A muted groan of male pleasure was her only answer as his tongue rolled over her clit, pressed against it, and threatened to ignite the explosion she was reaching so desperately for.

God. She couldn’t wait much longer. She was going to melt into a mass of pure sensation at any second. Waiting was only intensifying the painful eagerness now building inside her.

“More.” Lifting to him, rolling her hips against the invasion of his fingers inside her vagina, against the probing, wicked tongue and suckling lips at her clit, Piper fought to hold on to her sanity as the need became a driving, desperate ache to fly into the heated rapture she could feel awaiting her.

“Please. Jed . . .” She couldn’t take much more.

Oh, God, he was going to pay for this. She was going to make certain he paid for this.

His lips lifted; his fingers eased back.

Forcing her lashes open, Piper watched as he dragged himself to his knees before bending to the side of the bed and reaching for a condom.

The heavy length of his cock jutted out from his body, flushed and eager and tempting a hunger she’d never had the chance to give in to.

She had the chance now.

Her body was humming for the penetration she knew he was preparing for.

But she wanted . . .

As he straightened before her, Piper pushed herself into a sitting position.

“Not yet.” Her fingers curled around his wrist as he moved to roll the condom over the throbbing, flared crest of the fiercely erect shaft.

“Piper, baby.” The warning in his voice was clear. “I don’t know if I have the control for this.”

“Sure you do.” She breathed out, one hand curling around his erection, marveling at the fact that her fingers couldn’t encircle it, yet her body could accept each hard thrust made into it by the fierce shaft. “Just like I did.”

Leaning forward, she tasted him.

A hard, primal groan sounded above her as her tongue licked over the engorged crest.

Parting her lips, she covered the width of his cock head, taking him into her mouth as her lips hugged the hard flesh and drew on it with pleasure.

Salty, male.

The explosion of taste had a moan tearing from her throat, vibrating against his dick and sending Jed’s senses into overdrive.

Damn her, she was destroying him, and he couldn’t stop her. She was sucking his control straight from him by the simple act of sucking his dick as though it were a favored treat.

With her tongue lashing at his cock and her lips tightening around it, her wicked, seductive fingers cupping his balls in one hand as the other stroked the heavy width of it was nearly more than he could bear.

“God, Piper, I’m going to come, babe.” He groaned with a desperation he swore he’d never felt before this woman.

Her tongue rubbed at the head of his cock. It probed at the oversensitive nerve endings just beneath the head, then sucked the engorged heat with such pleasure he swore he was going to lose control and spill his release into her suckling mouth.

He had to tighten his fingers, had to grip her hair and try to force her head back from the shaft.

Her eyes darkened.

Seeing her staring up at him with the light green of her eyes darkening imperceptibly was nearly too much for the tenuous control he was barely holding on to.

Yet he couldn’t stop.

His hips moved even as he told himself he’d hold still.

He watched the head of his cock pull back, sink inside. Watched as he fucked her mouth and those pert, pretty lips reddened.

He watched until he couldn’t take it any longer.

Pulling free despite her protesting moan, Jed moved back, and before she could react, he managed to turn her to her stomach, his hands gripping her hips and lifting them before him.

“Damn, your ass is so pretty.” Sliding his hands back to the rounded globes as he positioned his cock at the slick, heated opening of her little pussy, he couldn’t help but marvel at the pleasure slicing through his senses. “I love this pretty ass, Piper.”

“You’re killing me,” she cried out desperately.

“Then we’ll go together.” He groaned as he pushed the head of his cock into the fiery heat of her juice-laden cunt and had to clench his teeth to fight back the release building in his balls. “God, Piper, we’ll go together, baby, because I never knew pleasure could be this fucking good.”

He couldn’t hold back.

He couldn’t hold on.

Gripping her hips firmly, Jed pulled his cock back, then in one fierce thrust buried the eager erection halfway inside the gripping, lush little pussy he was certain would steal his sanity.

Pure, unadulterated ecstasy began building in his senses.

Blood pounded in his veins, and on the second thrust, nothing else began to matter but the pure, mindless race to shattering rapture.

Piper tried to scream.

As the fierce, pleasure-pain sensations began whipping through her pussy, attacking her clit and racing through her senses, she swore she would never survive the cataclysmic pleasure building through her flesh.

She couldn’t struggle against it; hell, she didn’t want to.

She gave herself over to it, reaching ever harder for it, poised on the edge of an abyss she wanted nothing more than to fly into.

“Jed, please.” She forced the cry past her lips. “Harder. Please. Please fuck me harder.”

She wanted that release.

She wanted it now.

God, if she had to wait she might not survive it.

Fingers curling into the sheets beneath her, she held on tightly. She thrust back to him, panting for air, as flames burned through her system, licking across her flesh and attacking the rapidly rising sensitivity of her clit and the aching depths of her overstretched vagina.

As she fought to break the bonds holding her to reality and to jump headlong into the flames, she felt Jed above her. His lips were at her neck, stinging nips and heated kisses attacking the bend of her shoulder a second before he caught the tender flesh between his lips and delivered a heated kiss that became a catalyst to pure ecstasy.

