The moment her soft lips brushed against his, the darkest, most primitive shade of red fired through his clenching core, that intense color embodying a visceral influx of insatiable hunger. A deep-seated desire that could not be contained or denied as it raked its amorous claws through his insides. It permeated his headspace, exploding through his bloodstream like a rapid-fire quick to ignite, its intensity burgeoning amid several quickening heartbeats, thickening his shaft with pulsating need, until all he could focus on—fixate on—was possessing his gentle, intoxicating blue.

Don seized Elle's waist and hoisted her up, their mouths interlocked as he repositioned her thighs to straddle his lap, her series of skirts crowding her bare knees.

"All mine," he growled huskily against the seam of her trembling lips, grasping her face as tenderly as he could muster despite the concentrated heat burning through his lower belly.

Any gentleness he attempted was short-lived, for heightened aggression bled into his roving touch and their open-mouthed kiss, his large muscles tensing as the provocative impulse to match her honey with unyielding iron magnified the second her lithe tongue rolled against his. The irresistible urge to seat himself fully and unapologetically between her milky-white thighs vastly overrode his prerequisite to move at a tentative pace given her innocence and inexperience.

Don had resisted her all this time, but now, she was fucking his, his to mark and ravage the only way he knew how—with an intensity that toed the line of depravity.

She smiled against his impassioned mouth, meeting his ardor with that innate softness that only she could give—entrusting their kiss with a sweetening quality he was feverishly inclined to subdue.

Don gripped the nape of her neck as he thrust his tongue assertively against hers, any efforts to replicate her gentleness disintegrating as the ungodly pressure building in his lower regions seethed with hardness, coaxing him to devour and bruise. To corrupt and ruin. To respond with dark undertones of ferocity and greed, inserting just enough darkness to appease his beastly counterpart.

He drew back to examine her closely, their labored breaths mingling as he assessed her rosy, swollen lips and the deep flush spanning her alabaster skin. "My red becomes you, Nymph."

Her dark eyes glimmered warmly back at him, her small, trusting smile doing more for him than she could ever imagine. "My blue agrees with you, Beast."

Don emitted a deep, resounding noise in the back of his throat. It rang low and animalistic between them, a strong and sturdy vibration that heralded danger, that guttural caveat serving to demonstrate how quickly his self-control was precariously slipping with every infinitesimal second, but as Elle was conditioned to do, she made no move to scramble from his lap. There were no reservations in her soft, brown eyes peppered with gold save for a lingering shyness and a staggering desire reinforced by a profound and honest love that mirrored his heart.

He reclaimed her luscious mouth, this time kissing her harder, implementing just enough roughness to test the murky waters. To ease her into his dark pool of erotic awakening. To give her a taste of the ravenous need lurking behind the seductive pull and press of his lips, but to his astonishment, Elle reciprocated that roughness, her sultry lips and tongue equally demanding, matching his forceful rhythm with a sensual finesse that struck him in awe.

A thrill of excitement vaulted through him as he reached up and cupped her left breast, her breath catching on his tongue as his fingers began to knead and caress, manipulating the sensitive bud into a stiffened point. It strained beneath the fabric of her dress, eager for his touch—his mouth—making him wonder if her jutting nipples were a dusky pink or a delicate red.

As if privy to his desirable thoughts, Elle arched further into his amative caress, his fondling fingers creating a stimulating resistance he was more than keen to give. His tongue dipped and curled against hers, that undulating motion urging her shapely hips—and the junction of her thighs—tortuously closer to his straining thickness, evoking a delicious friction that incited a tremor of longing to shudder through his tightly wound body.

She was soft and responsive in his grazing hands, her desire shaping and climbing with every orchestrated touch. Her sensual kindling created a fever pitch in his blood and a violent urge to rip her dress from her lithe body and fuck her senselessly. Something he had yearned to do the moment he spotted her beneath the waxing moon, wandering fearlessly with no sight. He trembled with the effort to move gingerly, to offer her softness, something she unconditionally deserved but he was ill-equipped to give, not when she tasted—and responded—so fucking perfectly.

There was nothing finer or more exquisite than witnessing her carnal awakening and watching her fall apart at the ends of his fingertips.

"Say you're mine, Nymph." His voice was a throaty plea as his fingers tweaked and pinched her raised nipple. "I need to be inside you." He shifted his hips, grinding his raging erection against the inner core of her femininity. "Say that I can have you—that I can make you mine forever."

"I'm yours, Don," Her reply was quick, her soft pants stirring against his lips, her nails scaling and scraping his biceps, digging deep, and drawing blood. "You can have me."

