This was it.
They had been dancing around each other for more than a year now, deliberately easing in, then pulling back at the slightest hint of emotion, only to be drawn back again.
She’d teased, and she’d forgotten the warnings Jonas had given her.
She’d run from him, fighting to escape what she’d sensed was the inevitable. Jonas had warned her about running. He’d warned her about the predator living inside Lawe, the dominant animal that would move heaven and hell, kill or risk being killed, to possess his mate. And he would give her whatever she needed, whatever he knew instinctively she had to have, just to be happy.
For more than a year he had stayed away. He’d ignored the hunger, just as she had. He had ignored the need and let her run from all the emotions she couldn’t handle, and the knowledge that accepting him meant accepting the cage he would build around her.
Had he somehow sensed the monsters that rose up to slash at her emotions each time she’d fought to escape him, because he’d always let her go. Or had he been concerned with his own monsters and the battle to slip past them instead?
Whichever it was, he’d obviously decided it was time to do something about the hunger clawing through both of them.
Diane exhaled in a breath of surprise as Lawe moved for her, catching her around the waist as she turned to evade him. Gripping her hips, he jerked her back, bringing her ass against the hardened length of his cock as he pressed against her, firm and dominant, the stiff stalk of his erection rubbing against the cleft of her ass.
And she couldn’t keep from pressing back, from feeling him, heated and poker hard. She could feel him against her from her shoulder to her thighs. She could feel the rasp of his flesh, feel those tiny, tiny, almost invisible hairs that covered him from shoulders to ankles like a pelt of roughened silk.
“Living dangerously, baby?” He nipped at the lobe of her ear as her hands fell to his wrists, her grip desperate as she fought to push back the desire, or the fear. She had to let one go because he obviously wasn’t going to allow her to let him go.
The desire wasn’t budging from its position, it was only growing. The fear was holding on with bloody fingernails and faltering further beneath his touch as she felt the incredible, sexual heat sizzling up her spine.
“Scared, little wildcat?” he whispered against her ear, the warmth of his breath a caress against the sensitive shell of her ear.
“Of you?” The bravado in her tone was at odds with the vulnerability she felt, not to mention the inferno of lust building in her womb. “I think you know better than that, Lawe.”
Even as she denied that charge, Diane knew it for the lie it was. A soft exhalation parted her lips as his fingers tightened, his nails rasping over the skin of her hips as he pressed against her more firmly, grinding his cock harder against the cleft of her rear.
Pleasure whipped across her nerve endings, sending sharp flares of sensation rushing through her system.
Fear fell back as the warmth of his body seemed to penetrate the chill that wrapped around her earlier. But it wasn’t gone. She wondered if it would ever go away entirely.
A shudder raced through her with the touch of his tongue, like a roughened rasp against the sensitive flesh just beneath her ear. In that second, the fear was gone and pleasure overshadowed every nightmare that had ever chased her.
Need was a sharp-toothed demon tearing at Lawe’s cock, but even that couldn’t hold back the animal senses that drew in the scent of his mate’s desire, the heat of her need, and the chill of her fears easing away beneath the onslaught of pleasure.
He felt the animal genetics rising to the fore inside him. Each Breed carried the genetics of the animal he possessed. Some carried their animals closer to the skin than others, and for some the animal instincts were impossible to control when mating heat rose and sank its claws deep inside the primal alpha-male core of his psyche.
The need for her was tearing through him. He tried to control it. He fought it. But in that moment, Lawe knew he had lost the battle.
Pulling her around, his fingers burrowed in the back of her hair. Gripping the strands, he tugged her head back and before he could think or consider his actions, his head lowered and his lips covered hers as instinct had him pushing his tongue between her lips and burying it in the heat of her mouth.
Finding her tongue he rubbed against it, feeling the glands beneath his as they began to swell and throb further, pumping the spicy heat of the mating hormone suddenly spilling from him into the woman the animal inside had chosen as his mate.
Lawe had heard of the animal part of a Breed male taking over. How it rose to the forefront of desire as the mating hormone began spilling from the glands to mix with the adrenaline, the hunger and the lust coursing through him and into his mate.
Now, kissing Diane, touching her, Lawe felt the exquisite bite of a need unlike anything he had ever known in his life. A pleasure he realized he didn’t want to miss, not anymore. That empty hole in his soul had disappeared. That dark, bitter, unknown pain that always lingered inside him had been easing away since the moment he realized what she was to him.
Holding her head in place with one hand, he used the other to caress the soft, heated flesh of her lower back, then along the rise of her buttocks.
Diane lifted against him, arching, a small whimpering moan leaving her throat as he felt her hands press against his chest, her fingers curling, nails rasping.
He was burning for her. The tiny hairs that covered his body seemed so sensitive, so brutally alive as she stroked against him that he swore they were directly attached to his nerve endings.
Hunger clawed at him. A sexual hunger impossible to deny, creating an urgent, intense wave of lust that had him only distantly aware of his actions.
Diane whimpered as the heated, unique taste of him spilled to her tongue, her senses and, she swore, her soul.
Spicy, sweet, like candied pears. The taste of his kiss was spiked with the most addictive elixir. The taste seemed to permeate every corner of her awareness.
And it made her hungrier. Made the need so sharp and intense she could only whimper in distress as it struck repeatedly at her clit, at the tender depths of her pussy.
Jerking his head back with another animalistic growl, Lawe tensed, the hard ridge of his cock throbbing imperatively. Still immersed in his kiss, Diane let her hand travel down his bare chest, his abs, until she was running her palm along the heated ridge of the heavy erection.
“God, Diane.” He palmed the back of her head as she pressed her lips to his chest, allowing herself a taste of the hard flesh that covered the tight, flexing muscle.
“You’re going to push me too far.” His voice was so rough it was animalistic, sending a wave of sensual pleasure rushing through her.
“It’s okay for you to push me?” Diane whispered against his sensitive skin before her tongue licked out to taste him once again.
She had to press her thighs together, the muscles tightening convulsively at the sight of the heavy flesh strained out from his body.
She couldn’t help herself.
She’d fantasized about him for so long. Since the night he had rushed into a Syrian camp where she had been held by her kidnappers, her leg broken, her face swollen, her collarbone fractured from the beatings she had endured.
She had taken one look at the savage features of a Breed she didn’t know from Adam, and for the first time in far too many years, she had been more than a soldier. More than a hired gun.
Bloody, in pain, certain she was going to die, and for one heart-stopping, irrational moment, she had been a woman and had wished she’d met him at time when she had a makeup bag handy.