Serengeti Heat (3 page)

He sucked and licked at one breast, the wet warmth and sandpaper roughness of his tongue wringing short piercing cries from her lips and spasmodic thrusts of her hips against his. He turned his attention to her other breast, to begin the process all over again. Her cries became his name and something in the tone of her voice cranked up the dial on his need for her. His control became a memory.

Landon growled, his claws tearing at her jeans. He needed her naked.
Now
. But though the denim shredded, it did not melt away and the tattered ribbons of her clothing still bound her. She made an alarmed noise in her throat and Landon’s head snapped up to meet her eyes. He was too desperate to be ashamed of his frenzy, but he managed to grunt, “Did I hurt you?”

Ava blinked at him, her clear gray eyes fogged over with want. “No…yes…” She shook her head as if trying to clear it and reached out a hand to him, almost as if she would stroke his face, but instead she ran a fingernail across his nipple. “You startled me.”

Landon blinked at her uncomprehendingly. There was not enough blood flowing to his brain to work out what she wanted him to do. “Stop?”

She laughed and his cock jumped like a puppet on a string. “No.
More
.”

Thank you, God
. Crying defeat for the moment on the wreck he’d made of her jeans, Landon attacked the fastenings on his own. He struggled with them, his hands refusing to stay in full-human form long enough to work the button fly.

Ava brushed his hands away. “Let me.” The backs of her fingers rubbing against his shaft as she slowly, carefully worked the buttons was a new kind of torture in itself. Landon braced his hands on the seat and closed his eyes, determined to let her work and not fall on her like a ravening beast until she had freed his cock.
Then
he could be an animal. He just had to hang onto humanity for a few more seconds.

She shoved his jeans and underwear down over his hips. As soon as it was free, his cock sprang up, pointing due north like a fucking compass. Landon hissed as Ava wrapped her small soft hand around it.

Lights exploded in his brain. Landon wondered idly if he was having a seizure as Ava’s hand worked slowly down to the base of his shaft, giving him a little squeeze and then a slow, tugging pull up his shaft to the head. He was going to die. That much was clear. But what a way to go.

He let her have two more torturous strokes before closing his hand around her wrist and squeezing gently. “Enough.” His voice didn’t sound human, which was fine by him. He didn’t feel particularly human.

She released his cock, but he didn’t release her wrist. He pulled her hand away from him, pinning it against the seat near her head. He lowered himself to take her mouth again as his free hand probed between the shredded remains of her jeans, seeking the source of the musky moisture between her thighs. He brushed one spot and her entire body jolted.
Bingo
.

Landon eased her—amazingly still intact—panties aside and pushed one finger inside her slick heat. Her hips pushed up against his hand and moisture swamped his finger. He worked his mouth against hers as he worked a second finger inside her, stretching her. She was so tight. Her pussy was going to feel like a goddamn vise on his cock.

Landon released her mouth as he removed his fingers, pressing his face against her neck to breathe in the intoxicating scent of her as he positioned himself between her legs.

“What’s that sound?” Her voice was breathless.

Landon stiffened, trying to hear beyond the blood rushing in his ears. It took him a moment to identify the tinny ring-tone rendition of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, his sister’s idea of a great joke. “Shit. It’s Zoe. She wouldn’t call unless it’s an emergency.”

She’d better not have. He was about fifteen seconds away from the fucking promised land. If someone wasn’t dying, someone was about to be.

He found his cell phone in the pocket of his jeans, tangled near his knees. “What?”

“Ava’s missing!”

Landon blinked, startled by the depth of panic in Zoe’s voice. He wasn’t aware his sister had formed any strong attachments since their arrival in the pride three months ago, but her concern for Ava was unfeigned.

“I’ve got her.” At least, he’d been
about
to have her, a few seconds before Zoe had decided she needed rescuing. “I’m bringing her back to the ranch now.”

“Oh thank God,” Zoe whispered. “I’ll tell her brothers we can call off the search. Where was she? Is she okay?”

