“Shh. We just need a bit more of this,” he rumbled. Cool fluid hit the cleft of her buttocks and she shuddered at the contrasting sensations. He pushed his fingers deeper, adding a third finger to her anus. He pumped them in and out of her. “I’m going to fuck you here.”
“Yes.” She wanted that. “Now, Bastian. I’m so ready.”
That elicited a small groan from him. His hand moved away from her backside and then she felt the slide of his cock as he rubbed the head against her anus. He pressed forward, and the pressure of his thick shaft inside her was pleasure and pain all at once. With her eyes pinched closed, her mouth opened in a silent scream. She dropped her torso down until her cheek pressed to the bed. The angle made the penetration both better and more intense all at the same time.
He rocked against her, nudging farther and farther into her ass until he was seated to the hilt. She whimpered at how good it felt, her hands bunching in the bedspread.
Cupping a palm over her hip, he asked, “Are you okay?”
“Uh huh.” She nodded and her hair rustled against the blankets. “Keep going.”
Easing backwards, he slipped almost free of her before plunging in again. Tingles skipped down her limbs and her toes curled every time he sank inside her. She arched her body into his thrusts when he picked up speed, moving with him as easily as breathing. The sound of their flesh slapping together, the creak of the bed beneath them only underscored the eroticism of the encounter. Sweat dewed her skin, moans spilling from her lips as ecstasy whipped higher and higher.
He reached around her to play with her clit, his thumb rubbing back and forth across the sensitive bundle of nerves until she sobbed. Ripples of climax began to build inside her, pushing her closer to the edge of utter completion.
“Bastian, I need to…I’m going to…”
The words were barely coherent, but he seemed to understand exactly what she wanted because he pressed down directly on her clit, shoved his cock deep into her ass and ground his pelvis against her.
Orgasm slammed into her with the force of a tsunami, dragging her under. Her pussy flexed, a cry wrenching from her throat. Talons slid from her fingertips and shredded the bedspread. He continued to pound into her ass and flick his thumb over her clit, sending her tumbling into climax once more. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes as pleasure overwhelmed her. Goosebumps broke down her skin every time he entered her, and shivers quaked her body.
“Tori,” he gasped. Burying his cock in her one last time, he filled her with fluid, a low groan breaking from his throat.
She collapsed to the bed, boneless, and closed her eyes. There was no way she’d find the will to move until morning. Maybe not even then. “Oh my God, you killed me.”
“Fucked you to death, huh?” He patted her thigh as he flopped onto the mattress beside her. “I guess I don’t need to ask if it was good for you too.”
She grunted. “I will spank you for that smug tone. Later.”
“Looking forward to it.” He chuckled.
Sighing, she drifted in and out of consciousness. Not quite asleep, but content to stay right where she was. It could have been minutes or hours later, but she felt her body being lifted and stirred herself to ask, “Where are we going?”
“Shower. And then I’m going to fuck your pussy until you scream my name.”
That perked up her interest. She gave him a wink. “Looking forward to it.”
The languid heat filtering through her turned to something much hotter, greedier. She swirled a fingertip around the flat disc of his nipple, making it bead for her. Very nice. She pinched the small nub, twisting. “Hurry it up, Lykaios. It’s time to get to the screaming part.”
His serious face lightened as he laughed and picked up his pace. “Anything you want, sweetheart.”
She wanted him. She wasn’t sure about anything beyond that, so she blocked out all thoughts about the future and the complications and problems that might be coming their way. Enjoying the moment was her best bet, and Bastian seemed more than willing to keep her mind off anything except him.
He really would be easy to become addicted to.
It was the last rational thought she had for a long, long time.
The reporter was the logical option. Jeff Nichols had identified specific shape-shifters—a male and a female. The female was a fox, but the male was less clear. Barbara needed to know where to find the fox or any other shifter. A female would probably be easier to manage, especially if she shifted into a smaller animal species. The concern was being able to tell just by observing. If a petite woman became a massive animal, that could be a problem. Or perhaps the size of the person dictated the size of animal.
