Hakan Severin (7 page)

Her soft convulsions squeezed his cock, milking the last of his bliss.

Yep. Perfect pretty much summed it up.

***

Two hours later, Payton stumbled across the bedroom, and flopped onto the mattress as she struggled to catch her breath.

Wow.

She’d thought that nothing could match the pleasure Hakan had given her in the library. That had been…stunning. But when he’d joined her in the shower, he’d verified that you really could improve on perfection.

Now she sprawled across the bed and allowed Hakan to dry her off with a fluffy towel. She felt boneless as sated pleasure flowed through her with liquid heat.

Of course, that didn’t halt her appreciation of the sight of the naked Hunter as he gently bent over her.

The moonlight streamed through the large upper-story window, gliding over his carved muscles and adding a rich sheen to his dark caramel skin.

Dear Goddess. He was so deliciously male.

Purring beneath his touch, Payton sighed with regret when Hakan at last finished and tossed aside the towel.

Standing at the edge of the bed, he stared down at her, his expression uncharacteristically tender.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice low. “I wasn’t too rough?”

Her lips twitched as she pushed herself onto her elbows. “Are you fishing for compliments?”

“Do you have some to share?”

“I think your head is big enough,” she said, her attention lowering to his cock that instantly hardened beneath her gaze. “Along with other parts of your body.”

“I just want to know that I pleased you,” he said gruffly.

He had to ask? Payton would have assumed that her screams of pleasure might have given him a clue.

Oddly, his need for reassurance made her feel all warm and gooey inside.

“You pleased me very, very much,” she murmured softly.

“Good.” A slow smile of satisfaction curved his lips as his musk filled the room with an intoxicating fragrance. “This wouldn’t have been my first choice as a setting for our mating, but—”

“Wait.”

The euphoria that’d been clouding her mind with a sexual contentment abruptly shattered as Payton hastily shoved herself off the bed.

Hakan watched her awkward movements with a frown. “What’s wrong?”

A sudden, acute awareness of their mutual lack of clothing made Payton blush. Pantera possessed the ability to absorb whatever they were wearing when they shifted, so it wasn’t as if she was used to waltzing around naked. Still, she forced herself to stand her ground.

Dammit. She’d been so caught up in the sizzling passion that she hadn’t really considered what was going to happen when the momentary madness ended.

Now she felt an unpleasant knot of tension settle in the pit of her stomach.

“Who said anything about a mating?” she demanded.

The amber eyes abruptly narrowed. “Don’t play games, Payton. Not with this.”

She wrapped her arms around her waist, refusing to be intimidated by the force of his glare.

“I’ve never been the one who plays games, if you’ll recall.”

“We’ve discussed this,” he growled in frustration. “You know why I had to walk away.”

“I do.” She wasn’t lying. She could look back and see that she’d been unbearably young when her cat had decided on Hakan as a mate. But that didn’t mean the past twenty years had been erased. “I even understand you were probably right.”

“And?” he pressed.

“And while I can logically accept our past, my heart isn’t ready.”

He abruptly stepped forward, framing her face in his hands. “Then what the hell were we doing in that shower?”

Heat flushed her cheeks as she recalled in precise, Technicolor detail what they’d been doing in the shower.

It’d involved hot water, shower gel, and Hakan on his knees…

Payton slammed the door on the memories.

It was distracting enough to feel the press of his thick arousal against her lower stomach.

“I told you that sex wasn’t the same as trust,” she reminded him.

His thumbs brushed her cheeks, his touch so tender it brought tears to her eyes.

“That wasn’t sex,” he said in husky tones. “We made love.”

She gave a slow nod. She wasn’t going to lie about her emotions. Even if she wasn’t ready to make the leap he was demanding.

“Yes. I do love you.” She tilted back her head, allowing him to see the sincerity in her eyes. “I have always loved you.”

His jaw clenched, his features looking like they’d been carved from granite.

“But you won’t mate with me.”

She winced at his flat tone. The less emotion Hakan revealed the more intense his feelings.

Which meant that she’d just deeply wounded him.

“I…” She licked her lips, a part of her yearning to simply accept what he was offering. She had belonged, heart and soul, to this male for the past two decades. But another part rebelled at the mere thought of giving in so easily. It wasn’t pride. It was…hell, she didn’t know. But she wasn’t ready. She firmly pulled from his grasp and headed for the walk-in to pull on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt from the spares that were always kept in safe houses. “Not now.”

Hakan was standing in her path when she stepped out of the closet, his arms folded over his chest.

“Then when?” he rasped.

Turning, she reached to grab a pair of jeans off a shelf and tossed them toward him.

Dammit. That huge, naked body was making her want to do things with her tongue that weren’t going to convince him that she was serious about putting their mating on hold.

Things that involved licking that thick cock until he was pleading for mercy.

“I don’t know.”

Snatching the jeans before they hit his chest, he pulled them on with jerky motions.

“So this is my punishment,” he snarled.

“This has nothing to do with punishment,” she protested, even as a small doubt gnawed deep inside her.

A doubt she easily squashed.

Blistering heat filled the room as he straightened to glare at her with a barely leashed frustration.

“I understand. I hurt you,” he said, not sounding like he understood. At all. “Now you need to hurt me.”

“That’s not fair.”

“You know we belong together.” He leaned down until they were nose to nose. “Even now I can sense your cat’s hunger for us to complete the bond.”

It was true, but she refused to back down.

The needs of her cat didn’t control her. Not since she’d left the nursery.

