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“Ah, how I’d hoped you’d beg, just like this,” he said against my skin, and his palm pressed down hard.

“Patrick!”

“Hoped you’d whine like that, too.”

I was shivering, legs trembling, my hips moving instinctually, needing more. His smoky voice was a drug to me.

“Do you know how many times I’ve imagined fucking you?”

I forgot how to breathe, how to think. There was only this, only him.He guided the head of his erection inside me, and my head fell back, my mouth opened in shock.

“Holy god,” he uttered. Only he was looking at me, like I was some divine entity.

For an eternity I was lost in all those devastating sensations. The shudder of his chest, the urgent pulsating of my hips, begging him, pleading with him to satiate this burning. Each time I thought the ends of the earth had been found, the intensity increased. Each thrust pushed me further into insanity, made my nails dig into his shoulders. My body moved in discordant ways, hungry, ravenous.

“This is how I want you every single time,” he told me, his tongue playing with the skin behind my ear. “Just like this. Undone. Wild.”

My inner walls were tightening, and I watched his face transform into one of agony, acute pleasure. He captured my mouth and growled my name.

And I turned to shafts of light, rivulets of music, the shiver of stars misaligning.

CHAPTER 49PATRICK

Patrick had never understood the possessive tendencies of men in love.

Possession was for gold, land, idium. But something primitive and marrow deep lashed against his rib cage when Nina looked at him, and he thought, though he knew it was brutish, that he wished to claim her.

He took every measure to delay the moment they would have to leave that room. He had food brought to them, fruit and toast and pastries, and he watched every crumb disappear into her mouth. As soon as it seemed she was done, he pushed the tray aside and lifted her into his lap while she laughed at his impatience. He claimed all of her that he could, while he could, in this six-by-nine-foot realm of theirs. Eventually, the world beyond would come flooding in. The moment wouldn’t keep. He had a town to tend to. It seemed an unbearable task.

How quickly he had become addicted to hearing her breathe his name, the sounds of her climax, the pinch of her nails digging into his back. He took her again, then again, marveling at the many curves and valleys of her. He wondered if he’d ever feel fully satiated, or if he would always walk around with this yearning now, this knowledge of her entire body and the way it felt. And if so, whether it was possible to accomplish anything ever again, or if she had ruined him.

The rest of the day’s intentions had been laid to waste. Twice, Donnyhad come knocking at the door asking for Patrick, and twice Patrick and Nina had ignored him. “Brother, if you need me to break down this door and save you, just use the safe word. Has the Charmer bested you?”

“Fuck off, Donny,” Patrick had called, and Donny had snickered on the other side of the doorframe.

Nina lay naked against him, one leg entangled with his, her stomach pressed to his hip. She had her eyes closed but didn’t sleep. She smiled as Donny’s footsteps receded.

One of Nina’s fingers drew patterns on Patrick’s chest. Swirls. Mazes, perhaps. He’d never felt quite so peaceful.

“I wish I could draw you,” she murmured sleepily. “I’d be able to get it right this time.”

He frowned. “You must miss it,” he said. “Art, I mean.”

A pause. “A little.”

“I’ll find you some supplies,” he said immediately. “You can paint and draw until your fingers fall off.”

“Awfully generous of you.”

“I have a mind to keep you here by any means,” he murmured, following the underside of her breast with his fingers. She shuddered. “Bribery included.”

He felt her body surge slightly beneath his touch. He was quickly learning all the ways to make it respond to him. It was the most enthralling puzzle he’d ever encountered. A kiss beneath her jaw tipped her head back, her hips were ticklish, her inner thighs especially sensitive—she gasped every time.

He suspected she was marking him just as quickly. It seemed every place her fingers traveled set him on fire.

With nothing to stop him, he lowered his mouth to one pert nipple, delectably pink. His groin tightened painfully at the sound of the moan she emitted. Truly, if he had his way, he might hold her hostage in this bed forever, so he could elicit these songs from her at any moment.

Her chest flushed, her stomach dipped and rose with need. She triedto pull his face to hers but instead, he resisted. He traveled lower, skating down the length of her body until her legs rose on either side of his head, and his tongue parted her.