She couldn’t bear the throbbing desperation any longer. No amount of tightening of her thigh muscles was easing the ache. It was beginning to pound out of control, the piercing need shattering her defenses and stealing her ability to breathe.
It was terrifying. Exhilarating. It was the most dangerous thing she could allow to happen.
“Let me show you what you’ll never find with another man, Breed or not.” Savage, fierce, he growled the words at her ear as his hand stroked from her hip to the closure of her jeans.
Tearing at the snap and zipper of her jeans until they parted and his fingers were able to push inside.
She should stop him, she knew. She should have never allowed it to go this far. She couldn’t allow herself to sink so deep into this morass of sensations.
But it was happening.
Her thighs parted as his fingers met the soft tuft of curls between her thighs.
He hadn’t kissed her. But at that moment every thought was centering on what he was doing, not on what he hadn’t done.
There were very few preliminaries, but she didn’t need them tonight. When his fingers found the saturated, sensitized slit of her pussy and the swollen folds of flesh between her thighs she wondered if she somehow lost her mind in that moment.
Because there was no way that any man’s, or Breed’s, touch could really feel this good.
She really didn’t feel sensation suddenly snapping through her body as something so far beyond pleasure tore through her senses.
A cry slipped past her lips. Rough, ragged, it was one that echoed with a building ecstasy and the need she couldn’t control.
She didn’t want to control it.
“Lawe, this is dangerous!” Her voice filled with the need for more, the fear of more, the exclamation came just as his fingers stroked around her clit, gripped it and began plumping it.
Her knees weakened as she arched into the sensually charged, erotically painful pleasure. She could barely gasp for air, the sensations were so brilliant. It was all she could do to spread her thighs farther apart. Tilting her hips closer, Diane reached back to hold on to his neck as his fingers released the tight bud, slid lower then sank inside the clenched, tight depths of her pussy.
She moaned. Her inner muscles clamped on his digits, flexed and convulsed around them.
“Feel your body milking my fingers.” The growl in his tone, animalistic and primal, had her womb clenching with pulse after pulse of erotic excitement. “That’s how you’ll grip my dick, Diane. All sweet and hot. Like a tight little fist wrapping around it and sucking my cock until I’m exploding inside you.” His fingers pushed in deep, the feel of them rough and calloused. “Until I’m pumping my come so hard inside your pussy we’re both dying from it. Locked so tight inside you we’ll wonder where one begins and the other ends.”
And she wouldn’t care.
She was so close.
She wouldn’t care where he began and she ended. All she cared about now was the pleasure and the need for release that beat inside her bloodstream like a fever.
“So silky and hot.” His fingers eased back before thrusting inside her again, hard and deep and drawing another ragged cry from her lips.
“I want to taste you, Diane.” His voice was more guttural, rougher than ever. “I want to fuck you with my tongue, taste all your sweet juices and feel you coming for me. I want to taste your pleasure until I’m drowning in you.”
“Lawe, please.” She couldn’t bear it. The need for release was growing, tightening, burning inside her until she felt as though flames were licking through her body. “Just do it, damn you.”
“Mate you?” His fingers were deep inside her, stroking, caressing, rubbing against nerve endings never touched before and too sensitive to bear it for long. “Should I mate you, Diane? Give you my kiss and let you go crazy with the heat that will fill both of us?”
“Why are you doing this to me?” She moaned as reality threatened to intrude.
A whimper built in her chest as the sensations began to coalesce into a white-hot conflagration that she no longer had any control over.
She could feel her release building, feel her womb, her pussy, her clit tightening, reaching, rushing headlong into ecstasy.
“You’re mine,” he whispered at her ear as his fingers stroked, rubbed, thrusting into the clenched tissue. “My scent covers you. It’s my touch you ache for and only mine that will satisfy that sweet, hot little pussy.”
His fingers were moving harder inside her. Faster. She could feel it beginning to pour through her, like a wave rushing out of control, pounding at her, building, surging—
She wanted to scream.
“Why are you doing this?” she cried out, desperate for release as he tormented her. “Please, Lawe . . .”
“Don’t think to let another have you, Diane,” he snarled at her ear, nipped it. “Because no other will ever give you this . . .”
Harder.
His fingers fucked inside her with a rhythm that had her gasping at the savagery of the pleasure, reaching, crying out and giving herself to every white-hot sensation he unleashed inside her.
When the ecstasy hit she could do nothing but lift to him and gasp for air, her pussy clamped down on his fingers, convulsing, spilling more of her juices as she shot into her release with a power that left her spinning out of control.
She had never known anything so intense, so erotic and primal. An orgasm had never tossed her so violently into rapture, into such an ecstasy that there was no control, no denial or reality but that of Lawe and the culmination of his touch.
With Lawe, there was no way to throttle back, no way to ease anything or control it.
She was his.
Dependent upon him to remain standing and not sink to the floor.
Dependent upon him to hold her against him, to share his warmth, his heartbeat, to protect her for the few fragile moments she was defenseless and unable to protect herself.
She was dependent upon Lawe to ensure she came back to her own body after flying through space and time. To ease her past the savagery of each aftershock, to croon her name at her ear, to bring her slowly back to earth before he eased his fingers from the tight, convulsive grip of her sex.
