Tenderness gone, he was back to yanking at my belt and devouring my mouth. “I can’t wait,” he muttered against my lips. The urgency was plain in his voice, his hands, the erection straining the front of his pants. I was dying to know what had happened between the speech and now to get him into such a state.

“I’m sorry,” he said, finally working my pants open and wrapping my cock in a fist so tight and big that I forgot how to think. “I used to think this moment…if we ever were together again…I thought it would be different, longer and sweeter, but…”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said back, breathlessly, my entire being tightening into a bowstring of tension as he tugged and pulled on me. “Please don’t be sorry.”

“Well, I can’t be that sorry.” The hidden dimple flashed, and for a moment I saw a young man standing over me in the woods wishing I would beg. And then the next moment, I was tossed over my dining room table, the centerpiece—again from Morgan’s decorator—crashing to the floor. Both of us ignored it; Ash bent over me and turned my head so I could kiss him, and then bites were trailed down my back, dulled somewhat by the thin cotton of my shirt. My pants were yanked down to my ankles, my feet kicked apart.

“Embry,” said Ash.

“Bedroom,” I panted. “Top dresser drawer.”

It only took him a second, although bent over and exposed like that, that second felt like a month, panic chasing lust all over my body. Would he change his mind? Would he decide it was too close to Jenny’s death? Would he walk into my bedroom a king and walk back out a broken shell again?

I needn’t have worried. He strode back out with all the watchful hunger of a tiger approaching his prey, running his hand down my flattened back as he came around the corner of the table, a smile curling his voice. “Have you finally learned obedience, little prince?”

“Fuck you.”

“Such a mean mouth on you. And here I thought we were friends.”

He fisted a hand in my hair to arch my back off the table. My eyes watered; my blood sang at the sight and feel and sense of him, this part of him I’d been denied so long. This part of him he’d denied himself for so long.

As I was arched, a finger entered me, probing in the perfunctory, callous way I’d grown to crave during our years in Carpathia. The lube was cold, the finger was warm, Ash’s voice was both as he whispered, “Just like I remembered. So tight and so fucking strong—” his hand left my hair so he could grab my ass, the muscles of my left thigh, squeezing and slapping my flank as if I were a prized stallion. “—so you.”

I could feel my heartbeat in my dick. I could feel my heartbeat everywhere, like my heart was outside of me and filling up the room.

Of course it was outside of me. I’d given it to the soldier behind me years ago.

“I can’t wait,” he muttered again. I felt the loss of his finger like the loss of some part of myself, and then I heard the noise of his belt, the metal hiss of his zipper. The moment his crown kissed against the sensitive skin of my anus, I started shivering uncontrollably.

“I haven’t,” I said in a shaking voice. “With anyone. Not since you.”

If I thought this would give him pause, gentle the tiger, I was wrong. If anything, this seemed to stoke a new fire inside him, flare up some dark, primal satisfaction.

“Good,” he snarled.

And he pushed inside of me as rough and fast as he would a woman, shoving the blunt head in on the first push, the rest of his cock in on the second. Grunts left his throat as he forced his way inside, and his massive hands curled around my hips to keep me in place as I squirmed underneath him.

“Fuck.” It was so big. So impossibly big, and he was splitting me apart with it. “Holy fuck.”

There was no mercy from the soldier behind me, no relief. He wedged in, he dragged out, he wedged in again. I writhed, he pushed me down, I tried to move my legs and he kicked them back apart. It was him, inside me and over me and behind me; it was him taking what he wanted, what he needed; it was him, the one I had craved so hard and so long that I had forgotten what not craving felt like.

It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t fair, the only attention he gave my body was the occasional slap on the flank or rake of nails under my shirt, and I was going to come so embarrassingly fast if he kept it up.

“I’m going to fuck the cum right out of you,” he said in my ear, and then he made good on his word, reaching around and pulling my swollen cock down between my legs. The edge of the table kept it there, pointing straight down, all the blood and sensation in my body pooling into eight throbbing inches, and then he let go.

I wanted to beg him to keep hold of it at least, even if he wasn’t going to stroke me, because it was unbearable otherwise, as if the pleasure was too much to bear on its own. I wanted to beg him to stop or to go harder, I wanted to beg him to forgive me or punish me, I wanted to beg him to leave and to stay. I wanted everything in that moment, every painful, electric thing, as long as it came from him, as long as he gave it to me.

“Ash, please,” I moaned. “Touch it or let me—”

He easily caught the hand I was trying to get down to my cock and laughed. Laughed.

“No, Patroclus. Not this time. This time I want to see you come just like this. Just from my cock inside you. I’ve waited so. Fucking. Long. To. Have. This.” He punctuated each word with a thrust, thrusts so deep that tears burned behind my eyelids, so well-angled that my toes curled helplessly against the polished wood of the floor.