Scientific understanding of these hybrids was so thin. They still had so much to learn—they needed to have a live specimen, needed to observe her or him closely.
An educated guess told Barbara the reporter had to suspect more than he’d written so far, which meant he had notes or files somewhere. He was a freelance reporter, so he didn’t have an office, and he was staying in a hotel outside of Atlanta, which limited his security. That was to her advantage.
It was funny how the reporter who followed people around never suspected someone might be following him, watching him. Learning his habits, when he came and went. He went to lunch at a café near city hall every day, usually meeting with people there, which gave Barbara the opportunity she needed.
And just to be sure, she had Hastings watching the restaurant. He’d call her if the reporter so much as twitched.
The maid left her open Pepsi on her cart, and it was laughably easy to slip something into it that would knock the young woman out for an hour—maybe a bit less, so Barbara needed to hurry. With any luck, the maid would think she’d fallen asleep on the job. The drug was subtle enough for that. Getting the card key was a simple matter, and then she was in the reporter’s room. Pity she couldn’t get whatever notes he might be carrying with him, but she was taking whatever he might have at the hotel. She’d noted that he never had the maids come to his room, which meant there was a reason he didn’t want people in there.
He had information stored here and she wanted it.
He’d actually left his laptop behind, which made her giggle with a dark, spiteful glee that was entirely unlike her normally staid self. She clamped a hand over her mouth and rocked back on her heels. Pull yourself together, Dr. Powell.
After plugging in her external hard drive, she copied everything on the laptop. Such an unexpected bonus. He usually had the computer with him. One sloppy move on his part was a huge boon for her. The files were probably encrypted, but one of Hastings’s many degrees was in computer science. The man might actually prove to be useful for once.
Every piece of paper she came across, she took a picture of. From what little she read as she worked, she found that Nichols suspected he had the same anonymous source for his shifter information as she did. He even had some ideas about who that person might be. Keen interest burned inside her, but she didn’t have time to consider all the ramifications. The maid would be waking soon, and Barbara wanted to be long gone by then.
As she exited the room, she took the “Do Not Disturb” sign off the doorknob and dropped it so it drifted to the floor a bit down the hall. It would look like it got knocked off accidentally, and by the time Nichols was done with lunch, there’d be nothing to suggest anyone but the maid had been there.
Excellent.
Chapter Six
The first day, Bastian knew Tori had explored his house, the barn he used as a garage and all his other outbuildings. He’d gone in to work and managed to have a private meeting with his brothers about what had happened over the weekend, but he could smell Tori everywhere when he got home. With anyone else, he would have bristled at the invasion of his privacy, but not with her. He liked that she was curious enough about his home—about him—to want to know more. The feeling was unsettling, it was so unfamiliar.
By the second day
, he sensed she was getting restless, bored, and that unsettled him even more. A small kernel of panic lodged in his chest, knowing she could fly away any time she wanted and he might never see her again. He needed something to distract her, since there was no way he could take time away from the clan right now.
Then it hit him, the perfect thing to keep her at his place and to keep her entertained while he was out of the house.
He called her cell phone from his office. “Hey, I want you to check something out. Do you have your laptop turned on?”
“Oh Jesus,” she said. “Is it another article from that fuckwit reporter? Because so far my sources have come up with squat on the dads.”
“No article, thankfully. It’s better than that.”
He heard rustling through the phone before she spoke again. “Okay, I’m online.”
“Go to this website.” He rattled off the URL. “Tell me if you find anything you think has potential. I’m in the market.”
A pause and then the sound of typing.
“Classic cars,” she cooed.
He grinned at the sound of her pleasure. “It’s a local site that specializes in what’s available in the area.”
“I have to go. I like to car porn in private.”
