by Lora Leigh
He removed her dress slowly, satisfaction filling his expression as he pulled it from her, then tossed it carelessly over a nearby chair. Clad now in nothing but French-cut white lace panties and the black stockings with the iridescent emerald green thread sparkling within them, Gypsy felt the need burning inside her heating further.
His fingers hooked in the band of her panties, and a second later they were falling forgotten to the floor as Rule stared down at her, his face flushing, becoming heavy with erotic need as he knelt beside her.
Once again, the engorged length of his cock drew her touch, her hunger. There were things she had imagined doing to him, had never believed she would have the chance she now had. She didn’t want to watch it slip past her and somehow lose the chance to ever do it again.
“I need to touch you,” she whispered, rising until she was kneeling on the bed in front of him, her hand stroking down his chest. “Just for a little bit.”
He caught her hair in the fingers of one broad hand, a tight, brooding grimace pulling at his lips as she moved to taste him.
Her tongue lapped at the hard muscle of his chest, her teeth scraping over it as she felt his body tense further. He moved one hand between them to grip the base of the heavy shaft tightly as the thick crest pulsed in demand.
Gypsy let her hand follow his, stroking down past his abs to the broad head of his cock. She gripped the thick flesh once again and stroked it, learning each pulse and throb, each heavy vein that pounded beneath the silken, tightly stretched shaft.
Her lips moved lower, following the path her fingers had taken to the heavily engorged crest as it rose beseechingly to her lips.
A small drop of pre-cum beaded at the slit, tempting her to taste him. When her tongue swiped over the droplet of moisture Rule groaned as though he were being tortured rather than simply tasted.
His entire attention was focused on her.
The lean hard contours of his body were tight with pleasure as Gypsy parted her lips, her tongue reaching out once more to lick over the knob, before curling beneath the flared edge as her lips descended over it.
His teeth snapped together, pleasure rocking his body with jarring force as Gypsy sucked the head of his cock into the snug heat of her mouth.
Her tongue lashed at the overly sensitive crest, tucked beneath it and rubbed heatedly at the flared edge. With one hand she stroked down the hard column of flesh, then back up, cupping and stroking his tightened scrotum with the other.
A muttered growl escaped his lips. Pleasure arced from his balls to the head of his dick. Her hot little mouth sucked at him, drawing him deep before pulling back, licking and caressing the sensitive head before suckling it erotically once again.
It was torture. It was the greatest pleasure he’d ever known.
He couldn’t help spearing his fingers into the silken weight of her hair. Bunching the strands in his hands, he held her head in place, staring down at her as he fucked her mouth with slow, shallow strokes. Watched her lips redden and swell, her eyes glaze with arousal as the scent of her need washed over his senses.
“So sweet and hot,” he groaned, the sight of her expression suffused with pleasure enough to send a furious pulse of sensation racing through his testicles.
She was exquisite.
Tightening her mouth on him, she sucked at the throbbing cock head harder, creating a damp, wet haven for the shuttling crest as he moved against her. He wouldn’t last much longer and he knew it. He couldn’t last much longer. He’d waited far too long to have her, teased himself with the thought of taking her for far too many nights.
Before she could tempt him further, though, he moved back. He pulled himself from the liquid heat of her mouth as her eyes flew open, surprise and need gleaming in the dark green depths.
“Lie down for me, my wild little Gypsy,” he growled, lowering himself and forcing her to recline back on the bed.
Her lips were honeyed heat as he took them again, parting and welcoming as her tongue tangled with his, then arching closer for more as he pulled back to sip at her lips.
She was pure, feminine heat and erotic promise and Rule knew that even without Mating Heat, she would be damned hard to walk away from.
If he decided to walk away from her . . .
God help him if the Heat decided to ambush him, because it would kill him to tear himself from her now.
Gypsy gripped Rule’s powerful shoulders as his lips moved down her neck; the force of pleasure lashing at her nerve endings had her crying out and arching closer. His teeth raked over her neck, his lips and tongue easing the little hurt as he made his way to her collarbone, then lower.
He kissed over the rise of her breasts to the aching points of her nipples. Covering one painfully hard tip, his tongue curled around it, licked it, loved it, as he suckled at it deeply. Lava-hot pleasure enveloped her senses as her hands tightened on his shoulders, her nails unconsciously kneading the tough flesh.
Electric heat zipped from the tortured tip of her breast to strike at her womb, clenching it furiously before racing to her clit and swelling the little bud tighter.
