him, with absolute concentration and utter focus.

Brenna was trying to breathe, but it wasn't working very well, her air coming in broken pants. Judd was - oh, Lord, he was destroying her with pleasure. For a man who had never done this before, he was blindingly good. It made her very curious as to just what kind of research he'd been doing.

He nipped at her with his teeth.

She whimpered and ordered herself to find some shred of control at the same time. Otherwise Judd's arrogance would become impossible. Except that he was doing the most exquisite things to her with that clever mouth and control seemed a foreign concept.

His finger touched her entrance, circled, teased. But he didn't push in. Then he did it again. And again. And again. By the time he did begin to slide that teasing finger inside of her, she was so crazy with anticipation that the spike of fear her mind associated with an invasion of her body was buried under an avalanche of sensation.

"You're too tight," he said, sounding completely and deliciously dominant.

She squeezed her inner muscles around his finger in retaliation. "Tight," she managed to say, "is considered good."

He began moving that finger in and out. "Not when you're so tight, I might cause you pain."

It was getting impossible to have a coherent thought but she tried. "Judd, baby, do it before I lose what's left of my mind." She'd felt the rigid length of him against her, knew how much he wanted her. All that hot, hard flesh..."I want you inside me."

"You need a little more foreplay."

"I take it back!" she cried. "Foreplay sucks!" Why had she not realized that Judd's icy control, when melted, would translate into endless patience in bed?

"I disagree." Then he was kissing her again, tasting her most intimate flesh as if it were a delicacy he'd waited a lifetime to savor. The dark red of desire washed across her mind and when she surrendered, it was to the depths of her being.

Judd felt Brenna's surrender within his mind, as if he were reading her innermost thoughts with some heretofore unknown sense. Raising his head, he pushed out of her hold, kissed his way up her body, and braced himself with one arm on the bed, the hand of his other still between her thighs.

When he kissed her, she threw her arms around his neck and gave him everything he asked for. And when he went to push a second finger into her, she didn't protest, only breaking the kiss on a gasp and moving one hand to clench on his biceps. He spoke with his lips against hers. "Brenna?"

Her eyes fluttered open, bright and extraordinarily beautiful. "Come inside me now. I need you."

The simple request shot his plan to hell. "I'm afraid of hurting you." Not physically but mentally, psychically.

She pushed at his shoulders. "I want to switch."

Understanding, he withdrew his fingers on her moan and moved off her onto his back. Ceding control was difficult for him but he trusted Brenna on a level he'd never before trusted anyone. When she sat up to straddle him, he was stunned speechless at the proud female beauty of her. He luxuriated in the feeling, conscious that he'd have to retreat as soon as his power regenerated.

Reaching down, she closed slender fingers around the painful length of his erection. He gritted his teeth and fisted his hands around the bars in the headboard but didn't take his eyes off her. The play of emotions over her face was pure seduction. Pleasure, surprise, hunger.

"You're right," she whispered, examining his engorged flesh with those bright eyes. "I'm going to feel every inch of you going in." She shifted to put her body in the right spot, then used her hand to guide the tip of him into her before letting go.

He stopped breathing for a few seconds as the pleasure traveled from the apex of his erection down the length of his body. Until that moment, he'd never realized the mind-blowing sensitivity of that bundle of nerves - how could his people have given up this incredible rush of sensation? When he opened eyes he hadn't been aware of closing, he found Brenna on her knees above him, her head tipped back.

"Look at me."

She obeyed with a shudder that vibrated through him, reaching out her hands at the same time. He raised his own and clasped them to hers. Pushing against his hold, she began to lower her body, accepting him centimeter by slow centimeter. Their eyes never broke contact and the intimacy was so intense, Judd knew that had the dissonance been functioning, it would have killed him.

She stopped suddenly, chest heaving. "You're stretching me so tight, I can't bear it." Then she groaned and moved again. "Sweet mercy."

He was close to begging for mercy himself, burned by the scalding heat of her, thrown into a sensory inferno more acute than anything he had ever before felt. His hands tightened on hers, but she didn't complain. Instead, taking a deep breath, she squeezed her fingers around his and bore down on his erection, taking him inside to the hilt.

Pure sexual pleasure/pain.

His back bowed as he fought to remain conscious under the overload. For an Arrow trained to resist sensation at all costs, feeling this much was akin to being thrown into the most dangerous of flames.

It was Brenna's touch that brought him back from the edge - she surrounded him, a seductive mix of grace, female demand, and hunger. Opening his eyes, he found her sitting stock still. "What's wrong?" His voice was scraped raw, as if he'd been screaming.

"I'm getting used to you." Her eyes came closer as she leaned in, stretching out his arms until his hands lay beside his head. "You" - she brushed her lips over his - "fill me up."

He groaned, straining not to rise up and take command. That she'd accepted the intrusion of his body was more than enough. This time. Because he was very definitely repeating this, no matter what he had to do to cause another flameout.

Brenna kissed him again and this time it was wild and furious and wet. "Move in me," she whispered. Releasing his hands, she placed her own, palms down, on his chest.

He was incapable of speech so he just put his hands on her hips and began lifting and lowering her in rhythm with the movements of his own body. All his research had disappeared from his brain - what guided him was age-old instinct and an unrelenting tenderness toward his lover.

At first he kept it slow, letting her become accustomed to him as he drowned in the maddening ecstasy of her touch. Then she began to urge a faster rhythm and he responded by slamming into her, raising his body as she lowered hers. Crying out, she dug her fingers into his chest and rode him, wild and uninhibited.

When she made a frustrated sound, he caught her and flipped her to her back. She didn't protest, twining her legs around his waist. Reaching down, he rubbed at the hard bud of her clitoris as he took over the driving rhythm, pounding them both into a pleasure that seemed impossible. Somewhere along the way, he lost the ability to think.

Brenna's legs were jelly. "I don't think I can move," she mumbled into Judd's neck, where her face was currently buried.

His response was a grunt. His hand stroked her bottom once before falling away - as if he didn't have the energy to do more.

She ran her fingers over his chest, nuzzled at his pulse, and took the scent of him into her lungs. She already smelled of him, but from today, the scent would be inside her very pores. It made her feel possessed, protected, adored. It was good to belong to him, even if he did have a tendency toward dominance.

"Once more."

She was sure she was having an aural hallucination. "You did not just say 'once more.'"

"Before the Tk comes back."

She shook her head. "You're crazy." After that loving, he'd be lucky if she moved anytime this century. "Good thing I like crazy."

"One hour. Nap. Then again."

Despite her exhaustion, she found the femaleness in her reacting to the determination in his tone. "You are so sexy."

"I know."