Authors: Lora Leigh
And if she didn’t get some ease—she had suffered arousal in the past but nothing like this.
“Seth, please.” She arched in his arms as he moved from one breast to the next, as he sucked and licked, rasped with teeth and tongue and sent her senses spinning.
“It’s not enough,” she panted, trying to get closer, trying to crawl into him. “Seth, help me. It’s not enough.”
One hand slid from her back, over her rear. It jerked at her thigh then slid forward and cupped her between her thighs.
They both stilled. His breathing was harsh, heavy in the still air of the study, his forehead pressed against her breast as his hand moved, his fingers pressed into the humid flesh.
“I won’t stop,” he groaned, his voice agonized, tortured. “Dawn, if we keep this up—”
“Don’t stop,” she breathed out roughly. “Seth, please.”
She felt close, so close, to a pleasure she couldn’t define. One that had eluded her, but had tormented her for so many years.
Before she had time to cry out at the defection, he slid his hand from between her thighs as the other moved from behind her back as well. They met at her stomach, jerking, tearing at the metal buttons that secured her pants and sliding his palm inside.
Dawn froze, staring up at him as his head lifted and his hand slid inside her panties. His fingers inched over her lower belly, slowly, so slowly.
“I can already feel your heat.” He grimaced, his expression tight, savage. “I know you’re wet. So wet for me, Dawn. I’ve dreamed of touching you like this. Dreamed of feeling your sweetness against my fingers.”
She jerked, jumped as his fingers slid into the thick, slick juices that coated the bare folds. They slid between the lips of her sex, stroked, and she came to her toes as a long, desperate wail left her lips when his palm pressed against her swollen clit.
“God, yes!” Savage, guttural with arousal, his voice tore across her senses and wrapped them in eroticism. “Fuck. Dawn. It’s not enough.” His other hand was working her pants down, pulling her panties with them.
He jerked them over her butt, struggled to push them over her thighs, then went to his knees in front of her.
“What are you doing?” Wide-eyed, uncertain, so hot she could feel the perspiration pouring down her back, she stared down at him.
His shirt, expensive silk, hung on his shoulders, gaping open to reveal his chest as his hands gripped her thighs and encouraged her to part them.
“Just a taste,” he whispered, his expression twisted into lines of sensual desperation. “Just a taste, Dawn. Right here.” And he lowered his head to that wet flesh.
“Seth, unlock this door.” Striking, furious fists pounded on the door to the office as a snarl tore from Dawn’s lips and a curse jerked from Seth’s.
He was staring at her thighs, at the wet flesh, plump and swollen and aching for him. She didn’t know what this felt like; she had dreamed of him almost touching her there, almost bringing her ease, and now the dream was so close.
He licked his lips and leaned forward.
“Open this door or I’ll find someone to open it for me. Are you hurt? Has that feline bitch hurt you, Seth?” False hysteria echoed through the panel as Seth surged to his feet, jerked Dawn’s pants to her hips and just as quickly rebuttoned them.
Dawn stared back at him in shock as he tried to draw her shirt back over her shoulders.
“Hell, I ripped your fucking shirt.” He stared at it as though horrified.
“Seth. Open this door.”
“Seth, don’t touch her,” Dawn pleaded. She stopped him as he tried to fix her shirt, staring up at him, feeling the agony, the burst of pain that ripped through her at the memory of him holding the other woman. “Please. Not in front of me. Don’t touch her.”
His lips tightened.
“Seth, damn you!” Pure rage flowed into the room.
A bitter curse slipped from his mouth as he strode forcefully to the door, unlocked it and jerked it open.
Dawn stood where she was; she couldn’t have moved away from the desk if she’d had to. She didn’t pull the shirt over her black bra, and she didn’t flush as Caroline’s eyes landed first on her, then Seth.
She took in their undress, the ripped shirts and the scratches on Seth’s shoulders. And he did have a fine set of scratches, Dawn thought in satisfaction.
Caroline had a bloodred wrap tied around her overblown body, and her breasts were heaving in fury as she stared at Seth in disgust.
“I can’t believe you,” she sneered. “Ripped clothes, scratches.” Her fingers flipped toward his shoulders. “You’re in here messing around with that trampy little animal when I was waiting for you upstairs.”