Slumping against him as he turned her in his arms, one hand pressing her head against his chest as the sound of his heart raging in his chest beat at her ear. Beneath the furious beat a primitive male growl rumbled as a sob nearly tore from her chest.
His hold, the way he all but wrapped himself around her, the way he dared her to ever allow another’s touch, even as he gave her a pleasure she knew she would never reach without him, proved every fear she had ever had of him.
He would own her.
If she allowed it, Lawe Justice would steal every ounce of her independence, every chance of being the woman she had always fought to be.
She could be herself, or she could be his mate.
Standing in his arms she battled the tears filling her eyes.
She could never be both.
“I can’t be someone I’m not,” she whispered painfully, not bothering to hide the conflict inside her, just as she didn’t bother to hide the pain.
There was no way to hide it deep enough to keep him from sensing it. She was simply too weak, and too torn.
“How do you know the extent of who you are?” His hand stroked gently down her back as he posed the question softly. “How do you know, Diane, that fate hasn’t given you an escape you were unaware you needed?”
She stiffened, her head cradled against his chest as she blinked back the tears and accepted the knowledge that Lawe would never accept the fact that she was exactly who she had been all her life. The fight for justice, the feeling of being a part of that fight, of simply making a difference, just a difference, had always run to the very core of who and what she was.
“I know who I am.” Just as she knew he couldn’t accept it. “I know what fate meant for me, Lawe. You’re the on
e who doesn’t want to accept it. You don’t want to accept me.”
Yet, she had accepted him. Every part of him. The arrogance. The genetics, the Breed strength and phenomenal confidence he possessed.
She accepted everything he was, and there was nothing she wanted to change.
Nothing except his refusal to see who she was.
His mate.
So much more than a biological match, or even an emotional tie. A mate was more than a wife, a willing fuck or the survival of the Breed species.
She was his feminine equal.
The other half of him.
His right hand, his left if that was what he needed.
His sword.
Warrior to his warrior.
And all he wanted her to be was the toy he took out for amusement whenever he had the time.
She stepped back and stared up at him sadly. Her body still vibrated, her sex ached and the hunger for him burned hotter and brighter inside her.
He was her other half as well.
Her right hand.
Her warrior, her partner, her strength as well as her weakness. Anger bit at her soul that he refused to accept her as she accepted him.
“I need to be alone—”
“No, Diane . . .”
Her hand snapped up as she moved farther away from him. “I need to think, Lawe. I need to know I can be what you need before this goes any further.”
“It’s too late to deny it.” His heavy and brooding gaze speared hers. “Mating heat doesn’t work that way.”
Her chin lifted.
Like hell.
“Nothing rules me, Lawe. Not mating heat, not emotion or need. Not even you. I’ll accept it willingly, or it will not be a part of my life. And I need to consider what I can and cannot accept.” She stalked to the door and opened it slowly as he followed. “Please leave.”
“We’re not finished.”
She took his parting words as a statement of intent.
“We haven’t even started,” she informed him. “And we won’t, until I decide I’m ready.
“I should have just kissed you.”
“And I should have never returned here,” she snapped back. “You’re not my boss, nor are you my jailer. Now please, leave. At least allow me the chance to accept what can’t be changed here and to go on from there.”
His lips thinned. He didn’t answer. He stalked past her, striding into the hall before turning and heading toward the elevators once again.
As Diane closed the door, she knew her life had just taken a turn. And it was, quite possibly, a turn for which she wasn’t entirely ready.
•CHAPTER 4•
Somewhere between point A and point B, she had managed to lose her fucking mind.
Somewhere between Lawe moving behind her and a release that had erupted like a volcano inside her, her common sense had taken a vacation and left her libido in charge.
Bad idea.
Very, very bad idea.
Because her libido had no common sense and it sure as hell had no self-preservation instincts.
Standing beneath the pounding spray the next morning, her eyes closed as water sluiced over her body, Diane admitted that she may have made the worse mistake of her life when she allowed herself those few moments of pleasure.
Yes indeed, allowing Lawe Justice a window into a woman’s greatest weakness was a no-no. His touch was her greatest weakness, his kiss her fantasy, his possession an aching hunger that tore at her senses.
And he would be her destruction if she allowed it.
Last night had to have been some sort of breakdown. That was the only way she would have allowed it to happen, she assured herself. After all, her common sense was normally firmly intact. Her uncle hadn’t raised her to be no man’s dummy or his favorite pet.
And she could so easily see Lawe attempting to turn her into his favorite little pet.
She shuddered in horror at the thought. But it had nearly happened last night. She had allowed him to do far more than touch. She had allowed far more than the weakness that came with a moment of pleasure.
He had actually made her regret her unwillingness to be a Breed pet for all of—how many seconds had she been locked in her orgasm? Okay, for however long the rapture had held her in its grip, that was how long she had regretted it.
The sensitivity of her flesh this morning was irritating, though. The feel of a phantom caress against her tender nipples, the need for his kiss tempting her senses. All those things were something she simply didn’t need right now.