by Lora Leigh
Katie nodded, though she doubted he saw her as he quickly straightened his clothes before striding to the door.
Jerking it open, Devil stepped into the hall, opening the door no farther than necessary as she quickly dressed. Seconds later, Katie slipped out as well and raced to the guest room she’d been given.
Stepping inside, she could see that the curtains had been drawn, blocking so much as a hint of the late afternoon sun or anyone brave enough, or lucky enough, to get a view.
Closing the door behind her, Katie curled into the large wingback chair next to the door, wrapped her arms across her breasts and stared into the darkness of the room.
Would this be her life from now on? Running? Hiding? Always searching for safety and never being certain it existed?
She couldn’t imagine such a life for herself. Because that life would mean leaving the Reever ranch and leaving the Breed whose eyes seemed to stare straight to her soul and whose touch could make her forget everything but her need for him.
She’d never known a connection to another person as she felt with this Breed. She had never wanted to be with another person, not just sexually, but just near him, as she did with Devil.
For the first time since she’d learned exactly what she was and how she had come to be, Katie began to regret it. Because the very fact of her creation could very well be exactly why Devil was fighting the desire between them so hard.
Perhaps he simply didn’t want a woman whose life, whose very existence came with the kind of problems that hers would come with. He could want a nice, normal woman who would present no problems and no additional dangers to his own existence.
She could understand that.
The hell she could.
No nice, normal woman could ever tolerate a Breed male. They were arrogant, dominant, forceful, and so damned aggravating they made a woman want to kill at times. She knew exactly what they were like. She’d been dealing with them since she was sixteen years old during her first training year with the Breed Security Network.
Breed males were always certain they were right. They rarely, no, they never, at any time accepted that a woman, whether she was Breed or human, could survive without a male’s protection, and they were prone to prove it in a variety of ways.
They were peculiar, particular and perverse.
And she had a very bad feeling she might well be falling in love with one.
* * *
Graeme, secure the grounds,” Devil ordered quietly as he watched the Jeep rumble from view, the high-range camera mounted on the top pointing back at the grounds.
It had been pointing forward when the vehicle stopped at the gates.
“They’re secured,” he answered, and Devil knew if Graeme said they were secured, then they were damned well secured.
The Lion Breed was one of the few recessive Breeds Devil had known with actual Breed traits. He’d arrived six months before with nothing more than a change of clothes in a small pack, a knife and a sense of security weaknesses that had immediately found favor on the estate.
Tall, broad, laid-back and rarely displaying a temper, Devil was beginning to rely on the exacting precision in which the Breed did everything he set out to do.
“The girl’s still in her room,” Graeme reported as he consulted the wireless electronic security monitor he carried. “She left your office just after you and went straight to her bedroom.”
Devil glanced at the other man briefly. “You knew she was there.”
“It would be damned hard to miss the smell of her need,” Graeme agreed. “I have no doubt Mr. Reever and Mr. Sinclair were well aware of her presence there as well. Speaking of, Mr. Reever has requested a report immediately. I’d be prepared for questions regarding your activities in your office if I were you.”
Devil came to an abrupt stop, not really surprised that Graeme managed to stop the instant he did as well.
“Do you have a problem with the activities in my office, Graeme?” he asked the other Breed, knowing that the continued mention of it meant that Breed likely did have a problem with it.
Impassive, his expressive gaze showed little-to-no emotion at the best of times, were it not for the glitter of life in the dark brown of his eyes.
“I have no problems with them at all, Mr. Black,” Graeme assured him. “But, I’d expect questions from Mr. Reever as well as Mr. Sinclair, because they definitely seemed to have an opinion on it before the reporters showed up.”
Great, just what he needed, not just Lobo questioning, but also Dash Sinclair.
Lobo was bad enough.
“I’ll deal with Lobo and Sinclair,” he growled. “You deal with security and we’ll continue to get along, Graeme. Otherwise, your nosiness may cause you quite a bit of trouble.”
More than the feline would want to deal with, and Devil would make damned certain of it.
But first, he needed to deal with Lobo and Sinclair. Because any dealings he had with the sumptuous Ms. O’Sullivan was his business and no one else’s.
No one else’s at all.
FIVE
Stepping from a cold shower, and it wasn’t the first she had taken in the past twenty-four hours, Katie quickly dried the water from her body before donning a loose robe and belting it in irritation.
She had no idea what was wrong with her.
She was too young for hot flashes, right?
She didn’t have flu symptoms. She wasn’t running a fever. But she was too warm, her body aching, and the remembered taste of Devil’s kiss teased her senses with the persistence of an addiction. Or at least, what she’d always heard an addiction could be like.
But, it wasn’t really possible to be addicted to a kiss, was it?
To the wild, heated taste of a man’s lips on hers, his tongue stroking against hers as flames swept through her body and tension pounded at her clitoris and the clenched, untried depths of her sex.
Her breasts were swollen, her nipples hard and tortured, dragging an irritated moan from her lips as she stomped back into her bedroom, only to come to a sudden stop.