“That’s enough, Caroline,” Seth snapped, the anger building in his voice now. “What happened here was my fault. Not hers.”
“I believe I kissed you first.” Dawn smiled tightly at the other woman as her gaze jerked back to her.
“Dammit, Dawn.” Seth turned to glare back at her.
She met his look head-on. If he didn’t get rid of that black-haired slut, she was going to use her nails to scratch her eyes out.
Caroline’s fingers clenched at her sides. “We need to talk,” she ordered Seth imperiously. “Now.”
“He’s busy,” Dawn informed her as Seth parted his lips to speak. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”
An unattractive splotchy red filled the other woman’s face as her eyes bugged out at Dawn.
“That thing.” She pointed a shaky finger back at Dawn. “Get rid of her now.”
“She’s so melodramatic, Seth,” Dawn drawled despite the gut-wrenching agony ripping through her body. Seth stood between them, staring at Dawn as though he had never seen her before. “How do you stand it? I’d have pitched her off a cliff by now.”
“Seth.” Bloodred nails uncurled and latched onto Seth’s arm.
Dawn’s eyes jerked to the contact and she saw red. She saw blood rushing across her gaze as a haze of pure fury began to flow over her senses.
“Dawn!” Seth’s voice, commanding, sharp, jerked her gaze back to him. “We’ll talk later.”
She scowled back at him as she straightened against the desk.
“Excuse me?” She could barely force the words past her lips.
“I said, we will talk later,” he snapped. “Much later.”
He turned, grabbed Caroline’s wrist and pulled her from the doorway as Dawn watched in shock and betrayal.
They would talk later?
She moved to the door, hearing Caroline’s fishwife voice screeching at Seth as he pulled her up the back stairs. Dawn followed slowly, stalking, moving with catlike stealth as she followed them.
Instinct, honed and sharpened over the years, guided her. The mating heat was blazing inside her, the animal so close to the surface she could taste the wildness in her mouth. And that animal was enraged, furious that her mate was moving away from her in another woman’s presence.
God help her if he took her to his room. If he closed that door to his personal space and took that woman with him. She wouldn’t be able to control the pain or the rage. Even now it was tearing through her with the same gut-wrenching intensity that the arousal had torn through her moments before.
She was still wet for him. Her flesh was still screaming in need for his touch and he was opening a door to another room and pushing Caroline into it.
She paused, eyes narrowed as he turned back and saw her. He paused in the doorway, his expression inscrutable, his eyes almost black with hunger.
She could smell his arousal even from the distance that separated them. She could smell it, she could almost taste it, and it was hers. He was hers.
Then he stepped into the room and slammed the door closed behind him as Caroline let out an enraged string of curses.
Dawn walked along the hall, unaware of the predatory movements in her body, the violence that almost shimmered on the air around her.
“Caroline is a bitch, isn’t she?” a male voice responded with amused drollery from a doorway just ahead of her.
Dawn paused as the male stepped out, and barely held back the snarl that pulled at her lips.
He smiled, the curve arrogantly placating, holding his hands up as his eyes roved over her with a bit more familiarity than she liked. As though he had the right. He had no right.
Dark blond hair was cut close to the scalp, almost hiding the fact that it had begun to gray. Brown eyes, bloodshot and showing the influence of liquor, encouraged amusement, she guessed, in some people.
She stood carefully and watched him, like a snake, a rattler poised to strike. Her hand lingered on the butt of her weapon and she growled warningly.
“Yeah, Caroline pisses us all off like that.” He smiled as he leaned a bare shoulder against the wall. He was dressed in slacks and nothing more, his tanned chest and abs flabby and unattractive. “I was getting ready to turn in when I heard her cursing Seth.” He raked his eyes over her again. “She has a reason to be pissed.”
He was flirting. She didn’t belong to him, she belonged to the man who was currently in another woman’s bedroom.
“Would you like a drink?” He indicated his room with a jerk of his head. “My names Jason, Jason Phelps. My old man was a friend of Seth’s father’s. I’m harmless, I promise.”
“And I’m taken,” she told him dangerously, moving slowly to pass him.
“Might want to remind Seth of that pretty soon.” He grinned as though he hadn’t taken offense. “Caroline can be persuasive.”