The line clicked as she hung up on him. He laughed and tucked his phone into his jacket pocket.
“You are sounding far too cheerful in a shitty world, big brother.” Paul stuck his head in Bastian’s door. The two were the closest in age, but since Paul was his human stepbrother, there hadn’t been the kind of jockeying for power that often went on amongst siblings in leading families. It had been a relief for Bastian not to deal with that. His father was more than enough to handle on any given day.
“Someone’s cheerful?” Dominic, their youngest brother, pushed his way past Paul.
“You haven’t met Tori Haida?” Tomas joined them, rounding out the brotherly lineup. “If she were my mate, I’d be whistling Dixie all day long, even if the apocalypse were coming down on my head.”
Eyebrows arching, Dominic grinned. “Oh, really? I may have to come out for a visit. Welcome her to the family. It’d be polite.”
“No gawking,” Bastian snapped. “Because we both know y’all couldn’t be polite unless Mom had a gun to your head.”
Dominic made an offended noise, but then sniffed the air. “Yes, I can see why you wouldn’t want company. You’ve got a bit of lingering sex about you along with…lube? My, my, an adventurous lady you have there.”
The youngest Lykaios brother’s nose was legendary. He could scent and track from miles away—an ability he’d used to endlessly annoy his older siblings when growing up.
Bastian rolled his eyes. “And I repeat, you wouldn’t know how to be polite company unless threatened with murder, which is what would happen if you said something like that to my mate.” Though somehow he doubted Tori would be shocked—she might actually cold-cock his baby brother. Then again, that might be fun to watch. “Did you want something? Other than to harass me, that is.” And he wondered how long it might take him to get rid of them so he could go home to his mate. The thought almost made him smile again.
“Yeah.” Paul reached out and shut the door. “I found evidence that Dad’s been talking to that reporter.”
Instantly sobering, Bastian sat up straight, his attention riveted on his brother. “Tell me.”
He could only be relieved that his brothers had taken the news he’d broken about the weekend meeting well. It turned out they’d all privately started to suspect Michael and Hector, but hadn’t wanted to say anything. Or hadn’t known how to say anything. Even having this conversation could be seen as treason. It was a very thin tightrope they walked, but the brothers were united in their belief that werekind should remain hidden. There were very few times in their lives that the Lykaios brothers had been in complete agreement. Now, it united them against their father. There was a sad twist of fate.
“Dad keeps a couple of burner phones at the house.” Paul lifted his hand when Bastian opened his mouth. “Yeah, you know that already, but you haven’t checked the call log on those phones, have you?”
Bastian shook his head. Of course he hadn’t. Something so blatant would have gotten his ass kicked by the Alpha. “Among other reasons, I assumed they were password protected.”
“They were.” Paul snorted. “Child’s play.”
“Says the resident hacker-boy,” Tomas interjected.
“I am an IT professional. Who do you think keeps the network and computers running around here? It ain’t you, MBA-boy.” As he turned back to Bastian, Paul’s gaze glittered with triumph, the way it did whenever he pulled the wool over a wolf’s eyes. “Dom kept a lookout and I bootlegged a copy of everything on Dad’s phones into a file on my phone. Then I could take my time scrolling through the numbers he’s been calling.”
Tomas snorted. “He’s gonna smell you all over those phones.”
“Yep, me and Mom. She asked me to bring her cell to her and I brought those.” Paul widened his eyes innocently. “I wasn’t sure which one was hers and I’m not a wolf, so I can’t smell people’s scents on things.”
“You’re going to hell for lying to your mother,” Tomas drawled.
“You’re welcome,” Paul returned casually.
Bastian sighed and stepped in to referee. “I assume one of the numbers Dad called belongs to the reporter?”
“Yep.” Paul nodded. “There were multiple calls to that number. On the other burner phone, there was another number he’d called several times. It had a 617 area code. Cambridge, Massachusetts. The number is unlisted, but I hacked into the local phone company’s records—it belongs to Barbara Powell. She’s one of the MIT scientists that got canned for discovering shifter DNA.”
