That, and barely surviving the ultimate betrayal of her feelings and trust. But he didn’t need those gory details.

“Don’t be surprised if I ask you a lot of questions. I like knowing what’s going on with you and being involved in Bonheur or anything else you have going on. I’ll help however I can. You have only to ask. I won’t step in the middle of your business unless something seems dangerous or wrong. I know you’ve managed just fine for many years without me, and I’d never presume to think that’s changed.”

God, just when she thought the walls around her heart couldn’t crumble anymore . . . “Thank you.”

“If you think I’ve overstepped, we’ll talk. In return, I’ll ask only three things of you.”

Was this the catch she’d been looking for? “What?”

“First, no more stripping. The male population of Louisiana doesn’t need to see my wife naked anymore.”

“Done.” The last thing she wanted to do was take her clothes off for a bunch of drunk, slobbering strangers again. The fact he cared about who saw her body warmed her heart.

“Good. Second, I need your trust. After Peter’s attack, it became clear that someone once raped you. I don’t need details today or tomorrow. But I want you to know you can trust me with whatever you want to tell me.”

She’d figured he’d come to some fairly accurate conclusions, but the fact he wasn’t going to push her? Her relief was almost tangible. She’d heard enough from the other dancers whose cavemen husbands thought a piece of paper entitled them to know everything to be afraid. Alyssa didn’t think she was wired to share herself that deeply again.

“I appreciate that.”

“Hmm.” Luc exhaled across her shoulder and pressed his mouth to her collarbone. “I appreciate your skin.”

As his palm drifted down to her breast, she caught his wrist and stopped him. Yes, she wanted him again, feeling him deep and strong and demanding inside her. She was a glutton where Luc was concerned. But this conversation was too productive to stop now.

“And third?”

He froze, except for the clenching of his jaw. “Complete fidelity.”

Stinging as if she’d been slapped, she yanked away. “You still think I’m a whore.”

Luc was right on her, curling his arm around her waist and dragging her closer. “No. You don’t turn tricks or fuck customers. Before I got to know you as a person, I believed the stereotype, that a woman who’d shed her clothes for money would also be willing to spread her legs for it. But that’s not you.”

Alyssa pushed back tears, the relief was so profound. Then she noticed that her husband’s carefully crafted reply hadn’t included Tyler.

She’d given Luc a dozen reasons to assume that she and her bouncer were lovers. Tyler touched her openly in public, had a key to her house, saw her naked often . . . In Luc’s shoes, she’d assume the same thing. Insisting again that Tyler was only her friend was counterproductive. Luc would learn the truth soon enough.

“I don’t know a lot about marriage, but I believe fidelity is important. If you’re going to demand it of me, I want the same in return. When you go to Los Angeles to tape your shows next week, don’t imagine it’s okay to hook up with whatever brainless starlet plops in your lap.”

Luc laughed. “Not interested in brainless starlets plopping in my lap, bed, or anywhere else. I’m completely enthralled by you, and being with you, inside you . . .”

His voice lowered an octave, his gaze turning dark and forceful. Intent narrowed his eyes, and before she could think or breathe, Luc probed between her thighs and pushed inward.

His penetration seared her swollen folds. Not surprisingly, she was wet for him. Her nipples beaded. He took one in his mouth and nipped with a stinging pleasure-pain as he forced his cock higher inside her. Alyssa parted her thighs wider and lifted her hips, desperate to have him as deep as he could go. He pressed at her walls, straining her ability to take him. Accepting all of his length and girth in one stroke was impossible. The ramp up to feeling him deep inside her was deliciously maddening.

Her flesh stung, and the burning behind her clit nearly drove her insane. Luc continued to work her nipples. They were already slightly sore from last night. Now they stood up hard and straight and responded to the smallest lick, even to the feel of his breath on them. But when he sucked them in his mouth and bit gently as he plunged the rest of the way inside her . . .

She screamed.

“Yes,” he purred. “Being inside you, making you take every inch of me in this tight, hot pussy. I love sex with you. I’m addicted.”

He withdrew slowly, so slowly, she whimpered. As he lingered, his thumbs brushed her tight nipples before he bit at her neck and plunged deep and hard to the hilt, making her gasp again.

“When I don’t get to fuck you, I’m shaky and strung out. I ache.

I can’t think about anything but getting you naked and working my cock inside you, all gripping and scalding. And bare. Always bare. I don’t ever want anything between us.”

Condoms had always been a way of life for Alyssa. She’d never allowed any man to have sex with her without adequate protection, but what Luc did to her . . . God, there was no description. Even his words made her hot to take him constantly and deeper.

“Your worry, sugar, shouldn’t be what I’m going to do when I’m not in your pussy, but how you’re ever going to be able to keep me out of it. You make me damn hot, so expect that meals will sometimes get cold before you’ll eat them, that your showers won’t be solo, that you may not often get a full night’s sleep. I love you swollen and wet and ready, and I plan to keep you that way.”

Every word out of his mouth melted her into a worthless puddle. When men had talked to her like that in the past, she’d felt sleazy. But something about Luc and the way he whispered to her, almost reverent and amazed, made her feel both needed and special.

As Luc continued to drag his cock through her sensitive channel, blood heated her skin, rushed to her clit. Sensation flooded her as he drew back with stunning friction. She mewled as he pushed back into her so slowly, she dug her nails into his back, tried to push her heels into his ass. He refused to be rushed. In fact, he refused to allow her any say at all.

“Bad girl,” he muttered thickly in her ear. “Impatience will only earn you a slower fucking.”

Before her scrambled brain could regroup so that she could figure out what he meant, Luc withdrew and turned her over. Then plunged in deep again, his strokes maddeningly unhurried and torturous.

