Mercury's War (24 page)

    Ria resisted the urge to rub her hands over her arms as she stepped from the bathroom, once again in her gown, weariness dragging at her as she caught a glimpse of his face.

    Primal and wild just didn’t do his expression justice. It was suffused with sensual lust, his eyes glowing with it, the flesh stretched taut over the hard planes and angles of his face.

    The clean white silk gown she wore might as well not have been on her body. The way he was looking at her stripped it from her, revealed the hardened tips of her breasts and the dew she knew was accumulating on the curls between her thighs.

    “Has Vanderale been your lover?” he asked her, his voice rough, grating with animalistic fervor.

    Ria swallowed tightly. “Not in this lifetime. I grew up watching that man play more games than a chess master.”

    She had no intentions of allowing him to play games with her heart or her emotions. And Dane wasn’t above it. He was a good man, but his focus was set on the protection of his parents and the Breeds rapidly making their mark in society. He would do whatever it took to protect both. And if that meant breaking her heart, he would apologize, he would regret it, but he would do it over and over again.

    “And when you leave here?” He stripped his T-shirt off his body, before sitting down in the chair in the corner and unlacing his boots efficiently. “Will you take him to your bed after being with me?”

    When she left here. She turned her back on him, straightening the laptop and files she had placed on the small table by the bed, trying not to let herself feel hurt at his easy acceptance that she would leave him. That things wouldn’t last between them.

    She finally shrugged and said, “I have no intentions of going to bed with Dane.”

    Could she allow any man in her bed now that she had been with Mercury? The thought of it sent a sharp, painful spike of denial racing through her mind.

    She straightened and turned back to him, breathing in roughly at the sight of him naked, aroused. Damn, were all Breeds this sexual?

    He moved to her, muscles rippling beneath the dark bronze flesh, the light in the room picking up the shimmer of that fine, silken pelt that covered them.

    She loved the feel of those tiny hairs against her flesh, stroking over her, caressing her.

    “Are you ready for me to leave already?” she whispered, trying to hold back the hurt as she couldn’t hold back the question.

    She didn’t want to leave him. She never wanted to be without him.

    “Can I kidnap you?” he asked her as his hands stroked over her shoulders, her fingers curling against his chest. “When this is over, I want to tie you to my bed and make certain Dane Vanderale can never bribe you away from my side.”

    She stared up at him, feeling her heart melt. His eyes softened, filled with hunger and desire, and truth.

    “You don’t want me to leave?”

    “I want you in my bed, by my side, for as long as I can keep you, Ria.” His hand cupped her cheek. “But after what you saw tonight, can you stand to be there?”

    Her lips parted.

    “You were crying for him,” he growled down at her. “Tears were falling from your eyes and you knelt over him, naked, your hair stroking him.”

    Jealousy throbbed in his voice. Complete primal male Breed jealousy. They were completely territorial over their women. Ria knew that, had seen it with Leo and Elizabeth several times over the years.

    Ria felt herself tremble at the memory.

    “I thought he was dead.” A frown snapped between her brows as she moved back from him. “He may not be my lover but he is my friend.”

    “A friend that slipped into your bedroom while you lay naked in my arms. A friend that knew I lay there with you,” he pointed out. “The same friend who informed me that when this was over he would be waiting for you when you returned home.”

    Surprise had her turning back to him, watching him closely. He was completely comfortable being aroused and nude.

    “Dane is as adept at his little games as Jonas is.” She shrugged as she moved to straighten the bed. “But I’ll not defend myself over something that hasn’t happened or whether or not it will happen if you’re no longer a part of my life.”

    “I will always be a part of your life.”

    The sound of his voice, the large body suddenly behind her, the erection pressing between her thighs, rubbing against the slick, heated cleft there had the breath catching in his throat.

    Just as he had over the desk in the office, he bent her over the bed now, his palms flat against the mattress, his larger, harder body holding her in place as her head snapped up in surprise.

