And if he stopped, she would die.
Passion had never, ever served her. But oh, how it pleased.
What Aodh was doing, how it pleased.
He curled a finger around the collar of her gown and tugged it to the side and skimmed his tongue over the new territory.
Her head jerked back in shock and then she, wanton she, bent to the side to allow him in.
He took what she offered, went up the length of her neck, with no hesitation, his mouth a weapon of sin and desire, marking her cool skin with hot, lingering, open-mouthed kisses, feasting on her neck and shoulders. His body took the final step in, so that he was pressed up full against the back of her. She felt the hard curve of his maleness.
The thread binding her to sense quite snapped, and she arched her spine, pressing her breasts into the hard cupping heat of their intertwined hands, which pushed her hips back into his.
“Aye, like that,” he said hoarsely against her neck. He bent them forward, and guided their cupped hands down to the seam of her legs, until the silk was bunched high between her thighs, then he had them push in, hard and slow.
She flung her head with a gasp.
“Do you see how we shall do it?” he asked in a dark murmur, and moved their hands again.
She was that close to lost, that close to taking everything Aodh was offering, when a shout from outside the room broke through the miasma of their passion like shattering glass.
Her body gave a single, sinful shudder, then she wrenched free. For a half second, his arm tightened, then he released her, and she backed up a step, then another, and another, until she bumped into the table.
He watched like some otherworldly being, cast in shadow and flickering light, his head lowered slightly, the dark painted lines inked across the hand fisted at his side, breathing as hard as she.
Another tentative call came from the antechamber. “Sir? You’re wanted belowstairs.”
“Leave,” she whispered.
His gaze darkened. “Katarina.” It almost sounded like…a question.
Oh, that would never do.
She pointed at the door. “Get out.”
Something shifted in the eyes holding hers, a hardening, like black ice forming, and he laughed, once.
“If you wish to order me from my bedchamber, Katarina, you must first share it with me.”
The breath strangled in her throat. He was right. This was not her room anymore. Nothing was hers anymore. He’d taken it all.
He turned for the door without another word.
“You think I have no choice,” she said to his back.
He turned, his painted hand curled around the edge of the door. “If I wanted what came from a woman with no choice, Katarina, we would not be having this conversation.”
Whoosh.
“Come to me willing, or do not come at all.”
Chapter Eleven
AODH BARRELED out of the bedchamber, gripped in a vortex of lust.
It had consumed him, turned him into a churning, roaring thing of want he’d never known before. His body, his mind, his intentions, everything that beat or pulsed in him had been consumed, overtaken, wrested from his control, under the all-consuming power of wanting her.
If someone hadn’t called, if he hadn’t reached for self-control like a drowning man and let her go by an act of sheer will, he’d have had her up against the wall like some rutting beast, the very thing he’d spent his life proving he was not, all intentions of wooing and bending her will scorched away by the conflagration of his desire.