He loved her. The awareness trembled in her, just under the top layer of her skin, then seeped deeper, penetrating fully. How magnificent, to know he loved her so much. No question about it. He was cradling her face with his strong hands as if she were the most precious thing in the universe. She opened her eyes and met his troubled gaze, trying to say with her silvery silence all that she really felt, because she couldn’t say the words. She didn’t know how. No practice.

When he shifted her beneath him and his hard arousal rode between her legs she did it, made all that sound she’d sworn she wasn’t going to. Practically roared. So this was it. This was what made people crazy with passion and longing and hunger. This was what Shakespeare had known at some time in his life to write Romeo and Juliet, to pen such sweet verses of love. This is what the Hawk had meant by Valhalla.

She arched up against him, the muscles deep within her on fire, burning for something, aching and empty.

“Ari,” he breathed as he dropped his head to suckle one nipple into his mouth. He kissed and tugged and tortured it. He released the tightened crest and blew cool air on the heated tip. Nipped it lightly, then rubbed his rough, shadow beard gently across it. A flash of fire erupted in her, radiating outward from her breasts and flooding her entire body with waves of desire.

He scattered kisses lower, trailing across her stomach, the curve of her hips, her thighs. When he paused directly above her honeyed heat, his mere breath fanning her sensitive skin was sheer torture.

A heartbeat turned into a dozen, and she waited, frozen, for his next caress.

When it came, she whimpered softly. He dropped kisses on the satiny insides of her legs, then tasted the very center of her hunger. When his tongue flickered out, stroking her tiny, taut nub repeatedly, she cried out and her body quivered against him. She felt herself reaching, soaring for something just beyond her reach and then … oh!

How was it that she’d never experienced anything like this before? The Hawk flung her to the starlit heavens and spun her out between the planets, slid her down the Milky Way and through a star going supernova. Rocked her universe from end to end of its solar system. And when he finally, gently let her come back down, she shuddered beneath him with agony and ecstasy, knowing she would never be the same. Something had woken up inside her and blinked pale eyes, unaccustomed to the blinding brightness and stunning intensity of this new world.

She lay, panting and a little bit frightened, but ready. Ready to truly and completely give herself to her husband and make their marriage soar as she knew it could. Ready to try to begin to tell him the things she felt for him. How much she really admired his sensitivity and compassion. How much she adored his strength and fearlessness. How much she even cherished his brash and passionate rages. How glad she was to be his wife. “Hawk—”

“Ari, Ari … I … no. I don’t …” His face was fierce and wild, and she reached for him. But she missed.

Because the Hawk stiffened with a roar of agony and leapt from the bed. Leapt from her, and practically ran from the room without looking back.

The room fell silent except for the click of a lock.

Adrienne stared in total confusion at the door.

This was like being bedded in roses and waking up in the mud.

How could he just up and leave her after that?

CHAPTER 26

SIDHEACH JAMES LYON DOUGLAS DOES NOT SHAKE, HE REMINDED himself. Does not lose control. Does not almost start mooning about like some lovesick boy just because he gives a lass the orgasm of her life. He hadn’t missed that.

But it wasn’t the orgasm. Not even the way she’d shuddered against him, or how beautiful she’d looked as she’d panted, love-slicked, beneath his tongue.

It was that he’d been about to do something he’d never done in all his life—lose his seed outside of a lass. That and more, it was that he loved her and she still hadn’t said his name. Not even in the apex of her passion had she cried his name. Nothing. For all he knew, she could have been thinking of Adam. It was part of why he’d had to pull the damned hood off her. The hood had seemed a good idea at the start, but it just had to go.

The next time he loved her, he’d have her eyes open and seeing him from start to finish, and finish it he would. His throbbing shaft would not be able to handle that torture again.

But he didn’t want to give her his seed until he knew she belonged to him. Didn’t want the possibility of not knowing whose child she might bear.

And then he recalled the flask that the old Rom had given him. He considered it thoughtfully, wondering if now was the time to use the potion it contained.