“I do. I can make you stay, or I can make you run. I wonder which it’ll be. But you came to me, so it’ll be my way.”

He fisted his hands on the opening of her blouse, shredded it in one quick, shocking yank. “Stay or run.”

His eyes were dark, demanding, focused on hers. Cool air shivered over her bare skin. “If you stay, you’re mine. My way. Stay or run.” He gripped her hair, yanked her head back, and watched her, waited.

“Stay,” he murmured, then crushed his mouth to hers and ravished.

Speed and desperation. She was pummeled by both as he dragged her down into the hay and branded her lips, her throat, her breasts. She cried out when his teeth closed over her, lancing heat from breast to loins until her body was a bucking, writhing mass of sensation.

The asking was over, she knew. The choice was made. Now he would take, as he had in the dreams that haunted her at night. Rough and fast and mercilessly.

And she wanted that, the painful spin out of control, the hard, tough, impatient hands scraping her skin, the relentless, almost brutal mouth feeding on her.

She found his flesh—hot, smooth. The hay beneath her was prickly, abrading her skin and adding one more reeling sensation. The sound of her clothes tearing under his frantic hands, hands that streaked back to squeeze and probe and possess, was unreasonably erotic.

She could hear herself cry out, hear her own short, harsh panting, each gasp of shock and pleasure. Helpless as a raft on a storm-tossed sea, she rolled, thrashed, and gave herself over to fate.

Every time her hands gripped him, those neat lady’s nails biting in, his blood swam. Each time she whimpered, moaned, his pulses whipped. The first time her body convulsed and his name—his name—burst like a sob through her lips, his head reeled.

He could see every fresh shock in her eyes, those clouded gray storms that widened, unfocused, closed on a throaty moan. No one had given her this, of that he could be sure. No one had taken her where he would take her. Of all the things she’d been given, all the places she’d traveled in her privileged life, this was new. Though some part of him, deeply buried, hurt that this was all he could offer, he would make it enough for tonight.

For tonight, and as long as it lasted, he would and could be to her what no one had ever been.

He could feel every dark flash of new pleasure sing through her body and explode inside his own. He could hear her shocked gasps, and swallow them. He could take more, still more, and make her arch violently against him in desperate greed. And that delicate ivory skin, so smooth, so fragrant, dewed with the clean sweat of good sex.