Authors: Lora Leigh
He’d been too long without her. Too long since he had touched her. Loved her. He rose from his desk and drew his T-shirt over his head, his hands going to his belt.
“Undress,” he ordered her desperately. “Now, Anya. Give to me.”
Give to him.
She had given him everything, and he wanted more. Anya wondered if she had more to give after the hell she had trudged through today.
She unlaced her boots and slid them from her feet before undressing slowly. Tomorrow.
Tomorrow it would all end. He would learn how she had conspired against him.
He would turn against her then. He despised Breed scientists. He tolerated Dr. Armani because she had managed to hide from the Genetics Council; she had refused them through the years she was also doing her own research into what they were doing.
He would never accept Chernov and Sobolova. And he would hate her for bringing them to Haven. For exposing his people to them.
Naked, aroused herself, she moved to where he stood by the desk, tall and golden, powerful in his sexuality and his nudity. One large hand was wrapped around the shaft of his cock, stroking it leisurely as his chest moved with heavy breaths.
She loved his body. She loved the man. She understood what she didn’t want to understand, and she ached for both of them, because she knew it was going to blow up in their faces soon. Until then, she wanted her mate. Her lover. Her alpha.
“My coya,” he whispered as she came to him, breaking her heart with a title that would never be hers.
“Alpha.” She accepted him for who he was, what he was as she moved against him, rubbing her forehead against his chest, letting her lips drift over the hard muscles as she felt his palms curve around her hips.
She touched him, smoothed her hands down his chest, his abs. The fingers of one hand gripped his pulsing cock as she lifted her head for his kiss.
It was sheer power. Black magic. He kissed her with a hunger that sank inside her as surely as his tongue pushed between her lips.
Heady spice filled her senses. The taste of the mating kiss, smooth and whiskey-hot. It wrapped around her senses and reminded her of hot Colorado summer nights when she had lain alone, thinking of him, dreaming of him.
But this was no dream. This was Del-Rey. So powerful. So much hers and, yes, so separate from her.
She moved back, tearing from his kiss to find a breath. Her lips moved from his lips to his chest.
That fine sprinkling of chest hair mesmerized her. Light, lighter than the dark blond on his head.
Almost a burnished gold. It was soft to the touch, tempting, warm.
She rubbed her cheek against it and felt the small grumble in his chest. Not hardly a groan, a rough sigh of pleasure as his hands threaded through her hair.
“I want to touch you,” she whispered.
She needed to touch him. Everything was spinning out of control. He was the only thing she had left to hold on to as the world unraveled around her. Around them both.
“Touch,” he sighed. “Sweet baby. My coya.”
His coya in private. His whore to his men, nothing more. How much longer could she bear this?
She caressed the hard length of his cock with slow, easy strokes. Her fingers moved from base to shaft, stroked lower and curved around the heavy sac of his balls. She licked his chest, nipped it, kissed it.
She loved him the only way she knew how. With her touch, with her kiss. Moving lower, knees bending as she knelt before him and licked the engorged crest.
She stared up at him, sucked him into her mouth and watched as his head tilted back, his long hair falling over his shoulders. The broad planes and angles of his face were tight with need now, his lips heavy with sensual hunger.
“God, your mouth,” he groaned, staring down at her again. “Suck me, Anya. Sweet coya. Take me into your mouth.”
His coya. She was his coya here, but nowhere else.
Her lips parted as she drew the thick head inside. Immediately a pulse of pre-cum filled her mouth. As warm as heated syrup, tinged with lightning and male promise. She loved the taste of him. Loved the power and the promise in his taste, in his touch.
His fingers in her hair, the tight flex of his thighs, the throb of heavy veins beneath the silken flesh of his cock.
“Anya. Yes, damn you, I could die in your mouth it’s so good.”
His hips moved, pressing inside the heated depths as she opened for him, took as much as she could and sucked him, lashed the sensitive underside with her tongue. Another pulse of heated fluid and she was wilder, hungrier. Another and she was desperate, whimpering, reaching for him.