She hadn’t heard him enter the room. She hadn’t even suspected he would be there, and she could normally anticipate most people’s actions.
“Did you get rid of the reporters?” she asked before clearing her throat while drawing the edges of the robe above her breasts tightly together.
Narrowed, intense, his gaze swept over her body.
“For the time being,” he assured her. “But I’d like for you to stay within the inner grounds for a few days; the walls surrounding the house are equipped with special diffusers to ensure no cameras or other tracking equipment can penetrate it.”
She nodded nervously, watching as he moved to the windows and slid the curtains back several inches to catch the rays of the setting sun.
“The windows are also specially made to diffuse images in any optical equipment. As long as you keep them closed you’ll be safe with the curtains open.”
“I didn’t close them,” she said, wincing at the slight nervous quiver she couldn’t halt. “They were closed when I came into my room.”
He nodded before turning back. “It was probably one of the maids. They’re unaware of the windows’ properties, and we like to keep knowledge of it limited. It helps during those times when we key the electronics built into the windows to show the images we want seen. If everyone knew about it, then it would be less effective.”
Then why tell her? She wasn’t exactly a member of the family.
“How did you know the problem was reporters?” he asked her then.
“It really wasn’t that hard,” she told him, her expression pulled tight with the fear that glittered in her eyes. “There was, after all, a camera mounted on top of the vehicle they drove. I glimpsed that much as I peeked from my curtains.”
Katie twisted her hands together to keep from reaching out to touch him again as he crossed his arms over his chest and stared down at her with a frown. “What I’d li
ke to know is how they managed to find you here?” he growled. “I’ve sent one of my men out to learn as much as possible. Though, with those bastards, it’s hard telling.”
She had to agree with him on that one, of course. But that didn’t explain the question uppermost in her mind at the moment.
“Why are you here, in my room, Devil?” she asked instead. “You didn’t seem particularly upset that you were drawn away earlier.”
“Taking a virgin on my desk wouldn’t exactly be a testament to my maturity and experience either.” The rumble of a growl was accompanied by a flash of pure lust in his black and amber eyes.
“And you’ve decided I’m a virgin, how?”
She was, but it wasn’t exactly something she advertised.
“How the hell you made it to twenty-four years of age without taking a lover I haven’t figured out yet.” The low pitch of the rumbled words rasped over her senses as he began moving slowly toward her. “Tell me, Katie, were the men in Ireland completely stupid?”
“I was completely not interested,” she corrected him, though speaking past the harsh beat of her heart wasn’t exactly easy.
“You were engaged,” he reminded her, his expression shifting, tightening as though the knowledge displeased him in some way. “How could you be ‘uninterested’ in sex and be contemplating marriage?”
How could she be?
“He wasn’t exactly interested himself,” she sighed, regretting the friend she had lost when the news of her genetics had been revealed. “And I was tired of being alone and questioned regarding the fact that I had no lover or lovers. I was beginning to feel somehow inferior to others because that desire wasn’t there.”
Until him.
Now, she couldn’t seem to get rid of the need.
“And now you’re interested. Doesn’t that confuse you a bit? Perhaps cause you to question why it’s happened so suddenly?” Stopping in front of her, he reached out, his fingers circling her wrist and drawing her hand slowly from the material of her robe.
“Should I?” Her senses were in shambles as he smoothed the edges of the robe over the swell of her breasts, the calloused tips stroking against her skin and causing her to draw in a hard, sharp breath.
She didn’t want to question anything except why he wasn’t kissing her yet.
“You’re going to hate me later,” he told her, his head lowering, his lips brushing against hers sensually.
“Of course I will.” There was no denying that. He was too powerful, too dominant to ever understand the value of dealing with her in a straightforward manner. He was a man she could trust with her life, but not with her heart.
Unfortunately, her heart may have already made the choice.
“You know you’ll hate me?” He paused, his lips still within a breath of hers.
“I think it was destined,” she sighed. “But if you don’t kiss me, I’m going to hate you now rather than later. How’s that?”
His lips almost twitched.
Was lightning actually going to strike? Katie had sworn it would before Devil Black actually smiled.
Whether he intended to or not, before he could, his lips settled on hers, parted them, as he drew her close, showed her exactly how little she had known about kissing.
For instance, as his tongue pressed between her lips, Katie had never imagined the spicy taste of his kiss would have her lips closing around it, drawing around it as it pressed in, pulled back, thrusting against her as a sweet heat began to infuse her senses.
Katie was only barely aware of the belt of her robe loosening, falling from her shoulders to the floor a second before he pulled back just enough to jerk his shirt over his head and toss it to the floor as well.
Then his lips were on hers again, taking hard, forceful kisses as he swung her into his arms and turned to the bed.
Had she imagined she would feel like this?
That pleasure would rush through her body like wildfire, burning across her flesh and searing her senses with so many sensations that she could barely breathe for the heat and rapid fire bursts of hunger exploding inside her?
