Page 12 of Secret Pleasure (Bound Hearts 13)

“Why?” she asked.

Sebastian stilled, a brooding frown crossing his face as he pushed his fingers restlessly through his hair.

“Why what?” He finally shook his head as though he didn’t understand the question.

“Why would you kill someone for hurting me? You don’t know me—”

“Well, by God let me show you why.”

He lifted her to him. His head lowered, but when his lips came over hers there was no violence, no fury, expended into the kiss.

The results were devastating all the same.

Senses spinning, focused entirely upon the kiss, her lips parting beneath his and a moan escaping her throat, she knew she’d never be the same.

Firm, calculatingly masterful, and filled with a dark, rich hunger she could never have expected as he kissed her, Shane’s lips brushed over her shoulder, against the side of her neck. As he tenderly gathered her hair from her shoulder and held it out of his way, his teeth suddenly raked against nerve endings in her neck that shattered her concepts of pleasure.

Her cry came with the jolt of fiery, shocking sensation racing from her neck to between her thighs. Sebastian’s kiss became hungrier, steadily building each erotic sensation until she could barely breathe, until she was shaking, shuddering.

This was pleasure? Fiery bolts of sensation that threatened to obliterate reality? The need for something closer, something she’d never had before and had no idea how to ask for.

“Easy, Alyssa. Shhh, just this kiss,” Shane promised. “Nothing more. Nothing taken. When you want to be released you’ll be free.”

Did she want to be released?

What did she want?

Her fingers dug into the material of the shirt covering Sebastian’s shoulders, fisting into it as she tried and failed to still the erratic storm she sensed gathering inside her. Needs and hungers never known before. Sensations she had no idea how to ease, which only gathered and grew until she was suddenly struggling against them, desperate to be free.

Just that quickly, they released her.

She wasn’t left to try to stand alone, though. Sebastian did no more than release her lips and allow her to rest her weight on her own feet as she leaned against him for support.

What had they done to her?

Shane stood behind her, his forehead resting against her outside shoulder, his body so tense, so wired, she was terrified to move.

“That’s why,” Shane said then. “That’s why he’ll kill, why I’ll kill, if anyone tries to harm you. Because the pleasure you’re so confused by you’ve obviously never felt before. Because it’s ours. We brought it to life—”

“And now, it’s ours,” Sebastian finished for him. “We may not deserve it, but I promise you this: we claim it.”

He didn’t say she belonged to him. She would have fought that immediately. Instead, he said he was claiming her response to them. That was okay, she decided hazily. That would work. Because Shane was right: they had brought it to life.

“Let’s just hope you figure out what to do with it,” she stated unsteadily as she moved away from them. “Excuse me, I think I need to go have my nervous breakdown. I’ll be back in a few days, ’kay?” Lifting one finger rather facetiously, she turned and all but raced to the bedroom.

She needed just a few years to figure out what the hell was wrong with her body and how to control that storm she’d felt rising inside her. The flesh between her thighs was swollen, so slick and wet she had no ide

a how to handle it. She’d never been that wet.

She’d never felt what she was feeling now. The overwhelming need to demand his kisses and his touch in places other than her lips.

Along with it was the sudden, fierce demand for the right to claim them as well.

Yep, it was nervous breakdown time.

3

WEEK ONE