He smiled. “Oops.”
Charm.
This leopard lying next to her had a whole arsenal of it. According to what she’d been taught during her passage through the Silence Protocol, charm had both negative and positive aspects. Some used it as a weapon, others as a tool. But, she realized as she lay there limp from pleasure, all that changed if trust was involved. Then, it became a caress, a stroke, a kiss. “When we first met, I would’ve never predicted you could be this way.”
He circled her belly button with a finger. “When we first met, I was a mean bastard.”
“I don’t think that’s changed.”
He paused his playful touching. “Oh?”
“I’ve just earned a free pass through the meanness.”
That made him relax, a husky chuckle her answer as he shifted position to brace himself over her. His kiss was deceptively lazy this time, a slow tasting that made her sigh. When he kissed his way down her neck and to the valley between her breasts, she thrust her hands into his hair and held on.
The scrape of his shadowed jaw was rough against the tender skin of her breast. She sucked in a breath. He murmured an apology, licking his tongue over the sensual hurt until she could
barely bear it. There was so much more to this sexual dance than she’d ever imagined. So much more to the man she’d called the sniper.
“Thinking again?” he murmured, pressing his lips to her navel.
She looked down to meet his heavy-lidded gaze. “About you.” In her hands, his hair was soft, sleek. “I know my Silence was broken, but I was brought up in an environment where control was everything. I thought it would be harder to give in this much.” To trust this much—until both body and mind were so in sync, she couldn’t imagine being any other way.
“Come on then, sugar. Give in to me some more.” His lashes swept over her skin as he laid his forehead against her and pressed another kiss to her navel. When he rose, it was to his knees. Unsnapping the tab, he gripped the zipper of her cargos. “Down.” He suited word to action.
It felt as if he was touching each newly exposed inch of flesh, his eyes were so intent. She discovered that she was holding her breath, released it in a slow exhalation as he got the pants off and threw them over the side of the bed, leaving her dressed in one last piece of clothing. Her panties were plain black, certainly nothing like the delicate, lacy garments she’d seen displayed in the windows of human and changeling boutiques.
But Dorian didn’t seem to mind. “You’re damp.” He ran a finger over that dampness, making her bite back a cry. Then he did it again. And again. It sent twisting tendrils of sensation straight through her. But … it wasn’t enough.
“I feel … alone.” She needed something, something important. It felt as if she should be able to see it on the psychic plane, but the ephemeral something kept slipping out of her grasp. “Dorian?” It was almost a sob.
“I’ve got you.” One smooth movement and the panties were gone. “Christ, you’re beautiful.” A harsh male exclamation and then he was spreading her thighs, whispering for her to wrap them around him. She did, able to feel him nudging at her, hot, hard, rawly male.
She cried out into his kiss as he began to enter her, stretching muscles that had never known such use. There was no pain, only the most exquisite kind of ache, as if her body had been made for this man, for this moment. The emptiness faded from
inside her, overwhelmed by the amount of sheer sensation her mind was attempting to process. A part of her, a tiny hidden part, knew that something remained missing, but then Dorian bit her lightly on the shoulder and the thought fragmented.
“Biting is okay?” she gasped, adjusting to the blazing heat of him inside her.
He kissed his way up her neck, over her cheek, back to her lips. “Hell, yeah.” One male hand slid under her to cup her bottom, angling her for a deeper penetration.
Arching upward, she dared to use her teeth on the powerful cords of his neck. He hissed out a breath, squeezing her bottom. “More.”
No longer capable of rational thought, she dug her nails into his back and scratched hard. It made him growl and tug her head back for a firestorm of a kiss.
“Open.”
She bit his lower lip instead.
Snarling, he held her in place as he tangled his tongue with hers. She wrapped her body around him, giving back as good as she got.
Then Dorian began to move.
Slow.
“Faster,” she said, tearing her lips away from the seduction of his mouth.
Male heat in those bright blue eyes. “No.” He drew out inch by torturous inch … then pushed back in the same way. It was like the first time all over again, her muscles stretching, her body quivering with a thousand tiny quakes.
“Dorian.”
Teeth nipping over her lips, releasing. “You wanted slow.”
