And Lawe, for making her feel. For making her want. For refusing to be a partner and a lover.
She didn’t want or need either to feel the emotions tearing her apart or to ache with such need for any one man. She hadn’t asked him to step into her life and throw all her beliefs and the life she’d resigned herself to into chaos. And she sure as hell hadn’t asked her brother-in-law to help him. She’d begged Jonas for a way to make Lawe understand how it would never work to pressure her into giving up the life that made her feel valued. Instead, he’d suggested she resign herself to giving it up.
He’d warned her about yanking Lawe’s chain more than once.
He had warned her that Lawe was not a domesticated housecat but a fully trained Lion Breed in his prime.
Just as he had warned her that Lawe didn’t take orders worth a damn and he sure as hell didn’t purr on command.
And the last warning had been that the animal Lawe shared his skin with would one day overcome his determination to hold it back, and it would take the mate it sensed waiting.
If the look on Lawe’s face and his stiff, jutting erection were anything to go by, the animal and the man were pretty much in agreement that it was the time to claim the mate and they were prepared to prove it.
Icy blue eyes flared, then darkened, as his expression tightened and primal dominance suddenly marked it.
This was it.
They had been dancing around each other for more than a year now, deliberately easing in, then pulling back at the slightest hint of emotion, only to be drawn back again.
She’d teased, and she’d forgotten the warnings Jonas had given her.
She’d run from him, fighting to escape what she’d sensed was the inevitable. Jonas had warned her about running. He’d warned her about the predator living inside Lawe, the dominant animal that would move heaven and hell, kill or risk being killed, to possess his mate. And he would give her whatever she needed, whatever he knew instinctively she had to have, just to be happy.
For more than a year he had stayed away. He’d ignored the hunger, just as she had. He had ignored the need and let her run from all the emotions she couldn’t handle, and the knowledge that accepting him meant accepting the cage he would build around her.
Had he somehow sensed the monsters that rose up to slash at her emotions each time she’d fought to escape him, because he’d always let her go. Or had he been concerned with his own monsters and the battle to slip past them instead?
Whichever it was, he’d obviously decided it was time to do something about the hunger clawing through both of them.
Diane exhaled in a breath of surprise as Lawe moved for her, catching her around the waist as she turned to evade him. Gripping her hips, he jerked her back, bringing her ass against the hardened length of his c**k as he pressed against her, firm and dominant, the stiff stalk of his erection rubbing against the cleft of her ass.
And she couldn’t keep from pressing back, from feeling him, heated and poker hard. She could feel him against her from her shoulder to her thighs. She could feel the rasp of his flesh, feel those tiny, tiny, almost invisible hairs that covered him from shoulders to ankles like a pelt of roughened silk.
“Living dangerously, baby?” He nipped at the lobe of her ear as her hands fell to his wrists, her grip desperate as she fought to push back the desire, or the fear. She had to let one go because he obviously wasn’t going to allow her to let him go.
The desire wasn’t budging from its position, it was only growing. The fear was holding on with bloody fingernails and faltering further beneath his touch as she felt the incredible, sexual heat sizzling up her spine.
“Scared, little wildcat?” he whispered against her ear, the warmth of his breath a caress against the sensitive shell of her ear.
“Of you?” The bravado in her tone was at odds with the vulnerability she felt, not to mention the inferno of lust building in her womb. “I think you know better than that, Lawe.”
Even as she denied that charge, Diane knew it for the lie it was. A soft exhalation parted her lips as his fingers tightened, his nails rasping over the skin of her hips as he pressed against her more firmly, grinding his c**k harder against the cleft of her rear.
Pleasure whipped across her nerve endings, sending sharp flares of sensation rushing through her system.
Fear fell back as the warmth of his body seemed to penetrate the chill that wrapped around her earlier. But it wasn’t gone. She wondered if it would ever go away entirely.
A shudder raced through her with the touch of his tongue, like a roughened rasp against the sensitive flesh just beneath her ear. In that second, the fear was gone and pleasure overshadowed every nightmare that had ever chased her.
Need was a sharp-toothed demon tearing at Lawe’s cock, but even that couldn’t hold back the animal senses that drew in the scent of his mate’s desire, the heat of her need, and the chill of her fears easing away beneath the onslaught of pleasure.
He felt the animal genetics rising to the fore inside him. Each Breed carried the genetics of the animal he possessed. Some carried their animals closer to the skin than others, and for some the animal instincts were impossible to control when mating heat rose and sank its claws deep inside the primal alpha-male core of his psyche.
The need for her was tearing through him. He tried to control it. He fought it. But in that moment, Lawe knew he had lost the battle.
Pulling her around, his fingers burrowed in the back of her hair. Gripping the strands, he tugged her head back and before he could think or consider his actions, his head lowered and his lips covered hers as instinct had him pushing his tongue between her lips and burying it in the heat of her mouth.
Finding her tongue he rubbed against it, feeling the glands beneath his as they began to swell and throb further, pumping the spicy heat of the mating hormone suddenly spilling from him into the woman the animal inside had chosen as his mate.