His fist rammed into the shower, a ceramic tile cracking as Rule’s teeth gritted furiously, the torment racking his brain to the point that he didn’t even feel the pain to his knuckles.
Gypsy’s expression was branded into his head. That pale shock, her eyes rounded and dark with pain and confusion, then the color brightening as he’d made that dumb-assed statement. Her eyes had filled with tears even before he’d managed to turn from her and rush to the bathroom.
He’d left her lying there when he wanted nothing more than to push inside her again, swear he was just f**king crazy and give them both that electric, fiery pleasure he had been immersed in before he’d felt—
It.
His dick was f**king iron hard, pounding with the abrupt halt he’d forced on his release, the sensitive flesh just beneath the flared head f**king aching. Aching like a sore tooth right there where the mating barb was supposed to be located.
He checked his tongue against his teeth. Fuck. Son of a bitch, there were no f**king swollen glands, no mating hormone, nothing but that god-be-damned spot pulsing so violently he could see the flesh throbbing where it shouldn’t be.
Wrapping his fingers around his dick, he pressed the pad of his thumb against the hard throb, but all he felt was a tighter tension and slightly higher degree of sensitivity.
Was that normal, or was he was just so damned on guard for a mating that he was only now sensing it?
It couldn’t be a mating, could it?
What the hell was happening to him?
A mating barb didn’t extend from beneath the c**k head without a mating. Without that wild taste in a Breed’s mouth, the crazy need to f**k his mate insane, only to have the overpowering lust shoot through him again and again.
Rule felt no weakness, no hard dick twenty-four-seven. Just whenever he so much as thought of Gypsy.
But he knew what he had felt as that first pulse of his release shot from his balls. He knew what he was feeling now just beneath the pad of his thumb. Surely, he would have known if he had felt it before.
Wouldn’t he?
His breathing was rough, hard as he stared down at the offending part of his body as he forced himself to release it, watching the flesh pulse like a heartbeat just beneath it.
It had to be something else, he told himself as cold water sluiced over his flesh and covered his cock, having little effect on the burning hunger ravaging his senses.
He was powerfully sexual, he knew that. He couldn’t count a high sex drive as a possible mating sign. He had a high sex drive anyway. Most male Breeds did. They simply loved to f**k and did it whenever, wherever they could. They loved sex and they loved women, and petting them, rubbing against them, sensing their pleasure and satisfaction.
It was like a drug. A high.
And Gypsy’s pleasure had been like no high he had ever known in his entire life. Hell, he had been so attuned to her pleasure that he swore he felt the echoes of her release beginning to strike so deep inside his senses that he wondered if it sank to his soul. Something else he’d only heard of happening with a mate.
But the mating signs weren’t there.
He couldn’t even call the strength of her echoing pleasure a mating sign without anything else to go with it. And the feeling of—something—a heat and sudden building tightness beneath the head of his c**k just before he came had been so damned odd he’d jumped from her and rushed to the shower before he could risk the mating barb extending from his cock.
Once it was free, there was no going back.
How many times had he heard that?
Once the mating barb extended and locked inside his mate, there was simply no stopping the mating.
He shut the shower off, standing there, his flesh still hot, the need for Gypsy still pounding through his system like a fever he couldn’t stop.
But not just the need to f**k her.
He wanted so much more from her than just the incredible pleasure that had raced through his senses.
Mating Heat was all about the sex. It wasn’t about the rubbing, the touching, seeing the laughter in a lover’s eyes or feeling her joy as it wrapped around him.
Mating Heat was weakening. It took over the senses and erased everything but the need for the mate. He’d sensed that ravaging force in his twin, Lawe, when he’d found his mate. His brother’s lack of control, the inability to sense anything around him but Diane.
And he’d sensed it even before then, years before, confined in a cell, all too aware of the scent of his mother and the Coyote they called Elder in the labs. The scent of their need, of their building desperation had haunted that f**king lab. The scientists never forbade the Coyote soldiers from taking the female prisoners. But never before had one of them mated a breeder.