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Eleri didn’t want to tell him this was her normal, but she couldn’t lie to him anymore, not even by omission. So she admitted how food had stopped holding any significance for her long ago, that she’d eaten only to function.

Adam pressed a kiss to her palm. “That just means I get to play bear with you and bring you treat after treat to see what you like best. Or I could drop them into your hands from the sky—that’s more the falcon way.”

That single kiss made her shiver.

Tugging her closer, then manhandling her—with her enthusiastic consent—until she sat on his thighs, her legs on either side of his body while he held her hips, he leaned in to press a kiss directly over the pulse in her neck.

Eleri sucked in a sharp breath, her thighs clenching around him.

“Shh.” A nuzzle of her neck. “Dahlia and Bram are sleeping.”

Sinking her teeth into her lower lip, Eleri whispered, “Can I touch you first? I don’t know if I can manage silence if you touch me.

” The sensations were amplified a hundred times beyond anything she’d felt even when he’d been inside her, and her inner muscles spasmed with needy greed when she dared imagine what it might be like now.

Adam’s lips curved, a laziness to it that was somehow sexual in a way she didn’t understand. “I can’t wait to make you scream.” A rough whisper.

Lifting her hand to his chest, he placed it against a button in silent permission.

“I saw a woman screaming in orgasm in a memory once,” she told him as she slipped the small disk out of its hole to reveal the barest sliver of skin.

“It wasn’t a bad read, that one. One of my starter reads—a case of a regular threesome where one of the two males got jealous and punched the other one in the testicles right after he brought the woman partner to orgasm. ”

Adam winced. “I didn’t think Justice did reads for penny-ante stuff.”

“It’s just luck if your case hits when an apprentice-level J is doing reads as part of their studies.

” She hadn’t known it then, but those had been the best days of her life when it came to her work as a J.

“Because the supposed assault took place during sex, the read included the section with the orgasm.”

Still young at the time, with her emotions locked down well enough to pass for Silent, she’d just filed it away. “After the numbness, I found myself wondering how she could feel such pleasure as to scream.”

She ran her finger down the strip of skin she’d bared on Adam’s chest. The contact made her stomach tumble, her thighs clench again. Pushing the sides of his shirt apart as her pulse speeded up, she said, “I don’t wonder anymore.”

Adam groaned and leaned up to speak against her ear. “How wet are you?”

Breath short and jagged, she squeezed inner muscles that quivered with need. “Drenched.”

His hands clenched on her lower curves, his mouth at her throat again.

Barely holding back the whimpers that escaped her, she pushed him back. But he paused before his back met the canvas against the wall. “I want inside you.” A raw statement. “It’s fucking primitive, this need I have to claim you, mark you, but I don’t care.”

Eleri’s mind hazed. “Adam, I won’t be able to be quiet,” she said, moving her body on his thighs because she couldn’t stop herself.

“Scream into my mouth,” he said, before tilting her gently onto her back on the mattress.

Coming over her in a prowl that made her feel deliciously overwhelmed, his hair falling around his face and those wild falcon eyes glinting at her, he said, “Can I put my cock inside you, Eleri?”

Eleri’s entire body clenched. She hadn’t known that words could pump pleasure through her. Reaching down between them, she began to push down the elasticized pants she was wearing.

She pushed her underwear down with the pants.

“I can’t go further,” she whispered when she reached the limit of how far her arms would reach.

That feral smile. “Let me help you.” He moved with lazy grace to tug her pants and underwear off and put them to one side, then pushed her thighs apart and just looked at her.

She was already on the verge when he said, “My mouth is watering.”

Whimpering, she shoved a fist into her mouth to stifle the sound as her body arched up.

She shook her head violently at him when he glanced at her.

If he did what he was craving, she’d scream down this entire cave.

She was barely able to bear the level of sensation now, from the soft rasp of the cotton of her sweatshirt against her nipples to the heat of his body lapping against her.

“I’ll save that treat for later,” Adam said, and began to undo his jeans.

Eleri couldn’t look, stared up at the canvas. But she heard it when he put his jeans aside. Glancing at him, she said, “Not the shirt,” when he would’ve shrugged that off, too. “I can’t handle that much contact all at once.”

She wasn’t even sure she was going to survive the intimacy of his body sheathed in hers. She’d felt it when she was numb. How much more would she feel now?

A whimper threatened to escape.

“We’ll work up to it,” Adam said with a slow smile as he came over her again and leaned down to brush his lips across hers. It was the merest hint of a kiss, yet it made her breasts ache and liquid pool in her core as need clawed at her.

“I’m ready,” she gasped.

Gripping one hip, he settled between her thighs, his hair-roughened skin pushing against the delicate skin of her inner thighs.

Eleri’s mind overloaded.

At any other time, she’d have struggled against it.

Not today.

She just went with the overload, letting it drown her in erotic heat. But there was no way she was going to hold her quiet, so she hauled him down and pressed her lips to his, sealing them together as he began to push the thickness of himself into her.

Eleri began orgasming at first contact, her body primed and oversensitized and oh so willing.

He trapped her scream in his mouth, her body as trapped under his as he brought his weight down on her—as if he knew exactly what she needed, that this sense of confinement wasn’t confinement at all but a weight that kept her in one piece when she would’ve flown apart.

Holding on to him as her mind hazed and blurred and breathing became difficult, Eleri transformed into a creature of pure pleasure.