PrimalFlavor (8 page)

He chose the latter. She wasn’t the kind of woman who’d let
her guard down for just anyone. She had the suspicious squint and quick trigger
finger of someone who shot first and asked questions later. So yeah, he was
going with flattered that she could sleep with him here, that she’d let him
touch and taste her until she couldn’t take any more.

Zach glanced at his dick, still hard, still hopefully
pointed at the object of his lust. “Sorry,” he muttered to the poor, neglected
shaft.

Shaking his head at himself, he stood, stifling a wince as
the blood returned to his calves and feet. He must’ve gorged himself on her for—
He looked for a clock and winced. Nearly an hour. He’d gone down on her for
nearly a whole hour, wringing orgasm after orgasm from her with little care for
anything but tasting her. A grin tugged at his mouth and if anyone else had
been in the room with them, they would’ve seen his chest puff out just a bit. Yeah,
he was damn proud he’d eaten this hard woman into a near coma.

She didn’t move a muscle when he scooped her into his arms,
lifting her with no problem. Her limp body settled against his chest, her head coming
to rest on his shoulder. All that silky blonde hair floated over his naked
skin, trailing down to tickle his ribs. As tough as his Colette was, she had
some soft spots, he was coming to realize. Her long hair, her painted toenails,
smooth, silky skin that smelled like rich vanilla and spice all pointed to a
woman who was more than the gun she wielded. Even her home was softer than he
would’ve imagined.

Now that he wasn’t blinded by lust, he saw she’d decorated
it with flair and drama using bright, bold colors completely at odds with her
camouflage-wearing self. The scarlet sofa was the focal point of the entire
living room that had dark mahogany bookshelves packed with paperbacks, a
blinding-white love seat, abstract paintings all made a living area that looked
as though it belonged in an apartment loft in a big city, not in the swamp.

Interesting. His tiger wanted to explore more, but first he
needed to get his tired female to bed.

Zach carried his light burden down a door-lined hallway. He
felt absolutely no shame in opening each door to see what kind of room it
guarded and to sniff each one, making sure it didn’t conceal another male’s
scent. What he found was a guest bathroom, two guest rooms and what was
obviously Colette’s hunting room. She had three gun cabinets lining one wall, a
desk opposite with maps nearly wallpapering the room. Zach had no doubt if he
opened the closet, he’d see nothing but camouflage. Strange how that turned him
on. He eyed her speculatively, wondering if she wore camo undies when she went
hunting. His cock definitely liked the idea. A cute camo thong and matching bra
he could tear off with his teeth before he fucked her against a tree. He
swallowed a pained whimper as his dick gave another pulse of want. He ignored
the ache, nearly running out of the room of temptation.

The last door though, the one at the end of the hall, was
the one that made his tiger purr, made him want to roll over the bed to capture
her scent on every inch of his skin. But her bed didn’t look big enough for
him. He’d have to see about fixing that, but until then, they’d just have to
get real close. He placed her in the center of the queen-sized mattress and
pulled the cool sheet over her body. She sighed softly, turning on her side
toward him, curling into a little ball. He looked around at the blatantly
feminine room, at the pale-pink touches that almost matched her nipples, at the
lingerie spilling out of her dresser drawers. He gulped down deep breaths of
her spicy-sweet scent. Colette was a definite surprise. One he couldn’t wait to
explore.

Now that he had her settled, at least for a little while, he
began to poke around her house, exploring everything about Colette. The
pictures on the walls and shelves in every room spoke of a woman who loved her
family. The diplomas on the walls left him feeling like an idiot. This woman
who spoke with a flat Cajun accent, who hunted and conducted tours in the
swamps, had graduated summa cum laude from Loyola University with a Bachelors
of Science degree. And as if that wasn’t enough, there were awards for marksmanship.
The woman could’ve killed him if she’d wanted. She knew anatomy and could shoot
the center of a dime out at fifty yards. That she hadn’t was all the evidence
he needed to prove she liked him.