Her hands slipped over his sweat-slick body as she tried to urge him to increase the pace. It was impossible. He was pure lithe muscle to her soft female form. “Now I want fast.”
“No.” Another smile, another slow withdrawal and reentry. “I want to play.”
Play.
Yes, she thought through the erotic haze of sexual need, a cat would want to play. “What game?”
“I’ll go faster if you can talk me into it.”
She wasn’t even sure she could put together a coherent sentence at this stage. In desperation, she squeezed her internal muscles. It made him shudder and drop his head. “Do that again.” A demand that held hints of the predator he was, the dominant sentinel used to command.
“Go faster first.” Ashaya scratched him again, having realized his skin could take it, and not only that, that he liked it.
A low growl that shouldn’t have been able to come from a human throat. He tore her hands off his body, pinning them on either side of her head. “Messing with a leopard, sugar? Not smart.”
She tightened her muscles again, and saw his face suffuse with pleasure. It made her stomach clench, along with other, lower things. Her curiosity, always her biggest asset in the lab, was now fixed on Dorian. She wanted to explore his body in every way she could. Then she wanted to do it again in a thousand different positions. She wanted to make this cat purr.
“I can read your thoughts,” he said, eyes gleaming.
“Can you?” She moaned as he continued those oh-so-slow movements of his.
He bit her shoulder again, harder this time. She felt her body coat his with another layer of hot dampness even as lights started sparking behind her eyes. “Let go,” he said in a voice touched with a rough tenderness that undid her. “I’ll hold you safe.”
Yes, he would
, she thought. So she rode the wave of pleasure, let him ride her through it, and when the next wave crested, she buried her face in his neck, licking at the salt of his skin.
Something very close to a purr rumbled through his chest. And at last, he began to move faster, the hard heat of him a pounding beat inside of her. She held on, was held safe … even as she held him safe.
Dorian was feeling
very much the cat when he blinked open his eyes—after his heartbeat finally calmed. His first instinct was to check the security panel. Still okay. Good. ’Cause he had no intention of moving—his body was loose, his limbs relaxed, and his leopard curled up in a sexually satisfied ball, complete with smug feline smile. Not to mention, he had a damn sexy woman half-comatose next to him. He grinned at her complaining moan when he ran his fingers over her abdomen.
Ticklish, he thought, delighted. She was ticklish.
Flattening his palm on her, he rolled the good feeling through his mind, wrapping it around himself like a cloak. The guilt he’d deal with later, he thought, caging it when it began to rise. But it wasn’t so easy. The thoughts ate away at him. His sister’s death. His parents’ pain. His own violent rage. And now his pleasure.
But though the realization hurt like hell, he couldn’t regret it. Not this. Not his mate.
Ashaya turned her head, looking at him with those perceptive eyes. “Emotion is a complex system, isn’t it?”
He traced her profile with his fingertip. “One way to put it.”
“A plus B doesn’t always equal C.” Her tone was contemplative, her luscious skin warm and a little damp under his palm.
“No.” Yawning, he glanced at the bedside clock. “It’s almost one in the morning.”
“Hmm.” She gave a delicate yawn in response to his own.
“That’s called the pandiculation reflex, you know—the urge to yawn when you see someone else do it.”
“Now that’s what I call pillow talk.” He yawned again and had the surprise of seeing a tiny smile light up her face.
When sleep came, it was in a soft whisper. He slept curved around her, his senses alert for any hint of an intruder. But when he awoke no more than ninety minutes later, it was to the awareness of Ashaya watching him. “You look like you’ve never seen a cat in your bed before.”
Color brushed across her cheekbones. “You know I haven’t.”
He was about to tease her some more when he caught the edge of a scent that didn’t belong. Even as he moved to grab his jeans from where he’d left them, the security panel pinged to warn him of a breach in the outer perimeter. “Get dressed.” Smile wiped off, he zipped up the jeans and headed to the door. “Be alert, but don’t come outside.”
He stepped out without waiting for a response. A minute later, another man appeared from the silky dark of the trees. Andrew had clearly been in his animal form, because he was naked now—and at ease with that fact, as was the way of changelings. Though Dorian was leopard to Andrew’s wolf, they understood each other. The SnowDancer male’s sister had also been taken by Santano Enrique. Unlike Kylie, Brenna had survived, but only after going through the worst kind of torture.
