Married By Christmas: His Pregnant Christmas Bride / Carter Bravo's Christmas Bride

His slow approach toward her suddenly stopped at a slam of realization. That this could have been the real reason he hadn’t confronted her before he’d left her in the past. Maybe he’d dreaded if she’d known, she would feel relieved to be rid of such a monster, would have tried her best to forget him, to replace him.

Dog-in-the-manger, as she’d said.

He was more messed up than he had realized.

But even knowing so, there was nothing he could do about it now. Even if he overcame his own aversion to exposing the ugliness and madness in his past, telling her now would only disturb her more. And this he wouldn’t do.

But if he couldn’t satisfy her need to know, he could offer her what neither of them had been truly alive without. The all-consuming intimacy that they’d never be able to find with any other. At least he could give that to her for now. While she still wanted him. The man she thought he was.

His steps resumed as he started to unbutton his shirt. By the time he opened the shower, he was still clothed but he couldn’t wait any longer to have his hands on her.

It all happened at once. He got drenched, she gasped at feeling his entry and he was wrapped around her, taking her from her slump against the wall back against his thundering body, into the shelter of his no longer containable passion.

She twisted around to face him with a cry, her eyes streaming with both water and tears, glittering with one unspoken question.

He answered it. “I can’t let you go.”

He tried to obliterate the distance she’d put between them but her trembling hands flattened against his soaked shirt, pain filling her eyes. “I can’t have this be the only reason.”

A self-deriding and loathing huff escaped him. “The one thing that stopped me from taking you was trying to do what was best for you. For me, holding back has been a hell second only to the years without you, to when I lost Alex and thought I’d lost you, too.”

He thought, hoped, his confession would appease her, at least explain his behavior. But what she did next had him so stunned his heart forgot to beat.

Anastasia slapped him with all her strength.

That wasn’t saying much, compared to the blows he’d sustained in his life. But from her, it brought him to his knees, figuratively, as he realized just how much he’d hurt her.

She glowered up at him through the jet of water, her enraged eyes the most beautiful and overpowering he’d ever seen them.

“That’s for all these years of hell.” Then both hands slammed on his chest, wet, sharp lashes of fury. “And that’s a reminder to stop making unilateral decisions on my behalf.” Next she pummeled him, as if she wanted to storm his being, to break down his barriers. “And that’s for driving me mad with your contradictions, with all the things you think you’re protecting me from.” Then her hands were knotted in his hair, bringing his face down to hers for an openmouthed, desperate kiss, her voice a hot tremolo breaching him to his very core. “And that’s for saving me, for being the only one I’ll ever crave. The absolute best and worst thing that has ever happened to me.”

Before he could try to even think of how to deal with her lightning-fast mood changes, she pushed him away again, hands clawing at his shirt as if it was her worst enemy, tearing at the sodden material, ripping off the buttons he hadn’t undone.

“And that’s for coming in here still clothed,” she panted as she attacked him, lips and teeth suckling and biting at every inch of flesh she’d exposed. “For making me wait again.”

Everything that had ever held him back, every shred of control, every dread, every heartache, snapped, unleashing the longing and hunger that had been accumulating inside him.

Grabbing her hands, he pinned them above her head against the wet wall, while his other hand skimmed her lush curves greedily. But Anastasia wouldn’t be held back anymore, squirmed to escape his hold, to continue exposing him to her hunger. He lasted only moments before he stopped her fumbling efforts and shredded the remainder of his clothes,

Shoving them away, he kneeled before her, looked up at her, this woman who embodied everything that mattered. As she sobbed his name over and over, he rubbed his lips, his whole face against her scar, the evidence that she’d survived, that he’d been given a second chance, one he’d almost wasted.

“Anastasia.” He reiterated her name like a prayer, soul and body rioting with savage poignancy as he rose and lifted her off her feet.

As she crushed her swollen, hard-tipped breasts against his chest, rubbed her firm belly against his steel erection, he wrenched back at her lips. “No more waiting, moya dusha, never again.”

