Del-Rey shook his head.
“Kiss me,” she whispered. “I’m late for those damned hormonal therapy shots. It’s killing me.”
“No.” He couldn’t do this. “You should have called Armani. She would have come here.”
“Lockdown.” She stretched against him. “Snipers in the woods and all kinds of stuff.”
“You should have told Brim,” he snarled. “He would have gotten you there in the heli-jet. Damn you!”
He didn’t want to take her like this again. Not in the full fury of mating heat, where the scent of her was like a drug itself, whipping control from his mind.
“Brim offered.” She nipped his chin, then licked it as he tried to find sanity. “I want you the way nature meant for you to take me, Del-Rey. This is the way it’s supposed to be.”
Ah f**k. He was going to die. Her hips moved, the tip of his c**k invaded the snug confines of her pu**y, and he felt flames shoot up his spine.
Not like this. He wanted to kiss her, taste her. He wanted so much more for her than just the mating.
“Do you know,” she whispered roughly, “when you rub against me like that and you fill me with your pr**cum, you make me burn? Even before I felt the mating heat coming back, I felt that. You were tucked against me, and I was so wet, so wicked, I let you do it. And I felt that. And all I wanted was you inside me.”
He knew what Wolf and Coyote pr**cum did to their mates. Armani had explained it in humiliating detail. The silky fluid was filled with the hormone that induced heat as well as one that relaxed the tight flesh that would surround his cock. It would raise the female mate’s arousal, make her more sensitive, make the pleasure sharper as it prepared her body for his final release and the tight secondary swelling halfway up the shaft as his cum tore from him. It would lock him inside her, make it impossible to pull free as his seed shot into the heated depths of her pu**y. And it would hold him there—the last time, he had been locked inside her for over half an hour, feeling her climaxes as though they were his own, as she begged him to make it stop.
That memory gave him the strength. God, he never wanted that shame again. To stare into her tear-drenched eyes as she begged him, pleaded with him to make it stop and he could do nothing to stop it.
“Enough.” He jerked back, pushing her away before swinging around and shoving his feet to the floor. “I’ll call Armani and tell her.”
He froze. A sense of vertigo rushed over him as he felt her at his back, hot ni**les stabbing into him as her teeth raked his neck. “Call Armani, and I’ll take my injection like a good little coya and return to that dead little world where my dreams torment me, and my emotions overshadow the truth?”
“Honest arousal,” he snarled. “Give me that. I’ll take it. But not like this, where you have no control over your need.”
He couldn’t f**king breathe. The scent of her pu**y was washing through his senses like a tidal wave, like an eruption of white-hot heat piercing his brain.
“I don’t want something else controlling me either,” she whispered. “I want all of you, Del-Rey. Don’t you want all of me? Mating heat and all?”
“What do you want in your bed then, the animal?” he sneered.
“And the man,” she whispered as he glared down at her, holding her down, his hands manacling her wrists to the mattress, his hips pressing against hers. “You’re both. I want both.”
“So you had to do without the injections to take both?” Self-disgust tore through him.
“Is that what you think, Del-Rey?” She stared back at him, her eyes so brilliant with arousal it hurt to stare into them. “That I have to let myself become drugged by the heat to take you? That isn’t why.”
“Then why?”
“Because the hormone therapy they were giving me deadens certain nerve endings and makes anger, frustration and fear worse. It was the only way it would work. It blocked the receptors to areas that receive the most arousal, while heightening other emotions. I don’t want anything deadened or heightened unnaturally. I want to feel you,” she whispered. “All of you. Was that so wrong?”
He shook his head. He was supposed to make sense of this right now? When need was tearing through him with a force he had never known before?
“I want your kiss, and I want to taste it, feel it. I want your touch, and I want to know all the pleasure. I want you inside me, and I want to feel the emotions I felt before. All of them, Del-Rey.”
“You’re lying,” he growled. “I can smell the fear inside you and the lie that falls from your lips.” He pressed his forehead against hers, his balls cramping with the need tearing through him. “God, Anya. Why are you doing this to us?”
“I can’t be a little bit afraid?” Tears sparkled in her eyes then. “Del-Rey, I don’t want the hormone therapy because I don’t want to cheat whatever it is that does this to us. If I don’t face it now, I’m never going to.”
No, it wasn’t a lie, it was courage and fear. She was coming to him, all of him, and she was trying.
“And what do I do when I knot you?” he snarled. “When I swell inside you and the fear overwhelms that pleasure? When you beg me to make it stop, Anya? What do I do then? Because there is no stopping it.”
“Whatever you need to do, as long as you hold me, Del-Rey. Don’t leave me alone. Don’t let me get cold,” she finally answered. “But if I take another of those injections, then I won’t come back here until it wears off again. We’ll do this right, and we’ll both become accustomed to it, or we’ll not do it at all.”