“Just a few hours ago I hated you,” she pointed out, trying to be reasonable despite his annoyance. “I can’t just turn my feelings off and on.”

“Payton…” The infuriated male stiffened in alarm at the shrill beeps that echoed through the hallway. “What the hell?”

Taking advantage of his distraction, Payton stepped around his large form and headed for the door of the bedroom.

“The download is finished,” she muttered.

She managed to reach the sweeping staircase before Hakan was standing directly in front of her, his expression grim.

“We’re not done with this conversation, Payton.”

She shoved a weary hand through her still-damp curls. When was the last time she had a decent night’s sleep?

It seemed like an eternity.

“Hakan—”

“You’re my mate,” he stubbornly interrupted. “Nothing is ever going to change that.”

He turned to jog down the steps before she could answer. A good thing, considering she didn’t know what the hell she wanted to say.

They
were
mates.

No doubt about it.

It was just…

Giving a resigned shake of her head, Payton followed Hakan down the staircase and into the library. Then, trying to pretend she wasn’t vibrantly aware of his large form standing next to the desk, she crossed the room to peer at the computer screen.

Tapping in her private password, she studied her account, unconsciously chewing her thumbnail as she scanned through the long list of files.

“I think I managed to get something,” she at last said.

Hakan moved to stand behind her as she slid into the chair and used the mouse to click on the first of three files that she’d managed to retrieve that weren’t fragmented.

“What are they?” he demanded.

Payton skimmed through the various documents, swiftly realizing she didn’t have the skill to decipher the medical forms.

“This first one is some sort of lab work,” she said. “Blood. DNA.”

“Is it Lydia’s file?”

“It’s impossible to say, but it looks like there’s more than one patient. I’ll need the Nurturers to look at it to make sure.”

Hakan stiffened. “How many?”

“At least ten.”

“Damn,” he breathed. “It’s one thing to suspect that they’re screwing around with Pantera DNA, but to think they’re impregnating women with our semen…it’s intolerable.”

“I don’t think that these files are dealing with creating cubs,” she said, clicking open the next icon.

His breath brushed her cheek as he leaned over her shoulder. “Then what?”

She grimly concentrated on sorting through the documents. “I’m not sure. This is the only complete file I can open.”

“Patient Z,” he read out loud. “Why wouldn’t it have a name?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know much about medicine, but I suppose if you were doing some clinical trial…” She sucked in a shocked breath as she located a folder of pictures and clicked them open. “Hakan.”

She felt him grip the back of her chair as they studied the grainy photograph of a female strapped to a gurney in the center of a lab.

There was no mistaking the dark-haired Pantera.

“Reny,” he growled.

Payton made a sound of distress as she zoomed in. She could detect wounds on the unconscious Reny that suggested that the chains that bound her to the gurney were laced with malachite.

Not only must the pain have been unbearable, but the separation from her cat would have been a constant torture.

It was no wonder she’d blocked out the memories even after Sebastian had brought her to the Wildlands.

“This is why she went ballistic when she entered The Haymore Center and caught a glimpse of Stanton Locke,” she said. “She might not consciously remember what happened to her, but her cat no doubt sensed it’d been held captive there.”

Hakan leaned over her shoulder to study the picture, the heat from his body blazing around her. She didn’t doubt that it was taking every ounce of his willpower not to charge back to the Center and destroy everyone associated with it.

“Why would she be in a human medical facility?” he snapped.

Payton searched through the remaining photographs, hoping to discover some clue to those responsible for her captivity. Instead what she saw was pictures of Reny going back more than fifty years.

“Dear Goddess,” she breathed, her voice tight and tears flooding her eyes. “She’d been there since she was just a newborn baby.”

The back of her chair cracked beneath the force of Hakan’s grip.

“Is there any mention of her mother?”

Payton pointed a finger toward the last picture of a pretty, dark-haired female with jade green eyes.

“Not directly, but this looks like it might be a photo of her.”

Hakan abruptly straightened and paced from one end of the shadowed library to the other.

Inside, his cat roared, demanding vengeance for the helpless female Pantera who’d obviously been abused since she was a mere cub. Unfortunately, until they knew exactly who was behind the secret lab in The Haymore Center, he had no true enemy to battle.

“Hiss was right,” he at last said between clenched teeth.

“What do you mean?” Payton studied him with a wary expression and just for a crazed minute he was nearly overwhelmed by the urge to haul her back up the stairs and keep her in the bed until she agreed to complete the mating.

Okay. It might be arrogant to assume that after twenty years of denying the attraction between them, she would be eager to bind herself to him just because he’d decided it was time.

And maybe he deserved to do some squirming.

But dammit, she wasn’t the only one who’d suffered. Couldn’t she at least give him a lifeline? A smidgeon of hope that she wasn’t going to make him wait forever?

Then, with a muttered curse, he forced himself to focus on what they’d just discovered.

The mess he’d made of his personal life was going to have to wait until they’d identified and destroyed the people responsible for holding Reny captive.

Dammit.

“Hiss always swore that his family was still alive, but the elders insisted they’d been killed in a fire,” he explained, belatedly wishing he hadn’t dismissed his one-time friend’s insistence that the elders were lying to him as the grief of an orphan.

Payton frowned. “Could he have been involved with the Center?”

“No.” Hakan paced back toward the desk. “The bastard might have helped the disciples of Shakpi, but he was genuinely shocked by the blood tests that revealed Reny is his sister.”

“The kidnappers did try to negotiate to get their hands on Hiss,” she reminded him.

His hands clenched at his side. “And now they have him.”