She should resist him. She’d just experienced something that should have been quite traumatic. After all, by time he had finished releasing his pleasure inside her, he’d bitten her, knotted her, snarled, growled and declared “mine,” as though saying it made it so.
The problem was that when he’d declared “mine,” she had felt an answering demand inside her own heart.
“What are you doing to me, Malachi?” she whispered as he turned, sprawling her beneath him as he came over her in a surge of strength and latent power.
“I’ve been crazy since meeting you,” he rasped as he pulled the sheet away from her naked body. “Completely insane, Isabelle.”
A graceful brow arched as her eyes suddenly lit with an inner amusement. “I would guess you were already crazy, Malachi, because I haven’t seen a whole lot to suggest otherwise.”
Malachi lifted his brow. “Baby, you haven’t had time to draw that opinion. Once you get to know me, you’ll realize I’m actually hardcore certifiable. It’s a Breed thing.”
“Being certifiable?” she questioned. “After meeting Ashley, I’m beginning to think that rather than a Breed thing, it’s more a Coyote thing. I just hope it’s not too contagious.”
She was teasing him. Had anyone bothered to tease him before, she wondered as he stared back at her with that reserved, cool expression.
She wouldn’t let it bother her, she promised herself. If he intended to stick around, then he may as well learn. She, Chelsea and Liza were always joking with one another, sometimes playing pranks and always having fun. She wasn’t about to give it up.
“You make me want to laugh,” he groaned suddenly. “And if I drop my guard enough for that, what will I do if you decide to try to fight the mating?”
“So it can be reversed?” Already she was craving his kiss with a strength that had her mouth watering and her body tingling. Like someone needing their next drug fix, she needed his kiss.
She needed him.
“There’s no reversal.” Cupping the back of her head, he pulled her down for his kiss, needing it, needing her.
His tongue wasn’t swollen, the mating taste was only barely present to his senses, but still, the need to kiss her, to bind her now with pleasure, was an overriding impulse.
Catching her lips with his, he rubbed against the soft, pouty curves and tasted the warmth of them. It was a kiss of natural heat, the same passion and hunger that had flared between them when their eyes connected in the bar.
His tongue slipped past her lips, mated with hers, rubbed at it, felt the silken softness and the measure of the woman as she accepted him with soft innocence.
It wasn’t mating heat. It was just a man and a woman, that was all. Surrounded by warmth, by the attraction and the flaring emotion that happened only once in a lifetime. When one man and one woman fated to be together, came together.
That moment had happened in the bar when their eyes met. When their lives had merged and destiny had given them that one and only chance.
One chance. One moment out of time and Malachi refused to lose it.
She was his mate.
Letting her go wasn’t an option.
Holding her, ensuring her safety, her protection and, God, loving her. Those were his only options.
Easing back, he stared into the soft depths of her cobalt eyes and whispered, “For the first time in such a long, lonely life, I touched love.” Trailing his hand from the back of her head where he’d held her to him, he let his palm cup the fragile line of her jaw as his thumb brushed over her kiss-swollen lips. “You’re my mate, Isabelle. Frightening you is the last thing I want to do, but Breeds, like the animals we’re created from, heed our instincts, unlike man. Every instinct that makes up the creature I am knows what you are to me. Courting you isn’t an option. Wooing you isn’t in the equation because nature won’t allow the humanity inside us to chance losing that one moment, that single chance we have to claim what is ours. Or to allow our mates the opportunity to fear or to doubt and to turn away. That’s all mating heat is, baby. That’s all nature meant for it to be. Everything else is optional, but staying together, learning our way and learning what true love, what soul mates, were meant to be isn’t a choice any longer. It’s now a part of everything we are. It’s like death and taxes. Inescapable.”
She swallowed tightly. “Breeds don’t pay taxes.”
Trust her to have to point out the one flaw in the ages-old saying.
His lips quirked in amusement. Nature was indeed the perfect matchmaker, because this woman would be more than a challenge. She would keep him on his toes. There wouldn’t be a chance to be the lazy, shiftless Coyote that all of his Breed pretended to be.
“Breeds don’t pay taxes,” he agreed. “We have mates to keep us in line instead.”
Her head settled on his chest, her cheek against his heart as Malachi let his hand smooth from her shoulder to the middle of her back.
“It’s not going to be that easy, Malachi,” she whispered. “You know it’s not.”
He knew it wouldn’t be. “What is the old saying?” he asked softly. “Nothing worth having is easy? If it were easy, baby, would it be as important?”