by Roth
Unable to hold it any longer he released his seed into her. It erupted with such force that it made him shake. He grabbed Peren and pulled her to him, still deep within her.
“You’re mine now…forever,” he stated, very matter-of-factly.
“I know,” she said, rolling to the side, falling next to him on the bed.
He pulled her into his arms and kissed her forehead. She moaned slightly and moved her leg over his. The smell of her sex filled the room. He should have been sated, full, satisfied. Instead, he was left wanting even more of her. “Peren, baby.”
“Hmm?” she asked, lazily.
Lukian stroked her auburn hair and kissed her again. “Take me in your mouth. I want to feel those soft lips wrapped around me.”
She lay still for a moment and he thought she’d say no. When her tiny hand wrapped around his still hard cock, he knew she’d do as he asked. She slid down the bed and planted tiny kisses on his abs as she went. She reached the base of his penis and giggled slightly.
His brow creased as he leaned up to look at her. “What? Laughing at a guy in that position could cause him lasting damage.”
“No, Luke, I didn’t mean to laugh. I’m nervous. I’ve never done this before,” she said, slightly embarrassed, her cheeks reddening.
“Oh, baby, talk like that will get you flipped over and that sweet little ass of yours attacked. I can’t control myself when I’m near you. I want you, all of you.”
He reached into her hair and coaxed her mouth near him. He could read her thoughts and she wanted to take him into her mouth, her ass, wherever he wanted to take her. She was his mate, no doubt about it.
Peren’s tongue ran out and over him, sending shivers down his legs. She took him slowly into her hot mouth and inched her way down his shaft. The head of his cock touched the back of her throat and her eyes widened. It took her a minute to move, but when she did, it was pure ecstasy. Each lick, each suck, sent his body over the edge and the wolf closer to the surface.
He growled out and tossed his head back, letting his balls tighten and coming deep into her mouth. She drank him down, sucking softly, not missing a drop. Lukian’s legs jerked and Peren continued to move her mouth up and down on him.
He pulled on her head, gently. “Baby, I’m done.”
She moved her mouth off him and licked her lips. “No, you’re not. You’re going to fuck me again,” she said in a sultry voice.
Lukian laughed, deep and long. “Oh, baby, you’re killing me.”
Chapter 6
Lukian lay, holding her in his arms. She’d been asleep for several hours now. After making love three more times in the bed and twice in the shower, Peren was exhausted. He was grateful that she hadn’t seemed to regret what they’d just done. In truth, she had no idea what they’d done, he knew that. How could she? He tried to think of the various ways to tell her that he’d just claimed her as his mate, his wife. He’d never had a mate before. He’d had lovers, even a few who meant a great deal to him, but never anyone that made him feel the way he felt with her—complete.
He had wanted to steal away and ask Green how his research was coming. It was careless of him to lose control and come in her. If it turned out that her body wasn’t supernatural enough to accept his seed, then she would never end up getting pregnant, or worse yet, would get pregnant and die.
Lukian took a deep breath and buried his face in her silky hair. He silently prayed for her to be physically able to be his mate in every sense of the word. He wasn’t sure he could go on if she wouldn’t be in his life, or if he’d hurt her in any way. It was bittersweet, thinking of her possibly carrying his child. He would never forgive himself if harm came to her because of it.
His mind raced to his men. He’d spent the last twenty-five years lecturing them on the need for safety, for control. They didn’t lead normal lives. Being a member of an elite, supernatural, special operations team didn’t leave much room for family. The other men were young yet. They weren’t over fifty. Except for Green. He, too, was old. He was from the very first round of experiments that had been conducted on the eve of Hitler.
Green had been in his early thirties and a scientist when he’d volunteered for the experiment. He was one of only a handful of survivors. The only reason he’d made it through was that he’d been attacked by one of the captive weres and not injected with serum. He came by his panther part honestly; there was nothing man-made about him. The dawning of the madman in Germany put an end to America’s secret experiments for close to twenty years after that. They in no way wanted to be associated with the likes of that maniac.
None of the other men looked a day over twenty-five, the age they’d been when they joined the program. In the scope of immortals, they were babies. They most likely wouldn’t feel the need to reproduce for another twenty years or so. He, on the other hand, was much older than fifty and had believed that he would never find his mate.
Now, as he lay with Peren in his arms, he suddenly felt unsure. Not of her or what they’d done, but of what to do next. According to the code of the weres, Peren was now considered their leader as well. She was his chosen mate and most likely the future mother of his children. Her word carried as much weight as his, in theory. He knew that it would be a difficult sell to the were community, especially his pack. They would naturally question his choice in a mate because she was not a full lycan. She was something, that much he was sure of, just not full werewolf. The biggest problem of all was that he knew damn well that Peren had no clue what she was, or what he was for that matter.
He shook his head to clear his thoughts. Right now, his concern had to be on Peren’s safety. Someone had paid big money to bring them in to take her down. The very thought of having even considered killing her made him flushed and nauseous. He would die before he saw her hurt and he was guessing that would be a very real possibility when word got back to the powers that be that his team protected her.
