Let’s try this instead. Breaking the kiss to focus his attention lower on her body, his expression steely in its intensity, he pushed at the tightness of her entrance with his finger, and when she shivered, hands falling to fist in the sheets, worked that finger slowly inside. Yes? Hair tumbled over his forehead, he looked up, their eyes locking.

So much power, she thought, such unyielding control. It should’ve made her feel at a vast disadvantage. It didn’t. Because this was Kaleb. “Yes.” A moan of discovery as he slid his finger out, then pushed it back in just as slow. “Yes, please.”

A second finger, and all at once she’d had enough, her womb contracting with an emptiness that hurt. She might not ever have done this act before, but instinct told her what experience didn’t. “You,” she said, and it was an order. “I need you.” Only Kaleb.

His responding kiss was a naked demand, his tongue licking deep. “Spread your legs wider,” he commanded when he released her mouth, withdrawing his hand and rising to rid himself of the rest of his clothing at last—to reveal a body that made her feminine core clench.

Gloriously naked, his erection heavy, he settled between the legs she’d spread for him, one of his hands on her thigh, the other palm-down beside her head. Their gazes locked again as he began to push inside her with the blunt tip of his penis, her hand on his nape, her body slick and ready but still so tight against the thick intrusion of him. A painful kind of burning had her hissing out a breath, but below that was a need that wanted, hungered.

Are you hurting?

I want this hurt.

Sweat dripped down Kaleb’s temple, his jaw a brutal line, but he maintained the slow, inexorable push of his body until his erection was buried to the hilt inside her. Sahara. Passion-flushed cheekbones and eyes stormy with so much power it was akin to looking into the heart of a thunderstorm.

I feel . . . perfect. Tight and full to the point that it was almost pain and exactly where she was meant to be.

When he shuddered and pulled out an inch, she cried out, the friction of his rock-hard penis against her sensitized flesh an erotic shock. Kaleb thrust back in, only to repeat the withdrawal and reentry, the hand on her thigh shifting to her hip to pin her in place as he dipped his head to kiss her breasts, sucking on one of her nipples before releasing it through his teeth.

The caress made her internal muscles flutter around him. His body turned rigid, the tendons of his neck standing out starkly against his skin, the veins on his arms pulsing as his muscles went taut. But Kaleb had learned control in a vicious crucible—he didn’t break even under the intensity of the sensations. Kissing her again as she hooked one of her legs over his hip, he pulled out all the way, then pushed back in with ruthless patience.

Writhing beneath him, the abrasion of her breasts against his chest a sensual counterpoint to the harsh possession of him inside her, she moaned into the kiss. He swallowed the sound and once more repeated the slow, complete withdrawal and return, stretching her swollen tissues until her clitoris throbbed. Slick as she was, her body lubricating itself in rippling waves of passion, his size made taking him an effort—a hotly erotic effort that had her breaking off the kiss to issue a breathless feminine demand. “Faster.”

Are you sure? His fingers dug into her hip.

“Yes!” Gripping at his back, she attempted to arch her body toward him . . . but he was already pulling out.

Only to slam back in. Hard.

Sahara screamed, her body clenching around Kaleb’s in an orgasm that felt as if it would tear her to pieces . . . and that was when Kaleb’s control snapped. There was nothing practiced about the way he pounded deep into her over and over again, nothing restrained about the way he wrenched her head to the side to kiss and suck at her throat, nothing calculated about the way he bent her thigh upward then pushed it wide to facilitate a deeper taking.

It was primitive; it was rough; it was spectacular.

Coming so hard around him that her thoughts were nothing more than splinters, she held on tight to the sweat-slick muscle of his body, his heart beating a drum that matched her own and his fingers almost bruisingly tight on the bottom of the thigh he’d pushed up. Kaleb, my Kaleb. It was a claim passionate and possessive as pleasure tore her apart.

Kaleb came in violent silence, his breath harsh against her ear and his body rigid. The hot wet of his possession as his semen pulsed inside her made her erotically abused muscles spasm again, clenching tight around him. Jerking, he raised his head, eyes of obsidian holding her own as he drew back one final time, then thrust deep past her clenching muscles.

“Mine. You are mine.”

They were the last words Sahara heard before Kaleb’s kiss tore her apart, his body locked with her own as they fell.

