Her first. The way she said that, with such shy wonder, made him want to thrust inside her and growl, And your only.

Something far outside his wrecked restraint-probably the debilitating cocktail of shock and shame at causing her pain-held him back from that mindless display of caveman possessiveness.

“I remember I wanted to wait until, y’know, I met…the one. I assumed that when I met Mel…But it-it seems I wanted to wait until we were married. But…”

He’d been trying to get himself to deflate, enough to slip out of her without causing her further pain. He expanded beyond anything he’d ever known instead. His mind’s eye crowded with images of him devouring those lips that quivered out her earnest words, those breasts that swelled with her erratic breathing.

“But since there are ways for paraplegics to have sex, I still assumed we did one way or…” She choked with embarrassment. It was painfully endearing, when their bodies were joined in ultimate intimacy. “But it’s clear we didn’t, at least nothing invasive, and artificial insemination is essentially noninvasive…”

He shouldn’t find her efforts at a logical, medically sound analysis that arousing as she lay beneath him, shaking, her impossible tightness throbbing around his shaft, her torn flesh singeing his own. But-curse him-it was arousing him to madness. He wanted to give her invasive.

He couldn’t. He had to give her time, for the pain that gripped her body to subside. He started to withdraw. Her sob tore through him.

He froze, his own moan mingling with hers until she subsided. Then he tried to move again. But she clamped quaking legs around his hips, stopping him from exiting her body, pumping her own hips, impaling herself further on his erection.

“I’m hurting you.” He barely recognized the butchered protest that cracked the panting-filled silence as his. “Yes, oh, yes…” He heaved up in horror. She clung harder, her core clamping him like a fist of molten metal. “It’s…exquisite. You are. I dreamed-but could have never dreamed how you’d feel inside me. You’re burning me, filling me, making me feel-feel so-so-oh, Rodrigo, take me, do everything to me.”

He roared with the spike of arousal her words lashed through him. Then, helpless to do anything but her bidding, he thrust back into her, shaking with the effort to be gentle, go slow. She thrashed her head against the sheets, splashing her satin tresses, bucking her hips beneath his, engulfing more of his near-bursting erection into her heat. “Don’t. Give me…all of you, do it…hard.”

He growled his capitulation as he rose, cupped her hips in his palms, tilted her and thrust himself to the hilt inside her.

At her feverish cry, he withdrew all the way, looked down at the awesome sight of his shaft sinking slowly inside her again.

He raised his eyes to hers, found her propped up on her elbows, watching too, lips crimson, swollen, open on frantic pants, eyes stunned, wet, stormy. He drew out, plunged again, and she collapsed back, crying out a gust of passion, opening wider for each thrust, a fusion of pain and pleasure slashing across her face, rippling through her body.

He kept his pace gentle, massaging her all over with his hands, his body, his mouth, bending to suckle her breasts, drain her lips, rain wonder all over her.

“Do you know what you are? Usted es divina, mi belleza, divina. Do you see what you do to me? What I’m doing to you?”

She writhed beneath him with every word, her hair rippling waves of copper-streaked gloss over the crisp white sheet, her breathing fevered, her whole body straining at him, around him, forcing him to pick up speed-though he managed not to give in to his body’s uproar for more force.

“I love what you’re doing to me-your flesh in mine-give it to me-give it all to me…”

He again obeyed, strengthened his thrusts until her depths started to ripple around him and she keened, bucked up, froze, then convulsion after convulsion squeezed soft shrieks out of her, squeezed her around his erection in wrenching spasms.

The force, the sight and sound and knowledge of her release smashed the last of his restraint. He roared, let go, his body all but detonating in ecstasy. His hips convulsed into hers and he felt his essence flow into her as he fed her pleasure to the last tremor, until her arm and legs fell off him in satiation.

He collapsed beside her, shaking with the aftershocks of his life’s most violent and first profound orgasm, moved her over him with extreme care, careful to remain inside her.

She spread over him, limp, trembling and cooling. He’d never known physical intimacy could be like this, channeling into his spirit, his reason. It had been merciful he hadn’t imagined how sublime making love to her would be. He would have long ago gone mad.

He encompassed her velvet firmness in caresses, letting the sensations replay in his mind and body, letting awe overtake him.

He was her first. And she’d needed him so much that even through her pain, she’d felt so much pleasure at their joining.

