She wasn’t talking about the act. She knew he understood that. She’d never asked anyone for protection or defense. Instead, she’d become a master at preventing people from hurting her. She’d crafted herself into a knight forever trapped in her mail, the metal becoming her true skin while everything inside withered away from lack of sunlight, stimulation…touch. He’d broken her out of the mail, and she was shivering, naked, completely vulnerable. Completely alive.

“Never.” His voice was rough with emotion, and he came close, held her face cradled in his hands as he pressed his forehead to hers, touched her lips with his mouth. She cupped her hands over his strong, warm ones. “I’ve wanted you to say that to me for so long,” he murmured against her mouth. “To hear that you trust me enough to ask it. Never, sweet Savannah. I’ll destroy anyone who causes you a moment of pain.”

The totally male, totally unrealistic promise nevertheless squeezed her heart into her throat, stopping her breath as much as when he straightened and slid out of the shirt, his tanned skin a golden gleam beneath the room’s dim light. He had beautiful musculature under the fine layer of male fur, and she could not help following the sleek lines of him down to the waistband of his slacks.

“Do you want more?” he asked quietly, his hand at the fastener.

A tiny smile curved her lips. “My specialty is production. What do you think?”

He chuckled, but she did raise one hand, holding them just a moment.

“Just…go slow. You’re kind of overwhelming. Actually, this whole night’s been a bit overwhelming.”

“I know,” he said, a trace of regret in his voice. “If I were any kind of gentleman, I’d wait, but Savannah… God, it’s like a vampire thing. I have to make you mine by dawn or I’m afraid I’ll lose you, that I’ll see you tomorrow and you’ll be back behind your armor, convincing yourself it didn’t mean what it meant, any of it.”

His heated gaze traveled up her bare body, spreading fire. “But if you feel the soreness, the stickiness of my come drying between your legs, the smell of me on your skin, see a red blush on your jaw in the mirror tomorrow from the rasp of my beard, you won’t.”

“It’s a signed deal, then,” she whispered. She lifted her arms. “Will you come and just…lie on me a few minutes, before you take everything off?”

He had bought a man’s couch for his boardroom, so it was a good seven feet long and nearly three and a half feet wide. He tossed the small cushions scattered on it, except for one, which he adjusted under her head and shoulders, making her comfortable, before he stretched out upon her as she had requested.

His finger trailed along her thigh with gentle pressure so she widened their span to accommodate his hips

and long legs between them. She liked how he adjusted the pillow beneath her, scooping his arm under her shoulders, holding her face close to his chest, his chin brushing the top of her head as he saw to her comfort.

What would it be to get used to that, someone caring how she felt, not because she was responsible for thousands of people’s livelihoods, not because she was a legacy, but because he cared?

And what would it be to care for him the same way, hold his hand at a movie, stroke his brow after a trying day, see him laugh at something on television, see that toe poke out of the end of its sock?

“How’s that?” he asked in that sensual, bedroom-hushed voice. “Am I too heavy?”

The pressure of him on her was like the pressure of too much happiness on her heart, something so unfamiliar it was almost painful. It was a feeling close to heaven. His arms curled on either side of her head, her vision totally dominated by his handsome face, the dark eyes, that incredible mouth. Daring, she lifted her chin, reaching, and like a miraculous telepathy, he came down to meet her, with a soft, gentle kiss that was perfect. She parted her lips, shyly tasted him with her tongue, touching his lips, then his tongue, and felt the new sensation of his body tightening in response to the provocation. The friction of him against the juncture of her thighs, separated only by the trousers, pressed insistently, male power and strength held back only by his caring toward her. She closed her eyes as the kiss deepened, and a hundred things flashed through that darkness, things that had always been there, that she had refused to see. A hundred ways he had supported her, contributed to her reputation, respected her. She had focused on the battles, never allowing herself to see what else was there.

A million kindnesses. She remembered now, in stark detail, tiny things. Him reaching toward the center of the table, filling her water glass when it was almost empty, though his was full, underscoring that he was doing it as a courtesy to her.

Silly, but now it seemed full of meaning. The many times he’d called her during the week, to discuss this or that detail on their mutual business interests, but in some subtle way he’d lifted her spirits by making a dry joke or witticism about something they both understood. The fact that he’d sent her flowers every Friday since her father’s death.

