Then Marrok lifted her, wrapped her thighs around his hips, and thrust deep. At the sudden intrusion, pleasure shot past any pain, washing through her. She opened her mouth to scream, and Marrok covered it, driving her higher with his hungry demands.
His kiss claimed her, never-ending. He swallowed all her cries, as if he refused to share the sounds with anyone. Her body devoured every inch of his erection and squeezed, craving more. The ache inside skyrocketed, burning hot, threatening to incinerate her. Blood rushed to her swollen clit. Olivia convulsed as pleasure climbed, spiked, and overtook her.
He opened his eyes. Hard, bright, rapacious. A sizzling blue that threatened her sanity—her soul.
“Again,” he demanded.
The warrior in him compelled her surrender; he’d settle for nothing less than a proverbial white flag. But with one relentless thrust after another into her weeping core, the tightening tension and the perfect friction only strengthened their bond. It expanded outward, filling everything inside her, cocooning and disintegrating her at once.
“Feel me,” he whispered. “Tell me who you belong to.”
“No one.”
“Wrong! You belong to me.”
His determined growl resounded with passion and filled an empty place in her heart. Did she dare believe him?
“Say it,” he demanded. “Tell me.”
Inside her, he swelled, eased back, then pressed inside her again with a molasses-slow stroke that had her clawing his back.
“You!” Pleasure ripped the word from her.
“Only me. There will be no other.”
“Never!” She threw her head back to the wall.
With her neck exposed, Marrok planted his lips just beneath her ear.
“Come for me, love. Give everything to me.”
At his words, she released again in a cataclysm of sensation. Tingles poured over her, with a dash of hot ache and boneless satisfaction.
Marrok bit into her shoulder as his body tensed, jerked. He smothered his cry of ecstasy with her flesh as hot blasts of semen jetted inside her.
All between them was complete again…even if she didn’t understand his insistence. Was she more than the means to an end for him? Did he care?
Halfway down the stairs, clapping shattered the silence.
With a snap of his head, Marrok jerked around and stared over his shoulder. Bram. Olivia gasped in his ear. Covering his mate’s nudity with his own body, Marrok growled at the wizard, “What the hell do you want?”
“The way you dragged Olivia from the ballroom, I wanted to be sure you hadn’t strangled her. I see you had entirely something else in mind.”
A dazzling smile, a flash of white teeth. That rubbish worked on the ladies, but infuriated the piss out of Marrok.
“This was not for your eyes.” Every muscle in his body tightened. He wanted to charge Bram and beat him to a bloody pulp for witnessing even a moment of Olivia’s stunning pleasure.
Bram backed down a stair with raised palms in a gesture of surrender until he could no longer see them. “I heard more than I saw. Sorry. I actually came to tell you that Gray left.”
“Left?” Olivia whispered. “The Anarki are after him again. He has nowhere to hide.”
“He has hidden for over two hundred years,” Marrok said. “He will manage again.”
“Do you plan to continue training tonight? I believe Shock has had enough for today, since he disappeared after we ate. Should I send the others home?”
Bloody hell! Marrok wanted to stay with Olivia, protect her, feel her body writhe against his again, make certain she knew she was his. But Gray knew exactly where he and the Doomsday Brethren were training. Coupled with the staggering information about the keys, Marrok feared they had not a moment of training time to lose.
“In five minutes, I will meet the lot of you in the ballroom. We must continue. I’ve seen young girls wield a sword with more acumen.”
“Sod off,” Bram called, descending the stairs with a laugh.
Marrok turned back to Olivia. Her bare breasts still pressed into his chest, and reluctantly he slid from her sex as something vulnerable stole across her face.
Had he hurt her in his haze of fury and need? He was three times her size. Fear seized him as he forced his hands to gently curl around her shoulders. “Olivia?”
“That was humiliating,” she muttered into his shoulder.
“I lost my temper and my control. I never meant for anyone to find us. The responsibility is mine.”
“I care a lot less that Bram saw your bare ass pinning me to the wall than I do you carrying me out like a child in front of my father and everyone else. You accused him—to his face—of still being involved with the Anarki.”
“You make me…insane,” Marrok confessed. “I worry deeply, for I know what Mathias would do if he caught you. If I were cavalier with my trust and simply embraced Mathias’s former underling, you could pay with your life. My body might still walk because Morganna decreed it, but everything inside me would die with you.”
How could she not be moved by that? “Marrok.” Her face softened, and tears trembled at the corners of her eyes. “You say these things…”
“I mean them.”
She drew in a shuddering breath. “I would never help my father by betraying you, but I doubt you’ll ever believe me.”
Before he could say a word, Olivia wriggled herself out of his embrace, disappeared into their room and slammed the door.
Damn it.
With a heavy sigh, he righted his clothing and headed downstairs. This wasn’t over yet, not by half. Olivia had waited all her life to meet her father and resisted seeing the miscreant’s dishonesty. Richard Gray would put a wedge between himself and Olivia, should he fail to tread carefully.
At the bottom of the stairs, Bram waited.
“Is everyone ready?” Marrok asked.
“They are.”
The two walked toward the ballroom. Marrok wouldn’t call the wizard a friend exactly. Far too crafty and magical. A temporary ally, aye. But something troubled him.
“You seem to accept Gray. Why do you trust him?”
Bram sent him a cunning glance. “Who said I did? His past concerns me, obviously. But I’ve no specific reason to distrust him now. He gives every appearance of being a decent wizard and concerned father.”
Frustration clawed at Marrok. Did no one understand? “He has given us no reason to trust him, either.”
