“Chase. Chase, it’s so good.” She arched, lifting herself, parting her thighs. “I need you. I need you so much.”

She needed him hard and deep. Fast and strong.

He pressed her thighs farther apart, held her open, and they watched, together, as he pressed inside her.

Electricity sizzled around them. Pleasure scraped over her nerve endings, heated her and drew her tight with the needed release as he eased inside her. Inch by inch, parting the tender flesh and stroking inside her as she pulled her finger from his mouth and held on to his wrists.

Something to hold on to. She needed to hold on to him, because she could feel herself threatening to race into some glittering vortex of pleasure that would steal her senses.

It had never been like this. She had never known pleasure like this. Even with him and Khalid the pleasure hadn’t been like this. Just the two of them. Just his flesh and hers, his touch and hers.

“Ah, hell. Kia.” His hips jerked, bucked, filling her with the last inches of his cock and driving hard, deep inside her.

He lifted her legs, bracing them back, pressing deeper inside her as her head thrashed against her cloak.

She couldn’t make sense of this pleasure. It was more than heat, more than the electric thrills of racing fire and longing. It was more than pleasure.

Her pussy flexed and clenched, sensation tightening her womb as broken cries left her lips and Chase began to move. At first, slow, easy thrusts that built the need inside her. Like a fire being stoked, built, burning hot and blistering, Kia began to burn.

She twisted beneath him, staring up at him in dazed ecstasy as he began to move harder. Faster. His expression twisted, tightened into taut, savage lines of hunger. His eyes glittered beneath his lashes and even in the cold, beneath the fall of snow, a rivulet of sweat tracked down the side of his face.

He fucked her with heavy, hard strokes, pumping into her, impaling with a pleasure that tore through her and filled her senses with a kaleidoscope of sensation.

“Chase!” She cried out his name as she twisted beneath him. Burning. Needing.

She felt torn apart by the need that ripped through her, raced over her flesh and drove inside her womb, wrapped around her clit. She could feel it building inside her, expanding and contracting as he began to move harder, deeper.

“Chase. Chase, please.” Her hands fastened on his wrists as she felt her orgasm nearing, felt it with a force, a power, that a part of her warned could be destructive.

“Hold on to me, baby,” he groaned. “Hold on to me tight.”

He came over her, his hands moving beneath her shoulders, her legs wrapping around his hips and he was taking her hard. Forcefully. His hips pounded into hers, flesh slapping against flesh as Kia felt the explosion detonate inside her.

She screamed his name, arched, her legs tightening around his hips as the racing tremors of sensation became rapture through her body. Lightning, radiant heat, and the feel of him spilling inside her. The pleasure increased and swept her away on a tide of pure sensation.

Magic and starburst of rapture. Chase above her, his arms beneath her, holding her to him as he whispered her name against her neck, his body shuddering, jerking as he raced through his own release.

Kia held him to her, her arms wrapped around his neck, her head buried against his shoulder as she let him sink inside her. She felt wrapped in warmth, cocooned in the glow of pleasure, and, for the first time in her adult life, complete.

That was the frightening part. She felt complete in Chase’s arms.

“Sweet Kia.” His voice was broken as he kissed her neck before easing back slowly.

His hand lifted, touched her cheek, wiped away the damp of the melting snow, and brushed across her swollen lips as her eyes opened.

And she stared into his. His eyes were darker than before, his expression so tight, so savagely lined with a hunger, a need, that she knew had nothing to do with sex or lust.

“What am I going to do with you?” he whispered, laying his forehead against hers as his eyes closed. “Ah God, Kia. How the hell am I going to deal with this?”

She lay beneath him, waiting now, feeling the battle surging inside him, and wondering if she would come out losing against that battle, or winning.

Chase could feel her beneath him, tense, so warm, her body still gripping his in a fist-tight hold, so snug and heated he knew he could take her again, so easily.

So damned easily.

He eased back instead, grimacing as he felt his cock protest at the retreat and the cold that awaited it. As he moved back from her, her legs fell from his hips, her dress sliding over her thighs and to her feet as she lifted the dress strap back to her shoulder.

“It’s cold,” he told her, raging inside. The need to hold her burning as deep and as fierce as the need to let her go.

He could feel that darkness racing inside him, pounding in his head. A hunger he only associated with Kia, some unknown surge of emotion that had him enforcing his control over it.

He’d never known before what he could feel tearing at him now. He was naturally dominant, naturally sexually hard, and she was so sweet, so soft, she terrified him.

He stared into her quiet, watchful expression as he helped her up, helped her adjust her clothes before he adjusted his own.

He should never have gone to her tonight, and he knew it. He saw the hope in her eyes, and he saw the fear. And he knew, tonight, he would end up destroying himself.

Kia watched his face as he reached around her and zipped her dress. His expression was torn, his eyes roiling with emotion that she knew he wasn’t going to let free. She could see it, she could feel it. But he would never let go of it enough to trust it in her care.

She wondered if that was the battle. If he wanted to trust her, hold on to her, and had to push it back. Or if that darkness in his expression, in his eyes, held something more.

“Chase.”

He laid his fingers over her lips when she would have asked, when she would have tried to whisper her own feelings.

“Let’s get you home.” His jaw tightened. Flexed. “Before you catch a cold.”

She stared back at him, torn, knowing, feeling the distance he was suddenly placing between them. Just as he had when Khalid joined them. Just as he always had.

Damn him. Something inside her exploded in grief as he helped her back into the car. He waited until the door closed behind her before buttoning his shirt, moving around the car, his head down, his expression savagely controlled. For just a second she had seen the pain in his eyes, a flash of savage darkness that tugged at her soul and tightened her chest.

When he slid into the driver’s seat, he looked as presentable as he had at the ball. No one would have known he had just taken her on the hood of his car, whereas she knew she looked mussed, perhaps still a bit drowsy from the pleasure.

That haze was easing away quickly, though.

She sat silently as he drove quickly off the Sinclair property and headed back to Alexandria. He didn’t waste time; he maneuvered the vehicle efficiently, quickly, and, too soon, they were pulling up in front of her apartment.

She was surprised when he got out of the car and came around to her side.

He helped her out and kept hold of her arm as they moved inside the building. As though eager to get her to her apartment and be on his way.

“You don’t have to go up with me,” she told him. “I’m perfectly capable of getting upstairs on my own.”

She didn’t want him to come up with her. She didn’t want what she sensed was coming, the pain she knew would explode inside her.

“I know you are.”

He stepped inside the elevator with her anyway, punched in her floor, and watched the digital display as they rose up.