Lord of Rage. Jill Monroe

his hands down to his sides. Fisted his hands so he wouldn’t be tempted to touch her. Trace his fingers along the skin of her arm. Her cheek. Find out for himself if she was as soft as she looked.

      What the hell was he thinking? She wasn’t his. One person didn’t possess another. He willed his body to back down.

      Just then her eyes opened, green and sleepy. His gaze darted to her lips, which were turning into a smile. A smile for him.

      “Warrior,” she said, and hugged his pillow to her chest, still more asleep than awake.

      Everything in him controlled and restrained disappeared. Osborn needed to feel her in his arms, kiss that mouth. He reached for her shoulders, dragging her unresisting body toward him. Her eyes widened as he dipped his head.

      He tasted the sweet tartness of the lemonade on her lips. But nothing in this world he’d ever sampled was as good as her. Osborn wound his fingers in the messy strands of her blond hair, drawing her still closer. Smashing the softness of her breasts against his chest.

      His heartbeat pounded, and he took advantage of her unresisting lips and plunged his tongue in her mouth, savoring her, twining his tongue with hers. No, nothing he’d ever had tasted this good. Felt this good. Made him feel this good. Except …

      Except one thing. The woman who invaded his dreams. Tormented his nights. Left him alone feeling tortured, battling a fierce wanting and hungry for more.

      He pulled his mouth from hers. Thrust her away.

      The sound of their harsh breathing filled the small bedroom. The woman blinked up at him, confusion pulling her brows together. A flush rose along the delicate chords of her neck and across her collarbone. She’d been as affected by that kiss as much as he had. Satisfaction curled in his gut.

      She ran her fingers along her lower lip, and he longed to trace that path with his tongue. Suck those fingers into his mouth. All the torment and hunger and wanting torturing his body when he awoke from his dreams with her was magnified tenfold, a hundredfold, for having the real thing in his arms. This wasn’t a dream … was it?

      “You’re real?” he asked, his voice raw and harsh.

      Her nod was slow in coming.

      Then he knew. The woman in front of him wasn’t some dream girl his imagination had conjured to taunt him in the night. The haze that seemed to surround her in his dreams was gone. She lay before him in sharp focus. Osborn remembered the utter helplessness he’d felt, raged against, when he tried to draw her back to him that last time. How he’d failed.

      Somehow she’d put herself there. She was responsible for all the anguished desire he’d felt. All his want. Need. His yearning for something he could never have.

      Thought he could never have.

       His.

      Yes, she was his.

      His berserkergang was wrong to back down, assessing the woman in his bed posed no risk. Everything about her was a threat to him. And still the chill signaling the approach of his berserkergang did not hit him.

      Something must have been in his eyes, or the set of his lips must have alerted some self-preservation instinct inside her. He reached for her again. And that’s when she screamed.