Sasha
My back struck the wall with a bone-jarring force that stole the breath from my lungs. But any protestation withered on my tongue the moment Luca's scorching frame caged me in, the blazing intensity of his obsidian gaze searing straight through to my crumbling core.
He loomed over me, every powerful inch of his body a study in ruthless masculinity and coiled tension. The predator had finally been roused from its lair, provoked by the reckless taunts I couldn't seem to resist flinging in his path like trails of raw meat.
"You play a very dangerous game," he growled, leaning his weight into the rigid line of his hips until I was pinned beneath his imposing heat. "Do you have any idea what you're provoking?"
A tremor rushed through me—part fear, part undeniable yearning at his dominance blatantly asserted. The latter emotion was a galling revelation, one that splintered through the carefully crafted layers of dispassion I'd erected around my heart long ago.
But as Luca's hand came up to splay against the wall beside my head, as his penetrating stare held me, hostage, that hairline fracture yawned into an immense chasm that threatened to swallow me whole.
"I think you'll find," I countered, struggling to maintain my steadiness as that inescapable, simmering tension thickened between us, "that I'm not so easily cowed, Luca."
His pupils blew wide at the sound of his name tumbling so intimately from my lips, a dark promise flickering to life in those obsidian depths. The hand at my waist drifted higher, calloused fingers blazing a path of exquisite torment until his thumb grazed the swell of my breast.
"No," he agreed in a harsh rasp that sent a tremor ricocheting through my core. "That's precisely what makes you so goddamn irresistible."
Then he was crushing his mouth to mine in a punishing, searing kiss, and the world simply...ceased.
Every thought, every carefully strategized plan, fell to smoldering ash in the wake of the undeniable conflagration that roared through my veins. Luca's tongue plundered the depths of my mouth in a ferocious duel for dominance, his large frame surrounding me with his masculine heat.
And like a woman bewitched, ensnared by some ancient Siren's spell, I could do nothing but surrender to the delirious haze of want clouding my senses.
My nails scored down the rigid plates of his back in harsh furrows, drawing a guttural groan from deep in his chest. Luca ground against me, hips undulating in a maddening rhythm that liquified my bones and stole what little oxygen lingered in my starved lungs.
Distantly, I registered just how disastrous, how utterly ruinous these actions were. But the roaring in my ears drowned out any last rational protestations as I arched into his iron embrace, desire's molten licks of flame consuming me whole.
This was madness, pure and simple.
Yet as Luca's wicked mouth slanted over mine with increasing fervor, as his calloused hands mapped every swell and hollow of my writhing form, common sense splintered apart like fragile glass.
Reality itself became subjugated to this primal reckoning of clashing needs and bared animalistic hunger.
I burned. To burn him the same way I'm burning for what his family did to my family.
I want to make him yearn for his family as much as I'm yearning, for mine.
I shattered into a thousand blazing embers, searing my essence into Luca's very marrow as I surrendered to the inferno that threatened to consume us both.
For one shattering moment, I envisioned myself devoured completely until no remnant of Sasha Ivanov remained to haunt this world. I would be reduced to specters of ash, scattered on the smoldering ashes of everything I'd ever vowed to achieve.
Then Luca's mouth abandoned mine in a rasping groan, trailing a path of molten kisses along the throbbing pulse point at the hollow of my throat. And I promptly forgot to draw breath at all as my entire universe narrowed to that brand of unholy bliss.
He was my damnation, wrought in searing flesh and merciless intensity. The poison that would ultimately obliterate anything apart from this delirious rapture.
As my fingers threaded through the dense strands of his hair, nails scoring his scalp in savage ecstasy, I knew with chilling certainty that I would drink every drop of that deadly elixir.
Consequences be damned.
This lethal passion was far too addictive, too irresistible, to deny.
Not when my very survival hinged on experiencing its ruinous intoxication again...and again...and again.
Luca's mouth was everywhere, branding my skin with searing kisses that left scorched ruin in their wake. His hands roamed with rough possession, kneading the curves of my body until I thought I might burst into scorching embers beneath his skilled assault.
It should have been too much—the relentless ferocity of his onslaught, the sheer overwhelming force of his desire battering against what tattered remnants of higher reasoning still comprised my psyche. But like a dying sun devouring itself in one last blaze of incandescent glory, I gloried in the unbearable ecstasy searing me from the inside out.
My back bowed, breasts straining against the flimsy barrier of my thin top as Luca's wandering caresses drifted inevitably lower. He cupped, kneaded, and possessed every lush swell with fervent single-mindedness as a guttural growl rumbled from deep in his chest.
"Christ, Sasha..." His whiskey-roughened voice was a rasp of naked rapture against the hollow of my throat. "You're sublime."
"Luca..." I whimpered, all semblance of composure shattering in the wake of his scorching praise and the devastating skill of those wandering hands. Nails scoring his nape, I angled his mouth back to mine in a ravenous kiss that quickly descended into something primal and profane.
This time it was my turn to plunder and conquer as my tongue thrust past the velvet seam of his lips in a blatant taste of his masculine musk. Luca rewarded me with a harsh groan vibrating against my swollen mouth, his hands leaving searing trails as they roamed with increasing urgency.
