As she proved when she tugged off his pants to reveal the black boxer briefs he wore underneath. He let her get the pants off and drop them over the side of the bed before he retook control, flipping her onto her back and nuzzling a wet kiss to her neck. Her response was nails digging into his back. “You like my tongue, moyo solnyshko?” he asked with a stroke of his hand down her body. “Let me show you what else I can do with it.”

Taking off her bra with more care than he’d shown her pants—he liked that bra, liked how she looked in it—he threw it aside and filled his hands with the bounty of her breasts. Her nipples were a deep pink, and they made his mouth water. Not one to resist temptation when that temptation was Silver—his Silver—he lowered his head and feasted. Her cry was sharp, her hands gripping his hair tight and her body twisting under his.

Sucking not just her nipple but part of her breast into his mouth, he drew up with his teeth scraping her flesh, then flicked his tongue over the tiny hurt. When he repeated the caress on her other breast, his hand squeezing and petting the breast he’d already wet with his mouth, Silver said, “I want to bite you.” The words were breathless.

“Good.” He returned to his pleasurable task. “You taste even better than I imagined. I want to eat you up.”

Silver’s nails scored his back.

Making a deep, rumbling sound in his chest, he bit lightly at her nipple in mock punishment. She jerked . . . and pulled hard at his hair. He laughed against her. Yes, his Starlight knew very well how to deal with her bear mate.

Kissing his way down the center of her body, he licked a line along the waistband of her panties. It took him a second to remove that impediment. Two rapid claw swipes and he was done.

“I don’t have that many clothes,” Silver reminded him as he drew one of her thighs over his shoulder.

“Stop wearing panties. Problem solved.” Before she could respond to his very sensible suggestion, he gave in to the compulsion to taste the erotic musk of her and, pulling her other leg over his shoulder, buried his face in her pussy.

Her jerk all but arched her off the bed this time.

But she didn’t tell him to stop.

Thank God.

Valentin licked and sucked and petted and drank her in. She was liquid need and delicate softness and so intoxicating, his head spun. By the time he attempted to slide a finger into her sheath, she was wet enough that he had zero trouble. Except for one fact. “Chert voz’mi. You’re too tight.” He looked up with a scowl, saw her looking down.

Licking her lips, her breath coming in gasps, she said, “I didn’t plan on having sexual intercourse with an overendowed bear or I would’ve stretched myself out.”

He growl-laughed, delighted with her. “Yes, I am overendowed. Glad you noticed.” His bear swaggered, full of himself. “Now let’s make sure you can take me over and over and over again.” Dipping his head, he proceeded to do his best to drive his mate deliriously insane. So insane that maybe she’d lower the shields that kept them from mating.

He was wide open to her in every possible way.

Her thighs quivered, her pussy clenching on his tongue and the thick intrusion of his fingers, and her scream of pleasure loud enough to please his primal heart. But he was just getting started. Rising back over her deliciously limp body, he kissed every inch he passed, rubbing his stubble against her to mark her all over. He fondled her breasts because he could, kissed her already swollen mouth hot and deep.

“I can taste myself on your lips.”

The huskiness of her voice was a band around his cock that squeezed mercilessly. “You taste like the best kind of honey,” he said before making his way back down.

This time around, he was all about the main course.

He used his teeth on the delicate folds of her pussy, pushed in his fingers with a little more force, spread them inside her to prepare her for the intrusion of his cock.

She came again in a screaming rush, two of his fingers inside her, the pads pressing on a spot he’d made it his business to learn as a young man who was big enough that even bear females gave him a jaundiced eye. It had all been for this, to make sure he could pleasure his slender mate with her tight internal muscles and her eyes gone midnight and her pussy that was so, so wet for him.

Getting up onto his knees after a last possessive lick, he managed to tug off his briefs, then lifted up her legs, her knees hanging over his arms, and said, “Ready?” The eager head of his cock nudged the scorching heat of her.

Fuck, he was going to lose it.

Silver raised her arms above her head, her breasts taunting him . . . and smiled. “Do it.”

Valentin’s mind short-circuited. The only thing that kept him from just rutting into her like a caveman was the knowledge that this was her first time. Shoving her thighs wide, he pushed in, slow but relentless. The instant he saw pain whisper across her features, he froze. “No?”

“I said,” she growled, “do it!”

Rumbling back at her, he did, pushing in hard and deep. Her gasp was lost in his loud groan of pleasured pain. “Your pussy is like a vise around my cock.”

She squeezed her muscles even tighter.

“Mean, mean Starlichka.” Dropping her legs, he shifted so that he was braced over her.

She wrapped her legs around him. “I read an article in a magazine I found in the Cavern that said men like it when women do that during sexual skin privileges.”

“This man does, except when he’s about to blow his nut on a single stroke.” Kissing her, he drew back an inch, maybe two, then thrust back in. And the mean, mean woman in bed with him squeezed him tight again.

Valentin was only a bear. He lost it, pulling out and shoving back in in two hard, fast strokes before his spine locked and he exploded inside her in a gush of wet heat.

• • •

SILVER had made a conscious decision to deliberately breach the final walls of Silence and face the consequences. She’d known going in what those consequences were likely to be—especially after the earlier overload. Yet despite her foreknowledge, it still felt as if her mind had exploded outward, bloody shards digging into her.

It didn’t matter.

Not when she could feel Valentin’s heart pounding against her, his body a heavy weight. She could barely breathe and still it made no difference to her. Because she understood now, understood that it wasn’t the sex that complicated things.

This, what she’d done with her bear, it had had nothing to do with a simple physical interaction.

“Solnyshko moyo.” A kiss to the dampness of her neck as he roughly spoke words whose meaning had deepened to raw intimacy with a simple change in order.

Sun of my heart. Sunshine of my life.

The passionate, romantic words from her brawny, blunt bear hammered her straight to the soul, made her search for words to give him in return. She wasn’t like Valentin, didn’t always know how to show her love. “Valyusha,” she said, then got stuck, the power of what she felt for him choking her throat.

But he lifted his head and smiled. “Say that again. I like it.”

“Valyusha,” she said, her next words coming from deep in her psyche, words that crashed through all reason and sense. “My Valyusha.”

Eyes wild amber in unhidden delight, Valentin rolled off her, breaking their intimate connection. The aloneness was sudden, startling, but fleeting. He was drawing her up against his chest almost before she’d felt it. She shifted until she was on top of him, could look down into his face. His eyes were heavy-lidded, his skin flushed, his lips curved. “You pack a punch, Starlight.”