Bastian sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers together. “It’s proof, yes, but proof he can easily discard and deny. Also, he can pretend they aren’t his phones. That’s what burners are for.”
“I know.” Paul shrugged. “I said I had proof, I didn’t say I could blow this wide open.”
“No, but it gives us more than speculation, which is all we had before.” Bastian leveled his gaze at his human stepbrother. “Though it could get you in deep shit if Dad suspects anything.”
“We had to know,” Paul replied matter-of-factly. “It’s my family’s safety on the line here. Mom and Celeste are human like me, but that won’t make us safe if the Wolf Council turns on the Lykaioses. Dad needed to clear it with the Council before he went and did something like reveal werekind to the world. They could put us all to death if they felt like it. Old feuds notwithstanding, I’m thanking God Celeste mated with that leopard. He can give her some additional protection.”
Dominic looked to Bastian. “What are we going to do? How do we fix this?”
Bastian felt the weight of his responsibilities settle on his shoulders. This was how it would be if he ever became Alpha—everyone looking to him for leadership the way his brothers were now. Somehow that possibility seemed to be drifting away. It was all about damage control at the moment. Becoming Alpha had never been his priority—protecting his people had been.
A small voice in the back of his mind asked if not being the Alpha would be such a bad thing. He knew part of Tori’s resistance to their mating was that he was from a leading family, that expectations would fall on her. That she’d be caged by her mating to him. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if he wasn’t the Alpha? What if the Lykaioses just picked up and left? They could hide what Michael had done, secure the family’s safety, and Bastian could keep Tori happy.
And then he felt like an asshole for seeing any benefit for himself out of his family’s tragedy. It wasn’t as if it would be that simple anyway, not unless Michael suddenly got a lobotomy and started doing as he was told.
Shaking his head, Bastian answered his brother’s question. “I’m not sure there is a way to fix this, not completely. What we need to do is contain and
eliminate the problem to the best of our ability.” He met each of their gazes in turn. “Dad fucked up, there’s no getting around that. We do what we can to protect him from the consequences, but we have to stop this before it goes any farther.”
“Agreed,” Tomas said.
Paul and Dom nodded.
“Were there any other numbers he’d called, Paul?” Bastian smoothed his tie against his chest.
“Yeah. Several.”
“Okay, why don’t you see what you can uncover about them? We need to find out if this info is being leaked to more than just one reporter and a couple of scientists.” He sighed and rose from his seat.
“Should we dig farther?” Tomas asked. “At what point do we confront Dad and Hector?”
“Let me talk to the Leonidases, then we’ll make some firmer decisions. I’d like to keep this in the family, if possible. With Hector involved, his sons have a vested interested in smothering this quickly and quietly too.” Bastian powered down his computer and grabbed his briefcase, waving his brothers out the door. “Now, I need to get home.”
Dom made a few kissing noises and Bastian smacked him upside the head as he walked by.
Rubbing his no doubt stinging ear, Dom grinned unabashedly. “Dad knows you were out of town too. Mom mentioned that he asked if she knew where you’d gone. A little too casually, which made her suspicious, so now she wants to know what’s going on. Don’t be surprised if she drops in on you.”
The thought of Miranda Lykaios suspicious and digging into anything was enough to give any man pause. She might be human, but she was as tenacious as a pit bull with lockjaw when she wanted to be. “Thanks for the warning.”
“You deserved it.”
The drive home was a blur of conflicting thoughts and feelings. Rolling down the window, he drove at breakneck speed and let the wind rip through his hair and plaster his clothes against his skin. He could feel his life tilting on its axis, where everything he thought was right no longer was and everything he thought he wanted might not be perfect after all. Then there was the nerve-racking uncertainty of who was going to try to kill him first—the Alpha or the Wolf Council.
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