Mercury's War (35 page)

    Her thighs spread farther for him and she whimpered as his finger slid free of her grip. Only to have his hands slide beneath her rear, lift her. His head lowered farther and his tongue plunged inside her. Licking, stroking, he didn’t let up. He thrust inside her, filling her with that hormone, burning her flesh alive as she began to twist beneath him.

    Oh God, if he didn’t fuck her, she was going to die. She was going to combust into flames and be gone forever.

    “Please,” she whimpered. She begged. She screamed his name until she came again, arching and jerking against him as she felt her juices flowing from her vagina to his tongue.

    The growl that came from him was harsh, spiked with ravenous hunger as he straightened, jerking to his knees and dragging her thighs over his.

    Mercury could smell the heat on her now. Inside her. It infused him with the taste of her sweet syrup and stroked his lust to a boiling point.

    His cock throbbed like an open wound now. And the cure for it was but a breath away from the engorged, flushed crest beaded with the hormone-infused pre-cum.

    “You know what will happen,” he growled down at her as she stared back at him, her eyes wide, her face dazed with pleasure.

    “When I take you, Ria. When I come inside you, you know what will happen.”

    She shook her head, but the knowledge was in her eyes. She knew. She knew what he would give her, that when he released inside her, the extension he could feel throbbing beneath the head of his cock would become engorged. It would lock him inside her. It would spill the hormone that would begin preparing her body, changing her, making her receptive to the altered semen that could-and how he prayed it would-give her his child.

    “Please,” she whispered again, her voice ragged, filled with her need as he pressed his cock against her.

    She was so tight, and he was larger than before. Thicker. Anticipation built inside him, satisfaction glowing in him. This was his woman. His mate. He clenched his teeth and began to fill her.

    He watched as his cock began to sink inside the velvet heat of her body. Her panties, black lace and erotic, framed the penetration. Lightly tanned thighs strained, bunched as she arched and her pussy gripped him, milked him in until he was snarling with the pleasure, feeling the sweat pour from his body as he fought to hold back.

    Ria was dying from the pleasure/pain of the penetration. Everything about Mercury seemed larger now. His shoulders, his muscular body, the engorged length and width of his erection.

    She arched and writhed beneath him, moaning, begging as he took her. And she felt more than the penetration of his body into hers. More than the impalement of his cock. She felt a feral hunger driving inside her now. Her blood was fire. The perspiration covering her body was lava. Each nerve ending was pressing too close to her flesh, and she needed more.

    “My Ria.” He rose over her with a groan as he lodged his heavy flesh into her to the hilt. She could feel the press of his balls below, the throb of his cock inside her and his body covering her.

    She felt ecstasy and agony and could do nothing but hold on to him as he began to move. Slowly at first. So slowly. Easing into her, thrusting deep and slow, working inside her as her flesh clenched and convulsed around him.

    “Put your legs around me, Ria.” The deep, rough rumble in his voice sent a shiver down her spine.

    She shook her head. She couldn’t bear it. He was so large inside her, filling her so completely now.

    His teeth nipped her shoulder warningly. “Do it. Wrap around me, Ria. All the way.”

    She whimpered, but lifted her knees and wrapped her legs around his thighs.

    “God! Mercury.” Her hands clawed at his shoulders, as the pleasure seemed to radiate inside her, brighter, hotter.

    “You’re so tight. Like a hot, slick fist. Better. So much better than anything I could imagine.”

    Mercury was hanging on to his control by the most fragile thread. The mating hormone had sensitized his flesh to a degree that he could barely breathe for the pleasure consuming him now.

    He could feel the hot press of delicate muscles surrounding his cock, every ripple, every little milking spasm that worked through the too tight channel of her pussy.

    Agonizing pleasure. The head of his cock throbbed. He could feel the barb pulsing just under the flesh.
He felt it.
It was for her. All of it for her. Rising inside him like a tide of insanity and possessing with a hunger that went far beyond lust.