The thought left him with a bounce in his step as he continued
exploring the house. He peered in her fridge to see she had nothing in it. He
frowned, recalling the ladder of ribs he’d felt under his hand as he carried
her to her bedroom. She didn’t eat enough. A quick peek in her cabinets showed
boxed foods and her freezer held frozen dinners he wanted to toss in the trash
before she could heat them up. He shook his head in disgust even as he admired
her beautiful range. It was brand new and looked as though it’d never been
used. Going by the lack of raw ingredients in her kitchen, it was obvious the
woman needed someone to take care of her.

He returned to her bedroom to see her sleeping peacefully.
He had enough time to put his plan into motion before he woke her up. He
pressed a quick kiss to her forehead, inhaling her scent. “Don’t go anywhere,”
he whispered as he straightened next to the bed.

Feeling absolutely no shame, he took her keys off the rack
next to the door, discovered which one went to her house, locked up and shifted
with the keys in his mouth. He then spent a good twenty minutes marking his
territory. Only when the whole area was saturated with his scent did he leave. The
half-hatched plan in his mind solidified as he hurried back to his car and the
box of condoms he kept in his glove compartment.

When Colette woke, she wouldn’t know what hit her.

* * * * *

“I told you she was nothing but trouble.” The sulky words,
accompanied by a full pout by a grown man were enough to make him grimace.

Once he left Colette’s house, he’d met up with the Schumacher
brothers at some hidey-hole they had in the swamp. At first Roscoe thought the
meeting would be in the coveted ceremonial area, except he was doomed to be
mightily disappointed tonight. He should have known better. He would’ve
preferred meeting directly with the big boss after all this time, of putting a
face with the voice he’d taken orders from for the last four months, but
instead he’d been stuck with these morons.

They had nothing worth saying, nothing of note to give him
other than ignorant observations they made. They’d contacted the group via a
convoluted chain and somehow gotten to the right person, which meant the boss
told Roscoe to come out here. In the middle of fucking nowhere, yet he was
strangely okay with that because he had a feeling everything he’d been working
for was coming to fruition. He’d finally take part in the hunt.

He just had to get through spending time with Antoine and
Vernon. How he’d ended up working with this pair of idiots was beyond him, but
here he was, following orders as usual. He forced his eyes away from the sullen
faces of the Schumacher brothers, his wolf insulted to be near them. It was a
proud animal and it was also a very pissed-off animal after that fight with the
tiger. Yet another disappointment he’d have to get over tonight.

He considered the brawl a draw. Later, when things weren’t
so urgent, he’d go back for a rematch. But right now he had things to do, a
woman to draw into a trap and a point to prove to the world. He scrubbed a hand
over his jaw as he recalled his last sight of Colette Robicheaux. She didn’t
fit the description he’d been given before he ever arrived in Pointe-Aux-Chat
Parish. She wasn’t some veritable Amazon, some beast of a human female who stood
eye-to-eye with male bear shifters, a woman with leathery skin and hair like
straw from a life of working outside the way he’d been told.

She was none of those things. Colette was barely five foot two.
Her hair was pale, but not white with age. Her skin was dark from genetics, but
glowed with health and youth. Her eyes were eerily pale, but then so were his.
And she had a nice body. He’d gotten a very good look at her body from his spot
on the ground with her standing over him. If circumstances were different, if
his purpose here were different, he might have approached her for something
other than his plan. He might have tried to tempt her to play with the big bad
wolf.

But he did have a plan and it didn’t involve finding out if
the Cajun woman liked it doggy style.

“She’s the one?” he asked the idiots who’d called his boss. “That
little woman?”

Vernon, the smarter of the Schumacher brothers, which wasn’t
saying much, growled, his muddy-brown eyes glowing yellow for a brief moment. “She
ain’t what she seems.” He muttered something in French under his breath. “She’s
a hunter,” Vernon said when Antoine nudged him.

And with those words, the jackal shifter sealed Colette’s
fate. While he might doubt her danger to these two idiots, even the man known
as Roscoe could see there was something dangerous lurking under the small human’s
skin. It was in her witchy eyes and the way she walked, as though she didn’t fear
anything.

Unfortunately for her, Roscoe was something she needed to
learn to fear.