Chapter 27

“WE’VE SHARED DNA,” Kaleb murmured to the woman who lay in his arms afterward, knowing he should’ve told her the ugly truth before this, his only excuse being that he hadn’t believed she was anywhere close to accepting him inside her body. “There may be consequences.”

“No.” Sahara raised her head from his chest, eyes smudged with lingering echoes of pleasure. “I made a discreet visit to another one of the M-Psy in the clinic when my father”—a hitched breath —“went in to check on a patient yesterday afternoon. I’ve known the medic since childhood, and she made the necessary changes in my body chemistry without any intrusive questions.” Her fingers rising to trace his lips. “I knew this was inevitable.”

“Good. It’s better if my DNA isn’t passed on.”

“Why? You’re smart, beautiful, powerful.”

“I’m also mentally unstable and may have tendencies toward criminal insanity.”

The softness faded from her expression. “Kaleb, I refuse to call anything you did under Enrique’s coercion a choice. That was hi s insanity.” Flat, absolute, daring him to argue with her. “I’m not without intelligence. I know you’ve hurt people as an adult, but I also know you would have done so with a rational motive,” she said, seeing him with a clarity that was a razor.

“Power, control, money, you’d always have had a reason for your actions, whether or not those actions were justifiable.” Hard words, and yet her hand remained spread over his heart. “The criminally insane don’t have any rational reasons for their actions—what Enrique did? He found a sick pleasure in it. Did you?”

“No, but the seed lives in me.” Nothing could alter the pitiless biological fact of it. “That night after I killed the swan,” he said, speaking the truth for the first time in his life, “Santano told me that the paternal name on my birth certificate is a lie.”

Unwilling to believe anything the other Tk said, Kaleb had waited until he was wealthy enough to make arrangements for anonymous DNA tests, his intent to disprove Santano’s words. “I confirmed the fraud as an adult.” It had taken him ten cycles of testing to accept the truth of his tainted blood.

Struggling up onto her elbow beside him, Sahara pushed back her hair, a frown marring her brow.

“How can that be? DNA is cross-checked at birth to make sure of genetic lines.”

“Money and power can alter anything.”

He watched Sahara digest what he’d said, saw the instant of realization. “Santano Enrique,” she exhaled. “That bastard was your father?”

“In genetics.” Kaleb would claim nothing more of Enrique than he had to. “He had a theory about how to create high-Gradient offspring. He didn’t, however, want that child connected to him in case the experiment failed.” Santano Enrique could not have a weak child, could not be anything less than perfect in every way.

“Sometime after my birth, he made the decision to continue the subterfuge—mostly because it gave him a different kind of access to me.” A parent who treated his child with cruel brutality would be looked at askance in the Net, but a trainer was actively encouraged to do so in the case of an offensive ability. Discipline was everything when it came to a cardinal Tk child—without it, even an infant could kill.

“The man on your birth certificate?” Sahara brushed his hair off his forehead. “Your mother?”

“Bought off, then quietly murdered while I was still a minor.” He felt nothing at the thought of the people who had raised him till he was three, then abandoned him to Santano Enrique. “Low-Gradient as they were, no one noticed.”

“Surely,” Sahara said, “there were suspicions of a cardinal born of two low-Gradient Psy.”

“Santano chose two people with the necessary recessive genes to make such a birth a rare but true possibility.” He spread his fingers on her lower back, her skin delicate and warm, but with a promise of sleek muscle beneath, as if her body were remembering the dancer she’d once been . . . the dancer whose flesh had torn under a knife with a chipped blade. “I carry him in my very cells.”

Sahara’s jaw set in a stubborn line familiar to him from her childhood. “You may carry his genes,” she said, “but you are not and never will be Enrique’s son.” A passionate negation that vibrated with cold fury. “If you were, you wouldn’t find pleasure in touching me with care, only in causing me pain.” Pressing her fingers to his lips, she shook her head. “You’re Kaleb. That is your identity.”

* * *

A half hour later, Sahara was intensely aware of Kaleb watching with silent eyes as she moved around his kitchen, putting together a meal for them both, the ends of the white shirt she’d borrowed from him brushing her thighs. Certain parts of her body twinged with every movement, a silent reminder of the uninhibited intimacy they’d shared in the privacy of his bed.

Kaleb, dressed only in a pair of black sweatpants, the ridged muscle of his chest shadowed in the early evening light in this part of the world, was a young god, a Greek statue come to life. Strong and gorgeous and remote.

Except he wasn’t remote, wasn’t cold. Not for her. Never for her.