Neither he nor she had eaten since breakfast, and even then neither had taken a full meal, certainly not enough to sustain them through some of the erotic visions running through LaMia’s mind, the erotic scenes she wanted to act out with him.
Too many things had gotten in the way—Mateo’s escape attempt immediately coming to mind—for either to have worried about feeding their bodies.
Feeding was, however, all LaMia could think about now. She could think of nothing else when she watched Mateo except how she wanted to sink her teeth into him again as he sank his cock into her pussy and make her entire body tremble with the joy of it.
She suddenly leaped to her feet and paced beside the bed, shooting periodic glances his way, admiring the smooth-muscled contours of his back as he lay prone with one cheek pressed against a pillow, noticing the red-hot glow of his caramel skin after her punishment.
She had kept her promise not to leave any marks, but it was an empty one.
What good did not marking his body now do, when what she had done to his family years ago had marked his psyche ten times worse and more permanently?
LaMia turned and staggered in the direction of the bathroom.
Before food, she needed a shower, needed to wash away the guilt that had been clinging to her ever since she had arrived back at her loft to find Mateo motionless. Her remorse had been growing ever since she had pilfered that vision of him as a boy in the hospital.
Never before had she contemplated the aftermath of her actions, the consequences of her hunts and kills. Faced with Mateo’s wounded state of mind, however, brought all her sins to glaring life and forced her to see the pain and suffering her avarice caused.
LaMia slid open the frosted glass door of her shower, turned the hot water on full blast 64
Predator’s Salvation
tempered with just a touch of cold, disrobed, and stepped into the steamy tiled room.
She lathered up a luffa sponge and scrubbed her body from head to toe, but it did not matter how hot the water or how hard she scrubbed. She could not wash away the blood of Manny and Julian. Nothing could wash away this or the traumatized look of a ten-year-old little boy, or the sorrow of the seventeen-year-old young man he would become. She could not erase the anger and confusion of the twenty-four-year-old she had kidnapped and tortured.
It did not matter that Mateo had enjoyed what she had done to him. He had not asked to be here, had not asked to be taken.
What was she going to do with him now?
To keep him here with her, knowing how he felt—about her, about his position—and that she did not want to do him anymore harm, would only compound all the transgressions she had committed over the decades, especially the ones she had committed against Mateo alone.
LaMia’s chest tightened at the idea of letting him go, of not seeing his gorgeous face again, or not seeing his chocolate-brown eyes alternately lit with rage, lust, and sarcasm and all touching something wanting in her makeup, all filling a void in her that she had never realized existed before this revealing weekend.
She had not cried since her parents’ deaths, not since she had been an angry, impressionable and proud youngling of fifty. The alien pressure in her chest, the salty sting of tears in her eyes and on her cheeks, surprised her as much as her earlier realization that she had fallen in love with a human.
Lilith
, this situation was impossible!
She did not want to let him go, but she could not keep him, not at the risk of constantly being reminded of her downfall and un-Inanna-like weakness.
LaMia slid down the tile wall, sat on the built-in bench jutting from the back of the shower stall, bent forward and let the steamy water pound her head, washing her tears down the drain the way she could never wash away all her sins.
* * * *
He reached for LaMia without opening his eyes and was surprised when he didn’t find her in bed beside him but even more surprised that he was not shackled.
He opened his eyes and slowly scanned the loft. He was disappointed when he didn’t see her anywhere and wondered what he would have said to her had she been in bed with him.
Ms. Nubian Queen didn’t exactly strike him as a pillow talk or cuddling-after-sex kind of girl. What would they talk about really?
How was your day at the office? Designed a new office building, did you? And what
about you, dear? Captured and enslaved any new men today? Collared and tortured any new
pets?
Not exactly
The Brady Bunch
or
The Cosbys
.
65
Gracie C. McKeever
But were either of these ideals what he wanted?
Before this weekend, Mateo had never given much thought to his single status, to the possibilities of a long-term relationship. He’d frankly never found any woman worthy enough to make him consider changing his life and letting someone into it beyond the casual.
He’d dated his share of women here and there over the years, had sex with many of them, and made friends with much less.
He didn’t consider his life particularly lacking, but he guessed when he actually got down to it, before this weekend, he had only been drifting along on a tide of quiet complacency. It was an existence that wouldn’t brook or make room for just any regular woman who could never understand all the things he had been through as a child and a teen, a woman who would never be able to accept him with all his scars.
Was that LaMia’s attraction? That she knew everything there was to know about him?
That he couldn’t hide anything from her if he tried? Was it her intimate telepathy that made her so alluring to his mind and soul, made him want her as a mate?
Mate? Not girlfriend?
Christ, he had adopted her thought processes and speech patterns.
What more would he pick up from her if he stayed around her any longer? How much more complacent would he be? How much more would he allow her to do to him in that complacency?
Despite his confusion and guilt about his feelings for her, and his not fully reconciling her connection to his family’s deaths, the idea of leaving her and not finding out all that could be between them, made him ten times more miserable beyond anything he could have ever comprehended before she had come into his life.
We Inanna are an ancient race of predators...
To blame her for what she’d done to his dad and brother would have been like blaming a shark for taking a bite out of a man or a seal swimming in the ocean. The ocean was the shark’s domain, and anything in the water was subject to the shark’s discretion.
The human world was LaMia’s domain, and hunting and enslaving men was her nature, what she did in her domain.
God, how did Alex do it? How did he love and stay with Genesis?
It was obvious that they adored each other, but did their relationship work because Alex was half-Inanna? Did this legacy make it easier for him to accept the part of his wife that had preyed on men before him? Had Genesis hunted men as LaMia did, or was she the exception to the rule?