His hand was between her thighs, sliding up the inner curve of one before cupping the saturated heat between her legs. His fingers eased between the pouty lips to find the heavy juices spilling from her. His touch rasped over the clenched entrance of her sex. There, his fingers rubbed, stroked. They set up a firestorm of ecstatic pleasure, barely entering her, rubbing at the sensitive nerve endings just inside the entrance.
His lips moved from one nipple to the other, sucking at each, his tongue licking and stroking as she arched to him. Desperate need tightened inside her, clenching her muscles and whipping over her flesh.
“Rule, please . . .” she begged, arching, writhing beneath him as so many sensations seemed to converge on her at once.
Hunger and need, emotions she had fought back so long, were now rising inside her so fast, so hard, she couldn’t force them back.
Emotions she hadn’t realized she’d kept hidden so well from herself.
Rule lifted his head then, staring down at her as she forced her eyes open to stare into the wild hunger of his gaze. His lips curled into a devastatingly sensual smile.
“Ah, baby,” he crooned. “I intend to please you. Very, very well.”
Holding her gaze, he lowered his lips once again.
Gypsy couldn’t hold back the gasp that escaped her as his lips moved between her breasts, his tongue stroking over skin she hadn’t realized could be so sensitive.
Then he moved lower.
Stroking over her midriff, down her stomach, those slow, devastating kisses moved between her thighs. Broad palms pressed against the outer curve of her upper legs, spreading them wider and wedging his shoulders between them as his lips moved to the curls at the top of her mound.
His cheek brushed against the softness, his breath feathering the neat fluff as she arched involuntarily, her hips lifting for him, her thighs falling farther apart.
The touch of his tongue was such a shock of pleasure that Gypsy couldn’t hold back her cry. Nothing should feel that good.
His tongue swiped through her juice-laden slit, stroked around her clit, flicked against it and sent brilliant waves of sensation tearing through her body. Only to ease back, to lick lower, to tease and torment the entrance to her vagina.
Pure arching pleasure flashed through her so hard and so fast that Gypsy found her torso lifting from the bed before falling back. Her heels dug into the mattress, hips lifting, a cry tearing from her as his tongue pressed inside, licking at flesh that responded with pulse after pulse of quicksilver pleasure and yet more of the thick essence of her need.
She couldn’t seem to catch her breath.
Her body was burning with need, her clit so swollen, so desperate for release—
“Oh God, Rule, please.” She arched again as his lips returned to her clit, his tongue licking in a tight, blazing circle around the little nub.
She was so close. She could feel ecstasy reaching out to her, teasing her, tempting her to fall into the flames only to refuse her at the last second.
Rule pulled back, delivered a fiery kiss to the tortured bundle of nerves before suckling it into his mouth and tormenting her with the nearness of release again.
She was crying out for him. She could hear her voice, broken and pleading.
Suckling at her firmly, his tongue rubbed against her clit, stroking, caressing and licking, tightening her womb, her pussy, her thighs.
Release ripped through her like a vicious storm, shaking her from her head to her toes, pouring through her senses with a downpour of rapture that rained through her entire body.
Gypsy could feel herself opening, a part of herself she hadn’t known existed fracturing inside her soul. As though some inner wall were all but falling to rubble as the heat enveloping her seemed to pour from him, into her, then back again.
Collapsing back to the bed, she felt Rule move over her, his larger, harder body covering her. Forcing her lashes open, Gypsy watched as he gripped the thick base of his cock, nudging the crest against her entrance before his gaze lifted to hers.
“That’s it, baby, watch me take you,” he whispered as the thick crest parted the folds of her pussy and pressed against the snug entrance. “Sweet Gypsy. God help me, so much damned pleasure.”
The groan sounded torn from him, ripped from his chest as Gypsy watched the head of his cock press deeper, only to pull back, glistening with her juices before pressing inside again and delving deeper.
Her head fell back against the bed, pressing into the pillow as pleasure erupted through her flesh at the heavy stretch and burn of her vagina. Rule eased back, only to return, rocking against her, inside her, stretching her and burning her with a pleasure that had her nails digging into his shoulders, her neck arching as a cry tore from her lips.
She felt his muscles bunch as he pulled back again, his body tensing a second before he powered inside her with a quick, hard thrust that sent a flare of pain arching through her vagina a second before the invading heat stilled, buried mere inches inside her, thick and throbbing.
“Gypsy?” His rough, animalistic tone had her lashes lifting, confusion filling her as she realized he was staring down at her as though shocked.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered, running her tongue over her dry lips as she shifted experimentally against him, a heavy mewl of pleasure escaping her lips at the throb of his cock against her inner flesh.
Then he moved again.
Rule pressed deeper inside her, that feeling of fullness intensifying, heating until she was lifting her hips higher, desperate to take all of him.
