He was so large that he very quickly filled her entire field of vision. He had a shock of long, unkempt wavy red hair and a full—but surprisingly well trimmed—beard of the same color. Starkly blue eyes never wavered from hers, although he managed to casually counter every move she made while trying to extricate herself as if she was broadcasting them to him, somehow, through silvery hazel ones that couldn't seem to look away from the part of him that she knew represented her downfall more so than any other.

Forcing herself to look anywhere else, her gaze rose over him. His face bore scars of other battles, undoubtedly—a long, ugly one by his left eye that hinted at the idea he might well have come close to losing it, and another, deeper looking one on his cheek, the end of which was buried in his beard.

She wondered—erratically—how many others his facial hair covered.

He was solid muscle from the neck down, shoulders and arms bulging with them beneath the clingy shirt he was wearing that seemed barely able to contain them. It was holey and ripped and appeared to be made of much less than the best of materials, which, if she had been in her right mind, would have made her curious. He was obviously a successful man—why would he choose to wear inferior garments?

"Do you like what you see, little termagant?" he asked with a grin.

Embarrassed that he'd caught her staring, Ebby furiously tried to work up a mouthful of spit to hurl at him, but she was too dry for that—and she wasn't sure whether or not that was a good thing.

She thought he was going to lift her into the air again, but then she had to abruptly discontinue her highly improper inspection of him because he was gently but insistently turning her ankle—not so subtly implying that she should turn onto her tummy if she wanted to avoid a broken ankle.

And, although she resisted as long as she could, she knew she couldn't afford any kind of serious injury if she was ever going to get away from him, so she capitulated as quietly and efficiently as she could, somehow ending up feeling even more vulnerable than she had when she was naked on her back before him. It turned out that that was for good reason, since he didn't stop tugging on her until she was close enough to lift onto a knee he'd bent specifically for that purpose.

Before she knew it, Ebby was bent in half, hanging over his formidably thick thigh. He was so tall—and she so small—that her extremities barely touched the ground, even when he carefully placed his other leg over hers, trapping them against his bent leg, reaching down to clamp a hand none too gently at the base of her skull, rendering her essentially immobile with an ease that made her want to cry.

She wasn't at all sure what it was that he was up to, but she was relatively certain she didn't want to find out, especially since this position—so close to him and so terribly vulnerable—was causing her to want to rub herself indecently against him just to find some kind—any kind—of relief from the aggravating, mind-numbing ache that was pulsing between her legs.

And then she felt it and couldn't control a startled scream as his hand began to connect with her bare bottom in what quickly became a frightfully consistent rhythm.

"This is but a taste, little girl," he rasped down at her. "You're going to get a thorough spanking just to let you know what you can expect any time you don't obey my orders to the letter."

With that, he said nothing else as he relentlessly assaulted her small but generous behind and down the backs of her thighs as far as he could reach above his other leg. Each one came very close to making her cry out again—especially the longer it went on—not in surprise, but in pure pain. But Ebby clamped her teeth together and refused to make another sound, no matter the provocation.

To her deep humiliation, she was only able to honor that vow to herself for another few minutes as he slowly, relentlessly dismantled her ability to resist vocalizing her distress. At first, it was soft whimpers as he continued that horrible rise and tremendous, cracking fall of his palm against flesh she couldn't cringe away from him, as much as she wanted to. He kept her bottom exactly where he wanted it and her the perfect, helpless target.

From whimpers, it was a very short step to cries, and even sooner, moans. And, although she managed to keep herself from pleading with him to stop—barely—she was wailing loudly with every crisp, stinging swat that landed long before he stopped.

To add more shame to her humiliation, she had been crying almost from the first spank she'd received, her tears mixing with the dark stain of the evidence of her body's desires on the rug beneath her.

When he was through—having found himself almost unbearably aroused by the small, verbal signs of her defeat at his big hands—Ciaran laid her down on her back, ignoring her yelp of protest when her beleaguered backside collided roughly with the rugs, reaching down to lift her up further on them so that he could stretch out atop her when the time was right.

Then he reached for first one ankle, then the other, wrapping her legs around his hips, forcing even her most feminine parts to spread open obscenely beneath him as he brought them closer and closer to his weeping manhood.

Suddenly, coming out of the haze of anguish he had so easily reduced her to, Ebby realized that she was much too close to him—that she was in real danger of losing herself to him. Quickly, she was able to twist herself enough to put her bound hands where she wanted them to be and claim what she wanted, knowing that what she was doing was quite likely going to get her killed. But better dead than subjected to what she knew was coming.