Because with one phone call, the call he was making right
now, Colette Robicheaux’s life would change and it wouldn’t be for the better.

The smell of food and the insistent growling of her stomach
dragged Colette from the hottest, most erotic dream she’d ever had. It blew all
the others out of the water with its attention to detail. Zach, if her
fantasies were to be believed, had a very talented tongue he enjoyed using on
hapless females. Her body ached and throbbed with desire, but it was muted, as
though she’d come so many times her hormones were overworked and fully sated.
Like a tick about to burst.

Colette’s eyes popped open. A glance around told her she was
in her bedroom and everything looked exactly the same, but the delicious aroma
wafting from the doorway beckoned. Had she left something in the oven
overnight? Or had someone broken into her house to…cook? She shook her head.
Impossible. She would’ve heard it if someone broke in. Maybe her mom had
brought her breakfast? She glanced at the clock. It wasn’t even midnight yet.
No way in hell would her mom be out so late. Her heart skipped several beats as
another possibility intruded. One that involved a man with sultry gold eyes and
a body to die for. No, it’d been a dream. There was no way Zach was in her
house cooking. There was no way he’d buried his face between her legs and
feasted on her like a starving man until she’d passed out. No way.

But thoughts attempted to surface along with realizations.
Like, she was completely naked. There wasn’t a stitch of clothing between her
and her sheets. That meant nothing, she rationalized. She sometimes slept
naked, especially when she got sunburned, but she hadn’t been burned yet. That
would happen over gator season. The next thing that caught her attention was
her hair. It was loose. She never left it loose when she slept. It was so long
and got so insanely wavy, she had to braid it before she went to bed to avoid
tangles. Yet, she hadn’t done that tonight. And she didn’t remember coming to
bed at all. All she remembered was— Her eyes widened.

Had it been real? She let out a breathless laugh and shook
her head. No, of course not. Men didn’t just eat a woman out until she fell
asleep and put her to bed without getting anything in return. Except when she
bolted up in her bed and swung her legs over the edge of the mattress, her
thighs screamed. But her inner muscles didn’t feel stretched or sore. The
discomfort was isolated to her inner thighs, which didn’t fit with full-on
hard, fast sex. A flash of memory, of her sprawled on her sofa with her legs
spread wide, her hips propped on the sofa arm, nearly fired her circuits. Heat
scorched up from her womb straight to her face. She slapped her hands to her
cheeks and closed her eyes.

“Oh. My. God,” she whispered into the quiet of her room.

“If you want to eat while it’s hot, you should come on out,”
someone, a man, called from the direction of her kitchen.

Colette paused, every muscle in her body tensing at the
unexpected sound of someone else in her house. No, not someone else. A
man…Zach? She didn’t know. She hadn’t heard him talk enough to know his voice
right off the bat, but whoever he was, he hadn’t been invited. Habit had her
reaching out to the .40 caliber she kept in her nightstand. The sheet
threatened to take her to the ground when she stood, so she tossed it off and
crept across the room to the basket of clothes she hadn’t gotten around to
folding and putting away. She placed the handgun on the pile so she could
clothe herself, grabbing the first thing that came to hand. Luckily it was one
of her cousin’s old shirts and fell to mid-thigh when she pulled it over her
head.

Partially clothed and ready to take care of whomever might
be in her house, she picked up the gun again and slipped down the hall. The
door to her hunting-slash-home office was ajar, but she didn’t sense anything
suspicious. It should have pissed her off. Normally it would have, except
judging by the way her heart skipped several beats and her breathing quickened,
she wasn’t angry so much as excited. She almost snorted at herself. Excited.
Yeah, that was an understatement. If that was Zach in her kitchen, she wasn’t
sure what she’d do. Fall to her knees in worship for the amazing orgasms? Shoot
him for real this time because he’d ruined her for any other man? Maybe throw
herself in his arms and declare her love?

She stopped just a few steps away from the end of the
hallway where it met the living room. The man moving around her kitchen made no
attempt at disguising his sounds. There was the soft clang of something being
placed in the sink. The quiet rasp of skin over hardwood floor as he moved from
the cabinets to the fridge and back again.