He hissed a harsh expletive against her embracing lips, the presence of pain and blood galvanizing his desire to the cusp of abandonment, precum leaking from the tip of his rigid member. As she clawed and clung to his taut muscles, he welcomed the delicate sting of her imprint, the cutting graze of her sharpened fingers slowly leaching the aggression from his rustic bones, creating a pleasurable release from the anguish entrenched in his soul.

Don's grip tightened around her slight breast; the mound was small but fit perfectly in the palm of his hand. When she broke their kiss to tilt her head back, his eyes locked heatedly on her drumming pulse. "You should never offer your throat to a starving beast, my darling." To emphasize his meaning, he leaned down and nipped at her flesh, watching through hooded eyes as that ivory patch of skin bloomed a delicious tint of red.

Before the night was through, she would bear his color.

Her breath hitched, and it was the sweetest, most tortuous fucking sound to his ears, making him wonder what acoustics she would sing when she was writhing on his cock, her inner walls squeezing his remarkable thickness as he emptied his release.

The titillating image of Elle spread wide and naked like a feast beneath him, and the thought of her belly increasing with his child roused an involuntary groan from his throat, making his rock-hard appendage jerk against the ties of his breeches. It was almost enough to forsake his control and send him careening over the edge.

"Elle... fuck..." Don croaked, sinking deeper into the tantalizing red, his supplicating timbre his final attempt to spare her from the depraved notions churning through his head. "You value your softness," he pressed a rough kiss to the hollow of her throat, dragging his tongue over her leaping pulse to indulge in her skin, "but I have moved and lived with hardness for too long to offer you tenderness." He parted, his gaze dropping hungrily to her delicate mouth, his restraint nearly imploding as he pictured those pouty lips wrapped around the base of his cock, her throat taking him deep as he filled that slender column with his seed. "You are at risk for that roughness, my sweet." He all but growled the latter.

"I'll take what I need, my heart." To stress his point, he reached up and gripped her throat, applying just enough pressure to the fragile rhythm underneath. "I want you to fight me. Rebuke me. Give me the resistance I crave." Their gazes met and held, her rapid breaths masking his misshapen lips as he waited for her reply. His nostrils flared, inhaling hints of jasmine as he probed her molten eyes for traces of fear or doubts that implied an unwillingness to resume this path of corruption.

Elle did nothing to wrestle from his grip, but when she reached up to palm the indecent side of his face, he stiffened, unprepared for her mollifying touch. "I may not know much about lovemaking or have the experience," she started breathlessly, her small fingers reverently tracing his scars with immobilizing tenderness, "but I too have lived with enough hardness in my personal insecurities to recognize that it is not your affinity for roughness that frightens me, but your readiness to conceal that hardship from me. My feelings will not change, Don, I am committed to loving all of you, even the broken parts."

"And what if those broken parts wanted to hurt you?" Don asked, his inflection hardening. "What if you became my mitigation for pain?" The rage that he lived and breathed every single day had been his one outlet for the underlying pain and suffering that had plagued him for two decades. What if he shifted that inner pandemonium onto her? What if she became his outlet for that anguish?

"Is that such a horrid thing?" Elle asked gently, listing her head to the side. "To be your refuge? Your haven?"

"How does that make me any different from Seraphine, who aimed to use you in a similar fashion, but for power?"

She swiped her thumb across his bristled cheek and smiled, "Because you love me, and your heart is pure, despite your prickly barbs."

He smirked, "You would not consider my thoughts so pure if you knew what I was thinking."

Her smile widened. "I'm listening."

His grin slipped. "I want to make love to you, Nymph, and I want to fuck you. There is a considerable distinction between the two. I want to damage that beautiful, faultless skin until our scars are aligned. I want to instill just enough dark matter to make you imperfect. Until there is no mistaking that you are mine. I mean to corrupt and defile you in a way so no man will presume that you are uncommitted, and I mean to do so with the aggression that floods my veins."

"Then perhaps you should elaborate further," Elle stated in a resolute tone, her tongue darting out to wet her reddened lips, the coquettish gesture making his throbbing staff flinch. "In what way do you intend to corrupt and defile me?"

His expression darkened, the dark pupils of his eyes expanding with a pronounced heat, his rapturous reply falling soft and dangerous against her anticipating lips. "In a way that would be deemed unkind, my reckless one."

