Soul Deep (12 page)

“I clean up fine?” She rolled her eyes, fighting the arousal as she watched the slow amusement dawn in his eyes. “You are a nutcase. Has anyone mentioned that to you?”

He shrugged powerful muscles. “I think that was Simon’s line the night I caught him trying to break into the bar I worked as bouncer for. He wanted to blow the place up. It was my bread-and-butter at the time so I took exception.”

“A bouncer?” Oh, her father was going to love this one, but suddenly, it made him seem more real, less of a puppet.

“Yep. Bouncer in a rough-assed brothel/bar called the Raging Lilly just inside this dirty little French town. Filled with terrorists, low-lifes and pond scum. He was itching to blow it to hell and back. Took me a few minutes to convince him of the error of his ways.”

“Simon is the guy who drove the jeep?” She fought to concentrate as he handed her a glass of chilled water.

“Drink that. Dehydration is a problem sometimes with these damned matings I was told. And yes, Simon was driving the jeep.”

She drank the water, but it did nothing to stem the fever running rampant through her body.

“So, how did you become friends of the Feline Breeds? The last reports I heard, Coyotes were the most feared Breed.”

“Not the most feared, the most hated.” He shrugged. “Somehow, Simon must have figured out what I was. My best guess is he got a glimpse of that birthmark low on my back. It’s a genetic marker of some sort. He was friends with Sinclair, and when he learned the significance of it, he and Sinclair dragged me out of my life of disuse and into this. I’ll have to thank him for that. Again.”

There was a wry amusement in his gaze. He had a way of making her want to laugh, even when she wanted to hit him with something.

“Kiowa.” She licked her dry lips nervously, shaking in the grip of a need so powerful, she knew she was lost to it as he watched her closely. “Please.”

He sat his glass then hers on the coffee table, before he moved behind her, his body heat surrounding her.

“Please what, Manda?” he whispered at her ear, his breath wafting over the wound at her neck. “What do you need?”

“You.” Stark, blinding, she didn’t bother to lie or to deny it to herself any longer. “I need you.”

Not conversation, not explanations. His kiss, his touch, the blinding release she knew she was going to find no place but in his arms.

Chapter Sixteen

Before she could do more than gasp, Kiowa lifted her in his arms, his lips coming down on hers, his tongue pushing demandingly into her mouth as he carried her to the bedroom.

She wasn’t certain how he got the gown off, and she didn’t really care. All she cared about was the touch of him, the heat of his body, and the need coursing through her blood.

His lips were on hers, his tongue sharing the intriguing, addictive taste of honey and spice, as he laid her on the bed and came down over her. He was as naked as she. She promised herself that next time, she would figure out how he managed to undress both of them so quickly.

“Don’t rush this,” he growled as she rubbed against him, stroking her nipples across his chest and gasping at the pleasure of it.

“Me?” she groaned in response. “I’m not the one who has some kind of freaky aphrodisiac pouring out of me. That’s your fault.”

He grunted at that, a distinctly male sound of frustration that had a smile tugging at her lips. But his eyes crinkled with hidden laughter as he levered himself up to stare down at her, the black centers, despite their heat, soft with tenderness.

“I watched you a week before the kidnapping attempt,” he whispered as his hand cupped her cheek. “I followed you to school every morning, I followed you home every evening. If you went out, I was on your ass until you arrived at your destination and back on it until you got home. For a week, I listened to you laugh with your neighbors and coo over their children. And each time I saw you, the need for you grew inside me. No aphrodisiac. Not mating complications. Just a man slowly falling in love with a woman he had no right to.”

Her hands tightened on his shoulders as she stared back at him in shock.

“Last night, watching you give those treats out to the kids that came to your door, I was so hard I was about to bust my jeans. I could see so much life in you, so much wonder and joy, that I wanted to snatch you away myself and relish every drop of it. Mating you is no hardship for me, Amanda. But I would have never done this to you, had I known what that kiss would do.”