He boosted her efforts to clamp her legs around his buttocks, fusing their lips as he flexed his hips until his erection nudged her entrance. He went blind with arousal as her hot, molten core scorched him, her face scrunching with extreme lust as she opened to him fully.

But as he began to ease himself inside her, she bit down hard on his lip. “I can’t bear slow or gentle. Give me all you have, all your strength and greed. Devastate me. Finish me.”

“Anastasia, moye serdtse...”

And she was his heart. He could have more easily withheld his next heartbeat than deny her what she needed. Holding her gaze, he thrust inside her, hard and fierce, invading her with the power they’d both been going mad for, stretching her beyond her limits. Her scream of agonized exultation tore through him as she consumed every inch of him in her clenching hunger.

At last, he thought, groaned, over and over. At last.

Incoherent with the pleasure, with the possession, but still needing more, he filled his savage mouth and hands with her flesh, needing to plunder all that she was, leave no fiber of her being unclaimed. Her body yielded to his invasion while he watched greedily as wonder, pleasure and relief splashed across her magnificent face, squeezed out of her in splintered cries.

He’d filled her depths with that first ferocious plunge. He dropped his forehead to hers, overwhelmed, transfigured.

“At last, moya dusha...”

Her graceful back was a deep arch, letting him do it all to her. “Yes, Ivan, yes... I missed you, went insane missing you. Give me everything now. Ivan, please, now...”

Obeying her, he withdrew all the way out of her, roaring at the loss before ramming back into her tightness, that sheath of absolute ecstasy and oblivion that he’d craved until he’d become a shell of a man.

She was everything. The perfect fit, the end of his exile. Every glide inside her, the reality of their merging, the unimaginable pleasure of it, sent him straight out of his mind.

Her whimpers were delirious as her slick flesh clamped around his length with a force he was only too familiar with. He had craved it to the point of insanity throughout the years, and far beyond in the past weeks.

But she was tightening even more around him, contracting in forceful waves, her cries sharpening, getting more desperate, and he knew. She was already orgasming. She wanted him that fiercely, was that aroused, it had taken only a couple of thrusts to drive her over the edge. He pushed her hard over it and into an explosive climax, wrung her voluptuous body of every last drop of sensation and satisfaction.

He built the momentum of his thrusts all through her orgasm, until he was jackhammering inside her, until her whole body stiffened around him again, inside and out, absorbing all the ecstasy he rode her to. Her breath came in tortured keens as she hovered once more right at the edge of devastation. Then she exploded again in his arms. Her flesh rippled around him as bursts of completion convulsed through her, wrung him from the deepest point where he buried himself inside her, her screams stifling.

He withstood her storm as she expended every shudder and tear. Then he finished her as she’d always craved him to, impaling her beyond her limits, lodging himself at the gates of her womb and letting his own pleasure scorch through his length, filling her.

Her convulsions spiked at the first splash of his seed, sending him spiraling out of control along with her in the throes of a release that was the most powerful he’d ever experienced, even with her.

Plummeting into a realm where nothing existed beyond being merged with her, he rocked them together as they rode the aftershocks. All he knew was that he was still pouring himself into her, feeling her enveloping him inside and out.

Anastasia. His again.

It had been everything, beyond description. Yet not enough. Nothing had ever been enough with her. He’d always wanted more, always would.

Unable to stand any longer, he sank down to the marble floor, barely aware of the water still raining down on them. Only she had ever made him powerless. Since he’d first seen her, she’d been his undoing. Now he wrapped himself around her, the woman who’d been made to take him whole, to fit within his arms and being.

He realized she’d gone limp in his arms only when she lurched, a gasp seeming to restart her breathing. Her eyes, slumberous and replete and adoring, snared him, ate him up whole, sending fire raging through him again. She was a goddess of temptation and benevolence and fulfillment, one he’d always felt unworthy of. It never ceased to humble him that she, miraculously, wanted no one but him. Gratitude and greed surged inside him, making him crush her against him as he drove all the way inside her again.