She considered his words, that pensive silence worming its way into his bundled nerves, forcing him on tenterhooks. When she reached up, he tensed, not expecting her fingers to delicately graze the rough contours of his mouth. "Then what keeps you, my dark heart? Defile me. Ruin me. Inflict your detrimental touch."

Don shook his head, his hands falling to seize her waist in a bruising grip. "And if I hurt you beyond repair?"

Her mouth formed a mischievous grin. "Mayhap I'll hurt you, for even thorns tend to break."

His lips twitched, "Indeed, Nymph. You have all the power to break me. To make me yield. Never forget that. You can cage this beast, and I will not resist you."

She held his burning stare. "Why would I do that when I aim to set you free?"

Don inhaled a stuttering breath, madly and completely besotted by this woman, giving her the space of a few stunned heartbeats to reconsider. That was all he could manage before his hand curled around the back of her neck and he wrenched her close, slamming his mouth brutally upon hers.

******************

Elle had hardly taken a breath before he regained possession of her lips, kissing her with all that aggression and intensity that he went into raptures about, one hand firmly grasping her chin and slanting it in a way that gave him better access to her mouth. She moaned against his fitted scar, that unique deformity emboldening her to emulate his hardness, her sharp nails making ribbons of his flesh, lines of red scoring the taut skin beneath his loose linen.

When they came up for air, a visible change stole over him, as if someone had lifted a veil, unmasking a breathtaking force. His ghostly eyes were bright and magnetic, moving seductively over her ruddy face, missing nothing and wanting everything. It was like staring into the eyes of a poised predator, his sheer animalistic magnetism luring her in, that masculine energy enveloping her like a dark embrace.

She would be lying if she said that intensity didn't incite a shred of unease; truthfully, it was both exhilarating and daunting to be the focus of such unrestrained hunger—to be at the mercy of such blatant desire. There was a danger to be heeded in that arresting, white-hot gaze, a virile energy that had swiftly and ruthlessly dispatched others to a premature grave.

But Elle was not afraid—indeed, it was that savage allure that lit her soul aflame, but she did have reservations of her own.

What if Don found her wanting? What if her inadequacies made her a poor lover? What if she couldn't please him in return?

"This is a lovely garment, little one." His hands bunched in her dress, the threadbare fabric rending with a slight tug. "'Tis unfortunate that it won't withstand the evening."

Her former self—the shy and heedful Elle—would have balked at such a suggestive remark. She would have shrunk from his possessive inflection and recognized the danger to her maidenhead in the solid hardness twitching against her core, but she was no longer that reticent girl. She wanted to see and feel what Don would do with all that indelicate steel.

His arm tightened against her spine, their prolonged kiss far from tender and soft. It was full-bodied and demanding. A heaving of burning lungs and a meshing of impatient lips. It was an unstoppable collision of melding limbs and raw need that neither of them had the will to resist.

When Elle felt a sudden draft waft across her bare calf, she startled, breaking apart to find his hand slipping beneath the hem of her frayed skirts.

Their ragged breaths clashed feverishly as she met his hooded gaze, finding moonlight burnished in a sheen of simmering heat, her mouth falling ajar and her belly tightening as his fingers grazed her naked thigh, that innocuous touch belying the firestorm in his eyes as they drifted lazily over her face, taking in her flushed features.

"You feel as soft as you look," his voice dropped an octave, his breath falling warm and intimate against her mouth as he nuzzled the inside of her thigh, his fingers inching closer to her pulsating center. His touch was slow and tortuous, ringing a needy whimper from her throat as she nudged her hips closer, craving his touch like her next strangled breath, needing his fingers inside her, stroking and teasing parts of her no man had touched before.

Although they were not skin-to-skin, Don was a massive wall of heat, his garments straining against thick muscles chiseled like rough-hewn stone.

"Do you want this?" he rasped, his fingers pausing on the fleshy part of her upper leg, his voice parchment thin as he searched her eyes with a wild energy, waiting with bated breath for her consent.

Her heart thrashed in her chest, every part of her sensitized to his invigorating touch. "Yes."

His mouth shifted to her ear, his hoarse breaths stirring wisps of her hair as his lips grazed her delicate lobe. "What do you want, Nymph?"

She squirmed on his lap, the ache in her loins intensifying, her breasts heaving against his upper body. "I want you to touch me."

He held her gaze as his hand resumed its descent, reaching the apex of her quivering thighs. When his fingers delicately brushed against her warm center, she gasped, her legs tensing.

"Here?" Don breathed huskily, his eyes flicking hungrily to her mouth as he teased her opening.