She loved roses. She supposed he’d found that out from her office assistant. He’d sent her the first bouquet right after her father’s death.

She’d thanked him for it, assuming it was the usual condolence gesture.

Then they’d kept coming, every Friday for the past two years. She hadn’t acknowledged those bouquets at first, figuring if she ignored them he would stop sending them. He didn’t. In all those two years, he’d never sent her the same shade, and never a dyed flower. Always beautiful palettes of hybrids from gardens all over the country. One bouquet had even been shipped from England. At some point she’d started saving one bloom from each delivery, getting them pressed and preserved, and added them to a dried bouquet she kept in her bedroom.

Often, it was what she studied as she lay down at night, somehow not feeling so alone by the simple act of gazing at them.

“You’ve always been there for me, since we first met.” She accepted it.

Said it out loud.

“Not as often as I should have been. I should have done something like this a long time ago.” He bent his head, put his lips beneath her ear and cruised down her neck. She arched, pulling on her bottom lip with her teeth as the movement rubbed her body against his, the soft skin of her inner thighs sliding against the outside of his, instinctively pushing her aching center against his hardness. She was amazed at her own wantonness, unleashing itself now that she…

He raised his head as if he felt her reaction to her own thoughts.

“Savannah?”

“I trust you, Matt. I’ve never trusted anyone, not in my entire life. I think that’s why tonight was…possible. I kept asking myself why I wasn’t screaming and fighting you, why I wasn’t dialing 911 when I got free, and this was it. You knew, didn’t you? Since that day on the desk, like you said.”

He nodded, his heart and his desire for her in his gaze. “I knew.”

“And that I would…” She suspected “enjoy” wasn’t the proper word. “… respond to this type of thing?”

She wasn’t worldly about sex. She just knew it felt good, that she craved more.

“Yes.” He kissed her nose, lingering so she closed her eyes, savored. “I knew you were mine the first time I saw you, and I knew you’d be willing to be submissive to the right man, the man you could trust to take care of you when you have to be in control of everything else.

“You’re a strong, strong woman. The most basic way to prove that to you, the way the predator in you would understand, was to take you down the way another predator would. Make you expose your throat and concede my dominance over you.” He tilted her head back with a thumb to her chin, and set his teeth lightly to her jugular, flicking it with his tongue.

“As your mate. The one who cares for you and needs you the most. Who would never hurt you.”

The words were offensive, but the truth behind them was so primal, so intuitive and beyond the realm of political correctness, her pulse leaped, not in anger, but in response, and her thighs relaxed, accommodating him further, sending exactly the message he had said he would pull from her. Total submission.

“I…I don’t want to be free to choose any longer, Matt.” She got out the words, and she meant them so deeply, it was hard to form them. “I want to belong to you.”

With an almost feral growl of need, he lifted up from her, just enough for there to be a space. “Open my slacks.”

With trembling fingers, she found the hook fastener, slipped it, took down the zipper, her wrists brushing the hard heat beneath. He reached back, pushed them off his hips.

“Matt,” she said softly, not daring to look him in the eye. “Will you…can I feel all of you at once? Will you be…”

“Naked?” His eyes smiled at her, though his jaw was tight with his desire for her. “Anything for you.

Anything you ask, I’ll give you.”

He lifted off her, meliorating her immediate sense of loss by taking her hand as he rose, kissing her knuckles in a gallant gesture that ran electricity down her arm, tightening her breasts and the wet folds of her sex.

Then he took off his shoes, one by one, pulled off the black dress socks, making her smile when he put his hand in one to show her the hole in the toe. His slacks were open during the process and her eyes were drawn to the play of his well-defined stomach muscles just above the band of his underwear, the black soft jersey boxers. He slid the slacks off, tossed them over one of the conference room chairs, then removed the boxers as well. He saved his watch for last, and she was able to watch the play of muscles in his arms and chest as he bent his elbows to perform the removal task, and look her fill at his bare body. He made no move to adjust his stance, keeping his blatant arousal, his whole body, open to a thorough appraisal.

She was shy about him watching, and he must have noticed. “Look all you want,” he said gently.

“There’s no shame in wanting to look, and the way you’re looking at me just makes me want you more.