Dawn smiled, a baring of her teeth, a flash of the promise of violence. “Don’t worry,” she told him softly. “He’ll remember.”
The mating hormone was speeding through Seth, just as it was through her. She had felt his discomfort when that bitch had touched him, and again when he had been forced to touch her. No, Caroline wouldn’t be the least bit persuasive. Tonight.
She kept her eyes on the stranger as she passed him, and afterward she kept her senses open, tracking him as she moved to her room.
He wasn’t to be trusted. She couldn’t put her finger on why. Perhaps it was the liquor that he had obviously drank too much of, or the lust he didn’t bother to disguise as he stared at the open edges of her shirt. She didn’t know what it was, but it sent a chill up her spine.
“Hey, wait.”
She turned, pivoting on her heel and almost coming to a crouch as he stepped from his room. Her hand rose hard on the butt of her weapon and she could feel the sense of violence rising inside her now.
“Hey, come on, kid.” He lifted his hands and smiled again, almost laughing at the response as she slowly straightened. “I just wanted to talk. Hell, everyone downstairs is either plastered or talking business. You’re sober. You might not be sane, but hey, none of us are perfect, right?”
“Stay away from me, Jason Phelps,” she told him, rising slowly to her feet. “It’s not a good night.”
“PMS?” He waggled his brows.
“You have no earthly clue,” she drawled coldly before turning again and moving past the room where Seth was obviously trying to placate Caroline.
She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Caroline was raging over his voice. Dawn smiled tightly and moved down the hall, made the turn to the next hallway and moved to her room.
As she went to grip the doorknob, she paused. She inhaled slowly then pulled the communicator link from her back pocket and attached the ear bud to her ear.
“We have contact. My room,” she reported into the link as she drew her weapon from her side, locked it in ready and braced it against her side.
“Are you in the room?” Dash’s voice came through the line.
“No.”
“Stay in position. I’m on my way.”
“I’m moving onto the balcony,” Lawe reported.
“Covering the stairs,” Mercury spoke softly into the link.
Each of the Breed Enforcers had reported in by the time Dash slid into the hallway beside her, his weapon held ready at his thigh as his gaze tracked over the condition of her shirt.
He moved to the door, laid his head against it and inhaled slowly as Dawn moved to Seth’s door. She checked it, clenched her jaw, then nodded. Someone who shouldn’t have had been there as well.
The scent was off, odd, as though something were covering it, barely disguising it.
“Moira, Noble, move in on the main room, balcony and back stairs,” she ordered into the link.
Dash gave her a hard look when she indicated his attention to her room, and hers to Seth’s. Her mate’s room. Someone had dared to invade it.
Dash nodded slowly.
He counted to two, gripped her doorknob then swept into the room like a shadow of death. Dawn moved to the side, waited, gave Dash time to secure the room and move to the connecting door before she did the same. She jerked Seth’s door open, went in at a roll and came up ready, her gaze scanning the darkness of the sitting room and moving unerringly to the open bedroom door.
The scent was strong here as well, causing her nose to wrinkle. There was a human scent beneath it, but something astringent and musky covered it.
“Clear,” Dash spoke into the link. “I’m moving to the connector.”
Dawn moved to the side of the door. “In position.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “One o’clock.” She gave her position in relation to the door.
Dash came through it a second later and she barely saw him. Even with her night vision, enhanced by years of working in the darkened forests, he almost slipped by her.
When she caught sight of him, he was giving her a silent order to cover him as he moved toward the bedroom.
They moved in aggressively, weapons held ready at their sides, their senses tracking the odd smell straight to the double French doors that led to the balcony outside the bedroom where the scent slowly dispersed in the night air.
“We’ve had visitors,” Dash murmured as they holstered their weapons and let Mercury begin his sweep for explosives and listening devices.
“So it would seem,” Dawn matched the near silent tone of his voice as they moved back into the bedroom and came face-to-face with Seth.
The light flipped on. The side of his face was a bit red, a long scratch scouring his scowling countenance as Dawn growled in fury that another had dared to slap her mate.
“If I hear another growl out of you, I’m going to tie you, gag you and throw you on that fucking heli-jet to be transported back to where you belong.” His gaze sliced to Dash. “I covered my part. Now you take care of yours. And get the hell out of my bedroom.”