Had she ever suspected that a man’s touch could do what Devil’s was doing to her?
God, she hadn’t.
His hands stroked over her arms, moved to her waist, her breasts as he spread those insanely heated kisses from her lips, down her neck and shoulder, then on a blazing path to the peaked tips of her breasts.
Her nipples throbbed. They were so tightly swollen they ached with the need to be touched. Then his lips were covering them, drawing them into the heat of his mouth and wringing a cry from her lips.
Oh God, the rasp of his tongue was too much. Brutal, ecstatic as he licked against the agonized tip, his teeth rasping over it as her nails bit into the bare warmth of his shoulders. Each touch, each heated lick and caress was like a shard of sensation racing to her womb and exploding into fiery fingers of heat that surrounded her clit and exploded in the depths of her pussy.
And she had no idea how to control it.
Katie couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t fight the hunger raging through her for the taste, the touch of this Breed. She had no idea how to process each sensation or how to survive the destructive results.
“God! Katie.” His hand stroked over her hip, parted her thighs.
Calloused, excitingly roughened, his palm stroked up her inner thigh, the tips of his fingers finding the naturally bare flesh between her thighs.
A Breed female had no curls to shelter her there. Nothing to filter the heat and pleasure from her lover’s caress or to hide the slick response of her arousal. Her mother had told her it was simply a genetic trait she’d inherited from a distant grandparent.
God, she should have known better, but at the moment, all she could do was revel in the exquisite sensations it allowed her to experience as his touch stroked over the sensitized flesh.
Lifting her hips to him, her fingers clenching in the sheets beneath her, she fought to breathe as his kisses moved from her breasts to the skin beneath. Each lick, each press of his lips against her flesh stoking the excitement and pleasure higher.
She needed . . .
“Please, Dev.” Arching to him, feeling the stroke of his fingers against the slick flesh between her thighs, Katie fought back a scream of agonizing need. “Please touch me.”
Yet, he was touching her.
Touching her in so many ways, stroking not just her flesh but also a part of her she didn’t know existed. A need she hadn’t known filled her.
* * *
God help him.
Devil fought for strength, for just the smallest measure of control as his lips moved unerringly to the sweet flesh between Katie’s thighs.
Never in his life had he ached to taste a woman as he did this one. Never had hunger, need, protectiveness and overwhelming emotion surged through him in such waves of uncontrolled impulses as they did now.
Pressing her thighs farther apart with one hand and brushing his lips against the petal-soft flesh between her thighs, there was no holding back another growl—a demand.
Her hips lifted to him.
Sheened with moisture, slick and tempting, the little bud of her clit peeked from between her folds, drawing his tongue and his hunger.
Sweet virgin.
How had he, the Devil of the Breeds, ever deserved a woman untouched, untutored and so hungry for him. It wasn’t just touch or sex, desire or release she ached for. She ached for him.
She was his.
From this moment on, tied not just by the emotions that would have arisen in time but were now flooding both their senses in overwhelming waves, but also by a heat neither of them could ever resist.
A sensual, sexual heat—a bond of ever-increasing pleasure—
* * *
For a moment, just a moment, Katie was certain she was finding a pace with the pleasure that she could process. Riding the waves of sensations, forcing air into her lungs, out again, she was able t
o actually make sense of some of the emotions tearing through her.
She could feel her heart racing, adrenaline infusing it as some hidden part of her senses seemed to open and reach out to him.
She’d never done that. She’d never opened herself to anyone but her parents. And never in her life had she opened herself as she was now. Reaching out to another and feeling him. She could feel him. Not just physically, not just his touch, his kiss, the lick of his tongue over her hip.
She could feel the darkness inside him struggling with a compassion and a hunger that so matched the hunger she’d known herself for years. A need to know another to the very depths of their soul.
A hunger to touch another’s soul as she was touching his now.
Then, his lips moved from her hip, down the bend of her thigh. They brushed against her mound, his breath feathering over the swollen, desperately aching bud of her clit.
Following the brush of air, his tongue sent her reeling.
Pressing between the plump folds of her flesh, it curled around the bud, stroked it, then his lips were drawing it inside and the thought of anything but surrendering to the crashing waves of fiery pleasure, rising emotions, and sheer desperation was a thing of the past.
“Look at me, Kate.” The demand was a harsh, primal growl that brought her eyes open, instantly meeting his as he stared up at her from between her thighs.
He hadn’t called her Katie, just Kate. Staring into his eyes, she realized that where others may not see or acknowledge the woman she was, this Breed could, at the very least, sense it.
She hadn’t been Katie, at least in her own mind, for a very long time.
As their eyes met, white-hot sensation lanced her clit, dragging her back from any personal revelations to a place where only the pleasure mattered.
His tongue licked as his cheeks hollowed, suckling it deeper inside his mouth as he seemed to find just the right spot with his tongue where the slightest stroke and just the right pressure began to amplify the tension now pouring through her body.