The mention of Ava’s brothers searching—Jesus, they wouldn’t search the ranch road, would they?—not to mention his sister’s barrage of questions, had the effect of a bucket of cold water. Landon shifted off Ava, ignoring the small sound of protest she made, and retreated back to his own seat. He braced himself against the door, as far away from her as he could get, and tried to tug up his jeans one-handed without much success.

“We’ll be back at the ranch in—” he glanced around, looking for a landmark through the darkness outside the jeep, “—five minutes. You can ask her all the questions you want, then.”

Ava groaned from the passenger seat, pulling herself into a more traditional seated position, rather than her I’m-about-to-have-my-brains-fucked-out-on-a-bucket-seat sprawl.

“But she’s okay?” Zoe pressed.

Landon looked at Ava out of the corner of his eye. She was a sight. Rumpled, sweaty, trying to get her top back into place over her breasts with her jeans in useless tatters from her upper-thighs to her waist. She looked gorgeous. Fan-fucking-tastic. “She’s fine. See you in five.”

He disconnected before Zoe could lob another question at him, mentally crossing his fingers that his ornery sister didn’t keep calling him back every five seconds until they arrived at the ranch. Although, given his current control—or lack thereof—that might not be a bad idea.

Dropping the phone, he yanked his jeans back up over his hips and tried to shove his uncooperative cock back inside. He winced as each button closed, but managed to keep his hands from half-morphing into claws long enough to get his jeans fastened. Thank God. If Ava laid one finger on his fly, he was a goner.

Shit, if her brothers ever found out he’d come about five seconds away from fucking their baby sister in the front seat of a jeep, he’d be lucky to see his next birthday.

Landon started the jeep and punched the gas pedal. The vehicle jumped forward obediently, punishing them with a rough ride the last three miles to the ranch.

They were closer to the main compound than Landon had thought—though, to be honest, he hadn’t been doing much thinking. Anyone out for a run tonight could have seen them, groping in the car like teenagers.

How had he let things get so far out of control? He’d never even noticed Ava Minor before tonight, but the second she’d walked into the bar, he’d wanted her. The scent of her, the way she pushed her ass back at him as she stood at the bar, the reckless challenge in her voice as she argued with him in the jeep, all of it seemed calculated to drive him wild.

The truth smacked him between the eyes, making him feel like a prize idiot for not realizing earlier. He should have realized it as soon as she walked into the bar, but his hormones had short-circuited his brain. It was so damn obvious.

Ava was in heat.

She needed to say something. They couldn’t have been driving for more than a few seconds, but the oppressive silence coming from the driver’s seat made it feel like a millennia. He wouldn’t even look at her.

“I take it they discovered my absence,” Ava said, her tone a pathetic attempt at lightness.

Landon sounded about as light as a midnight hunt on the Serengeti. “Didn’t you even leave a fucking note so your brothers wouldn’t panic?”

Ava snorted. “Saying what exactly? ‘Gone to get some nookie. Back by noon.’ That’d go over real well.”

“Better than not saying anything at all,” he snapped. “They’re searching the ranch for you, Ava.”

Ava looked out the window, realizing they were on ranch land and had been for a while. In fact, they’d been on ranch land when they’d… “Oh.”

“Yeah.
Oh
.”

Ava tipped her chin defiantly. She wasn’t going to cower. She didn’t have anything to be ashamed of, dammit. “So what? I deserve to get out just as much as the next girl.”

“
Ava
.” Her name sound like a curse on his lips. “There are reasons why we do things the way we do,” he said as if explaining the facts of life to a simpleton and hanging onto this patience by the thinnest of threads.

“Yeah, well, maybe your reasons are stupid.” Keeping a healthy, attractive young woman with the libido of a cat cooped up on a secluded ranch with a bunch of men she couldn’t have was downright cruel and unusual. Ava had seen Lifetime movies about religious cults that did the same and things always ended badly for the misogynistic pigs running the show.

“Valuing human life is stupid, now?”

They hit a particularly nasty bump and Landon was forced to slow to a reasonable speed.

Ava frowned. “What does human life have to with a—”

“
Ava
,” Landon interrupted, her name sharp this time. “You’re in heat.”