Mateo carefully turned onto his side, propped up on one elbow, chin in the palm of his hand as he momentarily contemplated leaving and leading a life without her right before the sound of the running shower finally seeped into his consciousness.
There was another sound echoing throughout the loft, something so alien and amazing Mateo jerked to a sitting position and immediately regretted the pressure this exerted on his ass cheeks.
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Crying? Ms. Nubian Queen? No way.
Mateo flung off the comforter that was covering him and, naked, climbed out of bed. He marched towards the bathroom unsure of what he would say when he got there, but determined to see what he could do to help her.
What did a human submissive say to comfort his upset Inanna Mistress? What could he say to comfort his LaMia?
Mateo paused on the threshold of the bathroom, the room of their first heated encounter.
He closed his eyes against the memory of her sinking her teeth into his throat in this room and trembled at the sudden wave of hunger and need that washed over his senses.
She had marked him long before she had collared or beaten him. From the first moment when she’d drunk his blood and tasted him, he’d belonged to her.
And she belongs to you.
The thought emboldened him, powering his legs across the long length of the bathroom to slide back the frosted glass door behind where LaMia sat bent over, hands wrapped around her middle, crying her eyes out.
Mateo almost bent over himself with the pain of her emotions, her embattled aura a fierce collage of images and vivid colors that instantly assailed his senses.
God, she was in so much pain!
He steeled himself against the psychic onslaught, stepped into the shower, got down on his knees in front of her and took both of her hands in his. He barely registered the sting of the shower’s hot water on his tender back he was so focused on her. “Mia, talk to me.”
She looked at him. “Why are you here?”
He wondered if the pain had made her delirious, wondered if she questioned his presence in the bathroom or his presence in her life altogether before LaMia answered her own question.
“I should not have brought you here.”
A grin tugged at his lips before he asked, “Having second thoughts about enslaving me?”
“Yes,” she said, serious and grim as she stared at him.
“Too late. I’m already your slave, and your responsibility.”
“Please, Mateo. Do not joke at a time like this.”
“What better time than when you’re in a blue funk?”
“Is that what you call my…emotional breakdown?”
“Emotional breakdown?” He chuckled and gently squeezed her hands “You haven’t seen an emotional breakdown until you’ve been in a catatonic state in a hospital for several days pumped up with anti-psychotic drugs.”
“How can you joke about something like that, especially when it is me who was…is the cause of your suffering?”
Mateo couldn’t answer her, only knew that he no longer blamed her for what had 67
Gracie C. McKeever
happened to his parents or his brother. He couldn’t explain his feelings to her, not verbally, so he settled for the next best thing.
He released her hands and gripped her thighs to gently push her legs apart.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it feel like?” Mateo slid one hand between her legs, slowly inserted his middle finger into her hot cunt and closed his eyes as she sucked the digit in and squeezed her vaginal muscles around it.
“It feels like you are being an impudent slave,” LaMia panted.
“But you like it, don’t you?” He watched her close her eyes, bite her full bottom lip, and nod her head.
Mateo took his cue, slid another finger into her wet depths, thrusting deep before scissoring his two fingers and stroking her inner walls.
“Oh, Mateo…” She sighed and slumped back against the tile bench, opening herself up to his invasion, accepting her due.
“That’s it, baby,” he murmured. “Just relax and let me do this for you.”
Do whatever you wish,
mishva, she sent the silent message to Mateo and he jerked up his head to stare at her serene mahogany features.
He would remember that unfamiliar word for later and ask her about it. He didn’t want to think what it could mean, didn’t want to hope, and throw his concentration off from his more important task now at hand.
“Please, Mateo…I want your…mouth on me…”
“And you’ll get it, impatient Mistress. Just hold on.” He pulled back and plunged his fingers inside her, rhythmically pumping as he reached for one of her breasts with his free hand and gently rolled and pinched a rigid, cherry-red nipple.
LaMia arched her neck and slid forward on the bench as she groaned. “Mateo, please…”
He removed his fingers from inside her and his hand from her breast as she writhed in her seat. He spread her with his thumbs and quickly replaced his fingers with his mouth, first taunting her swollen clit with his lips and teeth before driving his tongue into her musky-sweet depths, his moans joining hers.
Christ, she tasted delicious! Sweet and spicy, tart and tangy. All the things that she had proven herself to be to him over the last twenty-four hours.
Her hands crept up to his head, grasped a clump of hair at his nape with both hands and firmly held his face in place against her.
You don’t need to hold me, Mia.
I know, but I want to...have to...
I’m right where I want to be. Tasting you...enjoying you...
Do not stop. Do not ever stop...
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She vibrated beneath his mouth, relentlessly climbing towards her orgasm as he retreated to lick her vulva and pull her labia between his teeth.
She pitched her hips into his face and Mateo added his thumb to the mix, flicking and rolling her engorged clit right before her cream spurted into his mouth. “Mateooooo!”
He caught her hips with his hands and held her as she trembled beneath his mouth and he lapped the last of her feminine juices with relish.
Mateo moved from his knees to crouch in front of LaMia as she blinked, opened her eyes, looked at him with a lust-hazy expression, and beamed.
“That was…incredible,” she murmured.
“I take it you’re pleased.”
“Very well pleased, slave.”
He took one of her hands in his and dragged her to her feet as he stood. “There’s more where that came from.”
* * * *
Feeling unbelievably eager and shy, LaMia stepped out of the shower and into the towel.
He gently rubbed her down from head to toe, his slow sensual ministrations making her as wet between her legs as the rest of her body was becoming dry beneath his hands.