Dark Solstice by Kaitlyn O'Connor

his weak knees and stalked from Raathe’s cell toward his own, hoping nobody challenged him along the way—because he was dead meat if they did. He sure as fuck wasn’t in any condition to defend himself.
    Rhea shivered at the withdrawal of Kyle’s warmth, watching him through her lashes as he stalked past Raathe and left, more than a little stunned at the force of the climax that had rocked her.
    She was almost as stunned that she’d gone from ‘faking it’ to mindless appreciation so quickly she wasn’t even sure of when she’d made the transition. Somewhere along the way, though, she’d completely forgotten that she was pretending to enjoy Kyle’s caresses to annoy Raathe.
    The thought brought her attention back to Raathe. He met her gaze for a long moment and turned away.
    In that handful of seconds, though, she saw that she’d succeeded in annoying him a lot more than she’d expected to and it unnerved her. With an effort, she pushed herself upright and climbed from the bunk, moving to the lavatory to bathe herself off. She could still taste Kyle on her lips, though, could catch his scent faintly on her skin with each breath she took and each time she did she felt a fresh stirring of warmth.
    He’d called her by name, she realized with a jolt as she finished cleaning up. How had he known her name? She hadn’t told anyone and she couldn’t recall that it had been announced when they’d led her into the arena.
    Maybe they had, though, and she’d just been too mindless with terror to notice?
    Raathe caught her as she headed back toward the bunk, his hand closing tightly around her forearm. She looked up at him with a mixture of surprise and wariness. He reeled her closer, threading the fingers of his free hand in the hair at the nape of her neck and dragging her head back on the stem of her neck. Before she’d fully assimilated his intent, he dragged her up against his length and claimed her mouth with his own. Too surprised to react at first, by the time the message had traveled to her sluggish brain, warmth had spread through her, turning her knees to water, and any thought of resistance had melted.
    His taste and scent and touch were as different from Kyle’s as the physical differences between the two men. It lit her up. She was so disoriented by his kiss, she wasn’t certain she would’ve even noticed the gentle collision with the wall he pressed her against if not for the iciness of it against her overheated skin. The coldness sucked the breath from her lungs, though.
    Before she could drag air back into her lungs to fight the dizziness that swept over her, he’d hoisted her upward along the wall, dragged her legs around his waist, and transferred the heated adhesion of his mouth from hers to her breast. The covetousness of his possession was heady, seemed to paralyze her lungs in her chest, making it nigh impossible to drag in a decent breath. Giddiness enveloped her.
    She struggled with the burning need for air in her lungs, the drunken lethargy that swept through her, the searing jolts traveling along every nerve ending with the pull of his mouth on her flesh, panting for breath. She’d just managed to drag a decent gulp of oxygen into her lungs when she heard the tearing sound of his suit closure parting, felt the press of hot, hard flesh at the mouth of her sex as he found her, claimed her. A low, animalistic groan escaped her as she felt his flesh parting hers, felt him sink deeply inside of her.
    Insane it might be, but the way the man made her feel when he joined his flesh with hers was like nothing she’d ever experienced before, delightful almost past bearing. He impaled her ruthlessly, shifting once he’d plumbed her depths to a position more advantageous and pounding into her in a way that carried her so swiftly from blossoming desire to completion that it took her breath. She sucked in a gasp on the sharp edge of a scream at the power of the explosion that rocked through her as