“I always am around you.” She sounded both marveling and miffed by the admission.

“Does that fash you, lass?”

“I’ve never felt, ooh!”—she gasped when he ground himself in a slow circle against her as he slowly undid the top button of her jeans—“this way before. I’m always turned on, and I can’t seem to turn it off.”

“It makes you feel out of control.”

“Yes.” She sounded fully miffed and not at all marveling now.

“You’re supposed to be out of control for your man, lass. That’s the way of passion. Think you passion is tidy? Neat?” He laughed. “Hardly. Not in my bed.”

“What about the man?” she demanded. “Is he out of control for the woman?”

He grunted. A man could never completely lose control with his woman. At least not a man his size with a woman her size. Still, that didn’t mean he wasn’t out of control in his thoughts, in his gut. He was. Just looking at her made something in him that had always been wild to begin with, even wilder. “I’m always hard for you. I got hard the moment I saw you that first night. And, nay, lass, I can’t turn it off, either. But unlike you, I doona try to. I give into the heat. The need. The pain of the hunger. I savor wanting you, lusting for you, thinking about all the things I’m going to do to you.” He cupped a cheek of her jean-clad ass in each big palm, squeezed. His voice deepened to a sexy, hot purr: “I relish every last thought of taking you, of knowing you as completely and intimately as a man can know his woman. And I’m going to know every inch of you, lass. You want that, doona you, Jessica?”

“Yes,” she moaned.

“By the time I’m done with you, you’ll never be able to forget me. I’m going to burn myself into you so deep that you’ll bear the imprint of me beneath your skin for the rest of your life. Tell me you want me to, Jessica.” Forgive me now for sins you doona even know I’m committing.

“I want you t—oooh!” Her reply turned into a gasp when he thrust strongly against her.

He smiled with dark satisfaction. There was too much clothing between them. He needed to feel her slick and wet and tight, closing on him. Popping the remaining two buttons of her jeans, he shoved them down over her hips, baring her luscious little ass.

He sucked in a ragged breath, pushed her jeans to her ankles, but no farther, leaving her feet caught in them.

“You want to feel me inside you, lass?”

“Yes!”

“Slow and easy, or hard and fast? What would you have of me, Jessica?”

“Yes,” she wailed.

He laughed, a deep rumble of masculine triumph. A man dreamed of an unconditional “aye” from such an exquisite woman.

Lifting her hips, he repositioned her the way he wanted her. Nudging her feet back, he pushed her thighs apart until her knees bent to accommodate the angle, and stepped between them. Catching her jeans behind his boots, he kicked back, drawing them taut at her ankles, pinning her helplessly in her jeans, trapping her between his big body and the desk.

With her legs spread on either side of his thighs, he could keep them wide apart, her ass up-thrust, her soft folds exposed. In her prone stance, she could only take what he was about to give her. Not control it a bit. And if she tried to, all he’d have to do was kick back with a boot to still her.

Later he might give her all the control she wanted—though it would chafe him to the very core of his manhood, he’d consider letting her tie him nine ways to Imbolc if it pleased her—but right now any control he yielded her would weaken his, and his was as threadbare as the original pair of trews he’d been wearing the day he’d been imprisoned.

They’d fallen to rags half an aeon ago.

Jessi gasped when Cian stepped between her legs. She was so wet and ready for him! She couldn’t have moved her lower body if her life had depended on it, and she’d never been so painfully turned-on in her life as she was, helplessly spread for him like this.

He was behind her, her great, big, intensely sexual Highlander, and for a moment, she was reminded of the first time she’d seen him in the professor’s office, a shadowy intimidating presence in the mirror. And the thought occurred to her then that from that very moment, this very moment had been somehow preordained. Inescapable. That no matter which way she’d tried to go, it all would have ended up with her bent over a desk, breathlessly waiting for him to take her, to make her feel this wildly alive. There was a word on the tip of her tongue, something about events lining up in improbable ways. It wasn’t “synergy,” it wasn’t “coincidence” or “providence.” It might begin with an S, she thought. . . .