Her eyes squeezed shut as she gasped, her core contracting around his fully engorged erection, making him thrust deeper into her, wrenching moans from both of them. Her eyes snapped open, scorched him with the amalgam of pleasure and pain that intensified her one-of-a-kind beauty. She brought his face down to hers, merging their lips, too.

His mind was a total blank as his tongue mated with hers in a languid duel. Though he’d been kissing her almost nonstop through the past weeks, this was different. This was total, complete. Tasting her while holding back, he’d felt like Tantalus, unable to ever quench his thirst until he’d felt he’d shrivel up and expire. Drinking from her lips now that they were sharing their bodies in profound intimacy again was a revival. Even her name described what she was. A resurrection. His resurrection.

Soon the leisurely pleasure caught fire, and she was writhing in his arms as he pounded himself up inside her until they exploded simultaneously into an even fiercer, more prolonged orgasm.

An eternity later, he relinquished her mouth to gaze down at her. Her head fell back, her face drugged with satisfaction.

Then those lips he’d kissed swollen and deep red moved, and that beloved voice poured out in a heartbreakingly tender melody. “I want you again, Ivan. And again. I want to make up for all the time you wouldn’t let me have you.”

At her words he hardened again immediately. It was as if their previous two times served only to whet his appetite. As it always had. Whenever he’d taken her in a fury of haste, the explosive satisfaction had only left him wanting more, the kind of pleasure that only slow lovemaking would bring. And that had been when he’d been ignorant of one paramount fact. That no other woman would do.

Now that he knew every cell in his body was her personal property, no matter if she would have him or not, his desire frightened him with its magnitude.

But she did want him the same way. She wanted him with everything in her. For now. And for as long as he could have her total desire, he would give her his everything.

Adjusting her in his lap, over his erection, he began to move inside her again. He luxuriated in possessing her, in exploring her body and plumbing the depths of her responses as he loved her. He gave her two more screaming, heaving orgasms before he took his own roaring release.

After he’d rinsed and dried them both, he scooped her up and headed toward his bedroom this time, where he intended to keep her for as long as she would stay.

It was only when he was walking the huge corridor leading to his suite that she stirred in his arms, her question slurring. “Where are you taking me?”

He bent to kiss those swollen lips that could barely articulate words. “To my bed. Where I’ll take you properly.”

* * *

It sometimes seemed impossible.

Well, it always did, actually. That Ivan could give her even more pleasure every time he made love to her. But he did.

Ever since that day six weeks ago when he’d given in and given her himself totally, every time he took her, it was even better, more carnal, yet more profound. He’d been very eloquent and copious with expressing his passion. Far more poetic than this science nerd could ever be. He told her every time he touched her, it was like he tapped into another realm, where neither of them had limits, where the potential for pleasure and unity was infinite.

Anastasia sighed, stretched in bed, every cell buzzing with bliss as she watched Ivan through the open door of his gigantic bedroom, theirs now. He was coming into view then disappearing as he walked to and fro in the attached living room, his deep voice barely audible so as not to disturb her as he no doubt settled a business matter with a subordinate.

She’d never felt like this before, not even with him. Their rapport had been growing with every touch, every glance and word, as if the ordeals they’d endured together had somehow given each a direct link to the other’s very essence. Now they were learning to perfect each channel of communication between them, every spark of sensation. The most incredible thing was his becoming that vocal in expressing his feelings, in communicating his thoughts and memories.

Not that he’d ever crossed some lines. He hadn’t put a name to those feelings, or ever went back in time further than when he’d been establishing Black Castle Enterprises with his partners, whom she’d discovered were more than brothers to him. It had been okay with her, as she’d thought it was only a matter of time before he let her in all the way.

But that had proved the only blot in the perfection. That she by now believed he never would.

Suddenly, the bone-deep contentment of waking up in his bed evaporated. Getting up, she put on the turquoise silk robe he’d bought her, another thing that echoed her eyes, which he loved to see.

Walking to the balcony, she opened the blackout curtains, let the cool late November daylight in, looking over the sprawling, snow-covered grounds, trying to shake off the dip in her mood.