And there was the man. No anger, no regret, simply stating no more than the truth as he saw it. It shouldn’t make her heart ache. It shouldn’t make her wish for things she knew couldn’t be real.

She swallowed the lump that came to her throat and pushed back the tears that would have filled her eyes as her hand moved from his shoulder, her fingers smoothing over his rough velvet lips.

“I’m supposed to be resisting you,” she whispered huskily. “You aren’t supposed to be the answer to all my sexual fantasies and make my heart ache at the same time, Kiowa.”

His brow arched slowly. “The answer to
all
your sexual fantasies?” he asked, the forced playfulness in his voice rending her soul.

He was so strong. Too strong. There were no regrets for who or what he was, no apologies or condemnations for the past. And she couldn’t love him, she told herself. She wanted to be a teacher, she wanted her freedom, her independence, didn’t she?

“All my sexual fantasies,” she finally answered, her voice tight with unshed tears as her body responded to the touch of his.

Her hand slid into his hair, her fingertips luxuriating in the cool black silk as his head lowered to hers once again. His tongue painted her lips with a whisper stroke, causing a broken sigh of hunger to escape them.

His hands threaded through her hair as he seemed to relish the taste of her lips and nothing more. He licked them, sipped at them, moaned a deep little growl that came from the depths of his chest and vibrated against her lips.

She watched him, unable to close her eyes or to miss the hungry intent in his expression. This was what she had dreamed of during all those hot nights that arousal stormed her body and wicked wishes pushed at her imagination. Just this.

“Spread your legs for me,” he whispered then. “I want to watch your eyes while I fuck you. See the blue darken, the flecks of green lighten. You have such pretty eyes, Amanda.”

Her breath hitched in her throat. She spread her thighs slowly, opening herself to him as he moved between them. She could feel his cock, hard and heavy as it lay against the mound of her pussy now, pressing against her clit.

She rolled her hips against him, her breath catching as the steel-hard heat of his erection caressed the sensitive bundle nerves peeking from the folds of her cunt.

“Temptress,” he growled, licking her lips again, his eyes locked on hers as he shifted against her, his cock dragging along her sensitive pussy until the thick head was poised at the entrance.

“Are you going to punish me?” She gave him a look of drowsy sensuality, a smile curving her lips as her neck arched, pleasure streaking through her in hard, rapid bolts of heat as he began to push into her.

“Hmm. Punish both of us maybe.” He was gritting his teeth now, and Amanda could see the struggle for control that filled his expression.

Had it really been less than twenty-four hours since he had first touched her? In that moment, she realized she knew things about Kiowa that she didn’t know about her closest acquaintances.

Then he was sliding into her, filling her with a heavy heat and hard strength that stole her thoughts and her mind. She could feel him, stretching her, her muscles protesting in the wake of each hard surge of pre-come that filled her, then eased her. Tingling, curling lashes of sensation assaulted her body as he lay over her, his cock moving slow and inside her, taking her with a gentleness and depth of emotion she didn’t want to feel.

She shouldn’t feel any emotion. She should feel nothing but the hot grind of their bodies together, his erection sating the unnatural hunger in her body. But she felt more, far deeper than just the depths of her pussy.

With her gaze still locked with his, there was no hiding the pleasure lashing at them both. His expression was feral in its intensity, his eyes so black she felt lost in his gaze. Her body was sensitive, sensitized to him, each rasp of his chest over her hard nipples, his pelvis on her straining clit rocked her to new heights. Each stroke stretched her, filled her, caressed hidden nerves and had her breath catching at the diabolical depth of pleasure building within her.

She rocked beneath him, her legs rising to encase his hips as his lips lowered to hers again. And then her eyes closed. There was no control, no strength to hold them open as he kissed her with a melting passion that left her weak.

With his lips moving on hers, his hips straining against her, driving his cock in harder, faster, sending the bolts of sensation tearing harder through her body, Amanda was lost.

Her back arched as everything inside her exploded. Her body tensed, her pussy tightened around his surging erection until she felt that change, the swelling within her that signaled his own release. It lit a fuse to her already exploding senses and sent her reeling again as she felt his semen jetting inside her.