Desperation unlike any I'd ever known lashed through me like a physical force, a cyclonic tempest obliterating anything beyond this cataclysmic joining in its path. Each searing caress, every incendiary glide of our fused bodies stoked the inferno blazing through my veins into a roaring crescendo.
Heat, want, sheer blazing need—these sensations washed over me in dizzying waves, subsuming every rational thought until only one driving demand remained.
More.
"Luca..." I rasped between soul-scorching kisses. "I need..." The words seemed to scald my very tongue with their mere utterance. "Please...I burn for you."
My body undulated against his, every lush curve molded to the iron hardness of his frame in wanton supplication. Any lingering sanity disintegrated in the wake of my naked entreaty, cast away in pursuit of the ultimate rapture he could provide.
Luca tore his mouth from mine with a guttural growl, dark eyes blazing like smoldering coals in their deep-set hollows. A thousand conflicting emotions flickered over that harsh, beautiful visage—unholy lust and punishing restraint waring in a tumultuous war.
Then he was hauling me against his powerful frame, lips slanting over mine in a searing brand of possession, unlike anything I'd ever experienced. All at once, I was pinned, surrounded, utterly subsumed by the sheer force of his want and the ferocious demand scorching the blood in his veins.
I did not simply crave him at that moment.
I needed him like sustenance, his body, and soul the only nourishment that could slake this relentless ache hollowing me from within.
I had become the very sin I'd sworn vengeance against, seduced so thoroughly by the darkness that I would gladly let it devour me whole. With each rasping breath, each molten undulation of our fused bodies, I gloried in my descent into utter abandonment and depravity.
Finally, with a guttural snarl of surrender, Luca wrenched us both from that precarious precipice and slammed me back against the unforgiving wall once more.
"As you wish, Miss Ivanov," he rasped, blatant sin dripping from every caressed syllable as he reached for the buttons of my blouse. "Burn for me."
Then his mouth crashed over mine again in a searing brand of possession as dexterous fingers began divesting me of every stitch of clothing separating us.
Flames licked along my nerve endings, scorching away any remnants of hesitation or coherence in their path. Luca had awoken a new sort of madness within me, an all-consuming wildfire of lust and forbidden rapture.
And with each garment disheveled, each new inch of blazing skin bared to his searing caresses, I welcomed the sweet, merciless ruination of being consumed utterly by its raging inferno.
Luca's hands left scorched ruin in their wake as he deftly divested me of my blouse, his smoldering gaze raking over every new inch of flushed skin exposed to his raptor's stare. I trembled despite the raging wildfire consuming my senses—though whether from need or residual shyness at being so brazenly bared, I couldn't say.
But any trace of lingering trepidation was ruthlessly banished as his mouth descended in a blazing path of open-mouthed kisses, each one a searing brand that liquified bone and sinew alike. Luca worshipped every lush curve and hollow with the ravenous reverence of a devotee at last beholding his goddess-given flesh.
When his tongue traced the scalloped lace edging my bra, I arched into him with a strangled cry. Coherency had become a distant dream in the wake of this smoldering spiral into depravity, replaced only by an endless litany chanting for more, more, more...
Satisfaction of a sort came as he obliged my silent entreaty, powerful hands deftly ridding me of the final scraps of fabric restraining us. Then I was bared before him in all my naked glory, and the sheer intensity of Luca's molten regard nearly undid me entirely.
This was madness, pure and ruinous, that I knew. But that didn't stop the deep-seated thrill that lanced through me at the reverent hunger blazing in his stare, at the possessive way his large hands roamed the newly exposed flesh as if staking an irrevocable claim.
At that moment, the part of me still clinging to the last vestiges of restraint was ruthlessly subsumed. Because no matter the ultimate cost, I craved Luca's rapacious mastery over me in a way that transcended sanity.
Everything blurred into a tempestuous riptide of dueling sensations—the vise-like grip of his arms anchoring me as he hauled me flush against his powerful frame, the tantalizing graze of heated skin on skin, the ferocious dance of our warring tongues and lips locked in a searing battle for dominance.
Need spiraled ever higher, each slick caress and desperate murmur only stoking the maelstrom raging between us into a cyclone frenzy of escalating passion. Rational thought turned to smoldering cinders, forfeit to this primal cataclysm of unquenchable fire and bone-deep yearning.
At last, Luca wrenched his mouth from mine, his chest heaving with the force of his ragged inhalations. For a suspended heartbeat, our gazes collided with the weight of a cosmic explosion, laying bare the searing cravings, the devastating vulnerability we'd allowed to detonate between us.
Then his grip tightened with inexorable intent, and I felt myself being turned, pressed into the unforgiving solidity of the wall with his unyielding frame plastered to my back. Every inch of him converged on me in a searing brand, the slightest shift of our bodies igniting shockwaves of frissons along my nerves.
Luca's lips traced the swell of one shoulder, his beard a scorching rasp against my hypersensitive skin as his hands roamed with unrestrained possession. He took and conquered, branding every inch of my writhing form as his own as his thick arousal ground against the cleft of my thighs in uncompromising promise.
"Mine..." He rasped the gravelly syllable against my nape like a cosmic vow and something inside me—the last remnants of resistance, perhaps—shattered irrevocably apart.
And with that ruination, only two words parted my lips in a breathless plea to the darkness:
"Yours...always."
I just said the words that would mean nothing to me.