She was being too silly, too greedy, needing to reach as deep inside him as he had inside her. But she had to live with the fact that there was far more to him than there was to her. Or anyone else for that matter. What had made him this incomparable man that he was had to have been experiences and tests that she couldn’t even imagine. No doubt things he wanted to forget, might even regret. If he couldn’t let her in that far, probably thinking she couldn’t handle it, it shouldn’t bother her. That it did was her own problem, not his. A problem she should deal with, once and for all.

“Did I wake you up?”

She whirled around at Ivan’s vocal caress. She’d been engaged in such a struggle with her wayward thoughts that she hadn’t heard his approach. He was behind her, then around her, encompassing her in his cherishing power.

She met his heated smile with her own. “I just woke up because you were no longer beside me.”

“Now I am, and it’s the only place I ever want to be.” His breath flayed her lips, hot, virile, filling her lungs and being. “No one should wake up this beautiful. No one should be this beautiful, period.”

Starting to tremble with that urgency for him that never abated, she ground herself against his hardness. “Look who’s talking.”

He pressed her back against the French window, driving one pant-clad powerful thigh between her quivering legs where her robe opened to expose them. “Tell me, Anastasia.”

He always urged her to tell him everything she was thinking, everything she wanted. It was as if he needed access to her very soul, to her every whim and need so he could satisfy them. Which he did. Apart from that one huge part of himself he never let her near, he was giving her everything there was to give. While she held nothing back from him.

Now she gave him what he asked for, full capitulation. “I find everything about you painfully, distressingly, beautiful.” To accentuate her admission, she slipped her arms from around his neck, pushed his open shirt farther apart and covered the perfection of his chest in compulsive kisses. “Every inch of you, every move and word and touch, every callus and scar... It all delights me, drives me out of my mind, even more the more I’m exposed to you, the more I have of you.”

His gratification—especially when she mentioned calluses and scars, which must be trophies of that blacked-out time in his past—was so ferocious it burned her. Though it had always disturbed her to formulate theories how he’d acquired them, tracing them with her fingertips and lips, feeling them raking against her skin, had always sent her clear out of her mind with lust. She found them as arousing and beautiful, awe-inspiring as every other part of him.

He ran his fingertips down her arms, slowly, tantalizingly, until they reached her hands, and he untangled them from his shirt. Then giving her such a wicked glance, he turned away from her. She watched him sit down on the couch facing the balcony, amazed all over again how the fever of anticipation and urgency only increased with every sexual encounter. Her heart shook her as he sprawled back, spreading his great body for her to drool over.

Then he beckoned. “Show me, moya dusha.”

She called on all her self-control not to run to him but rather play the game of slow seduction he seemed to want. She undulated toward him, conscious of the robe slipping off one shoulder, exposing a generous swell of one engorged breast, and the effect that had on him. Black pupils ate up the emerald of his eyes, the rock hardness tenting his pants expanded, and the smoldering smile became purely predatory. Prolonging the moment and reveling in her ability to arouse him always and completely, she took her time to reach him.

But once her knees bumped his, she lost the fight. She collapsed over him under the weight of the seven years of unremitting craving she’d only started expending. Slowing her descent with shaking hands against his unyielding shoulders, she straddled his hips, her robe riding up her thighs. His eyes burned into hers with smug satisfaction until her lips crashed down on his.

He opened his mouth to her urgency, let her show him how much she needed everything he had. And she did. Her hands roamed his Herculean chest, his granite abdomen, until they reached his massive manhood, as she lowered herself to press her drenched core against it.

“I want you, Ivan. You just breathe, I just breathe, and I want you. All of you.” She reached for his belt buckle, eager to unsheathe the formidable length of him.

At her feverish moans he stopped her uncoordinated efforts. Sighing in ragged relief, she let him take the lead, luxuriated in his domination, what he’d so maddeningly made her work for.

His hands roved her curves, pushing the robe off her burning body, his every move loaded with the ruthlessness of a starving predator unleashed on a prey long kept out of reach. It didn’t matter that he’d spent the night feasting on her. Their fire consumed them only to rage higher.