Each time he pulled back, easing the burning stretch and ecstasy of the pleasure building inside her, her breath would catch, protest rising inside her. Then he powered inside her again, deeper, fuller.
Her world shrank, narrowed, consisted of nothing but the pleasure crowding her senses, the sensations racing through her, building atop each other as his hips began to move faster, harder.
He thrust inside her with heavy strokes that kept her senses shocked and stunned with the alternate pulses of pleasure and pain, fire and fullness. Writhing beneath him, Gypsy cried out his name, the feel of his pelvis stroking the ultra sensitive bud of her clit as the flared head of his cock stretched her inner muscles, stroked and discovered nerve endings even Gypsy hadn’t known she possessed, sent her senses flying.
Each measured, hard thrust tightened that coil of sensation building in her womb and echoing in her clit. Each stroke sent so many lashes of pleasure, striking arcs of heat and excitement rasping across her nerve endings that she feared she wouldn’t survive it.
Pounding inside her, the jackhammer thrusts built the agonizing pleasure, pushing it higher, sensitizing her further and tightening her body until she swore she felt the sun erupt inside her pussy.
A storm of sensation exploded through her. It flared through her, blinding heat followed by flames of ecstasy licking over every nerve ending, stroking and caressing some internal trigger before setting it off and sending clashing rapture reverberating through her senses.
She was jerking in his arms, crying out his name. Her vagina tightened on his cock as she felt the heavy throb, a thickening of the already wide shaft and that first, heated pulse of his release jetting inside her.
A second later, her arms were empty, her body was empty, the burning rapture shut off mid-orgasm, leaving her confused and cold before she realized his body no longer covered hers. He was no longer finding his release inside her.
Hell, he wasn’t even in the bed with her.
He was standing next to it, his breathing harsh, his blue eyes vivid and wild as he stared down at her, a snarl on his lips revealing the sharpened canines as his cock stood out from his body, thick and hard and glistening from their combined dampness.
“Rule?” she whispered, her chest suddenly tightening, a feeling of impending doom weighing on her soul and stealing her breath.
“I have to wash up.” His voice sounded odd, too thick, too heavy. “I’ll give you a ride home when I get out of the bathroom.”
He turned and stalked to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him two seconds before she heard the sound of the shower.
The shower?
He was taking a shower?
She stared down at her body, seeing the smear of blood on her thighs, staining the sheet between her legs. She was slick from her need for him, her body still throbbing with remembered bliss.
He would take her home after he washed up?
Why? What had she done wrong?
CHAPTER 14
God, what had he done!
His fist rammed into the shower, a ceramic tile cracking as Rule’s teeth gritted furiously, the torment racking his brain to the point that he didn’t even feel the pain to his knuckles.
Gypsy’s expression was branded into his head. That pale shock, her eyes rounded and dark with pain and confusion, then the color brightening as he’d made that dumb-assed statement. Her eyes had filled with tears even before he’d managed to turn from her and rush to the bathroom.
He’d left her lying there when he wanted nothing more than to push inside her again, swear he was just fucking crazy and give them both that electric, fiery pleasure he had been immersed in before he’d felt—
It.
His dick was fucking iron hard, pounding with the abrupt halt he’d forced on his release, the sensitive flesh just beneath the flared head fucking aching. Aching like a sore tooth right there where the mating barb was supposed to be located.
He checked his tongue against his teeth. Fuck. Son of a bitch, there were no fucking swollen glands, no mating hormone, nothing but that god-be-damned spot pulsing so violently he could see the flesh throbbing where it shouldn’t be.
Wrapping his fingers around his dick, he pressed the pad of his thumb against the hard throb, but all he felt was a tighter tension and slightly higher degree of sensitivity.
Was that normal, or was he was just so damned on guard for a mating that he was only now sensing it?
It couldn’t be a mating, could it?
What the hell was happening to him?
A mating barb didn’t extend from beneath the cock head without a mating. Without that wild taste in a Breed’s mouth, the crazy need to fuck his mate insane, only to have the overpowering lust shoot through him again and again.
Rule felt no weakness, no hard dick twenty-four-seven. Just whenever he so much as thought of Gypsy.
But he knew what he had felt as that first pulse of his release shot from his balls. He knew what he was feeling now just beneath the pad of his thumb. Surely, he would have known if he had felt it before.
Wouldn’t he?
His breathing was rough, hard as he stared down at the offending part of his body as he forced himself to release it, watching the flesh pulse like a heartbeat just beneath it.
It had to be somethin
g else, he told himself as cold water sluiced over his flesh and covered his cock, having little effect on the burning hunger ravaging his senses.
