Lawe felt himself still. With his gaze locked with Diane’s, he had a feeling the battle of wills beginning was one that could end up destroying them both.
As she suggested, he should simply leave with Jonas. Staying here, accepting that challenge was the worse decision he could make, but that was exactly what he was doing.
“After last night, you really think it’s going to be that easy?” he asked with silky smoothness.
Diane’s gaze flickered with a glimmer of excitement and anticipation that he could feel her attempting to fight.
Attempting.
Lawe felt his own body preparing, his c**k hardening, lengthening, the glands beneath his tongue swelling and the faintest hint of the unusual taste of spiced, candied pears.
He hadn’t expected that.
He’d heard the hormone tasted of cinnamon, spring rain, even summer heat. But he’d never heard of candied pears.
“I don’t want this.” The surprising statement had him fighting every instinct he possessed to ignore her.
Jonas had suggested he just mate her and get it over with. Mating her hadn’t been his preferred course of action until he’d seen those bullets slamming into the cement wall above her head.
Until he’d almost seen her die before his eyes.
His mate.
She was his, and other than those stolen moments the night before he hadn’t touched her. Even then, he hadn’t kissed her. He had felt her sweet heat, but he hadn’t tasted it. He was dying for it. He wanted to lick the heated flesh of her pu**y, taste the slow glide of her juices as they met his tongue.
He wanted her with every cell of his body, with every breath he could drag into his lungs.
“Don’t look at me like that, Lawe.” There was an edge of breathlessness in her voice that had sweat popping out on his forehead and along his back as he fought the need to kiss her. To share the erotic taste filling his senses.
The head of his dick throbbed imperatively and the need that had it stiff and aching wasn’t something that was going to go away any time soon.
That order, though, that female arrogance as she demanded he deny himself even the pleasure of looking, had that dominant animal inside him rearing its head in furious denial.
“I can look at you however I want,” he growled, moving closer to her, aware that she wasn’t backing down; she wasn’t edging away from him.
A woman as wary as Diane should have been running to protect her virtue, because his intention was to steal every ounce of it.
And once he had her virtue, he would have her submission. His hands actually ached to grip the curves of her ass, spread them apart, show her an erotic hunger that would lead to the full, feminine acknowledgment that he was her mate, her protector.
Diane drew in a slow, deep breath and he could almost hear the thunder of her heart. He could definitely see it in the fierce throb of blood in the vein at her neck.
“You think you can intimidate me?” she asked.
“I’m not trying to intimidate you.” Intimidation had nothing to do with what he had in mind. Hell no. He wanted to f**k her until they both passed out in exhaustion, but he had no intention of intimidating her.
Unless he had no other choice.
And only after he sated the hunger tearing at his senses.
She stared up at him now, the nervousness that flowed through her senses based more in her need for him, a need she was fighting desperately to deny. And he could feel the fight, the desperation, and though he could understand why she fought it, even approved the fight, he refused to allow her to be any less helpless than he.
“Fighting it doesn’t work,” he murmured as he moved around her, his head lowering, his lips at her ear. “It only makes the body hotter, the need more intense. It only makes you hungrier, doesn’t it, Diane, especially after having some small, tempting taste of it.”
Her breathing accelerated.
He could smell her heat then, burning hotter and wilder than ever before. It was blooming inside her, overtaking her control and reaching out to him as he stopped behind her and allowed his hands to settle at her hips, his fingers curling over the fragile bones lightly.
“Right here,” he breathed over the fiercely throbbing vein in her neck. “I could take the gentlest of bites and it would begin. It would burn through both of us, making the hunger impossible to deny, impossible to walk away from.”
Her hands curled over the top of the chair in front of her then. A hard, desperate grip as he felt her fighting to hold on to the last of her control. The same as he was fighting to hold on to his.
“I won’t wait much longer,” he warned her, knowing he couldn’t deny that instinctive, desperate edge of need beginning to tear at his senses.
“And that’s supposed to make me step into line?” The denial, the defiance, was still there.
“I could only hope.” He couldn’t resist brushing his lips along her neck.
Just his lips.
He didn’t lick them first. He didn’t place a layer of the hormone between his lips and her flesh.
And the animal inside paced in fury because he hadn’t.
She jumped against him, suddenly moving to tear away from him, to escape his grip as she whirled around to face him.
“No.”
No.
His lips quirked. No was no. It was intrinsic, whether it was a game or not. It had the same meaning.
He would heed it. This time.
“We have a meeting with Jonas, Callan and Leo tomorrow,” he told her instead. “You’ll be there to give your report.”