Since Tina, he’d probably spent less than forty-five minutes alone with a woman. Most he pushed away after about twenty minutes.

He wasn’t a bastard. He left them satisfied, but he had nothing to offer but a good fuck and picking up the beer tab before he took off. Like most men, he wasn’t into the cuddling aftermath, but unlike them, it wasn’t because he feared intimacy. It was because he remembered what true intimacy was like. The mockery of it flogged self-loathing to life. If he was in range of alcohol, he’d be forced to get off his face to bury it again. Otherwise it drove him mad enough to do violence.

She didn’t care about that, the dogs he was afraid to loose. She herself had broken the chain holding them back. She reveled in his savagery, his attempts to fight her for control. She took him on like a she-wolf. At one point, he remembered staring at her through the darkness, for by that time Elle had cut the generator, leaving them only the option of candlelight. He’d seen a hint of his blood smeared on Lady D’s full bottom lip, the stain of it gleaming on a fang.

While he remembered nothing about the passage of time after that first coupling, everything else had the sharp edge and accuracy of a carved spear. She’d reversed their positions, shoving him to his back on the bed. His eyes had widened when she produced iron manacles from her belongings. Like those clapped on the wrists and ankles of his convict ancestor. He’d seen a pair under glass at a museum, and had imagined them, hard and unforgiving on a man’s legs or arms, limiting his choices.

With movements faster than he could follow, even if his chest hadn’t been working like a bellows, his dizzy brain still reeling, she had him bound again. There was the disturbing click on each wrist and ankle, four separate suspensions of time. She used her belt to bind the leg chain to the foot rail, his belt to make fast the wrist manacles above his head. Frissons of shock jittered through him, a strange, unsettling venom that compelled him to fight. However, the way her blue eyes intensified beneath the fringe of gold lashes as she studied the flex of his muscles, the bowing of his body, a thin line of perspiration along his neck, made him grow still again, shallow breath held.

She’d recovered his whip and held it in her hands, the braided length passing through her fingers, while she stood at the foot of the bed.

Despite the fact she’d just milked him, his flagging cock wanted to strain like a dying man, ready to pull itself over sharp rocks toward her.

“What . . .” He licked dry lips. “Love, what—”

“You may speak as you like,” she said. “Except to question anything I do to you. That’s up to me, and none of your business to decide. I’m a fair hand with a whip myself, Dev.”

And he felt it, enough to make him jump. The tail popped so close above his nipple the faint sting came from the snap of the air.

Despite himself, his cock slid from his thigh back up toward his belly, an animal reawakening.

“You do have some of the way of it, then,” she observed. “Though I’ll bet that’s a bit of a surprise to you. Has no woman ever mastered you? Taught you to respond to her slightest touch upon your mouth, guiding your head? Made you give her everything, letting her ride you past the endurance of your great heart? Like a stallion trained to go on until you’d let it explode in your chest rather than fail her.”

Christ, she was a sight. Talking like that, naked as a savage, her long blond hair loose and flowing along her arms and shoulders like a mane.

“That what you’re fixing to do, love?” he managed hoarsely. “Ride me to the end?” Her gaze flickered at his deliberate disobedience. This time the pop hit his abdomen with a singing pain that arched him off the bed, sent fire coursing through him and brought a curse to his lips.

“No,” she said softly. “I want to make certain you’ll go that far, if I demand it.” That powerful first time must have addled his wits, because he never had his feet back under him again. She brought him back to life with her sultry taunts and the painful caress of the whip, the brush of her body, her hair across his chest, and then she rode him to another climax.

Living in the Outback so long, his body had adapted so he didn’t waste water easily. He wasn’t one to sweat profusely, but nothing could dehydrate a man quicker than fucking. She didn’t give him water, or any type of relief for a while. She changed the manacles, spread his body wider on the bed, making his shoulders and hips ache.

The next time, she commanded his erection to life by running the whip under his arse and gripping it in both hands to hold him to her as she teased his girth with her small mouth. Slid his cock through the cleft of her breasts, using her own fluids to lubricate the valley. But what sent him back to groaning stiffness was when she turned, made him watch his cock pump up and down the channel between her cheeks as she straddled him backward. The flex of those lovely buttocks, gripping him, moving up and down, feeling her flesh clench his organ, made him leak out and slick the passage further, increasing the torment.