“I’ll never let anyone hurt you, my love, my wife,” he whispered softly into her hair.
Chapter 7
“You did what?” Missy said, in anything but a low tone. Peren grabbed her arm and pulled her into the tiny side room.
“Hey, announce it to the world, why don’t you!”
Missy’s dark eyes rolled and her mouth dropped open. “You fucked some ninja-Rambo-stranger? The guy’s a nut. All these guys are nuts! Peren, what if you’re pregnant?”
A soft knock on the door interrupted them. Peren opened it slowly and, seeing it was only Melanie, let herself relax. Melanie looked tired. Dark circles had formed under her normally vivid blue eyes. She pushed past Peren slowly and moved over to sit in one of the chairs at the long rectangular table.
Missy moved in to grab reinforcements. “Mel, guess what our little buddy did!”
Melanie turned her head slowly and looked up at Peren. “What’d ya’ do?” Her tone lacked any real interest. Missy shot a look of concern over at Peren.
“Mel?”
Melanie turned her focus back to Missy. A sinking feeling in the bottom of Peren’s gut hit her fast. She knew without asking that something bad had happened, she just wasn’t sure what it was. She pulled out one of the chairs and sat next to her friend.
“What’s wrong, honey?” she asked.
Melanie turned a set of glassy eyes on Peren and spoke slowly. “I…I had sex with Lance last night.” Missy let out a grunt and Peren shot her a nasty look. “He was just…I mean, well, he wasn’t…oh, shit, he was hot and I wanted him.” She turned and looked at Peren. “I got him. I got more than just him. We fucked three times before it happened.”
Peren looked at Missy and they both moved in closer to their friend. Peren’s chest ached with the pain her friend was feeling. She’d always been able to pick up and share others emotions. She’d had to learn to tune them out or she found herself weeping for no apparent reason. But she couldn’t tune out one of her closest friends in the world.
Melanie looked down a
t the floor. “You won’t believe me if I tell you.”
“No, sweetie, it’s okay. We’ll believe you, go ahead,” Peren coaxed her on, stopping only for a minute because she suddenly felt the weight of someone’s gaze on her. She glanced around the large meeting room and saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Melanie took Peren’s hand and squeezed it tight. “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I swear to you…Lance changed during his orgasm.”
“Changed?” Peren asked.
Missy leaned back in her seat. “Yeah, psycho-paramilitary freaks tend to do that.”
Peren gave her another nasty look and pulled Melanie closer to her. “He changed how?”
“His mouth widened and then his shoulders moved up…hair, dark black hair just sort of appeared all over him and the worst part was his teeth…they were huge…he looked like,” she gasped, “he looked like he was going tear me apart after he fucked me.”
“Oh, this is ridiculous!” Missy said, standing up so fast that her chair tipped over. “He obviously slipped you something in your drink at the club and you were hallucinating.”
Melanie looked up and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Hallucinating? Yeah, maybe, but it felt…it felt so real.”
Missy waved her hand in the air, dismissing the idea. “Well, you don’t have a mark on you and since you’re sitting here telling us this, he couldn’t have eaten you.”
Melanie nodded. “Yeah, yeah you’re right. When I got up this morning he was lying next to me in the bed, normal. I…yeah, it must have been something in my drink.”
Peren felt the penetrating gaze again and then smelled the faint scent of musk. Lukian. She felt like he was standing in her, next to her, all around her. She closed her eyes for a minute and could have sworn that she felt someone moving within her thoughts. As quickly as it came, it left. She turned her attention back on her friend and patted her leg.
“Yes, you were tired and had too much to drink. Lance didn’t slip you a thing. You were half in the bag when we got to the club and you’ve been running on empty with finals lately. I’m guessing that the stress of all that, combined with alcohol, left you a little off.” She hoped her lie would soothe her friend. She’s sensed the terror in Melanie as she talked about the events the night before and it was real, not imagined.
* * * *
“You changed during sex?” Roi turned on Lance with a look of disgust. Lukian could sense Roi’s rage. Hell, Lukian even agreed with it, but he couldn’t let him kill Lance.
“Calm down,” he said sternly.
The room stopped buzzing and all eyes turned to him. He was their Captain, their leader and now he’d be expected to fix this. Wilson took a step forward and tipped his head.
“Sir, maybe it would be best if we just eliminate the women. They know too much and…”
Lukian went to strike him, but Roi beat him too it, followed closely by Lance and then Green. He could understand Lance’s concern. He’d smelled his desire for the blonde one the minute he’d laid eyes on her. Roi was a different story. The self-proclaimed playboy rarely thought of women as anything more than objects. He’d been surprised to find Roi sleeping on the hallway floor outside Missy’s locked room when he woke.
Green pulled Roi off Wilson and turned his attention back to Lukian. “Perhaps full disclosure? It would ease their suspicions and if they understand the stakes, they may choose the lesser of two evils.”
“Sir, if I may, Wilson might have a point. I don’t want to hurt’em. They’re sweet girls, but to risk the secrecy of the team?” Jon said softly from the other side of the room.
Lukian spun around and glared at him, his nostrils flaring. “No one will be hurting any of the girls. Is that understood?”