“Well? Are you coming or not?”

There was a taunt in the voice, clear as a bell and without
even turning the corner Colette knew she’d see Zach rummaging around her
kitchen. She tugged on the hem of her t-shirt with her free hand, sucked in a
deep breath before straightening her shoulders and rounding the doorway. But he
wasn’t rummaging in her kitchen. Instead, he leaned against her counter, his
arms crossed over his chest, which did nothing to hide his erect cock and
muscled body.

He should have looked funny standing in her kitchen, naked
as the day he was born, but even though he wasn’t dressed in his chef’s coat,
didn’t have his longish hair hidden by a bandana, wasn’t surrounded by
assistants and his stainless-steel appliances, he looked as if he owned the
space. The sexy smirk on his face, the one she’d known was there, faded when he
caught a glimpse of her and his arms fell to his sides as he pushed away from the
counter.

“Do you go everywhere with a gun?” he asked as he stalked
toward her. “I know you don’t sleep with one under your pillow.”

Her heart didn’t skip a beat. It flat out stopped and she
felt the color leave her face at the realization that he had been moving around
her house while she slept. Around her bedroom. The color she’d lost returned in
full force. He had to have seen her toys. The many toys she’d purchased and
enjoyed over the years were carefully placed in areas where they wouldn’t be
immediately seen, but Zach was a tiger and she imagined he had a cat’s
curiosity.

Colette was so lost in her horrified thoughts, she didn’t
realize Zach was next to her until he plucked at her baggy t-shirt. “Do you
like this shirt?”

She shook her head and blinked. “What? Yes, of course I do.
I’m wearing it, aren’t I?” He circled her, but she spun around to keep him in
her sights. It wasn’t much of a hardship considering a naked Zach in motion was
the sexiest thing she’d ever seen. But that wasn’t important at the moment,
right? She totally needed to ignore the tingling in her pussy and find out what
he thought he was doing in Bayou Ange. In her house, more specifically.
Dragging her admiring gaze away from his flexing ass, she looked into his face.
“Why are you here?”

Gold eyes scanned her bare legs with appreciation. “I’d
think that’s obvious.”

Gawd.
Her face felt as though it were going to
explode from the force of the blood rushing to it. She was embarrassed,
turned-on and a little pissed. She drew herself to her full five foot two and a
half inches and planted her free hand on her hip. The other still clutched the
gun, although she kept it pointed at the floor. For now.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Colette demanded in a near
growl. If he thought just because she’d…let him give her a half dozen orgasms
in one night that it meant he could expect to get full-on sex…well, he was
probably right. But it would have been nice if he—

“I was cooking,” he said, breaking into her internal rant.
He spoke it so simply, as though it were perfectly natural for him to cook for
the women he’d tongue-fucked into a coma that she didn’t know how to respond.
He plucked at the sleeve of her shirt again. “Where’d you get this?”

She slapped at his hand with a frown, still slowly turning
to keep him in her sights. She was starting to get a little dizzy, but it was
better than having him at her back. Even if part of her wanted him to toss her
on the table and fuck her hard and fast. Her stomach gave a slow, hungry clench
that had nothing to do with the delicious smells in the kitchen and everything
to do with the tiger shifter eyeing her like a wounded gazelle.

“My cousin left it here after we went froggin’ one night.
Why? You have a problem with it?”

But he seemed to lose interest in the shirt because he
shrugged, ending his circuit around her by heading for the stove where pots and
pans she hadn’t even realized she owned sat on burners. “Sit down so you can
eat,” he said over his shoulder.

She didn’t of course. This was her house. But the way Zach
reached into the correct cabinet for a plate and began loading it with food,
she began to wonder exactly how much time he’d spent going through it. And how
was she supposed to think about food when she was staring at his ass? Watching
it flex and bunch with every move he made? Or the long, muscled lines of his
legs when he shifted from one foot to the other? Or— He turned around and his
cock pointed directly at her. Again.

Her heart fluttered with excitement and want. The logical
Colette, the one who knew Zach being in her house was a bad thing, tried to
tamp down the arousal. “What are you doing here?” she asked again as he
approached her with a heaping plate of food. It looked delicious and her
stomach growled.

