And she knew that tonight would be a night she'd remember for the rest of her life. Somehow, in this place, everything else had faded away. Here, there was only Dev, only Katya, and a sexual heat that threatened to consume them both.
When Dev pushed to his knees, she couldn't help her sharp cry of disappointment. He pressed a hand to her chest. "Wait." And then he was getting off the bed and heading to the living area.
Tempting as it was to go after him, she obeyed the order. It was another fence, another line of control. The psychologists would have a field day with her, she thought, but if this helped her cope with normality, then who were they to judge? None of them had spent endless mindless hours floating in the dark, unable even to sense their own skin, their own fingers, their own face. It had been like she was dead - alone in a cold, indifferent universe.
"So many thoughts," Dev murmured, walking back into the room with her scarf taut in his hands, the ends wrapped around his fists. "I can hear you thinking. It's like a little knocking at the back of my head."
Her eyes tracked him as he moved across the room with lazy confidence, her toes curling into the comforter. "Do you mind?"
"No." The bed dipped as he got on the bed, prowling up over her body. "What were you thinking?"
"That this need I have, this need for boundaries," she whispered, "it doesn't cripple me. I escaped you, after all."
A little smile that suggested all sorts of wickedness. "Did I punish you for that yet?"
"Dev." He was teasing her again, and this man . . . God, he was pure addiction.
Taking her wrists in his hands, he raised them above her head. "No, you aren't crippled. You've just found a way to deal."
She met his eyes. "Does it bother you?"
He wrapped the scarf around her wrists, pulling it tight enough that she could feel the delicious pressure against her skin, then tied the ends around the bars in the headboard. "In case you haven't noticed," he murmured, even as his fingers undid the buttons on her shirt one by one, "I like being in control." One big hand closed possessively over the bare roundness of her breast.
"Dev!"
He stroked and squeezed her with leisurely focus, kissing her each time she tried to hurry him. Sweat began to sheen her body and he hadn't even gone past her br**sts. "You'll drive me to insanity," she accused.
"I promise to make it good." A slow smile as he began to kiss his way down the centerline of her chest, pausing to torment her br**sts with little bites that had her arching her body upward in silent entreaty.
When he refused to comply, she bombarded him with telepathic requests laced with the fever of her hunger. His eyes glittered. "Playing dirty, baby?"
It was, she realized, the first time he'd ever used an endearment. Something shifted inside her, but she didn't know what it was, didn't understand why her heart beat with a sudden painful ache. "I say anything's fair in bed."
"Remember, you said it." He continued his downward journey, pressing kisses over the dip of her stomach, the curve of her navel.
Her eyes widened as she realized what he planned to do. "Why?" she asked, her voice coming out throaty.
"Why what?" A flick of his tongue along the sensitive skin just below her navel.
She had to take several deep breaths before she could answer. "Why would you do such a thing? What pleasure does it give you?"
Dark eyes meeting her own. "Don't you want to lick me, Katya?"
The image made her nerve endings explode. All at once, it was the only thing she could think about. "Let me try and see."
He chuckled. "Nice try, but I get to go first." Strong hands on the tops of her thighs, pushing her legs apart.
The unadulterated intimacy of it rocked her.
She was so primed that she could feel every square inch of her skin, every brush of his breath against her. Never had she felt more real, more alive. "Dev." It was a whisper, a plea, a demand.
The stroke of his thumb against the ultrasensitive skin of her inner thigh. She was still trying to soak it all in when he dipped his head and gave her the most intimate caress of all. The scream tore out of her on a ragged note, and she found herself gripping the scarf to keep herself from jerking out of bed.
Not that he would have let her go.
Strong hands kept her in place as her body tried to escape the overload of sensation - and get closer at the same time. Lights flickered behind her eyes, and she thought surely, surely, something of this would leak into the Net. But she couldn't think about that, could only drown under the waves of pleasure.
The graze of teeth.
Her entire body froze in an almost painful arch. And then she fractured . . . into a million brilliant sparks. The tremors spread outward from within her center, rippling through her like living fire. She was sobbing with the exquisite ache of it by the time she came down.
"Shh." Dev made his way back up her body, gentling her with a kiss that was as possessive as the hand on her breast. "You're so damn beautiful, Katya."
Somehow, she found a speck of sense. "Not too bony?"
He squeezed her breast. "Not where it counts. And we can work on the rest."
"I'm going to hit you for that," she threatened. "As soon as I get my breath back."
His smile was male and satisfied and unbelievably gorgeous. "Then I should make sure you never do." This time, his kiss was leisurely, but so hungry she gasped into his mouth, wanting only to give him everything and anything he wanted.
His hand slipped down, over her ribs, to the curve of her waist. "How are your shields?"