“Indeed, which is why I’m giving the man enough rope to hang himself. If he’s conspiring with Mathias, accusing him will only make him cling to his facade more tightly.”
Marrok closed his eyes. Bram was right, and he had allowed his temper and protective instincts to mangle his common sense. He had ignored simple tactics and revealed his suspicions to Gray too early. Stupid fool!
“How will you make amends if Richard Gray is guilty of nothing more than a terrible past? The same could be said of you.”
“I never plotted to make war with the enemy.”
“No, you did the horizontal mambo with her.”
With his fingers over his eyes, Marrok rubbed at them, suddenly exhausted. Why did Bram have to be right again?
“Let’s pretend,” the wizard continued, “that Gray actually is trying to make amends and is the only person who knows a damn thing about the diary. Reverse your positions. If you were he, what would you tell yourself?”
Get stuffed. Sod off. Fuck you…He could really go on with that list.
“I see you’re getting it,” Bram murmured. “Personally, I don’t trust the prick. But until he gives me a reason to distrust him, I must give him a bit of leeway.”
Normally, Marrok wouldn’t care a whit what Bram thought. But the bond between Gray and Olivia must be addressed, and he had handled it poorly tonight, alienating the father and infuriating the daughter…making it more likely he’d be immortal forever.
“We’ll write your behavior off to the excitability of a new mating,” Bram said. “It makes newly mated men overprotective for a time. Hopefully, Gray will accept your apology.”
Marrok would choke saying it, but say it he would. Would Olivia accept it?
Just then, Lucan came darting around the corner. “Zain is gone.”
“Gone?” Bram snapped.
“Unless you moved him, he escaped.”
Bram shook his head. “I left him below after the questioning. Bollocks!” Bram clenched his fists. “How?”
“Someone freed him.”
“What?”
“The wall was blasted from the outside,” Lucan explained.
“When?”
“In the last hour. There was no hole in the wall while we practiced outside.”
“No one can step foot on my property uninvited without warnings triggering all over.”
“Richard Gray was here an hour past,” Marrok pointed out.
Olivia’s father seemed guilty, indeed. But he could not tell his mate of this new suspicion about her father. They would only argue again, and as delicious as the last spat had been, he did not wish to upset her. He must remember strategy.
“Do we give chase?” Lucan asked.
“Zain is long gone. To think, I actually began to feel sorry for the sad bastard.” Bram shook his head. “What he said was total crap, of course.”
“Was anyone here who might have been persuaded to help Zain besides Richard Gray?” Marrok doubted it, but for Olivia, he asked the question.
“Shock,” Lucan spat.
Bram warned, “Don’t start that.”
“Zain is his brother!”
“Shock has been here all day and never asked about the git once.”
“Because he was waiting until the perfect opportunity—now! Shock also failed to show the night we captured Zain,” Lucan pointed out. “It’s possible he didn’t stand his guard duty because he was telling Mathias that Marrok had the book and where to find him. Shock was here an hour ago. And now he’s gone.”
Bram paused. “I don’t think he’s our villain.”
“You’re my friend; I know your shortcomings. Your worst is that you always want to be right, and you’re dead wrong about Shock.”
“The crap between you and Shock over Anka? Bury it. You’re as bitter as he. Why? You’ve got a mate, while he’s endured a century of celibacy. He’s had to steal energy or skim off half-encounters to survive. He must be starved for a full charge. What’s your excuse?”
Eyes narrowed, Lucan looked pissed. “You know his bloodline. If the rumors are true, he doesn’t have a right mind to be in. Whole families tend to join the Anarki, and Zain has followed in his parents’ footsteps. How do you know Shock hasn’t as well?”
“Without a doubt? I don’t. But I’ll send Duke after Shock and see if he’s harboring Zain.”
“My gut tells me this is Gray,” Marrok added.
“Of course you think he’s guilty. You hate the dodgy prat,” Lucan piped in.
“The same way you hate Shock?”
“Touché.” Lucan shook his head.
“You need training, but perhaps it is more imperative to retrieve Olivia’s diary key.” Marrok clenched his fists. “If Gray is Mathias’s man, he will hoodwink or force Olivia into surrendering her emblem and going with him. If she and that key fall into the wrong hands…”
“Exactly. The three of us together should provide her sufficient protection while she retrieves it. I hope.”
“Olivia?” The short knock on the door made her tense.
Marrok. God, the man confused her, accusing her of betraying him to please her father one minute, then telling her she was his life the next. He didn’t trust the father she’d waited her whole life to meet. He didn’t really even trust her. Yet she couldn’t deny Marrok anything. Stupid. Spineless. She rolled her eyes, trying to hold back tears.
Where did that leave them? She needed his touch to survive. But more and more she ached for him in a way that had nothing to do with magical bonds and everything to do with her heart.
“Olivia?” he repeated softly.
He opened the door. Since their encounter against the wall, she’d showered and donned the clothes she’d been wearing previously. Pinned under his gaze, she felt half-naked.
“What do you want?” she asked.
He eased onto the bed beside her and took her hand in his. “I am sorry we had an audience. It was thoughtless and wrong. No matter how badly I wanted you—”
“I’m angrier that you were so rude to my father and that you think I might betray you. You accused us of the worst treason.”
“If your father is not the man you believe, it will hurt you deeply. I wish to spare you pain if he’s not all you wished or imagined him to be. Though he is your sire, he seeks to separate me from the woman I view as mine and mine alone. Adjusting to our bond takes time.”
Olivia turned his words over in her mind. He could be telling the truth, and if so, it made him guilty of nothing more than a bit of overprotectiveness and poor judgment.