“Don’t tell me no, mate,” he retorted heatedly. “I smell your need, and even more, I smell the fact that you know I’m right. You’ll not run from this or from me.”
“I’ll run whenever or however I want to.” She pushed her fingers through her hair and backed out of the kitchen. “Leave me alone, Saban. Just leave me the hell alone.”
She turned and stalked to the steps. She had to make sense of this; she had to find a way to balance the things she was learning about him.
He couldn’t just attack people. This mating heat stuff was bad enough. How would either of them survive it without some control? Without one of them thinking sensibly, and it was real damned clear that the one thinking clearly wasn’t going to be him.
All she had to do was get away from him, just for a little while. Away from the sight of him, the remembered taste of him, the aching need for him.
She hit the stairs almost at a run, aware, so very aware that he was behind her, moving with lazy speed, gaining on her, his expression taut, hunger burning in his eyes. Her breath hitched in her throat; a ragged moan left her lips as she felt his hands grip her hips halfway up the steps, stopping her as his hands moved quickly to the front of her jeans and began working the snap and zipper loose.
“What are you doing?” she screeched, scrambling to capture his wrists, his hands, to stop the quick release of her clothes even as he jerked the material over her hips. “Dammit Saban…”
She went to her knees as a large hand pressed into her back, pushed her forward, and he came over
her, dominant, forceful, his lips covering the wound he had left on her shoulder the night before. Natalie froze as pleasure streaked, exploded, tore through her from that single caress. The area was so sensitive, so violently receptive to his lips, to his stroking tongue, that it stole her breath.
“This won’t solve anything,” she gasped as the head of his c**k pressed between her thighs, slid through the slick moisture there, and found the entrance it sought.
He didn’t move his lips; instead, he growled against the wound as his hips pressed forward, burying his erection inside her as Natalie felt needle points of ecstatic pleasure begin to attack every nerve ending he stroked.
“This doesn’t change it,” she panted, fighting the pleasure, fighting her inability to refuse it. “It doesn’t make it right.”
Her back arched as a mewling cry left her lips, and his c**k pressed to the hilt inside her, filling her, overtaking her.
“Tell me you’re mine.” He nipped at the wound, causing her head to jerk back against his shoulder, one hand to reach back for him, clamping on his hip as he held her to him.
“I won’t let you control me.”
“Tell me,” he snarled, licked the bite mark, sucked at it with a hungry growl.
“I won’t let you do this.” Her cry was weak, a pitiful, pathetic attempt to defy what she knew, even now, was the truth. A certainty as nothing else in her life had ever been. His hips flexed, causing his c**k to stroke her internally, to rasp against her inner flesh, the swollen, flared head caressing, enflaming tender, sensitive flesh with small thrusts. His lips grazed the wound at her neck once more, then his teeth raked over it, sending violent shudders to race down her back as her senses became overwhelmed, her common sense lost beneath the rush of pleasure.
“Tell me.” Insidious, flavored with dark sensuality, rough and primal, his voice stole through her mind, as his touch stole her reason.
“Yours.” Her cry was rewarded, her submission accepted, and the animal within him broke free. It was burning, pleasure-pain; each thrust was hard and heavy as control was lost for both of them. As though her admission of his conquest was all he needed to allow his own pleasure free rein. It was more pleasure than she could process; it was heated and liquid; it burned through flesh and bone and filled her soul where she hadn’t known she had been cold. Cold and lonely and searching for that something more, that reason to give her inner self to another. She didn’t have a reason, but that didn’t matter. She felt it melting, felt it flowing through her body, pouring from her cells, wrapping around him and drawing his essence into her. And breaking her heart. In the moment between agonizing pleasure and climax, Natalie admitted it to herself. It wasn’t Saban she was fighting; it was herself. Because she was losing herself in him, giving him parts of her soul that even Mike hadn’t known existed. Giving him parts of her that she hadn’t believed she could share.
And when the climax exploded through her, when it sang through her senses and quaked through her body, she knew she was lost.
Behind her, Saban jerked, snarled. The head of his c**k throbbed, the barb, that thumb-sized extension, became erect, pushing past the underside of his c**k head and stroking areas too sensitive for touch, already primed, already enflamed as his se**n spurted inside her. He had marked her. Taken her. He possessed her. And unlike Mike, Natalie had a feeling Saban truly could destroy her.
NINE
T here was a wariness between them, days later, that Natalie couldn’t figure out how to overcome. She didn’t know if she even wanted to overcome it at this point. The mating heat had her off balance; her emotions, her independence, and the fear Mike had instilled in her through their marriage of being controlled again all battled within her head and within her heart. A part of her wanted to reach out and take everything Saban seemed to be offering her, yet the other part held back, watched and waited. Nothing could be as easy as this. The mating heat, the sense of everything coming together when his body moved within hers.
The new school season was coming closer by the day. Classes were on a year-round basis, but the six-week break between the final semester and the beginning of new classes gave students and teachers a much-needed vacation before classes began. And it was during that time that the Breed Cabinet had given Natalie a chance to get used to the town and to review the files she had been given on the students assigned to her.
The classroom she had been given was one of the finest she had seen. The computers were state-of-the-art, the room was bright and airy, the tinted windows that lined one wall looked out on the green, well-manicured grounds that surrounded the school.
She knew the glass to those windows was specially made to ensure an assassin’s bullet couldn’t find its way through. Just as she knew that the Board of Education had approved a variety of security measures that would place Breeds in close proximity in and around the school to ensure the protection of the Breed children who would be attending classes.
It was a chance of a lifetime. She would always be known as the first non-Breed teacher to be a part of the education of the exceptional children rumored to have been born of the unions between Breeds and non-Breeds.
That had been part of the excitement of having been chosen for the job, until she met Saban. Natalie paused in inputting the class schedules she was making up into her personal PC at that thought. Yeah, Saban had changed things. From the day he had arrived at her home, she had known he would change things within her, and because of it, she admitted, she had fought the attraction rising between them.
She had fought him, snapped at him, acted like a shrew and a spoiled brat, searching for ways to irritate
him past the wickedly sexy looks he had given her.