“Has she slept?” Niki asked.
“No,” Max grumbled. His eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared as he surveyed Niki. “Looks like you didn’t either.”
“Jealous?” Niki grinned, knowing both Max and Lara could scent her pheromones and traces of Anya’s. Because she and Anya weren’t mate bonded, she didn’t carry the unique third scent—the chemical fusion of two Weres’ hormonal signatures that branded them as a pair for life.
“Damn right,” Max snarled. Lara grimaced in agreement.
Niki looked them both over, picking up on something other than the usual sexual rivalry that was natural among unmated dominants.
She remembered how she’d felt after the run with Sylvan, a craving so intense she’d been nearly mindless. Max and Lara would have borne the full force of Sylvan’s pheromones while they guarded her, since there were no other Weres around to help absorb it. Lara’s whiskey brown eyes were wolf-flecked and her skin was sex-sheened. Max had an admirable bulge in his jeans.
“I’ll get Andrew over here,” Niki said. “We’ll stand guard. You two go find someone to tangle with.”
“I’m fine,” Lara snapped, clearly insulted that Niki was relieving her from her post.
“So am I.” Max’s canines lengthened.
Niki growled, pushing into their space, making them both back up. They were compatriots, but there could be only one leader where Sylvan’s safety was concerned, and she was Sylvan’s second. “I need your heads clear or you won’t be fit to guard the Alpha. Now go before I make you go.”
Silence fell while Niki stared them down.
“You’re right.” Max shrugged and grinned, his grin the only concession to Niki’s supremacy. “The craving is riding me harder than usual.”
Lara shivered. “I thought it was just me. I’m so hungry Max is starting to look good.”
Max laughed. They were close friends but both too dominant to tangle. He tried to put her in a headlock. Lara blocked his arm and punched him in the stomach. Max laughed again and the tension broke.Niki’s warning bells were ringing even louder. Anya had said the same thing. The craving’s been riding me so hard for two days. She threw her arms around their shoulders. Max brushed his cheek over hers. Lara leaned her head on Niki’s chest. “Take a few hours to settle your wolves. Sylvan isn’t going anywhere today. I’ll call you if I need you.”
Max and Lara reluctantly left and Niki called Andrew to stand guard. Then she knocked on Sylvan’s door.
“Alpha?”
“Come.”
Sylvan’s office was lined with bookshelves on one side, another stone fireplace taking up the entire opposite wall, and a bay of floor-to-ceiling windows behind her desk on the far side of the room. The roughhewn plank floors were covered with thick earth-toned rugs, and a pair of forest green leather chairs sat in front of her dark cherrywood desk.Sylvan leaned back in a heavy wood and leather desk chair, a laptop computer in front of her. She’d donned a plain white cotton shirt and rolled the sleeves up, but hadn’t bothered to button it. The sweeping muscles of her chest and soft inner curves of her breasts glowed with a fine pheromone mist in the dim lamplight. Her eyes were more wolf-gold than blue. A rush of sex and power hit Niki so hard her sex contracted painfully. Sylvan’s tussle with her earlier, the run, the hunt, might have been enough to blunt Sylvan’s needs, but she was Alpha, and required more than just that vigorous physical release to vent the hormones cascading through her. No wonder Max and Lara had been suffering. Niki had been well satisfied with Anya, but Sylvan’s call had her in desperate need of more. She couldn’t believe the Alpha wasn’t close to feral with frenzy.
“How’s Misha?” Niki asked, her throat dry and raspy.
“She’s not awake yet,” Sylvan grated.
“Fever?”
“Not the last time I checked.”
“That’s good.” Niki considered diplomacy and then decided that was last thing Sylvan needed from her. “You either need to stay in your den or take someone to bed.”
Sylvan stood abruptly. The top button of her low-cut jeans was open, the etched muscles in her stomach tense and tight. A line of silver glinted in the cleft between her rigid abdominals. “I don’t remember asking your counsel, Imperator. ” Niki’s pulse spiked at the edge in her Alpha’s voice, but she stood her ground. “You’re broadcasting to everyone in scent distance. The guards can’t concentrate. I’m concerned for your safety.” At Sylvan’s furious expression, Niki spread her arms. “I just walked in the room and the only thing I can think about is finding a female.”
“Assign mated guards, then.”
“None of the centuri are mated, you know that, Alpha.” Niki sucked in a breath, forcing down the craving beginning to blur the edges of her reason. “Even you won’t be able to function efficiently much longer without release. If you don’t want any of the Pack, I will—”
“No.” Sylvan cleared the desk in one fluid leap, barely restraining her urge to take Niki to the floor as she landed inches from her. After her run with Niki, she’d headed directly to her office because it was the closest place to sequester herself. Her helplessness over Misha had left her with an uncontrollable need to dominate, an instinctive need to reestablish her claim as protector and assert her leadership over the Pack. She craved a female under her, submitting to her will. Her system was primed, broadcasting her dominance, and any unmated Were who crossed her path would attempt to submit to her. She wasn’t certain she could resist, and she did not want to tangle out of frustration and anger.
She was the Alpha. She had to have enough control to lead the Pack no matter how great the pressure, how unrelenting the stress. She owed it to them. “You play a dangerous game, Niki.”
“You call, Alpha.” Niki pressed her open mouth to Sylvan’s neck and licked her, tasting the primal forest thick with sweet pine and dark passions. She quivered, her instinct to submit warring with her natural dominance. Her sex pulsed with readiness, and she moaned, rubbing against Sylvan’s bare torso. She pressed her palm to Sylva’s abdomen, claws extruded. “I answer. I am not playing.” Sylvan closed her eyes, shivering with the heat of Niki’s mouth gliding over her throat. Niki’s claws pricked her skin and her nipples tightened. Her sex flooded, her clitoris swelled, and in another second, she would take Niki. They would both regret it, not because what they might do would be unnatural, but because it would destroy their natural order. She skimmed both hands over Niki’s shoulders and down her arms, then gently pushed Niki away.
“Leave me. Now. Go.” Niki’s hunter green eyes were glazed, her skin flushed and sex-shimmering.
“I willingly submit. Please.”
“No, you don’t,” Sylvan snarled. “Leave me.” Sylvan reached around Niki, yanked open the heavy doors, and shoved her out into the hall. After slamming and locking the door, she leapt to the lead-paned windows behind her desk, flung them open, and threw herself through. Her wolf landed soundlessly and in an instant had left the Compound, and temptation, behind.
“Dr. McKennan?” The ER charge nurse knocked softly on Drake’s call room door. “Are you awake?”
“Yes,” Drake replied gruffly. They’d cleared the board of patients shortly after four a.m. and she’d retreated to her on-call room. She didn’t expect to sleep, but she needed the solitude to sort through her riotous feelings. She couldn’t get the episode with Sylvan Mir out of her mind.
Whenever she recalled the ferocious way Sylvan had attacked Misha’s wound, as if she could defeat the injury through sheer force of will, Drake shuddered with excitement. She understood the physiology of an adrenaline high—she’d experienced it frequently after an intense life-and-death struggle. And those few moments in that cubicle surrounded by the unbridled aggression of the Weres, particularly the Were Alpha, had been some of the most exhilarating moments of her life. What she couldn’t so easily explain was how sexually aroused the episode had left her.