He was powerfully sexual, he knew that. He couldn’t count a high sex drive as a possible mating sign. He had a high sex drive anyway. Most male Breeds did. They simply loved to fuck and did it whenever, wherever they could. They loved sex and they loved women, and petting them, rubbing against them, sensing their pleasure and satisfaction.
It was like a drug. A high.
And Gypsy’s pleasure had been like no high he had ever known in his entire life. Hell, he had been so attuned to her pleasure that he swore he felt the echoes of her release beginning to strike so deep inside his senses that he wondered if it sank to his soul. Something else he’d only heard of happening with a mate.
But the mating signs weren’t there.
He couldn’t even call the strength of her echoing pleasure a mating sign without anything else to go with it. And the feeling of—something—a heat and sudden building tightness beneath the head of his cock just before he came had been so damned odd he’d jumped from her and rushed to the shower before he could risk the mating barb extending from his cock.
Once it was free, there was no going back.
How many times had he heard that?
Once the mating barb extended and locked inside his mate, there was simply no stopping the mating.
He shut the shower off, standing there, his flesh still hot, the need for Gypsy still pounding through his system like a fever he couldn’t stop.
But not just the need to fuck her.
He wanted so much more from her than just the incredible pleasure that had raced through his senses.
Mating Heat was all about the sex. It wasn’t about the rubbing, the touching, seeing the laughter in a lover’s eyes or feeling her joy as it wrapped around him.
Mating Heat was weakening. It took over the senses and erased everything but the need for the mate. He’d sensed that ravaging force in his twin, Lawe, when he’d found his mate. His brother’s lack of control, the inability to sense anything around him but Diane.
And he’d sensed it even before then, years before, confined in a cell, all too aware of the scent of his mother and the Coyote they called Elder in the labs. The scent of their need, of their building desperation had haunted that fucking lab. The scientists never forbade the Coyote soldiers from taking the female prisoners. But never before had one of them mated a breeder.
Morningstar had literally birthed a pack, four offspring, before her body had suddenly become infertile.
Or it had been, before Elder.
Before her Coyote rapist had mated her and caused her death.
That desperation to set her and her young free, to have her, no matter the cost, had been the cause of her death as well as her mate’s.
Rule knew he couldn’t let that happen to any woman he mated. If he mated, if he let himself weaken that far, then it would be far too easy to take Gypsy from him.
She wasn’t a fighter.
She wasn’t a Breed.
She was resourceful, smart. She’d spied for the Unknown for nine years without ever being identified until Jonas put his too-intelligent mind to work on finding one of their contacts.
But she wasn’t trained to survive.
And she couldn’t be his mate.
His dick slowly lost its desperate stiffness as he stared down at it, frowning in confusion, wondering what the fuck his body was doing.
What crazy shit was happening to him and how the hell was he supposed to fix it?
It couldn’t have been the mating barb. He wouldn’t be losing the hard-on if he were even close to the beginning stages of Mating Heat. It wasn’t possible from what he’d heard.
So it couldn’t be a mating, he thought desperately. It had to just be one of those damned anomalies Breeds came in contact with damned near every day of their lives.
They weren’t human and they weren’t animal, and their bodies weren’t normal. That made some interesting reactions sometimes.
That had to be what had happened this time.
A smothered grunt of amused irritation left his lips as he began thinking hard. Jerking a towel from the towel rack, he fought to come up with a reasonable explanation for what was no doubt going to be a furious lover once he left the bathroom.
Had he really told her he’d drive her home after he washed up?
He ran the towel quickly over his hair, shook the remaining water out of it and drew in a quick, hard breath. There was no such thing as a reasonable explanation, but maybe a partial truth would work. She made him feel a pleasure that no other woman had ever made him feel, and it simply shocked the hell out of him.
That was the truth, and he thought maybe Gypsy could sense the truth sometimes. A certain expression, the way her eyes darkened when he held something back from her, or when he hadn’t exactly told her the truth.
It was a suspicion he couldn’t prove yet.
Snapping the towel into the bathtub, he exhaled roughly and opened the door, stepping back into the bedroom.
“Gypsy, baby, I’m sor—” He looked around the empty room.
Before he could stop it, an enraged snarl erupted from him, an animal’s fury pounding through his veins with such suddenness that it was shocking.
The man he was became the secondary part of his senses. The animal jumped forward, suddenly free, suddenly enraged, though not at the woman. No, the animal was enraged at the man and clawing beneath his flesh as he tore free of the inner restraints.
Because of the man, his mate had run.
Before Rule could stop the impulse, his hand slashed out, claw marks raked across the wall, the shock of seeing that primal, impossible sight snapping inside him.
Claws?