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“Just like that,” he murmurs. “Good girl.”

“Fuck you.”

“Patience. First, I’m going to make you squirm.”

A quiet gasp leaves me. “No.”

“No? You don’t want me to do this?” His mouth is on me again, exploring, tasting, his tongue slipping under my shirt collar.

Yes, I do.

The slick heat blasts me with need, a deep, demanding need, but with a foggy purple patience I’ve never known before. I look around at the towering trees lining the clearing, the dark shadows living and breathing between them, trying desperately to resist the steep incline toward feverish bliss.

“Not at all,” I mumble.

His lips abandon me, his tight embrace easing, as if he believed my words.

I push my head back against him in protest. “Don’t stop.”

“Not even if—”

“Whatever I say, don’t fucking stop.”

I sense his relief, the smile over my shoulder, and I’m unable to tame the upward curl of my own lips. He understands my need for resistance—and for him. The semblance of hatred is our buffer, preventing other feelings from crashing into each other.

He slides his hand over my necklace, leaving my chest burning, and up my throat, tipping my head back and wrapping his fingers around my neck. Then those fingers compress, harder and harder, my life in his hands. I’m still not scared of him. He wants me alive. He saved me.

I trust him.

The realization takes my breath away, more than his hand ever could. But trust is the path to betrayal. To pain. To loss.

“And don’t do this?” Darkness drips from him. Still holding my throat, he slides my shirt off my shoulder and fastens his teeth on the newly bared skin, biting—a whisper between each pinch.

“Never. Ever. Never. Ever…”

I let slip a strangled moan, and he releases me. His nose nudges my jaw until my head rolls to the other side, exposing a pathway down my neck. He follows with more bites that build in force with his breaths.

“Never. Ever. Going…to let…you go.”

His teeth sink into the sweet spot in the crook of my neck, hard enough to pierce the skin. The anger mounting in me only amplifies the pleasure. I want to feel alive. I want to be craved so fucking hard that a beast awakens, primed to hunt, to catch, to feast…on me.

I hold in a needy groan, but he smacks a rough kiss on my throat as if he heard it forming there. “OnlyItaste you, Never. If anyone else makes you bleed, I’ll slice them open and drown them in their blood.” He latches his mouth onto the fresh marks, easing the slight sting with circles of his tongue.

I’ve never felt safer. My head falls back against him. Not a cloud remains, and I swear the stars shine brighter than ever before, damn near blinding. They remind me of Kelter.

What am I doing?

“What else don’t you want?” Eli murmurs in my ear.

My mouth betrays me, letting out a soft whine, but I search for self-restraint, something to reel me back to the moment, out of the purple haze and back to the facts. “I don’t want your hands on me,” I grit out, much too breathily—my biggest lie yet. I fight his grasp.

“Like this?” he says, ignoring my thrashing. His arms unwind from around my middle, and he drags the firm grip of his hands over my knees and up my inner thighs, stilling me.

“Or like this?” He takes the soft pouch of my belly in his grasp then rides up the ridges of my ribs, dipping between each one, feeling them through my shirt, higher and higher, then in. His palms slide onto my breasts, and fingers drill into my soft flesh. A rush of hot breath hits my neck. My back arches, pushing my chest into his touch.

“Dammit.”

“What else?” His fingers dig deeper, and my body trembles at all he holds back. “Let me hear it.”