The explosion tore through her.

Rapture ripped her from her place in reality and threw her headlong into the cataclysm of flames awaiting her. Destructive, the tidal wave of pure ecstasy overwhelmed her; as she flew through that place of searing sensation, she found the man who had taken her there.

Piper felt him inside her, covering her, not just taking her body, but sinking inside her soul.

His groan echoed around her.

His cock buried deep one last time, pulsed and throbbed; then her muscles clenched around him further as he found his own release.

Crying out his name, locked in a world of blinding color and overwhelming rapture, she could do nothing but trust him to hold her, to keep her secure as the pleasure pounded through her, tore past the deepest reaches of her heart and invaded the very depths of her soul.

She was his.

There was no denying it. There was no fighting it.

She belonged to him.

But as she felt him sinking inside the abyss with her, Piper knew he belonged to her as well.

He was hers.

There was no denying her, just as she knew there was no longer any chance of denying him.

For the first time in her life, she knew exactly what it meant to belong.

Now if she could just live long enough to enjoy it.

TWELVE

“What now?” With a towel wrapped around her, her damp hair lying along her shoulders, Piper stepped from the bathroom after showering, the reality of the danger facing her threatening to overwhelm her optimism.

The chest-tightening panic was returning, waiting, preparing her for Jed to walk away. . . .

Like her father had walked away and left her, her mother, and her sisters unprotected and alone. Just as she was afraid Tim and Dawg would walk away.

Was that why everything inside her shut down whenever she and Dawg moved toward a confrontation? To prepare her heart, to steel herself against the abandonment?

“We wait and see,” he answered, the towel he’d wrapped around his waist earlier still in place.

He hadn’t dressed.

Heated need for his touch was threatening to weaken her need for answers as she watched him toss their dirty clothes into the hamper next to the bathroom door.

“Since when do you sit around and wait on anyone or anything, Jed?” she asked, frowning at the feeling that there was much more going on than simply waiting. “What are you and my brother up to?”

Tightening in response to some imperceptible feeling of dread, her heart began to beat at a sluggish pace.

The impending panic was a result of the look on his face, the darkening of his navy gaze that made his eyes appear almost black.

“We’re not just waiting; we’re watching,” he finally stated, his expression hardening just enough to warn her that she was going to hear something she didn’t want to hear.

“What are you watching?”

“Your room.” Jed paced to the television, retrieved the remote, and hit the power button.

Watching the screen, she was surprised as he reached behind the unit, and a second later, the split view of the screen showed both her bedroom as well as her sitting room.

“Brogan had the cameras installed just after he started sleeping with Eve,” he revealed. “He was afraid his or Dawg’s enemies would attempt to strike out at her, or take her from him. There were cameras in her room, and GPS on her car and her cell phone.”

The cameras had been there since before Brogan and Eve moved from the inn? And they were still there?

“I was supposed to move them,” he told her. “And I was going to until I learned you were taking her room after she moved in with Brogan.”

“So you’ve watched me when I didn’t know you were?”

Controlling her? Maneuvering her?

Was he so much different than she had begun to believe he was?

“Only once or twice.” Broad shoulders shrugged as he watched her carefully. “The night you were packing to leave for New York.”

Holding the towel close to her breasts, she sat up, watching the view on the television, wondering what she should feel.

Was the need to deny that he would do such a thing to control her normal? Was she simply trying to make excuses for him?

“Why?” she whispered. “Why were you watching me?”

He rubbed at the back of his neck, frustration tightening his face. “I worried about you. I wanted to see you. Hell, Piper, you’ve made me fucking crazy since I’ve moved in here, as you’ve tempted me, then run from me. There were days I wasn’t certain I could keep from playing the caveman I knew you were waiting for me to reveal lurking inside me.”

Biting her lip, she glanced to the screen again.

“So why show me now?”

“Because I don’t want any secrets at all between us any longer,” he stated. “Not secrets like this.” Flipping his hand toward the screen, he moved to the dresser and pulled his clothes from the chair next to the bed as she watched, then began dressing angrily.

“I don’t want to take your fucking freedom,” he growled at her as he shoved the white-and-gray-striped shirt into the waistband of his jeans and quickly buckled his belt. “I don’t want to control what you think or feel or what you do.” Glaring at her, he sat down in the chair next to the bed and pulled on dark leather boots. “I just want you.”

He just wanted her?

“And now you’ve had me,” she said, feeling kind of hollow inside. “Did you change your mind about wanting to control me and my life?”

Had she made a mistake? The one mistake she had sworn she would never make—had she fallen in love with a man unable to resist the urge to completely take her life over?

The look he shot her was one of such scorn that anger immediately flared inside her.

What the hell did he expect her to think?

Stomping to the end of the bed, where he’d laid the clothes he’d collected from her room earlier, Piper pulled on her own jeans, soft cotton tank camisole, socks, and sneakers.