    His sweat coated them now. Making them slick as he slid against her. Hard, hot little nipples poked against his chest. Tight and hot, they drew his mouth as he began to thrust harder against her, working his erection in and out as violent need began to break through that last measure of control.

    “You won’t leave me again.” He nipped the upper curve of her breast. “You will never run from me again.”

    Where would she run? How could she run? She could never live without knowing this pleasure again, without feeling it rising inside her with such ecstasy.

    Ria bit her lip, twisting against him as the need began growing, burning brighter, hotter. She rose to meet each thrust, whimpering, dying for more.

    And he was giving her more. Hard, powerful lunges buried his cock inside her, stroked her internally as the need for his taste began to overwhelm everything else.

    Her lips turned to his shoulder. Panting breaths, ragged cries left her throat, and as his thrusts increased, as they pounded inside, she licked the flesh of his shoulder, moaned, cried out, and before she could help herself, she bit him.

    As he had bitten her so many times. She latched onto the hard flesh of his shoulder, held it tight, licked it, sucked at the taste of him.

    Mercury froze against her. His entire body tightened, shuddered, then with a snarling growl of hunger his teeth pierced her shoulder like a brand and his hips surged against hers.

    Ria would have screamed, but the pleasure, the need for his taste, the driving, furious stroke of his body inside hers, was tightening her womb, throbbing in her clit.

    Tears spilled from her eyes at the incredible power and beauty of what he was doing to her. The pleasure-it wasn’t just pleasure. It was ravenous. Shameless. It was pure sensation, blinding-hot and reaching inside her to places where she’d never known could know pleasure.

    Her womb tightened furiously. Her clit exploded in ecstasy, and rapture erupted through her entire consciousness.

    She had to let go of him to scream. To buck against the furious thrusts powering the whipping sensations racing from nerve ending to nerve ending.

    Her head ground into the pillow. She knew she was clawing his shoulders and she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t scream. A starburst of color exploded before her eyes as she felt him give one last, hard lunge, and then his release spilled into her.

    His release and something more. She felt the barb. Felt it extend, engorge, press into flesh convulsing, tightening around his cock, locking him inside her. Her upper body jerked forward, but his hard chest held her in place, his strong teeth tightened on her, his tongue licked, and this time, she did scream. The pleasure was too much to contain. The sheer violence of another orgasm tearing through her, stealing control of her responses, her body. She jerked and shuddered, writhed and arched, desperate to escape, to get closer.

    The barb was blunted, like the tip of a thick, heavy thumb pressing into her, oh God, stroking her, pulsing as though it were coming as well.

    She could feel his semen blasting inside her, and from that extension, the barb male Lions possessed, she felt a burning ejaculation to add to her pleasure.

    Mercury jerked above her, his head lifting from her shoulder, a roar of triumph leaving his lips, filling the room as he bucked against her again, driving his cock and the barb deeper inside her.

    The animal was free, and she should have been terrified. She knew what this meant. She knew it wasn’t for her. But she couldn’t let go of him. She held on to his arms with desperate hands, his hips with enclosing legs. She let the pleasure take her like a tidal wave sweeping across the land. She was helpless before it. Rocked to her soul by it. And now bound by chains that would never allow her to walk away from him.

    She was mated to him. His mate, whether it was meant for her or not, and satisfaction should have filled her. It should have blazed inside her. She had won the man and the beast. He was hers. He loved her. He had mated her. But nothing could overshadow the fact that it had been another woman that called the animal free inside him.

CHAPTER 21

    Mercury eased slowly from Ria’s exhausted body, grimacing as the overly sensitive flesh of his cock was stroked by the snug grip of her pussy.

    Damn, he was still hard. Still hard and so fucking aroused it was painful. But he had his senses back, his sanity.

    He pushed her hair back from her face, watching as her lips pouted and she burrowed against his chest as though she were cold.