However, Dorian’s acceptance of Andrew only went so far. And it was nowhere near enough to allow him this close to Ashaya. “What are you doing here?” Though SnowDancer and DarkRiver had free range over each other’s territory, the wolves preferred to stick to the higher elevations.
Andrew’s eyes shifted over Dorian’s shoulder. “I can smell her.”
“Don’t.”
The younger male grinned. “She’s all over you, too. Is she as sexy as she smells?”
Dorian knew Andrew was deliberately jerking his chain. “Why don’t you come closer and find out?”
“Do I look stupid?”
“You look like a wolf.”
Andrew bared his teeth. “I thought we were friends.”
“And I thought you got posted back to San Diego.”
The other man shrugged. “I came back to visit my baby sister, check up on that mate of hers.”
“She’s fine,” Dorian said, relaxing a little at Andrew’s deliberately nonaggressive stance. “I’ve been keeping an eye on her.”
“Yeah, I know. She’s always muttering about how she has
three
overprotective morons for brothers now.” Andrew snorted. “Wait till she has a baby girl. I can’t exactly see Judd being any less feral.”
Dorian grinned in agreement. Judd was his sparring partner and one cold son of a bitch. Except when it came to Brenna. “Cut the shit, Drew. You didn’t come here wanting to shoot the breeze.”
“To tell the truth, I wasn’t planning to talk to anyone at all.” Andrew rotated his shoulders, as if resettling his bones, before leaning up against a slender fir. “I was out for a good, hard run. Decided to come down here for a change of scenery.”
Dorian nodded. “But?”
“But I saw something, thought it might be important. Then I caught your scent and voilà.” A sly glance behind Dorian. “I caught another scent, too. A much more delectable one.”
“You know, Drew,” he said conversationally, “Judd’s right— you have a fucking death wish.”
“What the—!” Andrew stared at the quivering handle of the knife blade stuck into the tree trunk he’d been leaning against. “Where the hell did that come from?”
Dorian was about to answer when he heard something behind him. His senses sharpened—he hoped to hell that Ashaya wasn’t about to do something stupid and walk out. The second she did, this would escalate. Because no matter how much he liked Andrew, Dorian wasn’t ready to allow
any
unmated male near her. Not yet, not when the mating dance remained incomplete.
But the next sound he caught turned his cold fury into a smirk. “She has a gun pointed at you.”
Andrew’s eyes shot toward the cabin. “Should’ve known you’d hook up with some chick as crazy as you are.” Light words but his eyes were already serious. “I saw Psy guards. Fully armed, black uniforms, right on the edge of your territory.”
“Shit.” He stuck his hand into a pocket and found the phone he hadn’t bothered to take out when stripping earlier that night.
“Wait.” Andrew thrust a hand through his hair. “It didn’t seem
like they were looking to mess with us or you. Far as I could tell, they were taking every care
not
to step over the boundary lines.”
That made Dorian pause. “We’ve had no problems with the Council since we fucked with their computer systems.” The sabotage had been in retaliation for an attack on a defenseless changeling group under DarkRiver’s protection. “You sure they’re not out to attack?”
“Seemed more like they were searching for someone.”
Dorian’s neck prickled. “Coordinates.”
The SnowDancer male rattled them off. At the same time, Dorian’s phone came to life in his hand. When he answered, it was to hear Lucas say, “Got reports of Psy activity on the borders.”
“Hold on.” He nodded his thanks to Andrew as the other man made good-bye motions. An instant later, the SnowDancer shifted in a shower of multicolored sparks and then a sleek silver wolf was shooting away in the opposite direction. “Luc, I think they’re tracking Ashaya, probably through her twin.” He’d already given his alpha a quick rundown on Amara’s psychic bond with Ashaya when Lucas had arrived with Sascha to drive Keenan up to the SnowDancer den.
Lucas swore softly. “What else have you got?”
Retrieving his knife from the tree trunk, he slid it back into a pocket while telling Lucas about Andrew’s inadvertent discovery. “If they have tracked Shaya here, might be they’re trying to cut off her escape routes, set it up so they can grab her outside our territory.” Not that it would work. Dorian would hunt down anyone who dared take his mate from him.