Elle wet her dry lips and nodded jerkily, unsure what to expect but knowing that she wanted more—needed more.

As he slipped a finger inside her, she clutched at his broad shoulders, stiffening at the initial intrusion, unprepared for the uncomfortable sensation. But it wasn't long before he was moving, sliding his finger deeper, her inner walls clamping around him as he began to stroke and tease, the rough pad of his finger strumming a hard rhythm that heightened the pressure at the base of her spine. As he pumped his finger in and out of her channel, focusing ruthlessly on some secret part of her, she bucked against his hand, the spine-tingling motion almost too much for her to bear as a feral tension crawled through her tightening limbs.

When he inserted a second finger, her sharp breath of surprise was seized on his tongue as he captured her mouth once more, kissing her brutally enough to render blood as he coaxed a release from her body, a warm sensation flooding her lower regions as he ravished her lips.

Don bit down on her lower lip, her cry of pain muffled in his demanding kiss as he murmured, "So wet for me."

Elle froze against him, wrenching free of his mouth as embarrassment burned through her belly. "Wet?"

With his fingers fixed inside her, he met her horrified gaze and smiled reassuringly, "It is nothing to be ashamed of, my sweet; 'tis your body's natural response to being aroused."

She swallowed, her inquisitive eyes flitting to his pitted mouth. "Are you... aroused?"

His gaze turned half-mast, something intense sparking through his pale depths. "Allow me to demonstrate, my fallen petal."

When Don withdrew his fingers, she groaned in disappointment to find her pleasure thwarted, but that objection was brief as she watched in utter astonishment as he licked her moisture clean from his glistening fingers.

A different kind of heat ignited behind her ears, another burn entirely settling in the pit of her belly. She failed to process the hugely lewd—but wildly erotic—act before his large hands slipped beneath her undergarments and closed around her bare bottom.

Elle squeaked in surprise as he scooped her up, lifting her easily before repositioning her aching center over his heavy erection.

Her eyes widened, her hands splaying across his rising chest as she felt the full impression of his impossibly hard appendage prodding her slick center. He was fully clothed as he rocked against her, the hard ridge of his cock applying just enough friction to kindle her pleasure tenfold, the force of it gaining momentum like a voracious flame.

"That's right, sweetheart," the tendons of his neck strained as he matched her undulating motion, his fingers squeezing her buttocks. "Ride my cock. Give me your release." He reached between them, his fingers sinking into her damp passage as she oscillated her hips, his coarse digits working back and forth, her petite frame bowing as an earth-shattering orgasm shuddered through her body.

Her head fell back in a silent cry of ecstasy, Don's guttural curse falling on her open mouth as she climaxed on his throbbing staff.

Had it not been for his hands gripping her firmly, Elle was certain she would have tumbled to the floor. Her muscles loosened, the peak of her pleasure melting into a listless numbness as she steadily reconciled with her bearings and recovered her senses.

It was only when she gained clarity that she realized what she had done—or rather, what she hadn't.

Don gripped her face, noticing her considerable pause and drawing her focus center. "You have nothing to be ashamed of. Do you understand, Nymph? There is no shame to be had in taking your pleasure."

Elle shook her head. "It is not that."

He frowned, "What is it, my heart?"

She swallowed, her heart thumping hard in her breast as she fought to find her courage. "I-I..." Her eyes dropped between them, where his rigid member nestled between the crook of her thighs. "I failed to please you."

His expression softened. "Elle, you please me immensely."

Again, she shook her head, "No, I mean..." She shifted her weight, drawing attention to where their bodies embraced, the mere fabric of his breeches preventing them from taking their intimacies further.

As realization dawned, his visage darkened, heat blazing anew in his electric eyes, and before she knew it, Don was in motion.

He rose to his feet, cradling her flush against his body as he straightened to his towering height before depositing her on the soles of her slippers.

When he released her, Elle retreated a few steps to drag a breath into her lungs, her eyes hastening over his impressive build, feeling that familiar tug in her loins as he reached up and yanked his tunic over his head, exposing the massive expanse of his muscular chest.

Her mouth instantly went dry.

"I sought to slake your pleasure." Don's voice was rough, like crushed stone, his mercurial gaze voraciously caressing the length of her body, his hunger by no means sated as he stated in a gravelly tone. "And now I intend to take mine."

Her heart jolted in her sternum as he stalked closer, his following words making her pulse spike with excitement.

"Run, Nymph." He took another step toward her, the wolfish gleam in his eyes igniting her blood on fire. "For when I catch you, I intend to fuck you."