The ravening beast wasn't paying much attention to what she was doing while he was practically drooling on her, running a broad, flat tongue that felt much too good over her heated skin from just above the small triangle of hair to just under her shamefully peaked breast.

Just as he was about to claim the most perfect nipple he'd ever encountered with a mouth that was—as she'd surmised—salivating for want of her, Ciaran was puzzled to feel her bring the arms that had been over her head down quite forcibly, and he grunted as something sharp was stuck into his back, just near his left scapula, followed quickly by the not unfamiliar feeling of blood oozing out of a wound.

Unfortunately for her, his little omega had neither the strength nor the leverage to do much damage. She'd barely given him more than a flesh wound, which he easily ignored as he grabbed her hands, bending them back painfully until she finally let go of the knife, which he then threw well away from them. Ciaran was much angrier at himself for having underestimated her like that—for not having realized that she was a more formidable foe than he'd thought and feeling even more admiration for her than he had before. She'd obviously taken the time, once she was alone in his tent, to hide a knife beneath the rugs, and she'd gone through with her little plan, even though she must've been pretty sure that he'd kill her for attacking him like that.

And yet she'd done it anyway, in a last-ditch attempt to keep herself from becoming his.

It was something that he—if he'd been in her situation—would have done, too—damn the consequences.

She was truly a worthy mate for him—not that he was going to let her misbehavior go unanswered. He couldn't—wouldn't—go easy on her in any way. She would learn who was in charge the hard way, from the beginning, so that there could never be any question, even in what seemed to be her sharp, intelligent mind, about just whom it was who owned every single bit of her.

Without a word, Ciaran stood, taking her with him with a casual hold around her waist as if she was a sack of flour. She continued to try to fight him but he paid her feeble attempts no mind whatsoever, setting her down in front of the center pole of the tent. Despite her writhing and wiggling and trying to heave herself away from him, he had her trussed up to a very high spot on that pole within seconds of having put her there. Then he secured her ankles to cuffs that had been drilled into the wooden floor beneath the carpets, leaving her completely vulnerable, open, forced to remain on her tiptoes in order to relieve the ache in her arms.

As he moved to stand in front of her, Ciaran reached to take something from his bureau, which he unfurled before her eyes, seeing the fear it evoked in her and feeling his cock twitch because of it.

It was a long, worn leather belt that looked as if it had gotten a lot of use in the past, and she was pretty sure that it wasn't used to hold up his pants.

She couldn't prevent how she began to tremble at just sight of it.

"This belt is used to discipline my soldiers, sometimes, when a whip isn't at hand. And being punished as a child would be quite humiliating, which adds to the discomfort." He reached out to catch her chin, looking into her eyes as he asked, "Do you consider yourself a soldier?"

Despite her fear, she met his gaze and spoke defiantly. "Do you see me wearing a uniform? I am merely a female trying to defend herself from rape—"

"You aren't just a female—you're an omega."

Her eyes darted away from his. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Ebby expected to feel the fire of the belt across her backside, but instead, he crouched down and she watched with horror—utterly unable to avoid it—as he raised one finger of his hand, putting it into the steady stream of the dew her body insisted on producing for him, bringing the wet tip to his lips and licking it off as if it was ambrosia. And to Ciaran, it was.

If he allowed himself, he would have been undone by the sweet yet musky taste of her, and this would all have been over much too quickly for the both of them.

But he held himself in iron hard control while he still could, forcing himself to rise and stand behind her again.

It was then that she felt the first vicious stroke land with precise accuracy across her already very sore cheeks, and it tore an agonized scream from her that made the cries of distress she'd issued during the spanking she'd already received seem like she'd been singing a happy tune.

When he spoke, it was in a calm, firm tone. "Don't lie to me, and the next time I see you handling a weapon of any kind, I'll make you wish I'd used the belt."

Ebby couldn't imagine that there could be anything worse than this. She heaved herself against the pole each time the stiff leather descended—not that it helped in the least because it seemed to follow her determinedly, no matter how she tried to avoid it. He was quite expert at using it, too, because, despite its length and heft, it never once struck her on any part of her body other than where he'd intended—those beautiful curves of hers and the backs of her thighs were the only places that suffered, but suffer they did.

