Because he couldn't hurt Anna.
Sweet, innocent Anna.
Stilling, he held her hips tightly in his hands. She tried to buck into him, but when he wouldn't let her move, she looked up at him, confusion warring with desperate desire on her sweat-dampened face.
"Cole?"
"So small and sweet." He had to lick at her lips, tasting the salt from her skin mixing up with her own sweet essence. "I don't want to hurt you."
He'd been saying the same thing to her since practically the first moment they'd met, and damn it, he didn't think he could live with himself if he ever hurt her, if he accidentally ripped her apart because he'd needed her too bad to think straight.
"Then why are you hurting me now?"
His chest clenched with instant regret. "Jesus, Anna, I didn't mean--too rough on--you're too small for--" He was trying to force himself out of her wet heat as word fragments fell from his lips, but f**k, even knowing what he was doing to her, he couldn't manage more than an inch.
"I love it when you're rough, Cole. I love it when you can't control yourself."
He blinked hard, his brain working to convince him that he'd heard her correctly. "But I'm hurting you."
"The only time you hurt me is when you stop."
And in that moment as he looked into her eyes and knew she wasn't saying what he wanted to hear, but was speaking the truth--he let the switch go.
All the way up.
The next heartbeat had him driving into her so hard that the entire couch slid across the floor. The knowledge that he hadn't imagined her answering smile of pleasure had him ravaging her mouth with his lips and teeth and tongue even as he ravaged her pu**y with a c**k that was as hard as steel and so thick that he could feel her sensitive tissue working to stretch around him.
And then, through his own crazy thrusting and pumping into her, he felt it...the telltale way her muscles all clenched around his cock, the way her ragged breaths came to a momentary stop, hitching in her chest, the way her nails dug in deep along with her heels, the way her thigh muscles tightened on his hips. Any other time he would have focused on her pleasure, would have made sure she hit her climax before he did, but now that the beast was out, there was no locking him back into his cage.
Rearing up over her, he roughly cupped a breast in each hand, her hard ni**les searing the centers of his palms, and he rode her like he'd never ridden anyone. Her head was thrown back, her eyes closed tight as she held onto his forearms and let him take her, riding the wave that he'd become. And instead of pain or fear, in that moment when a gasp left her throat as she began to climax and she opened her eyes and stared straight into his soul, he saw his own pleasure mirrored in those ocean depths.
A pleasure so deep that he wasn't sure how either of them were going to survive without it.
His roar shook the windows as he exploded, her muscles milking him, and if he might have thought that he should pull out, that they weren't really married and he shouldn't be shooting his come deep into her womb, he didn't hear it, wasn't aware of anything but riding out the biggest, strongest orgasm he'd had in thirty-four years.
* * *
Cole shifted them so that he was lying beneath her on the couch and Anna was plastered over his big, hard body, still holding on for dear life, still trying to figure out how to breathe, how to think. She was still trying to figure out how it was even possible for anything--or anyone--to make her feel so good. To feel so much.
If she were smart, if she had any sense of self-preservation at all, she'd be sliding off him, putting space between them, making sure she didn't let him take her over, body and soul.But that last orgasm must have obliterated a huge chunk of her brain cells. Because she couldn't have left Cole's warmth, the comfort of his arms around her, if someone had been holding a gun to her head.
Not when she was finally right where she'd wanted to be for so very long, held in the arms of a strong man who knew exactly what she needed, even when she hadn't known it herself.
He pulled her tighter and she willingly curled into him, closing her eyes, her muscles relaxed, her breath coming more evenly as she realized just how much all of that crazy, extremely physical sex had worn her out.
* * *
Cole hadn't thought anything could top the wild sex they'd just had on the couch. He was wrong.
So goddamned wrong.
It didn't make any sense that anything could be better than f**king Anna, especially not when they repeatedly had the most explosive sex of his life.
But Anna's warmth, the soft press of her curves against him as she fell asleep in his arms
--holding the sweet trust of a woman he was starting to really care about in the palm of his hands--was good.
Too good.
Way too good.
So good that a man could lose his way if he wasn't careful.
Chapter Thirteen
Anna woke in Cole's big bed. He was stretched out beside her, watching, obviously waiting for her. Even though he wasn't touching her, she felt her skin come alive beneath his gaze.
He was naked now, too, and as she ran her hungry gaze down his tanned skin, over the deeply sculpted muscles over his shoulders and chest and stomach to the thick erection jutting out from his body, she realized what he was holding.
The dildo she'd bought.
Amazingly, in their frantic coupling in his living room, she'd forgotten all about it. Now, looking at the thick flesh-colored plastic penis she'd chosen made her blush. She reached out for a nonexistent blanket to pull up over her nakedness.
Cole's gaze was full of heat and such deep possession it stole her breath. "Why don't you put those hands above your head, sweetheart?"
It shouldn't be so tempting to follow orders. Her hands and arms shouldn't automatically be rising above her head, but the truth was, she'd already given up trying to make her reaction to this man fit into a tidy little box.
There was nothing tidy whatsoever about any of this. Not their quickie marriage, or the fact that instead of cursing the way he'd manipulated her into marrying him as a gift for his grandmother, she felt almost ... thankful.
"You look so pretty like that, Anna. Your skin all flushed, your sweet br**sts arching closer to my mouth." He bent over her then, his tongue a flat press of heat over one peak.
Anna instinctively moved her hands to thread into his hair and he lifted his head from her sensitive skin.