“Right now, I’m feeding the hungry beast in your stomach,”
he said easily, bypassing her to put the plate on the table.

Colette allowed herself to relax since his back was to her,
but before she could do more than squeak, Zach spun around and snatched her off
her feet. In a split second she found herself perched on his lap, her gun
clattering to the tabletop. She gasped, her head lifting, and stared directly
into his gorgeous eyes, which were only inches away from hers. The look in
them, hungry and devious, sent a quiver of awareness through her. If she hadn’t
recognized the need in them, the hard column of his cock pressing into her hip
would’ve told her exactly what he planned to do.

But just in case she still didn’t understand, he told her.
“Later, I’m going to feed an entirely different beast,” he whispered against
her lips. He pressed a quick kiss to her mouth and pulled away. “Now eat.”

Stunned from that brief moment of contact, a kiss that
reminded her too easily of what he’d done to her on her sofa, how he’d turned
her anger into arousal, Colette looked away from him and at the plate of food
he pulled closer to them. Two thick, fluffy pancakes sat at the center,
surrounded by a moat of berries. Sliced strawberries nestled between
blackberries and raspberries in a neat circle around the pancakes, which were
golden perfection. Her stomach yowled.

Zach reached out and sorted through the berries, rejecting
several before he plucked a plump blackberry from the pile. Then he held it up
to her mouth. Colette reared back in surprise, her gaze flying to his. He
wanted to feed her? He traced her bottom lip with the berry, letting it drag
across her skin, the heat in his eyes requesting—no, demanding entrance. Her
stomach twisted with the abundance of butterflies that had taken up residence
there.

Without thinking, she gave him access, opening her mouth for
him. Satisfaction gleamed in the gold depths of his eyes as he placed the ripe
berry on her tongue. Colette reflexively closed her mouth and captured his
fingers between her lips in a suckling kiss. His pupils dilated, the black
swallowing the gold until only a thin ring remained and a deep purr rumbled in
his chest. Unable to help herself, caught in the intense sensual pull he had,
she flicked her tongue over the tips of his fingers in a shy caress. The
movement caused the berry to burst, combining the salty taste of Zach’s skin
with the tartness of the fruit, her eyes closing from the tart flavor.

“You have a nice kitchen for someone who doesn’t cook,” he
said conversationally.

Colette opened her eyes again to see a smile flirting with
his sinful lips. “I’m not good at it,” she confessed. “My mama tried to teach
me, but I preferred being on the water or in the woods with my dad and
cousins.”

He placed a slice of strawberry on her tongue, his fingers
stroking her bottom lip and leaving a trail of fire behind. “You’re close to
your dad, huh?” She would’ve responded to that, but he popped a raspberry in
her mouth when she opened it. “So what do you do at the tour company?”

Between bites of succulent berries he kept pressing on her,
Zach slowly drew out information about her. She told him about the Bayou Ange
Swamp Tours, how her dad had started it when he returned from college and
brought his brothers in with him. How she’d grown up with a true love for the
beauty of Pointe-Aux-Chat Parish and had gone to school to study biology so she
could have a better understanding of her surroundings. She told him how her
parents met, that her mom was a third-generation Haitian whose twin sister
married a clouded leopard shifter and lived in New Orleans. She told Zach
everything he wanted to know without even meaning to and in doing so, she
learned more about him as well.

“How did you end up becoming a baker?” she asked when he was
busy searching for another “perfect” berry. Since there were only a few left,
she figured he was stalling.

He shrugged, the purring growing softer for a moment before
starting up again when he looked at her with another raspberry pinched between
his fingers. He fed it to her, his eyes on her lips. “I came to live with my
grandmother when I was four. My mom wanted nothing to do with a kid, so she
dropped me off and that was the last time I saw her.” He shrugged again and
reached out to pull a small covered bowl toward him. “Mamaw had the bakery,
which had been in the Trahan family for over a hundred years. Since Mom was her
only child and had no interest in it, she taught me the recipes that have been
passed down for generations.”