The massive male tugged her towards the bed. Claire was spun about and pressed down on her belly, her legs left dangling towards the floor. A hand raked almost too hard down her spine, the pulsing head of his cock positioned at her folds. He did not press in. Instead, Shepherd slapped her; his palm met the full roundness of her ass and left it red and stinging as she cried out in surprise. His hips surged, and in the midst of her yelp he speared her with the entirety of his girth.

“You are so fucking wet, yet still dare to pretend that you don’t want this? That you need to be forced?” he roared, gripping her hips even as she presented, arching her back in instinctual invitation. Roughly, he pulled her back to meet each thrust, Claire mewling into the covers, falling into the drugged delirium where she could fade away and forget.

The second her mind grew free of petty feeling and thought, Shepherd took his cock away, flipping her over.

Blazing silver eyes met hers. “Do you want me to continue to fuck you?”

Her eyes glued to the shining, throbbing thickness that he should be burying inside her again and again and again, she snarled, “Yes!”

The man stood there, panting, eyes blazing, with her slick all over his groin… and simply did nothing.

Claire pounded her fist against the mattress and looked up with furious, half-dilated eyes. There was a snarl, her own version of the growl, and she launched herself at him to take back the only thing she had left to ease the pain. The sound of her demand inspired the man manipulating the situation to his liking. Shepherd took her in his arms, plunging his cock slow and deep where she ached, and watched Claire’s silent pleas for more.

Kept just at the border of the insensibility she craved, like he knew her game, Shepherd moved with decided cunning in the dissection of her avoidance of what they were and why he mated her—forcing Claire to recognize who offered her carnal satisfaction, what he felt like against her, and how much she loved it.

Without the frenzy, there was no void, there was no loss of self. Claire knew in her bones that he was knowingly denying her the only escape she had left by making love when she only wanted to fuck.

Shepherd smiled like a man standing in the bliss of heaven, whispered to her so she had to recognize his voice, and controlled every thrust no matter how she squirmed or rocked her hips. There was no escaping him or the pleasure.

Her mind grasped the irony with each tender stroke that the one thing she’d fought to preserve when Shepherd first took her had been her sense of self… until he broke her. Now all she wanted, now that her world was so dark, was to forget that identity and waste away.