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His emerald eyes glistened with unshed tears. He was strong, ever strong and unyielding. But now he would yield. To me. At least for a little while.

“Let me kiss your wounds,” I whispered. “Give me your tears, my love. Bury yourself in me and give me all of your grief.”

A choked sound came from his throat. Still, the tears stayed put.

I pressed my lips to his and kissed him. Kissed him as if there were nothing else I should be doing. Emptying my mind and filling it only with this moment, as if this kiss were everlasting and immortal.

We had lost people we loved.

But there was still this. A kiss worth all of the pain and all of the heartache.

Then Draven’s tongue swept into my mouth, harsh and demanding, and my lips parted in surrender. I could taste the wine he’d been drinking and wondered just how much he’d had.

And then the kiss changed. There was no slow build, no gentle request, no sweetness. He pushed my hands away and grasped my face, kissing me with hard tantalizing strokes of his tongue.

I gave myself up to the demand of his kiss. His fingers slid down the back of my neck, and my body rippled and shivered.

My eyes closed as he pressed against me, feeling the shape of him, firm like forged iron. My breasts yielded against his chest, soft and pliant. This. The feeling of my mate. His scent, his warmth, the feeling of his strength. Even with only a few days apart, I had missed him more than I’d realized. I needed him more than I knew.

He clearly felt the same, for he was drinking me in, taking my mouth greedily, his hands moving down to stroke the small of my back and caress my hips.

I pulled away, and he looked down at me blankly.

“Come,” I whispered, and took his hand.

I led him over the crumbling rocks and beneath the lintel of the temple.

Inside, the air was chill and musty.

“Is this what you want?” Draven growled from behind me. With a slight movement of his hand, he whirled me around. I collided with his chest, the breath going out of my lungs. In an instant, his hands were around my throat. “To fuck in the house of a god? To fuck in the darkness?”

I could sense the torrent of emotions behind his words. The agony, the rage. I sensed how close he was to unleashing all of the pain he felt upon me, to letting me see the jagged wounds he could barely keep closed.

I made no movement, simply held still beneath his hands, feeling his breath hot upon my face in the dark as we stood there in the abandoned house of an ancient and terrible god.

“It doesn’t have to be dark. Unless you like it that way. But perhaps you’d like to burn even better?” I lifted my hands, and torches along the walls blazed to life.

Draven hardly spared the flaring torches a glance. He simply looked down at me with a gaze that would have turned any other person to ash.

“If you start this,” he said, his voice a hard, dark thing, “you should know I won’t be able to stop and I can’t be gentle.” He dropped his hands from my neck. “We should go back.”

“No,” I said firmly. “I think we should stay right where we are.” I took his hand in mine again and tugged him backwards.

I already knew what I would find as my body moved through the cool shadows.

My hips hit a slab of hard, cold stone.

Draven’s jaw clenched so tight, I thought it would break. “If we stay here, your world is here. This. Me. I’ll take you. Between your legs, inside your mouth. Everywhere I can. I’ll hurt you, Morgan. I’m broken. You don’t know...” His voice cracked. “You don’t know what I’m capable of right now.”

“And you do? You think you know what I need right now, Draven?”

I ran my hands down my body, cupping my breasts briefly, feeling how tight and heavy they already were. “What I need is you. What I need is for you to take me any way you need me.”

Draven’s eyes watched my every move.

“What are you waiting for?” I goaded him. “Unleash your pain. Heal me with it. Heal me, gods damn it, and fuck me like you know you want to, Draven.”

That was all he needed to hear.