She was especially sensitive after last night. His entry not only burned through her, it felt perfectly right, exquisitely good.

He paused, chest heaving, to ask roughly, “Am I hurting you?”

In answer, she tightened her legs around him, drawing him farther in. “Only in the best possible way,” she breathed in his ear.

He angled his head to look at her. With one hand braced against the wall by her head, the other arm wrapped low around her hips, he began to pump into her.

She had always felt a shock of connection when she looked into his eyes, and now, coupled with the savage carnality of their coupling, it was almost too much. But she couldn’t look away either. The hunger, the heat in his dark eyes, the intensity all fed her own. She couldn’t take him in deep enough. Flexing, straining, she stretched to reach around the outside of her thigh to finger the place where they were joined.

A groan broke out of him, and she could tell that her caresses heightened his pleasure as well. “I can’t get enough of you,” he muttered. “This is making crazy.”

“Me too,” she whimpered. It shocked her. Did that whimper really come from her?

His heat and hardness, the rhythmic sensation, built up a pressure and a need inside her that had her clawing at his shoulders. “Come on.” As he hissed in her ear, he gave her hips an insistent yank while he ground himself against her. “Come on.”

It was such a demanding thing to do to order her to climax, so very Nikolas and quite entirely imperious. She didn’t know whether to laugh or to be offended or shocked. Instead, she felt a primal response rise up from deep inside. Arching off the wall, she gripped him by the back of the neck as she slammed into an orgasm.

He watched every moment of it, fiercely, as he kept moving in short, fast jabs. The twisting pleasure wrung at her. She clenched on him, shaking, until the last of the waves subsided.

Still inside her, he sank to his knees. Sitting splayed on his muscular thighs, she wrapped her arms around his neck while he began to move again, harder and more urgently. Biting at his ear, she egged him on until he froze, muscles bunched, and suddenly the intolerable tension broke and she felt him spurting inside her. Rocking gently, she helped him as he had helped her, drawing out every last moment of pleasure.

Just when she thought his climax was subsiding, he gripped her by the hips so hard she felt the pressure from each individual finger, and he picked up the pace, to gasp in her ear a few moments later as he spurted again. His expression was taut, beautifully wrung out. Loving every sensation, every glimpse, she ran her fingernails down his back, only to have him arch up into her again, with another renewed wave of climax.

It was odd, addictive, delightful. She’d never experienced anything like it, but all her previous lovers had been human. Nikolas presented her with an entirely different, unknown landscape. Pulled out of her preoccupation with her own pleasure, she breathed every part of him in.

Finally he held her hips stationary as he gritted, “We have to stop.”

We have to stop, he had said, not I can’t do any more. He still felt as hard inside her as he had when they had first started. Did that mean he could actually go further, do more, climax again? She spiraled dizzily into wonder.

But he was right. They didn’t have time for leisurely exploration. Still, her fingers wanted to cling to him, and her arms wanted to remain wound around his neck. It was physically and emotionally difficult to detach.

Did he feel the same?

Almost as if he had heard her thoughts, his arms tightened around her. “I don’t want to let you go,” he growled. “And I don’t want to stop now, but the day is flying by and we must stop. This is why I don’t have anything to offer a lover—there’s no time to give you the attention you deserve.”

Oh, that old thing.

That old understanding she had worked so hard to establish between them last night. This was just supposed to be sex, just an interlude. They weren’t even supposed to like each other.

How had she put it? They had the opportunity to give each other some pleasure. There was nothing more to it than that. It certainly wasn’t his fault that she had gone and changed the rules of the game in her head without him.

Don’t be weird at him, Sophie, she admonished herself fiercely. In terms of pleasure, affection, and a transcendent experience, he’s given you so much more than you had expected or asked for. Don’t ruin it now.

He was studying her too closely, his expression brooding, so she gave him a quick smile and a kiss. “Thank you,” she said. “That was more than I could have expected.”

He scowled. “What the fuck does that mean?”

She blinked. “What do you mean, ‘what the fuck does that mean’? Last night you said you couldn’t give a lover time and attention. Today you repeated it. So okay, I said thank you. Was I supposed to beat my chest and say, oh my God, we had sex in the bathroom? Because if so, I didn’t get the memo.”

He took her head between his hands and said between his teeth, “You said thank you the same way you would thank someone for buying you lunch. You make me crazy.”

She shouted, “I said it was more than I could have expected! What else was I supposed to say?”

In answer, he rose to his feet, grabbed his clothes off the floor, and stalked out. Utterly bewildered, she sat, legs sprawled on the bathroom floor, and watched him leave.

After a few minutes, she stirred to gather up her own clothes. She looked down at them, then started banging the heels of her hands on her forehead again.