His pupils flared and subsided, giving his eyes the illusion of flashing emerald. Then he bent to the breasts he was kneading, grazed and suckled her peaked nipples until he had her writhing, her breath fracturing, her arousal soaking his pants. After his devastating homage, he swept her around, spreading her naked on the couch. Opening her thighs wide, he took them over his shoulders as he came down on his knees between them. Before she could mutter a protest, he buried his lips in her flowing readiness. She shrieked at the feel of his tongue and teeth, opening herself fully to give him total access to her intimate flesh, what had always been his.

Then he nipped her bud, and the slam of pleasure told her that one more suckle or graze would finish her. And she didn’t want release this way, even if she knew he was addicted to giving it to her. She was addicted to him, to merging with him, feeling his potency invade her, fill her every emptiness and loss and need.

“Ivan,” she gasped. “I need you inside me.”

Growling, he heaved up, caught her plea in his savage mouth, sharing her taste on his tongue. In one fluid motion he rose, lifting her in his arms. But instead of taking her to their bed, he took only a few steps before he stopped abruptly, pressed her with her steaming back against the cool, smooth wall. Capturing her there with his massive body, he locked her feet around his buttocks, thrilling her again with his strength. Then he leaned back, freeing his erection.

As always, the potency she’d worshipped so many times, that had possessed her during so many long, devastating rides to ecstasy, had her mouth watering, her core clenching. The intimidating weight and length of it thudded against her swollen flesh, squeezing another plea from her depths. He glided his incredible heat and hardness through her molten lips, sending a million arrows of pleasure to her womb. But he didn’t penetrate her until she cried out.

“Fill me.”

Only then did he ram inside her. Pleasure burst from every nerve ending at his carnal invasion. She was addicted to this, the first almost unbearable expansion as he stretched her beyond her limits around his length and girth. It was always a shock so acute, so exquisite, her senses flickered.

“Every single time, moye serdtse, you feel even better,” he growled. “Anastasia...if only I could devour you whole for real.” And it felt he tried to, his teeth sinking into her shoulder like a wolf tethering his mate in the throes of a feral copulation. Then he withdrew.

It felt as if he was dragging her life force out with him. Her arms tightened around his back, her hands clawed it, begging his return. He complied with a harder, deeper plunge until he forced her flesh to yield fully to him. Only when he’d breached her to her very core did he quicken his tempo. Every withdrawal was a maddening loss, every plunge excruciating ecstasy. In her heightened state she was aware of every sound and scent and sensation. Her cries that blended with her muttered name on his lips... The carnal sounds of their flesh slapping together... The musky scent of sex and abandon... The glide and burn of his hard flesh inside her. They all combined to rocket her to the point of combustion.

When she couldn’t bear it anymore, he gave her what she needed, as he always knew just when, how hard and fast. He hammered between her splayed thighs, his erection pounding inside her with the perfect cadence and force to unleash everything inside her. She shattered in his arms.

Sensations radiated from the pinpoint of insanity where he was buried deepest. Currents of release crashed through her, squeezing her intimate muscles around him, drawing out every jolt of pleasure from her every inch. She felt him everywhere, igniting her every nerve ending, invading her heart.

Knowing he’d inundated her with satisfaction, knowing she now needed his, and his total domination, he roared her name and exploded in his own climax. With one last plunge he filled her to overflowing, sharpening the throes of her release. She felt him pulse the last of his seed into her depths, completion imbuing her as she slumped over his chest...

A rumble beneath her ear jogged her back to consciousness. “Perfection, Anastasia. Every single time. And more.”

Feeling boneless, she tried to nod her spinning head in agreement as he carried her and started walking, still buried within her depths. Knowing he’d carry her to bed now, she drifted off again.

Jerking out of her sensual stupor as he laid her down, she twisted around sensuously in the cotton sheets imprinted with his scent and that of their intimacy, compensating her for his loss as he left her body to strip fully.