My heart beat so loudly in my chest, I was sure he could hear the echoing thump thump thump against my ribcage.

Did he know what I was asking? Did I know what I was asking? Before I could let the potential fear kick in, I gave my mind over to my body and lifted my arm to slap him one more time.

He grabbed my wrist in a crushing grip, stalling its progress before I could strike him.

There was no give in that look. Not one. Single. Inch. For the first time, I met his eyes and saw something to fear, but I didn’t fear for myself. That look said he’d been to the brink of insanity and stood just on the good side. One push might send him over. So I swallowed my hurt pride, let him squeeze my wrist a little too tight, and popped up onto my tiptoes to finally taste sin.

But he wouldn’t let me reach his lips. His other hand closed around my throat, not squeezing, but cradling it. I knew he understood exactly what I wanted right now, what I needed right now, and I let him take control.

He spun me to face the wall. His body aligned behind mine, and he released me to rip open the bottom of my shirt. I mourned Cap for a brief second. The rough handling and the loose hold sent the fabric scraps to my ankles. I swallowed the knifepoint of fear threatening to slice open the moment and bleed it dead. No. He wanted me, and I wanted him. I didn’t expect it like this, but I was in no way unwilling. My pants were next as he roughly shoved them to my feet along with my panties.

“Put your hands on the wall and don’t move,” he said in my ear. More growl than an actual directive.

I spread my arms out and anchored my fingertips in the brick, the scratchy grooves between the rectangles giving me something to anchor to. It should have felt like a police frisking. Cold and unmovable, with my bare ass out and him completely clothed behind me.

The heat of his body through his clothes warmed me, excited me, aroused me in a way I didn’t know was possible.

I cleared my throat to speak, but he clamped a hand over my mouth.

“Don’t. If you want to stop, you have to explicitly say stop. No matter what happens or how many rounds you think we’ve gone. Do you understand? When you say stop, I will let you go completely.” He released his hold over my mouth and buried his face into the back of my hair. “Tell me to stop. Tell me to stop now,” he begged.

My body reacted before my mind and reached around to hold the back of his neck. I wasn’t going to say stop. He’d started this, and now, he was going to have to see it through.

“Put your hand back on the wall,” he snapped after a second of us standing, breathing, beating together.

The fear left me. He was in control and some dark twisted part of me liked it that way. To surrender to him. To give up that gnawing part of my always questioning mind.

At the same time, it wasn’t always like this. We had been in a reverse position only hours before and both of us wrangled for control then too. It seemed this time he’d won. Next time I would.

His hands traced the curves of my bare hips, and I caught a whisper in a foreign language I didn’t recognize. Right now, I couldn’t ask what it meant, but I filed away the information for later.

He slid those long fingers over the curves of my thighs to my core, only inches from touching the part of me that ached for it. “Do you know what I’m going to do to you?”

He didn’t want an answer, so I stayed silent, cheek pressed against the wall. Instead of reaching between my thighs, he released me all together, but kept his lips near my ear, the only bit of him touching me now. “Go to my bed. Ass in the air. Do it now.”

I scuttled with my pants around my ankles and paused long enough to untangle them and toss them away. I pushed open his bedroom door and went straight to the bed. Once my hips were centered over my ankles, I risked a glance back at him. Something had softened in his face. No. I didn’t want that. He needed this release, and so did I.

When I shifted to move off the bed, the hard edges returned to his gaze. “Don’t you dare fucking move.”

I froze and put my knee back in place, but it was too late. He stalked across the room and struck my bare ass with his open palm in one hard thwack. The pain bloomed slowly as the sharp initial sting released. That bloom heated me thoroughly. He put a hand on either hip. I wanted to look back, see his face, but I kept my head forward.

“Izzy,” he whispered.

I rolled over and tucked my hips under to land on my ass. His eyes glistened softly. “I can’t give you what you want.”

Not a fucking option. I scooted and bounced myself off the bed until I stood chest to chest with him. “Do we need to run through this again?”

He blinked, and I squared my shoulders and slapped his face again. His jaw clenched and his lips tightened, but he didn’t move, or say anything.

I reached out to do it again but he grabbed my wrist, hard, like I wanted it.

Before I knew it, he’d spun me around, shoved my face in the coverlet, and pushed inside me hard and fast. I was wet and thought I was ready for that invasion, but nothing could have prepared me.

He held my upper back, pressing me into the bed, and fucked me with what I could only assume was decades of pent-up anger and frustration.

Each shove of his hard length inside me was accompanied by a hard exhale, and the sound made me more wet for him. I could only keep my mouth and nose free to breathe and hang on to the bedding as he pounded into me. He took up a harder rhythm and moved the hand that had been holding my back up to join the other to clutch my hips.

