The Taming: Book 3 in the Tribe Warrior Series by Imogen Keeper (romantic novels in english TXT) 📕

her neck, leaning in close to press a kiss to the corner of her clenched lips. “Do not push me, Klym. I am a violent man, and you make me angry.”

Her breasts heaved, hard nipples clearly visible through the shirt, which was rucked up around her waist.

He trailed a hand along her ankle. “You will behave, or I will spank you again.”

Her face was mutinous, and that lip wobbled. She sucked it into her mouth, and he stared down, struggling to read the strangely forlorn look in her eyes and reconcile it with the scent of her arousal thick in the air.

“Did you like being spanked?”

She glanced to the ceiling like she always did when she lied. “No.”

“Should I check?”

She chewed on her lips, refusing to meet his eye, but she didn’t resist when he slid a hand up her thighs and parted them.

He hesitated, his palm resting over hot skin, soft hair tickling him. “What will I find, Klym? Will I find you wet and ready for me?”

She looked up at him with eyes so raw and almost sad that his heart thumped in his chest. And she nodded, hesitantly.

He sucked in a breath. “There’s no shame in that. You’ll be my wife. It will be my foremost duty, my honor, to see to it that you are always satisfied when you feel that way.”

He left his hand there for a long, silent moment, letting the heat of his palm do the work for him. When her hips lifted up, trying to get him closer, he backed away. Let her feel some frustration. Let her want him.

Her brows drew together, tilting up in the center, her eyes wide and wet.

“Migané, amiera. You slay me with those eyes.”

He’d bend just a little. Let her think so anyway, so she’d stop looking at him like he was a monster. “If you can find someone in the universe who wants you enough to come get you within fifteen days, I’ll let you go. But if not, you’re mine.”

She shivered, but a burst of hope flared. She’d never find anyone. Her father couldn’t come for her. Agammo wouldn’t. She’d never ask Spiro. There was no one. She was alone but for him. But if she needed time to get used to that, fine.

He slid his hand up her thigh, higher, to cup a cheek of that perfect ass. It would be so easy to spread her thighs, push his way inside, fill her with his seed and make her forget who she was, but she’d hate him for real if he did that.

“Thirty,” she said.

“Twenty.”

Her chin jutted forward.

“If at any point, you change your mind and want to stay with me, all you need to do is say so.”

Her brow wrinkled.

“Say you understand me, Klym. Say it out loud.”

Her chin stayed high as she shook her hair back over her shoulders. “I understand you.”

His grip tightened, not quite enough to leave a bruise, but enough to make her flinch. “One more act of defiance in the meantime, one more plate in the face, one more sulk in the bathing chamber, one more bout of silent treatment, I fuck you. Wherever we are. And we both know you’d like it.”

Her eyes widened.

“That’s the deal. Twenty days from now. In that time, I keep you safe from the Alliance in my home, as my selissa. If you disobey me in that time, the deal is void, I fuck you immediately, and you are mine forever.”

Her lips quivered, and a strange light shown in her eyes. “I left the last man who tried to steal my freedom bleeding on the deck of his own ship.”

“A fact I remember well. But that’s because he was a man of high morals, and I am not. You won’t get away from me.”

She kicked his shoulder, and he laughed. “You can’t just give me an orgasm every time I piss you off.”

“Challenge accepted.”

18

Drool puddles

“WHAT TIME WILL WE ARRIVE?” Klym stared at the empty bulkhead next to Tor’s bed.

She had memorized every inch of it in the last seven days. She’d spent most of her time in that bed. Sleeping, or... not sleeping beside him.

That first night after their fight with the noodles, he’d come back, laid her digi and her holo-cam on the side of the bed in silence, and used a warm, wet cloth to clean her between the thighs where his mess had covered her, and left her there.

She lay in the dark for a long time, and when the silence got too hard to bear, she turned on the holos, let them spin their reel around the room, her father looking happy and normal without the pinched-nose, hard-jawed expression. So in love. A family. Like she’d always wanted.

At some point, she must have fallen asleep, because when she woke, he was sitting on the bed, with his back to her.

He watched the holos for a long time, his elbows resting on his knees. She’d have given anything to see his face, have a clue what he’d been thinking. After a while he turned off the feed and slid under the covers behind her.

He hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t needed to.

She’d feigned sleep, too tired for a fight, and let him pull her body into his. If she was honest, she’d been desperate to escape her own churning mind and the desperate reality that there wasn’t a single person she could name who wanted her. So, she’d accepted his captor’s comfort because, for all he’d done, in the dark it was so easy to pretend that he cared at least a little.

The darkness closed in like a shroud, thick with his intoxicating scent. His arms squeezed her tight, and a single, hot, open-mouthed kiss to the back of her neck was all it took for her to dissolve. She stopped pretending to be asleep, she stopped pretending to be brave, she stopped pretending she didn’t need him.

He’d whispered in Vestigi. Words of sorrow, apologies, guilt and promises.

She