Not that it had mattered to him in any way when he’d thought she’d belonged to Mel, had probably been experienced before him.

But now he knew she’d been with no one else, he almost burst with pride and elation. She was meant to be his alone.

And he had to tell her that he was hers, too. He had to offer her. Everything. Now. “Cybele, mi corazón,” he murmured into her hair as he pressed her into his body, satiation, gratitude and love swamping him. “Cásate conmigo, querida.”


Cybele lay draped over Rodrigo, shell-shocked by the transfiguring experience.

Every nerve crackled with Rodrigo-induced soreness and satiation and a profundity of bliss, amazement and disbelief.

She’d been a virgin. Wow.

And what he’d done to her. A few million wows.

The wows in fact rivaled the number of his billions since he’d given her all that pleasure when she’d simultaneously been writhing with the pain of his possession. But the very concept of having him inside her body, of being joined to him in such intimacy, at last, had swamped the pain, turned it into pleasure so excruciating she thought she had died in his arms for moments there.

Love welled inside her as she recalled him looking down at her in such adorable contrition and stupefaction. The latter must have been because she’d babbled justifications for her virginal state with him buried inside her. Another breaker of heat crashed over her as she relived her mortification. Then the heat changed texture when she recalled every second of his domination.

What would he do to her when pain was no longer part of the equation? When he no longer feared hurting her? When he lost the last shred of inhibition and just plundered her?

She wondered if she’d survive such pleasure. And she couldn’t wait to risk her life at the altar of his unbridled possession.

She was about to attempt to beg for more, needing to cram all she could into her one time in his arms. But she lost coherence as he caressed and crooned to her. Then his words registered.

Cásate conmigo, querida.

Marry me, darling.

Instinctive responses and emotions mushroomed, paralyzed her, muted her. Heart and mind ceased, time and existence froze.

Then everything rushed, streaked. Elation, disbelief, joy, shock, delight, doubt. The madly spinning roulette of emotions slowed down, and one flopped into the pocket. Distress.

She pushed away from the meld of their bodies, moaning at the burn of separation, rediscovering coordination from scratch. “I meant it when I said no tomorrows, Rodrigo. I don’t expect anything.”

He rose slowly to a sitting position, his masculinity taking on a harsher, more overwhelming edge among the dreamy softness of a background drenched in red roses. He looked like that wrathful god she’d seen in the beginning, decadent in beauty, uncaring of the effect his nakedness and the sight of his intact arousal had on flimsy mortals like her. “And you don’t want it, either?”

“What I want isn’t important.”

He stopped her as she turned away, his grip on her arm gentleness itself, belying his intensity as he gritted, “It’s all-important. And we’ve just established how much you want me.”

“It still makes no difference. I-I can’t marry you.”

He went still. “Because of Mel? You feel guilty over him?”

She huffed a bitter laugh. “And you don’t?”

“No, I don’t,” he shot back, adamant, final. “Mel is no longer here and this has nothing to do with him.”

“Says the man whose every action for the last ten weeks had everything to do with Mel.”

He rose to his knees, blocked her unsteady attempt to get off the bed. “Care to explain that?”

Air disappeared as his size dwarfed her, his heat bore down on her, as his erection burned into her waist. She wanted to throw herself down, beg him to forget about his honor-bound offer and just ride her to oblivion again.

She swallowed fire past her hoarse-with-shrieks-of-pleasure vocal cords. “I’m Mel’s widow, and I’m carrying his unborn child. Need more clues?”

“You think all I did for you was out of duty for him?”

She shrugged dejectedly. “Duty, responsibility, dependability, heroism, nobility, honor. You’re full of ’em.”

And he did the last thing she’d expected in this tension.

He belted out one of those laughs that turned her to boiling goo. “You make it sound like I’m full of…it.”

Words squeezed past the heart bobbing in her throat. “I wish. You make it impossible to think the least negative thing of you.”

He encroached on her as he again exposed her to that last thing she’d thought she’d ever see from him. Pure seduction, lazy and indulgent and annihilating. “And that’s bad…why?” Oh, no. She’d been in deep…it, when he’d been only lovely and friendly. Now, after he’d kick-started her sexuality software with such an explosive demonstration, had imprinted his code and password all over her cells, to all of a sudden see fit to turn on his sex appeal intentionally was cruel and unusual overkill.