Long minutes later, she gathered the strength to unlock her legs from his waist and release the hold she had taken on her shoulders. Exhaustion rode her now, as hard as lust had ridden her minutes before.

Her eyes fluttered opened, her vision sleep-blurred as she stared into his dark eyes, sighing in blissful, sated pleasure.

“Sleep, baby,” he whispered, resting his head against hers, a restrained shudder working through his body as another pulse of seed filled her milking cunt. “I’ll take care of you while you sleep.”

Her eyes fluttered closed. She knew that, she thought. He didn’t have to say the words. Above all things, she did know Kiowa would take care of her.

Kiowa rarely dreamed. He considered it a blessing. After some of the nightmares of his childhood, he had no desire to visit that inner realm and tempt the angers of the past. But when he drifted into sleep beside Amanda, they were there. Like demons raising their dark, horrifying heads.

The woman who bore you is dead,” his grandfather informed him. She was killed in a car crash.”

Kiowa raised his head from the book he had been devouring. Five. Pitifully thin and small, little else had mattered to him but the words he needed to learn. And learn them he was. He didn’t know the woman who bore him, as his grandfather called her. He couldn’t even remember her face, though he knew there had been a time that he had been with her.

Kiowa nodded solemnly, staring up at the broad frame of the older man, wishing he could see something other than the twisted expression of distaste that was on his face.

“You don’t even care do you?” the old man had growled.

“I don’t know her,” he had whispered then.

“That’s an animal’s response,” his grandfather had lashed out. “One without a soul.”

The dream distorted, moved in time. Kiowa was eleven, living alone in the shack high in the mountain, waiting eagerly each week for his grandfather’s visit. He knew he had to stay hidden, knew that the people who had forced his birth on the mother he never knew, were searching for him.

The television was his constant companion and with it, he had learned to read over the years, to decipher the words and to make sense of how to use them. Books sat in stacks around the small living room. A blanket was tucked in the couch. He didn’t sleep in the bed. In the dark, too many thoughts raced across his mind and too many sounds in the mountains outside fueled his fear.

But that television was his lifeline. On it he saw his dreams. A family. A mother, a father, children who were loved and protected, and in those dreams he could laugh and be free, fly a kite, ride a bike. He didn’t have to fear detection.

“Here’s some more books.” The box was dumped at his feet as his grandfather stared down at him emotionlessly.

The other man had gone from disgust to chilly dislike over the years. “I’ll put the food on the porch. You’re big enough to put it away yourself.”

Eleven years old. He had celebrated his birthday alone, clumsily wrapped several pinecones he had found and books he had read in old newspaper and pretended they were a mother’s gifts.

“Thank you, Sir.” He had stopped calling him grandfather years before. Grandfathers loved their grandkids. They spoiled them, showed them the world, took them to amusement parks. They didn’t lock them away on a mountain and leave them to suffer the silence and the cold alone.

“Have you found your soul yet?” the old man snapped then.

Kiowa had stared up at him quietly, years of loneliness and grief locked inside him.

“No, Sir. No soul this week.” He had moved slowly past him then and collected the boxes of dry goods and canned foods that he survived on.

Winter was coming on, he could feel it in the air. He wondered if his grandfather would forget to bring him a coat again this year.

Time shifted again. Kiowa had been fourteen the night the news had reported a car crash on the interstate. Joseph Mulligan had been involved in a head-on collision with a semi-truck and killed instantly. He was survived by no remaining family members, the newsman reported. And for the first time in years Kiowa had shed a single tear.

The next day, he packed his meager belongings in a pillowcase and set off down the mountain. Winter was coming again, and the cold was a bitter enemy when you had no dried foods, no warm clothes.

He had read enough and watched enough that he understood certain things where the world was concerned. He knew he had to be careful, that his very creation was a law against nature, the sharp canines that he kept filed down at the side of his mouth were proof of that. He knew there were ways to survive, he just had to be tough enough. Strong enough.