She rocked beneath him, her legs rising to encase his hips as his lips lowered to hers again. And then her eyes closed. There was no control, no strength to hold them open as he kissed her with a melting passion that left her weak.
With his lips moving on hers, his hips straining against her, driving his c**k in harder, faster, sending the bolts of sensation tearing harder through her body, Amanda was lost. Her back arched as everything inside her exploded. Her body tensed, her pu**y tightened around his surging erection until she felt that change, the swelling within her that signaled his own release. It lit a fuse to her already exploding senses and sent her reeling again as she felt his se**n jetting inside her. Long minutes later, she gathered the strength to unlock her legs from his waist and release the hold she had taken on her shoulders. Exhaustion rode her now, as hard as lust had ridden her minutes before. Her eyes fluttered opened, her vision sleep-blurred as she stared into his dark eyes, sighing in blissful, sated pleasure.
“Sleep, baby,” he whispered, resting his head against hers, a restrained shudder working through his body as another pulse of seed filled her milking cunt. “I’ll take care of you while you sleep.”
Her eyes fluttered closed. She knew that, she thought. He didn’t have to say the words. Above all things, she did know Kiowa would take care of her.
Kiowa rarely dreamed. He considered it a blessing. After some of the nightmares of his childhood, he had no desire to visit that inner realm and tempt the angers of the past. But when he drifted into sleep beside Amanda, they were there. Like demons raising their dark, horrifying heads.
The woman who bore you is dead,” his grandfather informed him. She was killed in a car crash.”
Kiowa raised his head from the book he had been devouring. Five. Pitifully thin and small, little else had mattered to him but the words he needed to learn. And learn them he was. He didn’t know the woman who bore him, as his grandfather called her. He couldn’t even remember her face, though he knew there had been a time that he had been with her.
Kiowa nodded solemnly, staring up at the broad frame of the older man, wishing he could see something other than the twisted expression of distaste that was on his face.
“You don’t even care do you?” the old man had growled.
“I don’t know her,” he had whispered then.
“That’s an animal’s response,” his grandfather had lashed out. “One without a soul.”
The dream distorted, moved in time. Kiowa was eleven, living alone in the shack high in the mountain, waiting eagerly each week for his grandfather’s visit. He knew he had to stay hidden, knew that the people who had forced his birth on the mother he never knew, were searching for him. The television was his constant companion and with it, he had learned to read over the years, to decipher the words and to make sense of how to use them. Books sat in stacks around the small living room. A blanket was tucked in the couch. He didn’t sleep in the bed. In the dark, too many thoughts raced across his mind and too many sounds in the mountains outside fueled his fear. But that television was his lifeline. On it he saw his dreams. A family. A mother, a father, children who were loved and protected, and in those dreams he could laugh and be free, fly a kite, ride a bike. He didn’t have to fear detection.
“Here’s some more books.” The box was dumped at his feet as his grandfather stared down at him emotionlessly.
The other man had gone from disgust to chilly dislike over the years. “I’ll put the food on the porch. You’re big enough to put it away yourself.”
Eleven years old. He had celebrated his birthday alone, clumsily wrapped several pinecones he had found and books he had read in old newspaper and pretended they were a mother’s gifts.
“Thank you, Sir.” He had stopped calling him grandfather years before. Grandfathers loved their grandkids. They spoiled them, showed them the world, took them to amusement parks. They didn’t lock them away on a mountain and leave them to suffer the silence and the cold alone.
“Have you found your soul yet?” the old man snapped then.
Kiowa had stared up at him quietly, years of loneliness and grief locked inside him.
“No, Sir. No soul this week.” He had moved slowly past him then and collected the boxes of dry goods and canned foods that he survived on.
Winter was coming on, he could feel it in the air. He wondered if his grandfather would forget to bring him a coat again this year.
Time shifted again. Kiowa had been fourteen the night the news had reported a car crash on the interstate. Joseph Mulligan had been involved in a head-on collision with a semi-truck and killed instantly. He was survived by no remaining family members, the newsman reported. And for the first time in years Kiowa had shed a single tear.
The next day, he packed his meager belongings in a pillowcase and set off down the mountain. Winter was coming again, and the cold was a bitter enemy when you had no dried foods, no warm clothes. He had read enough and watched enough that he understood certain things where the world was
concerned. He knew he had to be careful, that his very creation was a law against nature, the sharp canines that he kept filed down at the side of his mouth were proof of that. He knew there were ways to survive, he just had to be tough enough. Strong enough.
As he walked away from the cabin, he paused and stared back at it quietly.
“I have a soul,” he had whispered forlornly. “I always did.”
Kiowa’s eyes opened slowly, the dream dissipating, but not the woman he held in his arms. Her head lay against his chest, her hair a cloud of silk around their bodies as she slept deeply, peacefully. He stared to the window, the dark curtain shielding the rays of the sun and tightened his hold on her. If Felines and Wolves mated only once, then there was a chance a Coyote could mate forever as well. He had never wanted another woman as much as he had this one, before he ever touched her. He had never dreamed of another before her, but he had dreamed of this one. He couldn’t let her go.
Chapter Seventeen
“Welcome to Sanctuary.”
Amanda raised surprised eyes to the front door as it pushed open and Merinus Lyons walked into the cabin. She carried a baby in her arms, the woman behind her carried a foldaway playpen.
“Just put it in the corner, Lilly,” Merinus directed the other woman. “We don’t want David terrorizing the place while we’re here.”