And he was there. Lifting her into his arms, laying her across his desk. His lips played with her nipples, first one, then the other. Hunger enfolded them, surrounded them, sank into their pores as they fought to devour each other.
Her lips were at his shoulder, his on her breast. His hands stroked her thighs, moved between.
Calloused fingers rasped through the silken folds as her head tipped back, a strangled cry leaving her lips at the pleasure washing over her.
“I need to taste you.” Heated, rough, his lips moved down her stomach. “All that sweet cream I can smell. So hot and sweet, Anya.”
His lips caressed, licked, kissed to her thighs. Pushing her legs farther apart, he moved to the aching flesh there, his tongue swiping through the wet center as she cried out his name.
She arched, begged. Her legs fell over his shoulders as his hands gripped her rear, held her to him, and he ate her with a pleasure she couldn’t contain. Heated, hungry lips, his tongue an instrument of pleasure and lust. He licked and stroked. Electric pleasure whipped through her, left her writhing beneath each caress.
Her fingers tightened in his hair as his tongue circled her clit, his lips surrounded it, and the suckling, heated pressure began to draw ecstasy to its pinnacle.
The explosion that rocked her had her screaming his name. She ground her sex tighter against his hungry lips, fought for more and then arched into the sensations as they consumed her.
Damp with perspiration, she was waiting for him when his head lifted, his hands dragging her legs around his hips as he lifted her to him.
Thick and hard, his erection was pressing inside her as he collapsed in the chair behind him, drawing her legs around his back as he began to work inside her.
Anya gripped his shoulders, stared into her lover’s eyes and saw all the desperate pleasure, the aching need and loneliness she felt inside herself.
“Too slow,” she moaned. “Harder, Del-Rey. Take me hard and fast.”
His hands clenched on her rear, fingertips delving into the narrow cleft there.
Anya clenched her muscles around the flared head as it lodged inside her. A hard, heated spurt of pre-cum had her whispering his name again. Another had her trying to force him inside her.
“Now,” she panted. “Hard, Del-Rey. Take me hard. Give me everything.”
His black eyes, hints of blue, were fierce with the insatiable need that poured between them.
“Fuck me, wild man.”
He growled, hips flexing, his cock driving deeper, and he didn’t stop. Thrust after thrust until he was filling her, and he didn’t stop.
Holding on to him, Anya moved with him, her arms wrapping around his neck as her lips took his kiss, smothering both their cries as she moved against him. Taking him, loving him. Her sex sucked his erection inside her as she sucked his tongue into her mouth.
The deep, penetrating thrusts raked and caressed exposed nerve endings. She could feel the pleasure building, ratcheting up with each thrust, until she was mindless with the need blazing through her like wildfire.
She needed.
She braced her feet on the chair behind him as she lifted and fell with him, his hands on her ass, his fingertips clenching on her rear, pressing into sensitive nerve endings there. His lips took hers, caressed hers. They were buffeted by a storm of sensation that caught them off guard, left them fighting for release, bucking and thrusting until Anya tipped her head back and cried out in a perfect, burning orgasm that sent her flying.
Mindless. Bodiless. She was pure sensation, pure pleasure burning in his arms as he thrust into her full-length and that deep, burning swelling filled her until she was shooting into the stars and exploding into a white-hot center of pleasure.
She was aware of him following her. The way he growled her name, jerked her to him and bit into her shoulder again. To hold her in place, she thought hazily. That bite held her body in place where he wanted her, in perfect alignment with his, his seed spurting inside her, filling her so deep, with such hard, burning spurts that she knew she would never be the same.
She collapsed against his chest when his teeth finally released her. His tongue licked over the wound, each caress sending a racing shiver through her as she shuddered in his arms, his cock still locked inside her.
“I need to hold you,” he whispered, his lips caressing her neck. “Just like this, Anya. Just in my arms.”
Her head rested on his shoulder, turned away from him as she fought back her tears. Just like this, just in his arms, and separate everywhere else.
It was like being torn in two. Always on the outside staring into what had been or what could have been and knowing he wanted nothing more than this.
Del-Rey watched an hour later as Anya moved from the private bathroom attached to the office
—dressed, she was beautiful but her expression was somber.