    “Will you, Mercury?” she asked him, uncertainty filling her voice. “Breeds mate. They mate their other half.”

    He tensed against her, a violent tension; it poured out of him and whipped in the air, tightening around her chest with spiked bonds that she thought would break her heart.

    “I could not want another woman the way I want you.” He nipped her neck. “Mating heat be damned. There are enough anomalies in it that it can get fucked as far as I’m concerned.”

    Tears filled her eyes as he turned her, stretched her out beneath him and held her trapped to the bed despite her struggles.

    “Let me go, Mercury.” She shook her head, pressing her hands against his chest as she fought to be free.

    She wasn’t going to let him see her tears. She wasn’t going to cry about something she had no hope of fighting, no way of changing. She had learned better than that years ago.

    “I can’t let you go.”

    His voice, the guttural roughness of it, the spike of need and emotion that filled her, had her fighting hope. And she had never been good at fighting hope.

    “Mercury.” Her breathing hitched, the emotion nearly strangling her now. “You’ll mate, someone, sometime.”

    “That time is past,” he ground out.

    “And she
was
your mate,” she flashed back at him, the anger at that tearing through her. “You loved her so desperately you nearly went insane when you lost her. I’ll always be second.”

    “You’ll always be first,” he snarled in her face, silencing her, the blue highlights in his eyes increasing, glowing, as his voice thickened with his hunger. “Always, Ria. Always first.”

    He pushed his hips between her thighs, spread her thighs, and before she could do more than gasp, he tore her gown down the center with strong, powerful hands.

    “Tell me you don’t want me,” he demanded, the thick head of his cock pressing against dampened folds between her thighs. “Tell me now, Ria, that you could want another man as desperately as you need me right now.”

    She couldn’t possibly desire anything in life as much as she desired Mercury. She couldn’t ache, need or dream of anything as much as she did a life in his arms.

    As she stared into his eyes earlier, while the feral rage consumed him and he fought to shield her nakedness from the others, she had known that nothing mattered but Mercury.

    “I wasn’t crying for Dane,” she admitted. “I was crying because I was afraid.”

    He paused. “Of me?”

    The first tear slipped free. “That they would try to steal you again. That they would see your protectiveness as the feral displacement. That I would lose you, Mercury. And I couldn’t bear losing you.”

    Silence stretched between them, his hard body covering hers, his cock throbbing at the entrance to her body.

    His hips shifted, parting her folds further, pushing inside her, slowly, until her flesh surrounded the thick, throbbing crown.

    “I need you more than I need freedom.” He lowered his head and whispered the words at her ear.

    And more tears fell. Because she knew the Breeds’ need for freedom, and she suspected his need for it was fiercer, stronger than any others’.

    “You are my mate, Ria,” he growled at her ear. “In my soul. You are my mate.”

    He moved inside her, burying himself deeper into the desperately clenching flesh awaiting him. She surrounded him, arched to him and let a cry fall from her lips.

    “This is freedom.” His growl was tight, thick with hunger. “Right here, buried inside you, racing through pleasure with you. This is my freedom.”

    Ria wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held on to him. Once he was deep inside her, she wanted nothing more than to feel him moving, thrusting.

    He stilled instead, buried full-length, stretching her, burning her.

    “Look at me, my sweet Ria.” His lips brushed over hers. “Look at me, baby. See how much I need you. How much I want you.”

    She opened her eyes, her gaze blurring with the tears that ran from the corners of her eyes.

    “No tears.” He kissed them away. “Just you and me, Ria. Would you deny us both this? Would you walk away and return to the cold, when I could be right beside you, warming you?”

    She couldn’t. She could never return to the cold and she knew it. Not willingly. Not without hurting, without feeling the parts of her that Mercury owned now crying out in agony.

    “You’ll miss your mate,” she whispered.

    “How can I miss my mate?” He kissed the corner of her lips, licked at the lower curve. “She’s right here, in my arms. I won’t miss you, Ria, because I won’t let you go.”