When he thought he could stand no more of that without the tearing agony of a forced orgasm, she backed over him, filling his vision with the heart-shaped backside as she leaned forward to go down on him and stroked him beyond speech with the hot, sucking pressure of her lips, the grip of her fingers, moist breath on his broad head. Her pussy was over his face, but strain as he might, she kept it out of reach, though the fluids collected over her aroused cunt lips before his glazed eyes. He opened his mouth to take in the slow drops that eventually fell, sweet as hot molasses, on his tongue, his lips.

At one point, he demanded she rub it in his face, that she ride his cock. She did neither until he begged, pleaded.

After the third time, or maybe it was the fourth, she’d had water brought, and food. But she hadn’t let go of the upper hand then, either. Putting the water in her mouth, she cradled his jaw in one hand, her other loosely on his neck, so the pressure of her palm was against his ragged pulse. Coaxing his mouth open, she let the fluid trickle in and hydrated him that way, one painstaking mouthful at a time. By the time the slow, sensual process was over, he was high and proud again. He was going to be fucked to death.

Death by fucking he could take. It might even be welcome, though it would mean he was surely going to hell. He hadn’t lived a good enough life to earn heaven, and only a god with a macabre sense of humor would give him every man’s wish for his last act on the earth before plunging him into the fires that would scorch the memory.

True to her word, he wasn’t allowed any questions about what she was doing or why. Every attempt was met with a punishing strike of that lash, as opposed to a teasing lick from it, and she was liberal with both, for he was hardheaded, when all was said and done.

Occasionally, the restraint, the pain of it, brought forth a surge of emotion so strong he had no control anymore. He raged at her, thrashed against the manacles until they scraped the skin off his wrists, enraging him further, pulled at the unrelenting iron headboard. He called her foul names, demanded she release him, the demon-bitch from hell.

Her answer was more devastating than simple pain. She let him run out, then shifted her legs beneath his head and shoulders, slackening the hold of the manacles enough so she could cradle his upper body in her lap, stroke his head. Wouldn’t let him snap at her, holding his head fast and gently applying pressure to his windpipe until his vision blacked and he settled down out of self-preservation. Still, he thought she was taking a risk with her more tender appendages when she brought her nipple into the proximity of his lips. But at that point, gasping for air, his mind whirling, he was nonplused when she pulled her hair to one side and then poured more precious water down the curve of her breast, exercising such steady control that it was a slow, precise trickle down that luscious hill. The way it arrived at the nipple, skirting around it across the mauve areola, with his mouth so close, made it the simplest thing in the world to close his lips over it and begin to suckle, take in the fluids he now desperately needed. The feel of that taut nub against his tongue, the need to flick against it even as he drank, tasting her with the life-giving water, was something he couldn’t deny himself.

It took some time, but as she crooned softly to him, one after another, each taut muscle that had been struggling like a wild creature for release began to relax. He kept suckling, his breath and heartbeat steadying. She kept up her purring, replenishing him from her breast.

Christ, it was the oddest combination of sensations. One minute, a killing rage if she didn’t let him go. His instinct could turn him into a beast when cornered, as she’d just seen. But there was apparently an even deeper, more primitive instinct she’d uncovered that put him in this strange trance, a stupor of zealous devotion and fascination with her at once. His mind was in some fucking bizarre limbo, no longer wanting to question or want. She was the beginning and end of it all.

Then, holy God, she started all over again.

By the last time, many hours later, it had become painful. It was as if she’d flogged his cock the way she’d striped other parts of him with his own whip. His balls ached, burned. There was nothing left, there wouldn’t be. Still she urged him on, demanded, and as she’d threatened, he was working everything he had for her. His whole world was about the fierce victory of putting a flush on her silken skin, hearing a catch of breath in her throat, raising the level of arousal in her eyes, to see if he could get it higher than last time. He couldn’t explain it, why it was so easy to abandon everything to her, even hope. There was no responsibility for him in this, just in serving her.

She understood the power of it, the sheer abyss of oblivion that he’d not found in his long years in the emptiness of the Red Center.

He’d found it here, in a small, stuffy room, physically overpowered and unraveled by a slender blond vampire.

He didn’t have to explain it. She knew.

“Don’t think I . . . can, love,” he gritted that last time, even as he pumped his hips up from the bed as best he could. Christ, everything hurt, and yet the slippery purse of her cunt clutched him, demanding, keeping him hard.