The Mills & Boon Ultimate Christmas Collection. Kate Hardy

release. But she didn’t want it to end.

      She so didn’t want it to end.

      She rocked back and forth, gratified when a tortured sounding moan escaped his lips, when his hands tightened on her hips, his fingertips digging into her flesh, hard enough that she imagined it might leave a mark. She hoped it did. She hoped that she wore evidence of this claiming when it was finished. That the stubble from his five-o’clock shadow left her skin red, that she would be able to see the impressions of his hands where he had held her tight.

      She rocked against him again, and this time he growled. Feral, uncontrolled. As though she had brought him down to her level. She was always doing that. In the hall, in public at the palace, here in this place. But she wasn’t sorry.

      She liked him like this. Uncontrolled, needing her. Wanting her as she wanted him.

      No walls between them. Nothing separating them.

      She felt at home. Finally.

      He held more tightly on to her, and suddenly, she was being propelled backward. He lowered her slowly to the floor, settling between her thighs and thrusting into her hard and deep. She felt tied to the spot, trapped beneath his strength and weight. And she loved it.

      His dark eyes bored into hers, and she was certain he could see all her secrets. See down deep. She wanted him to. She wanted him to untangle all the frightening, intense emotions that were brewing inside her, because she wasn’t certain if she could. She had no experience with this. Perhaps he did. He’d had lovers. Perhaps this was normal.

      No.

      Her heart rejected that thought. Immediately. Violently.

      This wasn’t like his other times. She was certain of that. Because he had said he felt nothing with Francesca. Because he was with so many different women, so often. There was no way it could be this feeling. This, all the time and with different people, would surely consume a person. Which would surely eat him alive from the inside out.

      It was only him, and only her, and still it was going to devour her.

      He held tightly to her hips as he drove deep. The tile was cold, hard beneath the bare skin of her back, but she didn’t care. She was with Andres, and so she felt perfect. Even though her skin felt too tight for her body, even though all the things in her chest felt too large to be contained. Somehow there was all of that, and still she was perfect.

      Everything with him was like that. Contradicting each other, complementing each other, being too much, not enough and yet just right.

      The pleasure that was blooming in her stomach grew, expanded. She couldn’t breathe, could scarcely handle the sensation that was spreading through her veins, bleeding outward, crackling over her skin like an electric current.

      Andres lowered his head, his hold on her tightening as he growled, pushing inside her one last time as he found his release. That added pressure, the intensity of his own pleasure, heightened her own and she found herself letting go. Color flashing, exploding behind her eyelids as pleasure wrapped itself around her, cushioning her from everything. The past, the future, the hardness of the floor. There was nothing but Andres. Nothing but the two of them together. Nothing but the blinding, white-hot pleasure she experienced at his hands.

      She screamed, losing control, utterly and completely as the intensity of her climax shook her. She screamed as she hadn’t done since those lonely days when she was in the mountains by herself. Consumed by grief. Withering in her isolation. But this was different.

      Before, she had only been able to make noise like that because she was alone. Because there was no one there to see.

      But he was here. And she was free.

      And when she came back to herself, she wasn’t alone.

       CHAPTER TEN

      “WHERE HAVE YOU been the past couple of days? You disappeared during my speech. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

      Andres stopped in the middle of the hall, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth at the sound of his older brother’s voice coming from behind him. “I’ve been in Vegas. Gambling with the crown jewels. I traded our mother’s engagement ring for a prostitute. Don’t worry, she was very skilled.”

      “You can’t have done that, because my wife wears that ring. Otherwise it sounds like you.”

      “I’ve been in my city apartment. With Zara. Did you think she was off in her room shredding newspaper and making a little mouse nest all this time?” He was being unnecessarily cruel to his brother, who probably had genuine concerns that Andres truly had been off whoring around. But for some reason, Andres was incapable of simply backing down in calming Kairos’s fears.

      “I have scarcely seen her since I put her in your custody.”

      “Convenient for you. You pass the woman off to me, and wash your hands of her completely. And trust me with attempting to tame her.”

      “And how has that been going?”

      Andres allowed himself to think back on the past few days with Zara. They had barely left his apartment. They had barely dressed; they had eaten the entire cake he’d brought from the restaurant. Licked much of the frosting from her skin and shown her just what having your cake and eating it too could mean.

      He had put on the bare minimum to receive food when it was delivered to the penthouse, but that was it. Otherwise he had preferred that they stayed naked. So that he had easy access to Zara at all times. In bed, on the kitchen counter, in the shower...

      He had never felt so insatiable for a woman. This was unlike anything he’d ever known. It wasn’t about filling a void with sex; it was about being with her. It wasn’t a hunger for companionship in a general sense, but for Zara.

      That realization left him feeling raw. She seemed happy with him.

      Part of him wanted to hold on to that. To keep her with him. To use her as a cover for that empty well in his soul.

      Zara didn’t know the man he had built himself up to be. Didn’t know the playboy who had done his best to destroy his brother’s trust in him. The restless, uncontrollable boy who had driven off his mother. The man who only ever spent the night with his lovers to avoid being alone because he feared isolation more than any monster lurking in the shadows.

      “It’s been going well.” He held up his hands, palms facing Kairos. “I’m still in possession of all ten fingers, so there’s that.”

      “She’s supposed to be your fiancée. Could you not talk about her like she’s some sort of rabid mongrel?”

      “I could,” he said, thinking back to all the ways she was nothing of the kind, but a whole, pure woman. “But this is more fun.”

      “Are you going to be able to handle yourself when we announced your holiday wedding at the Christmas Eve party tonight?”

      “I promise you, Zara and I have figured out how to deal with each other.” He couldn’t suppress the smile that turned up his lips.

      Kairos raised his eyebrows. “Have you?”

      “We have.” And the deeper they settled into it, the more she wound herself around his life, the more unsettled he became.

      Strange. He should take comfort in not being alone. But there was something about all this that made him feel as if he were being held underwater. As if he were holding her down with him.

      And the deeper they went, the more panicked he felt. The more he wanted to release his hold on her and make his escape.

      To retreat to the punishment of solitude because it would be better than the alternative.

      Needing her. Losing her.

      Failing her.

      “Please