Her introduction to his belt was much like the spanking had been in that he was very planned about it—it rose and fell with alarming regularity and terrifying agony. It marched up and down skin that rapidly took on a deep, carmine red, and then, in some places, a darker, almost purple, with military precision.

There was no pretense this time that she could hold back her utterances in the least. She howled uncontrollably from the first to the last, only missing those times when her breath had already been expelled completely from her lungs from the previous slash across her tender flesh.

Ciaran watched her dance at the end of his belt as he applied it ferociously, determined to impress on her what a bad idea it was to try to attack and kill him, even if the idea seemed a bit ridiculous to him. It obviously didn't to her, and that was what mattered. She was his—would soon be quite fully—and he intended that she would learn from the start exactly what he expected of her in the way of correct behavior, and that definitely didn't qualify.

But he made sure that the belt stopped singing before she passed out, watching her very carefully in order to prevent that from happening. He didn't want her to have the bliss of unconsciousness and thus relief from the just punishment he'd given her, and he did want her wide awake for what came next.

Truthfully, though, he might have disciplined her a bit longer, but his body wasn't going to allow him to.

So, he stopped abruptly and put the belt away, hanging it deliberately from another nail on the pole above her, so that it dangled down into her face as a tangible threat that there could easily be more to come. He didn't even think she'd really noticed that the punishment had ended, though, as he rearranged her position to his taste. She was almost suspiciously passive, not showing the slightest sign of resistance as he untied her wrists, then retied them on the other side of the bottom of the pole, where he also wrapped the thick leather collar that was attached to it there around her neck.

The closer he came to having her, the harder it became for him to resist his body's demands to simply take her, to make her his in the most brutal of manners.

But he intended to get as many children off her as possible, and he knew what he had to do in order to achieve the best odds of that, although he'd now set himself a very hard task, considering how torn up her backside was. Bringing her back to pleasure—while still keeping the scale tipped somewhat over into pain—wasn't going to be at all easy.

There was ample evidence that gave him cause to hope, however, in the dark spreading stain that was visible beneath her quim, despite how severely he'd corrected her.

The city-state from whence he had hailed had several omegas, and careful research was being conducted as to how best to get and keep them as fertile as possible. Because he'd always planned to acquire one of those rare gems himself, Ciaran had read some of the conclusions of the doctors who specialized in those studies, and he knew that an omega woman responded best to a firm hand, first and foremost. It was even evident in the very act of breeding her—pain and pleasure, comingled, but pain first.

As he knelt behind her while she was spread wide, bottom offered up to him as a different kind of sacrifice entirely now, head down and kept there—waiting for him—her Alpha—to mount her and take full possession of her, body and soul, he took a deep breath, full of her scent, sniffing loudly.

Ebby wept a bit more obviously at his crass action, but that was about all she could manage in the way of defiance at the moment, although her body was definitely reacting entirely on its own to his nearness, gushing for him, the ache between her legs very close to eclipsing even the agony she'd just endured. Every bit of her wanted her to arch her back, to offer up to him that which would bind her to him, to accept his dominance and submit herself to him.

She fought those urges with everything she had—which, unfortunately, wasn't much after that strapping.

And when his big hand cupped her there—right there—just reached out and literally claimed what he wanted—a long, feminine moan that bespoke of deep, undeniable pleasure was torn from her sore throat.

And his own, much deeper one rumbled out of him in response, making resistance a million times harder.

"You are mine—all of you—but here most importantly. I am the only person who will ever touch you here. Not even you are allowed to touch yourself here."

She didn't say anything to that, but then, he wasn't sure he expected her to. She probably didn't even know what he was talking about in regards to touching herself.

Ciaran loved how wet his hand was becoming—baptized, as he was being, in her delicious cream. She was being held so open that his fingers were already lying between her lips, and he curled the slippery tip of his middle finger over her little nub—just once, very slowly.

Every part of her body keened unabashedly at his bold action. Ebby found herself pressing back against that finger, trying to rub herself on it, but he held her still, stroking her himself and not allowing her to stimulate herself.

She was very nearly lost in the tidal wave of ecstasy he was bringing to her and began moaning almost immediately, until she grasped frantically at the last shred of her autonomy and forced her mouth closed, although it was one of the hardest things she'd ever had to do, and even in that she still failed. Her mouth was still producing those unsettling sounds of sexual desire, but they were quieter, at least.