“But the brown-haired one…Jen or something? She was our target, we should at least hand her over to the Colonel. Maybe he could figure out what to do with the other two,” Wilson said, wiping his bloodied mouth.
“Her name is Peren and she is my mate!” Lukian said loudly.
Every eye in the room turned to him. The silence was deafening. It was Roi who stepped forward first. “Brother, tell me that you didn’t mate with her. Tell me that you didn’t offer her your seed.”
Lukian stood silently and looked through the two-way mirror at Peren. She was still holding her friend to her, trying to comfort her. He knew that she’d just felt him reading her, scanning her thoughts and that was another sign that she was his true mate. His mind flashed back to his moment of release in her, when he filled her body with his hot come, sealing the deal that she would be his forever.
“Your silence speaks volumes, Lukian! If she gets pregnant, she will die. What do you have to show for it then? How could you take a human mate?”
Green stepped forward and cleared his throat. “Umm, here’s the thing. I did some more tests on Peren this morning and she’s less human than we are.”
Roi and Lukian turned to Green. He continued, “I told you about the vampire DNA in her and what I thought might be faerie…and well, you yourself told me about her surviving a werewolf attack. So, it’s obvious she carried a bit of that in her as well, but…”
Green looked at Lukian, scared that his commander and friend would kill the messenger. Lukian nodded to him, wanting more than anything to hear what he had to say.
“Peren shows signs of having every known form of were DNA in her blood, along with several mid-level demons. The most shocking of all is that these have all meshed together. I’m not sure, but I think she could shift into upwards of thirty creatures and most likely has the same powers as most vampires. She, of course, is unaware of any of this. I could sense that during the testing.”
Green had the gift for reading truths. It was normally reserved for wolves and vampires, but somehow Green had developed this gift. If he said that Peren was unaware of her condition, then it was true. No one in the team would question that. They’d come to rely too heavily on each other’s strong points to start doubting them now. The question that was plaguing Lukian wasn’t if Peren knew what she was, but how she came to be in the first place. Someone out there knew full-well what she was and wanted to put an end to her. But why?
Lukian stormed past his friend and went straight for the cell phone they’d been given to keep in contact with the Colonel. He pressed the send button and waited for the Colonel to answer.
“Mission is complete, Sir.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end. “Very well, I-Ops can retire. I’ll expect a full briefing tomorrow morning.”
He hung the phone up and tossed it aside. Not one of his men questioned him. He didn’t think they would. He looked back at the mirror to stare at the three beautiful women who had gotten themselves tangled up in a mess they couldn’t possibly understand. He thought back to his time at the laboratories with Peren’s father. They had worked side by side in creating an elite fighting team. There had been three tries prior to theirs. All were unsuccessful. Synthetic serums had been used to try to recreate the DNA and induce change. Most of the men had died; others had been rendered useless as soldiers.
He turned and looked at the five men standing near him. Each had been carefully screened. It had been determined that all had traces of supernatural abnormalities in their blood. Somewhere in each man’s family history, there had been an event that no one talked about. Lukian had spent over a hundred years roaming this earth and had come into contact with more immortals than he cared to count. He was able to round up enough pure blood for Dr. Matthews and it was used on his men. His team. They knew the risks before they went into it and they knew the consequences.
All but one had survived. Roi had been selected as a back-up. He’d been an alternate candidate. The man prior to him had been given too much of Lukian’s straight blood and the effects had been devastating. He’d been unable to control the changes and the man had lost his mind and escaped. They’d searched for him for the last twenty-five years, but he’d managed to drop off t
he face of the earth. The chances of him surviving had been so minimal that continuing to spend money and man hours in search of him was ridiculous.
Chapter 8
“We need to get out of here,” Missy said softly in Peren’s ear as they rinsed the dishes from dinner.
Peren didn’t turn to acknowledge her friend’s statement, she just nodded. Missy was right, she knew that. They had to get away from these men. The thought of leaving Lukian made her sick to her stomach. The thought of staying scared her just as badly. She’d spent the greater part of the day avoiding him. He’d tried to talk with her once, but she’d turned away and left him standing alone. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done.
A light pain started in her temple. She’d been experiencing them since Melanie had told her about Lance’s change. She kept feeling like something was trying to push through her head. The only thing that helped was to envision a wall around her, protecting her, shielding her, for lack of a better word. She’d asked Green for an aspirin and he had been the one to suggest trying the semi-meditation techniques. They’d been working out well for her. Green seemed like a nice man. He was handsome and as far as she could tell, unattached. She’d wished that it had been he that Melanie had fallen for, not slicky-boy Lance.
She finished with the dishes and headed upstairs to check on Melanie. Voices floated to her from the other end of the hallway. Peren sunk back into the corner and stood silently.
“I can’t believe that little prick even suggested hurting them. I should have ripped his fucking head off.” She knew that deep voice. It was Roi, the one who stayed close to Lukian.
“I know, I feel the same way,” Lukian answered.
“Of course you feel the same…I still can’t believe you took her as your mate. The others will be hesitant to call her their Queen. Does she even know about you?”