He didn't tell her to stop analyzing their interaction, didn't accuse her of not acting like a normal woman, both fears she'd harbored. Instead, he smiled and said, "Show me where."
When he let go of her arms, she spread the palm of her right hand over her navel, partly touching skin, partly the material of her cargos.
"There?" Brushing aside her hand, he replaced it with his own. She looked down, mesmerized at the erotic contrast. His hand was thickly masculine in comparison to her own, the hairs on the backs of his arms shimmering with light, his fingers marked with faded scars. He was beautiful to her. But when he looked at her, she saw a startling truth - she was beautiful to him, too.
"Yes," she whispered, and it was a permission not an answer.
He took her at her word, this man with a wounded soul and the heart of a leopard, a man so complex that she knew he'd be a puzzle she could explore the rest of her life, if she only had the chance. She sucked in a breath as he changed the direction of his hand, arrowing his fingers down under her waistband and inside her panties in a firm move.
Sensation exploded behind her eyelids. She felt her knees collapse, her body begin to quake with pleasure so extreme, it caused blackness to slide over her eyes. She should've been terrified. Except it felt too good to fight. So she surrendered.
There was no time for worry. Or fear. Only pleasure.
When the darkness receded, she found herself lying on the bed, still half-dressed... and being watched by human eyes that held a very feline satisfaction. "I said slow."
He smiled. "Oops."
Charm.
This leopard lying next to her had a whole arsenal of it. According to what she'd been taught during her passage through the Silence Protocol, charm had both negative and positive aspects. Some used it as a weapon, others as a tool. But, she realized as she lay there limp from pleasure, all that changed if trust was involved. Then, it became a caress, a stroke, a kiss. "When we first met, I would've never predicted you could be this way."
He circled her belly button with a finger. "When we first met, I was a mean bastard."
"I don't think that's changed."
He paused his playful touching. "Oh?"
"I've just earned a free pass through the meanness."
That made him relax, a husky chuckle her answer as he shifted position to brace himself over her. His kiss was deceptively lazy this time, a slow tasting that made her sigh. When he kissed his way down her neck and to the valley between her br**sts, she thrust her hands into his hair and held on.
The scrape of his shadowed jaw was rough against the tender skin of her breast. She sucked in a breath. He murmured an apology, licking his tongue over the sensual hurt until she could barely bear it. There was so much more to this sexual dance than she'd ever imagined. So much more to the man she'd called the sniper.
"Thinking again?" he murmured, pressing his lips to her navel.
She looked down to meet his heavy-lidded gaze. "About you." In her hands, his hair was soft, sleek. "I know my Silence was broken, but I was brought up in an environment where control was everything. I thought it would be harder to give in this much." To trust this much - until both body and mind were so in sync, she couldn't imagine being any other way.
"Come on then, sugar. Give in to me some more." His lashes swept over her skin as he laid his forehead against her and pressed another kiss to her navel. When he rose, it was to his knees. Unsnapping the tab, he gripped the zipper of her cargos. "Down." He suited word to action.
It felt as if he was touching each newly exposed inch of flesh, his eyes were so intent. She discovered that she was holding her breath, released it in a slow exhalation as he got the pants off and threw them over the side of the bed, leaving her dressed in one last piece of clothing. Her panties were plain black, certainly nothing like the delicate, lacy garments she'd seen displayed in the windows of human and changeling boutiques.
But Dorian didn't seem to mind. "You're damp." He ran a finger over that dampness, making her bite back a cry. Then he did it again. And again. It sent twisting tendrils of sensation straight through her. But... it wasn't enough.
"I feel... alone." She needed something, something important. It felt as if she should be able to see it on the psychic plane, but the ephemeral something kept slipping out of her grasp. "Dorian?" It was almost a sob.
"I've got you." One smooth movement and the panties were gone. "Christ, you're beautiful." A harsh male exclamation and then he was spreading her thighs, whispering for her to wrap them around him. She did, able to feel him nudging at her, hot, hard, rawly male.
She cried out into his kiss as he began to enter her, stretching muscles that had never known such use. There was no pain, only the most exquisite kind of ache, as if her body had been made for this man, for this moment. The emptiness faded from inside her, overwhelmed by the amount of sheer sensation her mind was attempting to process. A part of her, a tiny hidden part, knew that something remained missing, but then Dorian bit her lightly on the shoulder and the thought fragmented.
"Biting is okay?" she gasped, adjusting to the blazing heat of him inside her.
He kissed his way up her neck, over her cheek, back to her lips. "Hell, yeah." One male hand slid under her to cup her bottom, angling her for a deeper penetration.
Arching upward, she dared to use her teeth on the powerful cords of his neck. He hissed out a breath, squeezing her bottom. "More."
No longer capable of rational thought, she dug her nails into his back and scratched hard. It made him growl and tug her head back for a firestorm of a kiss.