That was what was missing, he thought, her smile.
“I’ll see you tonight?” she asked, fiddling nervously with the hem of her sweater as she pulled it over the low-rise waist of her jeans.
“Tonight,” he promised.
“Maybe we could shower together?” There was something lost in her voice, something that cut him to the bone.
“Are you okay?” He moved from the desk to cup her cheek in the palm of his hand. “Do you hate me, Anya?”
Her lips trembled. “I love you, Del-Rey,” she whispered, staring up at him with those sad blue eyes. “I’ll always love you.”
He dropped his hand as she moved quickly away from him then and escaped as he stood in shock and surprise. He had known she loved him; he could feel it in every touch. He had known it since she was sixteen, had burned for it when she was twenty. But he hadn’t expected her to admit to it.
Following her to the door, he opened it and watched her leave. From the shadows across the wide cavern that led into Communications, he glimpsed someone else.
Ashley.
She stood, eyes narrowed on him, a knife sheathed on her thigh, the olive gray uniform he had rarely seen her in giving her a harder, merciless look as she turned her head and stared back at him with a cold, level gaze before moving to follow her coya.
He didn’t like seeing Ashley in drab olive green. The next time he saw her, he’d have to ask about that. He much preferred the flirty Ashley in color and tripping around with her pretense of ditzy fun.
This Ashley, he sighed heavily, like Anya, reminded him of everything he could feel he was losing.
CHAPTER 22
Anya had hoped to delay a confrontation for herself or between the now opposing factions of Coyote soldiers. She felt as though she and Del-Rey were in the middle of a very silent war. Hers against his. She could feel everyone’s determination, like her own, to leave the alpha out of it. It wasn’t his fight. It was hers.
A fight to keep the Russian Coyote Breeds within the alliance that had formed and to hold on to the tenuous peace she could feel unraveling around her. A peace she had worked eight months to ensure. The battle between his and hers. The Coyote soldiers that had followed Del-Rey for so many years and the ones she had fought tirelessly to gain freedom for.
As long as she had been coya, peace had reigned. Now those of the Russian pack saw an insult in the reversion of rights and her lowering of status. She saw Del-Rey’s reasons, almost understood them, but to make them work there was no way that the packs could know the reasons.
That left them at a stalemate she feared wouldn’t last much longer.
It was evening by the time she made it into the kitchen. There had been an attempt made to load the dishwasher. It was haphazard at best.
The kitchen was the biggest problem in the whole facility. None of them wanted to clean up their own messes. Soldiers were always in a rush, teams rushing in to eat, then back out. Some came in weary and tired, fixed what they could, then went to sleep, exhausted. She couldn’t fault them, but she couldn’t keep up with them either.
At least someone had tried.
She was straightening the dishwasher when Jax stepped into the kitchen. Tall, light blond, with darker streaks and dark blue eyes. He was as handsome as the others. Breeds were created to be perfect in every way.
He wasn’t cruel with it, or even mean. But like the other soldiers, he pushed and he tested his boundaries. He hadn’t tested her as coya, but it seemed he was determined to test her now.
“You didn’t make biscuits,” he noted as he moved to the fridge and set out a plate of thickly sliced sandwich meat. “Morning teams missed them.”
“I was busy this morning,” she sighed, straightening the dishes in the machine.
“Yeah, Del-Rey’s a horndog when he gets started,” he snickered. “I remember a coupla years back, he wore three women to exhaustion and was looking for a fourth before the night was out.
Damn, he was fun then.”
Anya stiffened. “TMI, Jax.”
He snorted at that. “Come on, Anya, you know what he’s like yourself. You checked out his rep before you came to that bar when you first met him. You were a cute little thing,” he commented.
“I wouldn’t have waited so long if I’d been Del-Rey. I would have done you that night.”
Anya straightened slowly and turned to face him. He was standing behind her now, his expression controlled, his gaze cool.
“Don’t do this, Jax,” she said softly.
“Why? Because Cavalier likes to warn those of us that followed Del-Rey what a little angel you are? What happened, Anya? How did you betray the alpha enough to force him to revert your authority?”