Again, Ciaran found himself nursing a grudging respect for her, but he was determined not to allow her to continue resisting him in any way and stepped up the speed and manner in which he stroked her, quickly learning what yielded the loudest groans and doing only those things, until her mouth opened again and remained that way as her responses to his efforts grew only louder.

It was those sounds—undeniably—that caused him to lose the fragile grip he was maintaining on his own control. He'd kept himself under as tight a check as he could for as long as he could, but even he was only human, and he wanted her as he'd never wanted anyone or anything before in his life.

So, he took her, when his mind was screaming quietly in the background that he ought to wait, that he ought to bring her along a bit more before he covered her. But—for one of the few times in his life—he let his heavy, throbbing genitals think for him. His need for her overrode everything else, and, seconds later, his hands found their way to her hips, to keep her from moving, and himself buried within her welcoming passage with one powerful thrust.

Ebby was completely unprepared to be stretched open like that—as if around a tree trunk that had lodged itself between her legs—and she squealed her displeasure, finding herself so full of him that she thought he was going to split her open. But then she found a terribly sensitive new spot within herself skewered as if by a nettled barb, causing her to scream—again—and try to heave herself away from him to relieve a different kind of agony from what he'd already brought to her.

The pain cleared her mind slightly, and that was almost worse than being bathed in pleasure as she realized that her worst nightmares were coming true.

She was becoming his, and there was precious little she could do to prevent it.

He was so big that he dwarfed her easily, his entire body surrounding and capturing her as he caused the poor girl so many different types of pain at once that she couldn't really respond to any of them. The fact that he'd wrapped himself around her had mostly immobilized her, but a large hand landed in the middle of her back, just below her waist, forced her to arch herself up to him—just when she wanted to get away from that awful hook of his—so that he could occupy her even further, as if she welcomed his wanton invasion of her and wanted him to do this to her.

Only when he had nudged himself up against the very top of her cunt, did he begin to move within her, each motion—even the slightest—tugging torturously at how she was caught to him. That spike or hook he'd embedded in her was set deep within her and sending waves of anguish through her that if she hadn't been on her knees already would have knocked her to them. The ripples of pleasure that were just underneath the terrible pain weren't close enough to alleviate the frightening torment of the horribly intimate ways she was being pierced by him as he jarred the tent pole with each snap of his hips.

His other hand reached beneath them to pinch her berry red nipples, tugging them down hard in sequence, bringing back some of the maelstrom of bliss she had felt before he had taken over her body, before he left them to apply his fingers between her legs to that same spot he'd touched before, only this time he didn't stop. Ebby found herself panting while attempting to cope with the feelings she was being subjected to, trying to draw a full breath but wholly unable to as she was expertly ridden and fondled and subjected to both an agony and an ecstasy that she didn't want.

And then, it happened. She had thought she had been prised as wide open as she could possibly be, but as she was being forced to a peak she couldn't recognize and didn't expect, so was he, and the bottom of his cock began to swell dramatically, until the pain of being so obscenely stretched eclipsed almost everything else for her.

Ciaran continued to worry that little scrap of flesh, to which her body eagerly responded without her, but her mind wasn't engaged, and when she climaxed around him—which only caused her just that much more discomfort—it was an automatic response to how she was being touched. She felt the pleasurable spasms, but it was as if they were hidden behind a curtain, not quite tangible, whereas the pain of what she was being forced to endure was all too real.

The swelling at the base of his cock—that never seemed as if it was going to stop—as well as having that vicious barb dug into her tender flesh, were very hard on her. They—much more so than the savage slaps of leather across her bottom—set her pleasure back quite a bit, despite the fact that her traitorous body seemed to crave every single thing he was doing to her.

Even out of nearly every single aspect of his mind with the delirium the bond brought to him—unlike anything else he'd ever experienced—he could tell that it had not been the same for her, and that was a problem. She had come, but not very hard. Her body responded because he gave it no choice but to obey him, and, although he was certainly way more than satisfied as he continued to release more and more of his spunk deep inside her, he knew he'd made regular women come harder than she had, which was not at all acceptable. He needed to breed her fully and as often as he could in order to bring her into heat.

Much more quickly than he thought it would—or should—the spurting of his essence at the entrance to her womb began to taper off and the knot began to recede. She wasn't milking him as hard or as long as he thought she could, although it was still as close to paradise as he was likely to get in this lifetime.

But he knew that he could do better for her—and thus for himself—and he intended to do just that.