I took a gasping breath as now he had the leverage to yank me back into him until the entire length of his cock was stuffed inside me. Then he stopped.

I exhaled, shaking, and then stilled and waited. What would he do next? I’d told him no anal, but right now I might have even negotiated that. Not to mention the fact that he was fucking me bareback, and we hadn’t even had that conversation. It felt illicit and sensual.

He flexed his fingers around my hips, digging them in one by one so they curled up to my hipbones. I jerked back as he slid one of them forward between my legs and passed his index finger over my aching neglected clit.

“You feel so good,” he whispered, drawing me toward him now, moving in and out of me slowly with the time of his fingers playing music on my body.

It was as if the rage was gone and the gentleman Dorian returned. I risked a glance around to see his eyes focused on where his cock slid in and out of me. No indifference there at least. The look was something I hadn’t seen on his face before. Even when he’d pounded into my face in his entryway. This was reverence and worship and the fucking way to my heart.

I turned back to focus on the bedding. His dick pulling me apart, his fingers rubbing me closer and closer to orgasm. I focused so hard, it began to slip away. He must have noticed the shift in me, because he removed his hand at my core and placed it back on my hips. Another second passed, and he carefully slipped from my body, flipped my hips to the side, and then dragged me toward him. I loved a man who knew how to handle a woman’s body.

He opened my legs, climbed between them, and was inside me again. The weight of him on my belly and chest, and the ability to look into his eyes, made the act deeper, more meaningful. The exact opposite of what I was going for.

The bastard caught that too and leaned down to kiss me. Hard and fast, gone in seconds, but the press of his lips lingered. I opened my eyes and let out a sigh. “Get off.”

He blinked but continued his slow and steady entry and retreat into my body. As if he had it timed on some internal clock.

“I’m not feeling this anymore, get off.”

The corner of his lip quirked up and a prick of fear shot through me along with a wave of adrenaline and splash of curiosity-laced arousal. He raised an eyebrow, daring me to push him away.

I tried, pushing his chest, but he didn’t move. “I told you to get off,” I said with no real heat, my pussy already flooded with new interest.

He said nothing, did nothing but stared into my eyes. I opened my mouth to repeat myself, knowing he wouldn’t do anything, not caring either way, and then he smashed his hand across my lips, the edge of his palm under my nose leaving barely enough room to breathe. And between seconds my entire body lit with fire like I’d never known. Every inch of my skin woke up and tuned to the way he slowly rocked his hips forward, the scent of his hand that smelled like my arousal, and the way his eyes darkened above me.

Fuck, Gray.

He picked up the pace, and I gasped and moaned and writhed under his hand. He dragged his own lip between his teeth as I darted my tongue out, licking the inside of his fingers while I stared into his eyes. After a minute, his pace took an unsteady rhythm, and the knowledge he was close to coming ratcheted my looming orgasm even higher. He let go of my mouth and braced his hands on either side of me now, arching his back so his face remained close to stare into my eyes.

“Do you want to stop?” he asked. It wasn’t a real question. The wet heat gripping him tight was enough for him to know that.

“If you stop now, I might just figure out a way to kill you, Gray.”

He smiled. A new smile. One I hadn’t seen before. With teeth and those damnable full lips, and its sexiness practically punched me in the gut.

“Are you close?” he asked, his breathing going erratic now.

“Yes,” I managed, reaching around to hold on to his ribs, digging my nails in as he surged faster and harder into me.

One second I hovered at the edge of it, and then I fell in. Like walking off a safe stable ship deck into a roiling ocean. I held onto Gray through the storm. He collapsed on top of me, all his weight wrapped in my arms as he surged inside me again and again and again. Then finally he stopped, his entire body quaking with an unsteady exhale.

The silence in the room was unsettling after the noise of our lovemaking. I blinked back to reality, releasing my hold on him. He didn’t move, and I couldn’t help but chuckle as he laid there, his sweaty forehead tucked against the side of my neck. I almost drifted to sleep when a sharp pain on my shoulder ripped me out of it.

“What the hell?” I yelled and opened my eyes to glare.

He smiled, that damn fucking real smile I didn’t even know he had. The one that loosened the reins on my doubt about him. The one I sort of wished I’d never even seen. “That’s for earlier,” he whispered before rolling his weight off me and pulling me in tight to curl up in front of him.

I let out a long steady exhale allowing him to cocoon me with his body. “I think I hate you a little, Dorian Gray.”

He kissed the back of my shoulder and whispered, “Good. It’s probably better that way.”