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“Ewan.” My voice is barely above a whisper, gentle and pleading. “Can I talk to you now?”

With a couple of slow blinks, some of the dazed pleasure drains from his golden gaze, replaced by a sharpness that makes me suck in a surprised breath.

There he is.

In the span of a few heartbeats, Ewan pulls back into a half-shift, taking deep, pained breaths as he orients himself. When his eyes meet mine, those rasps turn into a groan. Before I can react, he hauls me up against him.

As soon as I’m pressed to him, his whole body trembles with nerves or anger or relief, or maybe some combination of all three, and I swear I can feel all of those emotions echoing through me.

Ithurts, this thing in my chest. The beat of pain and longing I can’t shove to the side right now.

And I don’t want to shove it down. Not when I feel so impossibly close to him. Not when some part of me knows he needs this, needs me.

“Ewan,” I say, my voice coming out hoarse. “Talk to me. Tell me what you’re thinking. Tell me how I can help you.”

He shakes his head, swallows roughly, and pulls me even tighter. I open my mouth to speak again and he smothers the words with a kiss.

There’s a moment, just one, when I know some line is being crossed that there’s no coming back from.

The heat pulsing between us is pure and primal, the spark to start an inferno, a blaze that reaches in and scorches a corner of my soul I didn’t even know existed.

Like it’s been with Ewan since the beginning, though, no part of me can turn away. Come what may, there’s nowhere in the world I could be right now but here. Right here. With him.

When I part my lips for him, he groans again. I swallow the sound, reaching up to run my hands over the scales on his shoulders and back, to tangle my fingers in his hair, to cup his jaw and hold him to me.

His hands are just as urgent as he tugs at my clothes, discarding piece after piece on the forest floor around us. I don’t know how it happens as fast as it does, but when I come up for air, I’m as naked as he is. The balmy afternoon air brushes up against my skin and makes me shiver at being so exposed.

Ewan hasn’t said a word, not a single damn word, and he stays silent as he puts his hands on my hips and walks me back a few steps until my bare shoulders brush up against a wide tree trunk.

Then he falls to his knees.

His wings drape elegantly behind him, and he looks up to hold my gaze as he reaches around to cup my ass and lift me, settling the backs of my thighs on his shoulders.

I scramble, trying to shift myself so I don’t go tumbling onto the forest floor, but there’s no need. Between the steady strength of him beneath me, the firm grip he keeps on my ass, and the smooth bark against my back, I’m not going anywhere.

When he dips down, taking a long, slow lick up the very center of me, my head lolls back into the tree. I arch into his mouth, grind myself against his face, and the growl he lets out sounds just like his dragon—pleased and primal and vibrating against my core.

Ewan works me with single-minded determination, pushing me higher, faster, barreling toward a peak. There’s no slow build, no leisurely tasting. No, apparently he doesn’t have the patience for that right now, and neither do I.

I want to break. I want him to take me apart piece by piece until there’s nothing left but pleasure and heat, until this thing in my chest stops hurting and I can pretend it was never there at all.

I come with a hoarse, strangled cry, and Ewan doesn’t give me a moment of mercy until I’m boneless and trembling, barely able to keep myself upright as the last waves of my orgasm subside. Only then does he move, maneuvering me with effortless strength until he’s standing and my legs are around his waist. He keeps me pinned to him—one arm banded around my back so I don’t have to lean too hard into the tree—and when the thick head of his cock notches against me, he pauses.

“Tell me yes, Kenna.”

My choice. Whether or not I want to leave the line blurred or obliterate it completely.

“Yes.”

He drives into me with a single hard thrust and I cry out again, body arching in unimaginable pleasure and fullness.

Ewan is just as relentless as he was when he was on his knees. Desperate, wild, slamming into me with hard, punishing strokes. There’s nowhere to hide, no inch of space between us, so I just hold on to him, panting and breathless, tied up in knots as he drops a hand to my clit and rubs in firm strokes.

“I want to feel you, ember,” he rasps into the tender skin just beneath my ear. “Let me feel you.”

Peeling my eyes open with an effort that takes every spare bit of concentration I can muster, all the air in my lungs stutters out on a gasp.

Ewan Blair is undone completely. Stripped bare, looking at me with a wildness in his eyes that I’ve never seen, a desperation that wraps around my throat like a fist. He looks almost… afraid. Of whatever this is, of whatever’s happening to the two of us right now.