Beautiful Sacrifice

erection, setting fire to everything.
    “I’ve been hard since the first time I saw you.” His voice was more a growl than words. “You get to me like no one since…”
    “Pauline?”
    Deliberately his teeth closed over Lina’s full bottom lip. “We were teenagers. More hormones than brains. The way you reach into me as an adult scares me almost as much as it turns me on.”
    She pulled back a little, just enough to see his eyes clearly. Black rims around the iris, shards of silver and blue of every shade radiating out from the pupil, an intensity that staggered her.
    “It’s the same for me,” she said. “I need you in too many ways. I don’t know how to handle the other needs, but this one…” She arched into him again. “This one can be satisfied.”
    Hunter’s smile was slow and hot. “We sure can try.”
    He looked at her for a long moment while the air crackled between them, lamplight poured over them, and bright dust motes pulsed around them with each breath. The electric dance of the pulse in her neck and the smell of her skin filled him as surely as Suzanne’s death had emptied him. Suddenly everything inside Hunter was too strong, too much to be held by his skin. He needed something else surrounding him, holding him deep.
    He needed Lina.
    His mouth pressed hard against hers, as demanding as his arms pulling her so close they breathed each other. His fingers ran though the black tide of her hair and he groaned with the perfection of her—hot, woman, his.
    Lina’s fingertips dug into Hunter’s back as they fought a sensual battle for control of the embrace. Neither won. Both won. His skin beneath his shirt was tight, hard, yet supple overmuscles in a way that shouted he was male. She gloried in it, demanded it, let her hips move against him, and shuddered at the wonder of it. When one of his legs shifted to press between her thighs, breath hissed in. Hers. His. Both.
    He turned and braced her against the wall even as her arms locked around him in demand. Their mouths ate at each other, sucked, savored, devoured, needing more and always more. She tried to say something, anything, but all she managed were throaty sounds of hunger and pleasure.
    “You—I—we—” Her mind scattered when he bit her neck with exquisite care.
    “Oh yeah.” His voice was deep, hoarse. “Us. Damn, sweetheart. It’s going to be so good. You want us straight up now or in the bed as fast as we can get there?”
    She gave him a dazed look, eyes huge and dark with gold flashing unexpectedly when the light caught her just right.
    “God, you’re beautiful,” he said roughly.
    “I—it’s you.” She shook her head and fought to breathe. “Bed. I can barely stand up.”
    “Your knees hurt?” Hunter asked, concern shadowing the fire in his body.
    “What knees?” she asked with an odd laugh. “It’s not the bruises making me shaky. It’s you.”
    He bent to kiss her hard and deep, but stopped. If he started here, they wouldn’t get to bed the first time. Hell, maybe even the second.
    He breathed out a rough word. “You’re killing me here.”
    She glanced down his body and smiled, feeling less shaky, less blindsided by the heat burning through her.
    “Those jeans look tight enough to bruise.” Lina’s hands reached for the steel buttons on his fly. “Let me see if you’re hurt.”
    With a strangled laugh, he grabbed her hands and led herdown a short hallway. The bedroom was like the house, small. Or maybe it was the bed that took up more than its share of the room.
    Before Lina could draw a breath, Hunter dropped her in the middle of the mattress and followed her down, landing over her in a sprawl of muscle and heat.
    “Gotcha,” he said.
    She smiled and slid one hand between their bodies to find him, rub against him, digging her fingernails into denim, flesh hot and hard beneath, and his breath shuddered. “Gotcha right back.”
    “I’m trying to slow down.”
    “I’ll tell you if you go too fast.”
    “Promise?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    She barely got the word out before his long fingers had the business jacket off her shoulders and down to her elbows. He tugged her blouse out of the matching slacks. She tried to help him, but kept getting distracted by her own need to get his clothes off so that she could enjoy him. The fact that her jacket was around her elbows didn’t help. She felt her bra suddenly loosen and then his mouth was on her, licking and nibbling at her breasts. When