    He kissed her. His lips covered hers, his tongue slid inside and she tasted something wild, untamed, in his hunger. A subtle flavor that was there and gone just as quickly.

    Her arms wrapped around his neck as she held on to him, feeling him move, feeling the heavy width of his erection stroking her slow and easy.

    “There, baby,” he groaned, his lips moving to her neck. “Hold me, nice and hot, just like that.”

    Milking him. She could feel her vagina milking his flesh, contracting around him, stroking him and being stroked as she flew in his arms.

    The need built, consuming her, creating a flame unlike any sensation she had yet experienced with him. She writhed and twisted beneath him as his hips slammed against hers, burying his cock inside her as they groaned, moaned, cried out with each forward motion.

    There was a tightening in her womb, stronger, deeper than before. A need for his taste that had her begging for his kiss, searching for his lips.

    His tongue speared past them as his cock plunged inside her. They were racing with the pleasure, flames whipping through her, burning her as his tongue pumped into her mouth.

    Closing her lips on it, she suckled as he pulled back, then reached in again. Instinct drove her to hold on to him, to lock him so deep inside her that there was never a risk of losing him.

    “Hold me,” she cried out, even as he did just that. Wrapping his arms around her, holding her close and taking her, pushing her, throwing her over the edge of madness as orgasm tore through her.

    She exploded, fragmenting and melting around him as she arched and felt her womb contracting, her clit releasing the agony of need inside it as her sex clenched and pulsed.

    His release drenched her, pumped into her with hard, heated blasts, and when his canines scraped her shoulder, she swore she came again.

    She was flying with him. He was a part of her, spilling himself inside her, marking her with his teeth, his touch and his hunger. She would never be free of him. Yet she knew, as he had said earlier, that freedom existed in this. Just in being with him.

    It was long moments before he lifted her to her pillows, dragged the sheet over them and turned off the lights. He didn’t give her a chance to get cold, because his large, warm body wrapped around her.

    “I don’t know if I could keep from killing another man who touched you. Even Dane,” he told her as he kissed the bite mark on her shoulder gently.

    He always did that. Locked his teeth in her flesh as he growled his release, and that minute pain always sent fire streaking through her body and her orgasm tearing through her system.

    Ria stared into the darkness then, feeling him inside her where he shouldn’t have been able to invade her. He had broken down the shields surrounding her heart and stolen it more completely than any other ever had.

    “I hate losing when I love,” she whispered into the darkness.

    Each time she did, she remembered being a child, only six, rocking herself in her mother’s bed when night came and her mother hadn’t returned to their small apartment.

    She remembered being hungry and cold and being too frightened of the darkness to venture from the bed. She remembered crying for her mother, and knowing she wasn’t coming back to her.

    That same pain filled her each time she had allowed herself to feel security, or to feel love. Because each time she had done so, it had been taken from her. And she had never cared for anyone as she did Mercury.

    “I won’t leave you, Ria.” The rumble of certainty in his voice had her relaxing in his arms. “I promise you. I’ll keep you warm.”

    His mate was dead, she reminded herself. Gone forever. And Breeds only mated once. It wasn’t as though someone could walk in and take him away from her.

    He could belong to her. She could let herself belong.

    She let the fear and anxiety seep from her until sleep stole over her. If she dreamed she heard her Breed purr behind her as she slept, then she marked it down to her own need to know, to belong to him as fully as she felt she was meant to.

    If she felt his lips touch hers, and tasted something so wild and primitive that it drew a moan from her lips, filled her mouth, then she let herself sink deeper into the dream. Because she knew nothing could be this easy. Something or someone would take him from her. After all, now that she was playing with the ultimate fire, there was no way not to get burned.

    
The animal waited until the man slept. Only when he slept was it safe to emerge. The man was watching, on guard, strengthening his control against the animal’s freedom.

    
But here in sleep, with his defenses lowered for the woman, the animal found that smallest hint of freedom.