“No, I’m no…” Her denial was automatic, but her voice trailed off as she mentally did the math. “Shit.”

The shape-shifters who traded shapes between human and lion form didn’t possess the exact physiological traits of either. A shifter lioness would go into heat only three times a year, lasting anywhere from a few hours to several days. And like their feline cousins, they wanted sex almost constantly during that period. Even the birth control shots she received to suppress ovulation couldn’t combat the hormonal demands her body made during her heat.

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.” Ava folded her arms across her still-sensitive breasts, knowing she looked like a petulant child, but feeling like one giant exposed nerve.

“You don’t s—” Landon cut himself off, his hands fisting on the steering wheel. He bit out his next words with careful precision. “Have you ever had sex while you were in heat?”

A blush rose up her already warm face until she felt like her cheeks were on fire. “No.” She left her answer at that. He didn’t need to know that her entire sexual history consisted of a few bumbling encounters in dorm rooms the one semester of college when her family had eased up on the reins enough to allow her to live on campus.

She’d been embarrassingly celibate ever since she’d moved back to the ranch. As if it wasn’t bad enough having four ridiculously over-protective older brothers lurking around every corner, the lionesses who weren’t old enough or genetically desirable enough to mate were cloistered while they were in heat to avoid unwanted pregnancies. So her opportunities for sex in heat were severely limited.

“When a shifter is in heat, everything is amplified,” Landon explained, his tone carefully blank. “Many females, particularly the younger, less experienced ones, will shift uncontrollably when they climax.
That
is why we have rules against seducing humans during heat. It isn’t safe to be with someone who can’t defend himself, or understand what the fuck just happened when he finds himself in bed with a several-hundred-pound lioness.”

Ava’s blush was getting downright uncomfortable. “I’m sorry,” she muttered in the direction of her lap. “I didn’t realize.” But then her remorse faded and she frowned at the Roman gladiator driving the jeep. “It still doesn’t seem fair. You guys get to go around screwing anything that moves and we have to be virgin priestesses.”

“I’m not telling you not to get fucked,” Landon snapped. “I’m telling you not to fuck a human.”

Ava bit her lip on the complaint that was poised to jump out of her mouth and mortify her—that the only lion she had ever wanted was
him
. She was afraid he already knew. The way she had reacted to him, wordlessly begging him to take her, had made her feelings for him pathetically clear.

She had wanted him since the second she saw him walking through the compound the first day he arrived, wary and worn from his travels. Even before he was Alpha. She had felt desire tightening her body when he was just another reckless nomad, a lion without a pride. She’d had more of a shot with him then. The second he became Alpha was the instant he rose out of her reach.

To a nomad, any lioness was a prize, even a small, abnormal one. But the Alpha? He would mate with the strongest and fastest among them, and Ava would never even come close.

So why had he leapt on her in the jeep? Was it possible he could really want her? Or was the truth much more awful than that? Could he have somehow learned of her infatuation? Was he taunting her? Playing some horrible game? Was that why he had stopped just short of taking her?

Ava glanced over, her eyes locking hungrily on the impressive bulge beneath his fly. No, he wanted her all right. There was no doubt about that.

Landon looked over at her—just in time to see her staring at his crotch. Ava’s blush reached terminal levels as he shifted uncomfortably in the seat. “That’s another reason unsuitable females are sequestered when in heat.”

Ava flinched back from the words like he’d slapped her.
Unsuitable?

As they pulled into the compound, he went on relentlessly. “Any male coming into contact with you, looking and smelling and acting the way you did tonight would have lost control and climbed all over you. That’s why there are
rules
, Ava.”

She averted her face as he slowed the jeep, rolling slowly between the low-lying bungalows that made up the ranch compound where the pride lived. She was
not
going to cry in front of him. Even if he was telling her that the electric, soul-searing almost-tryst they had shared not ten minutes ago was nothing more than a forced chemical reaction.

Ava felt an ominous tightness behind her eyes and swallowed thickly, fighting to keep it together. So what if he didn’t want her? So what if he was saying he never would have touched her if not for the hormones messing with his impulses? He was just the only lion she had ever wanted. What was so special about that?