And he was giving her more. Hard, powerful lunges buried his c**k inside her, stroked her internally as the need for his taste began to overwhelm everything else.
Her lips turned to his shoulder. Panting breaths, ragged cries left her throat, and as his thrusts increased, as they pounded inside, she licked the flesh of his shoulder, moaned, cried out, and before she could help herself, she bit him.
As he had bitten her so many times. She latched onto the hard flesh of his shoulder, held it tight, licked it, sucked at the taste of him.
Mercury froze against her. His entire body tightened, shuddered, then with a snarling growl of hunger his teeth pierced her shoulder like a brand and his hips surged against hers.
Ria would have screamed, but the pleasure, the need for his taste, the driving, furious stroke of his body inside hers, was tightening her womb, throbbing in her clit.
Tears spilled from her eyes at the incredible power and beauty of what he was doing to her. The pleasure it wasn't just pleasure. It was ravenous. Shameless. It was pure sensation, blinding-hot and reaching inside her to places where she'd never known could know pleasure.
Her womb tightened furiously. Her clit exploded in ecstasy, and rapture erupted through her entire consciousness.
She had to let go of him to scream. To buck against the furious thrusts powering the whipping sensations racing from nerve ending to nerve ending.
Her head ground into the pillow. She knew she was clawing his shoulders and she couldn't stop. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't scream. A starburst of color exploded before her eyes as she felt him give one last, hard lunge, and then his release spilled into her.
His release and something more. She felt the barb. Felt it extend, engorge, press into flesh convulsing, tightening around his cock, locking him inside her. Her upper body jerked forward, but his hard chest held her in place, his strong teeth tightened on her, his tongue licked, and this time, she did scream. The pleasure was too much to contain. The sheer violence of another orgasm tearing through her, stealing control of her responses, her body. She jerked and shuddered, writhed and arched, desperate to escape, to get closer.
The barb was blunted, like the tip of a thick, heavy thumb pressing into her, oh God, stroking her, pulsing as though it were coming as well.
She could feel his se**n blasting inside her, and from that extension, the barb male Lions possessed, she felt a burning ejaculation to add to her pleasure.
Mercury jerked above her, his head lifting from her shoulder, a roar of triumph leaving his lips, filling the room as he bucked against her again, driving his c**k and the barb deeper inside her.
The animal was free, and she should have been terrified. She knew what this meant. She knew it wasn't for her. But she couldn't let go of him. She held on to his arms with desperate hands, his hips with enclosing legs. She let the pleasure take her like a tidal wave sweeping across the land. She was helpless before it. Rocked to her soul by it. And now bound by chains that would never allow her to walk away from him.
She was mated to him. His mate, whether it was meant for her or not, and satisfaction should have filled her. It should have blazed inside her. She had won the man and the beast. He was hers. He loved her. He had mated her. But nothing could overshadow the fact that it had been another woman that called the animal free inside him.
CHAPTER 21
Mercury eased slowly from Ria's exhausted body, grimacing as the overly sensitive flesh of his c**k was stroked by the snug grip of her pu**y.
Damn, he was still hard. Still hard and so f**king aroused it was painful. But he had his senses back, his sanity.
He pushed her hair back from her face, watching as her lips pouted and she burrowed against his chest as though she were cold.
A little moan passed her lips as her hard ni**les raked the pelt over his skin. They were still engorged, reddened. And he wanted to suck them. He wanted them against his tongue, the sweet taste of her flesh in his mouth.
He inhaled harshly and pulled the blankets over her, coming down beside her as she stretched against his body and let him wrap himself around her. His hands played in her hair, touching it, petting it. Loving the feel of it.
He loved the feel of her.
He frowned, thinking back to the confrontation with Alaiya. Distaste had clotted his senses when she touched him. And when her lips had pressed to his, he'd had to freeze, to force himself not to kill her. She knew; the moment she saw him, smelled him, Alaiya had known he belonged to another. And still, she had pretended to play the wounded mate.
What game was she involved in here? Definitely one he knew he wanted no part of, but one he knew had the potential to destroy Ria.
Alaiya was a perceptive creature. She was as cold and calculating as Jonas in many ways. Though the director of Breed Affairs didn't have the cold-blooded maliciousness Alaiya possessed.
He rubbed a heavy strand of Ria's hair between his fingers as he considered this problem. His Ria. She was confident, powerful, a force to be reckoned with when it came to what she knew. Codes. Tracking threads of deception. She was the best he had ever seen, even within the Breed community.
It was the woman she hid that concerned him. The one he could see in her, feel in her, the one she refused to release. That woman would be wild, powerful, a mate who could endure the years it seemed mated Breeds were being allowed.
She kept that part of herself vanquished, refused it freedom just as Mercury had refused his beast freedom. Because a woman's confidence was so easily shattered. That woman had never been free because Ria was terrified of losing the one last part of herself that gave her strength.
She was a contradiction, there was no doubt. The woman inside hid, while the logic and business sense of the woman faced the world. The woman who faced the world hid the one that longed to wear sexy dresses and high heels. To be vivid and wild.
Because vivid and wild drew attention. They made such a woman an object of speculation, of gossip, of men who wanted nothing more than her name notched into their bedpost.