“Please. Faster.”

Luc leaned over her back and kissed the side of her jaw, the back of her neck. “What do you want faster?”

God, he was going to make her say it. They’d played this game their first night together, months ago. She’d resisted, and he’d wrung every begging admission from her eventually, then fulfilled a dozen fantasies. That he might do the same now made her blood thicken like lava in her veins.

Alyssa clenched her jaw to hold the words in, but his unhurried strokes were undoing her. Then he added his fingers to her clit and toyed with the distended button.

“Tell me what I want to hear, and you know I’ll give you what you want.”

Yes, he would, but he’d also take so much power from her. She’d already handed him her heart. This . . . would be a sign that she’d surrendered the last of her independence. Her soul.

His fingertips dragged over the exposed head of her clit, and she gasped. He nipped in her ear. “I could do this all morning. You’re so wet, and I love to keep you on edge. You swell and swell, gripping me so tight . . . Mmm.”

Pleasure ripped through her body. Her stomach clenched. The pressure built until it burned and tightened, like hot clamps squeezing at her resistance.

Another dragging withdrawal, another sheet-fisting glide back inside until he bumped her most sensitive spot and pressed. She couldn’t breathe. Dizziness encroached. Luc fingered her needy little bud again.

“Luc!” The demanding shout was more like a sob.

“That’s it, sugar. Yeah. Keep tightening on me.” He clutched her shoulder and used it as leverage as he continued to saw in and out of her body at a molasses pace that made her insane. “Tell me what you want. I can’t give it to you until you do.”

He was playing her, daring her. Giving in went against her grain . . . but Luc had become so effective at strumming her body for his pleasure. The staggering ache kept crashing in on her until she had no more defenses.

She sobbed again. “Please . . .”

“Tell me. Open that pretty mouth and tell me what you want.”

“Faster! Fuck me faster!”

Still he hesitated, his hot, heavy breaths on the back of her neck making her tremble. “Faster? If I do that, what will you do for me?”

He wanted something, and Alyssa had no idea what. If she’d been in her right mind, she would have refused. Who promised something before knowing what it was?

But Alyssa was in no frame of mind to bargain.

“Anything,” she gasped, trying to push back on his cock.

Luc clutched her, preventing any movement. “Just anything?”

The pleasure was coalescing inside her, turning thick and sharp and tight. The slightest movement . . . She needed it. Now. Her mind was about to snap, her body already his slave.

“Anything.”

“What if I want everything?” he growled.

Alyssa couldn’t find her breath, so she gave him a shaky nod.

“Say the words, my little wife.” His fingers retreated, tracing the soft pad of flesh above her pussy, denying her that one touch to her clit that would send her into the stratosphere.

God, she had nothing left to fight him with, no way to keep even an ounce of herself hidden. She arched to him, and he slid a bit deeper inside her. And still it wasn’t enough.

“Everything!” Her cry resonated in her ears.

Like a predator sensing blood, Luc moved in for the kill. “Absolutely everything?”

“Yes,” she breathed. “Please, God, yes!”

“That’s exactly what I’ll take,” he vowed in a snarl, then pounded into her with deep, merciless strokes, fast enough to multiply the friction and still slow enough to savor the mountain of pleasure burying her.

He pressed slick fingers onto her clit again and rubbed in tiny circles. Her blood boiled over, her sanity snapped, and the pleasure burst through her, seemingly bigger than her whole body. It rewrote the definition of amazing sex, became the stick by which she measured encounters with every other man. They all came up woefully short. And still the ecstasy kept piling on top of her, a raging deluge she gladly drowned in.

She’d barely caught her breath and remembered her own name when Luc struck again, this time circulating his slick fingers around the rosette of her back entrance.

Oh, God. He wasn’t just trying to tear away her defenses; he was trying to destroy her. “No.”

“You said everything,” he reminded, his fingers, wet with lubrication still circling the small hole.

“It’s too much.” Alyssa heard the pleading note in her voice and no longer cared.

“Did I hurt you last time, on our first night?”

He knew better. As often as she’d come for him, he must know. But like everything else tonight, he wanted her admission.

“No.”

He pressed two fingers deep, his tongue laving her shoulder. “I’m going to make it good, sugar. So good.”

Of that, she had no doubt.

Alyssa gasped as his fingers went deep, deeper, as his cock stroked in and out of her pussy, bringing back to life nerve endings she’d been certain were overwrought and dead. They didn’t just flicker, but flared, leapt, raced, throbbed.

She was still trying to adjust to the change when he withdrew from her, then angled his body higher over hers. He began pressing his cock into her small back entrance. The stretching bordered pain, and she hissed at the riot of needs flaring to life again as he shoved past her resistance, then pushed in a seemingly endless tunnel inside her until his body pressed completely against her back and she swore she could feel him everywhere.

“Fuck, yes!” He clutched her shoulders, traced her waist with his palms, then grabbed her hips in a brutal, desperate grip. “Rub your clit. This is going to be hard and fast.”

Small mercy after all this time, and she should probably tell him she wasn’t following his directives. She’d rub her clit if she wanted to and not before. But he’d already made her itchy, edgy, needy.

As soon as she touched herself, Luc set a pounding pace that stole her breath. In seconds, he overwhelmed her. Sensations she hadn’t felt in months, wrought by the awakening of greedy nerves and a jacked-up libido, demanded more. She touched herself, dragged up higher and higher by his ferocious strokes into the deepest recesses of her body, igniting the darkest of her fantasies where Luc took her exactly as he wanted, for as long as he wanted, making her climax for him at will.