He surged into her, all heat and fire, a steel sword, spreading lightning through fire. She cried out, pushing back, needing to impale herself on that wonderful weapon. He wasn’t gentle. It was rough. Brutal even. But the hands at her hips steadied her, and his voice, so velvet smooth, murmured to her.

“You’re so beautiful, Evangeline. So perfect. You feel like heaven. Scorching hot. Tight. So tight, malyutka, like a vise made of the hottest silk.”

He kept moving in her and all she could do was try to breathe through the fire consuming her. Her breath came in ragged pants. She wept, but knew it was for joy. Joy for her leopard and for herself. Because she had this man.

“Ya tebya lyublyu.”

She knew he’d told her he loved her. He’d done that more than once. She’d never said it back, not a single time, but she knew she did. She hadn’t wanted to give that much of herself away, to be so vulnerable to a shifter male. She hadn’t been nearly as courageous as she wanted to be. Love was something she hadn’t believed in until Alonzo. Until he’d walked into her bakery and taken over her heart.

She tried. “I . . .” A streak of fire burst through her and deep inside she coiled tighter and tighter, the fiery friction taking her higher than she’d ever been. “Love.” She got that out. It came out on a sob.

His fingers flexed. He paused, his cock buried deep. So deep. So thick, swelling more, expanding in her until he was pushing at the walls of her sheath, so she could feel his heart beating inside of her.

“You,” she managed.

She knew he heard her. That it mattered to him. That her ragged admission was truly from her heart and that it had been difficult for her. He understood her, and it mattered, those three little words.

For a moment he laid his body over hers, so his heart beat deep inside her feminine channel and she could feel that same heartbeat against her back as his lips brushed the nape of her neck and then her shoulder. “No one in my life has ever said that to me. Mean it, Evangeline. Mean it or don’t say it.”

The terrible fire of the Han Vol Dan was everywhere, in every one of the cells of her body, burning out of control, a raging firestorm, and yet in that moment, there was utter calm, as if the eye of the storm were over them. She felt his every breath. The need in him. The fear to believe. She realized he was far more vulnerable than she could ever be. Holding himself still. Surrounding himself with ice. Inside and out, her man was totally a fortress but for her. To her he made himself completely and utterly vulnerable.