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I caught his eyes.

Stay.

* * *

I was floating.

Weightless, the cool night air kissing my skin. The cold season was coming. In a few months, the tips of the peaks ringing the Effren Valley would be capped with snow. But already, the alternating kisses and nips were persistent.

It wasn’t the cold air, I realized as another quiver of pleasure seized my body. It was Arran’s mouth, the wet trail he left across my body, that caught the breeze, shivering and shimmering. Those nips were not the cold, but his canines against my skin, teasing at the barrier.

My scabbards were on the ground, my gown with them. There was nothing between his mouth and my skin but his hot breath as it skittered and sent gooseflesh rising.

How could I be so hot, so cold, so completely undone by one male?

Arran lifted his mouth to mine, kissing me slowly, thoroughly. He caught my lower lip and pressed down hard enough that my flesh yielded, so little pinpricks of my blood filled our mouths. Then he feasted on that blood, his tongue picking up speed, darting into the recesses of my mouth to taste every drop of it.

He was a male crazed.

Tasting my blood had done something to him. Those long, languorous touches of the past half hour were replaced by a desperate frenzy.

Good.

Take it, I urged him with the lift of my hips.

Take me, I begged as I hooked a leg around his waist to draw him closer.

Let us be joined, this one last time.

“Veyka,” he moaned, the head of his cock nudging at my pussy.

I ground my hips against him, desperate to hear it again. “Tell me,” I said, taking control.

He tried to shove his hips forward, tried to work his head past that initial resistance, to where my walls would tighten around him. But I wouldn’t let him, denied him that final push. I relished the feeling of his cock stroking up and down my slit, pausing so the head could tease my clit again and again. A delicious torture that I wanted to burn into my memory forever, to erase everything bad that had ever happened to me.

These were the moments I would remember, exiled in a foreign land. Not the pain and the loss. But this male and what he’d given me. The way he’d made my body feel, and how he’d made that sick, dead organ in my chest quiver to life once more.

“Veyka, please,” Arran rasped, his nails digging into my shoulders.

I scented the blood—my own blood. Suddenly I was as desperate as he.

If I’d been born a terrestrial, I’d have thought a beast of my own was awakening inside of me. I raked my fingers down his back, drawing blood as I went.

Arran roared against me, half male, half beast. But then my fingers were closing around his tightly muscled ass, shoving him forward as I lifted my hips and finally welcomed him inside of me.

Every inch of that magnificent length tore me apart, sundered my sanity. I lifted one hand to my mouth and sucked the fingertips between my lips, savoring the thick, coppery taste of his blood on my tongue.

Then my orgasm was upon me, my climax driven by the brutality of his thrusts, the stars above our heads, the taste of his lifeblood as it slid down my throat. I heard the deep growl building in Arran’s chest. He was close, too.

I held on, not knowing what else to do. I clung to his shoulders, my tongue licking over the tracks I’d raked through his deep golden skin. I fucked him as hard as he fucked me, until we both came in an explosion of sound and sensation.

Arran collapsed on top of me, his head resting on the arm of the lounge chair.

I couldn’t open my eyes to look at the stars above us, because I knew I’d mark their progress across the sky and count the hours. I pressed them closed instead, savoring the heat and weight of his body where it pressed into mine, relishing the way his cum leaked out around his cock, still buried inside of me, mingling with my own wetness and sliding down my thighs.

I would never find this again.

Whateverthiswas.