    A little moan passed her lips as her hard nipples raked the pelt over his skin. They were still engorged, reddened. And he wanted to suck them. He wanted them against his tongue, the sweet taste of her flesh in his mouth.

    He inhaled harshly and pulled the blankets over her, coming down beside her as she stretched against his body and let him wrap himself around her. His hands played in her hair, touching it, petting it. Loving the feel of it.

    He loved the feel of her.

    He frowned, thinking back to the confrontation with Alaiya. Distaste had clotted his senses when she touched him. And when her lips had pressed to his, he’d had to freeze, to force himself not to kill her. She knew; the moment she saw him, smelled him, Alaiya had known he belonged to another. And still, she had pretended to play the wounded mate.

    What game was she involved in here? Definitely one he knew he wanted no part of, but one he knew had the potential to destroy Ria.

    Alaiya was a perceptive creature. She was as cold and calculating as Jonas in many ways. Though the director of Breed Affairs didn’t have the cold-blooded maliciousness Alaiya possessed.

    He rubbed a heavy strand of Ria’s hair between his fingers as he considered this problem. His Ria. She was confident, powerful, a force to be reckoned with when it came to what she knew. Codes. Tracking threads of deception. She was the best he had ever seen, even within the Breed community.

    It was the woman she hid that concerned him. The one he could see in her, feel in her, the one she refused to release. That woman would be wild, powerful, a mate who could endure the years it seemed mated Breeds were being allowed.

    She kept that part of herself vanquished, refused it freedom just as Mercury had refused his beast freedom. Because a woman’s confidence was so easily shattered. That woman had never been free because Ria was terrified of losing the one last part of herself that gave her strength.

    She was a contradiction, there was no doubt. The woman inside hid, while the logic and business sense of the woman faced the world. The woman who faced the world hid the one that longed to wear sexy dresses and high heels. To be vivid and wild.

    Because vivid and wild drew attention. They made such a woman an object of speculation, of gossip, of men who wanted nothing more than her name notched into their bedpost.

    And Ria couldn’t afford that shame, that hurt. Just as she couldn’t afford to appear to be more than the employee the Vanderales depended so highly upon.

    There it was. He frowned at the thought. Ria couldn’t afford to become visible, because she feared losing the advantage she had in her job. Wallflowers faded among the crowd. No one noticed them. No one feared them, she had told him. But it was more than that. She held an advantage. One the Leo approved of, needed. She was a tool he used quite effectively. And the Vanderales were the only enduring thing in Ria’s life.

    She feared losing that one certainty. The family that had saved her. They hadn’t raised her, but they had overseen her raising. They had educated her. They employed her. She was the poor orphan child everyone thought the powerful family felt sorry for.

    The inner woman had no confidence in herself, in her ability to command the attention and power Mercury knew was her due.

    He growled at the thought of it, his eyes narrowing into the dusky light of the room as he considered each avenue open for him to proceed.

    He was her mate. It was his job to protect her, to assure her security, her happiness.

    She was never going to believe he had mated
her.
That part of her that refused to allow her to accept anything as her own would always pull back. Because the mating heat hadn’t made itself fully known until Alaiya’s appearance.

    He couldn’t fully blame her, and yet he did. And he knew when she awoke, the fury of a woman terrified that she had something that didn’t belong to her would blaze as high and as hot as the mating heat.

    Simply telling her would never be enough. And it wasn’t enough for him. She had enraged him when she ran from him. Torn at his own pride and sense of worth. This was his mate. She would fight for him. She would fight for him or there would be no fury greater than his own.

    He lifted his head and focused on the open closet door. Within it were those ugly clothes she insisted on wearing. He looked at the clock, and a hard, determined smile pulled his lips back from his teeth.

    He eased away from her, tucked the blankets around her and moved for that closet. He had a few hours before the heat would awaken her. Before the need would begin clawing through her.

    He stepped into the large closet, closed the door behind him and switched on the light. He turned, and his eyes narrowed on the clothing before he looked down at his hands.