“I don’t want this, then.” Her head shook as her face mirrored some inner desperation.
“Don’t you, Scheme?” Before she could tighten her thighs to evade him, his hand slid between them, cupping the fiery mound of her pu**y as his teeth snapped together at the heat filling his hand.
“You’re so f**king wet I could drown in you,” he said accusingly, using his fingers to part the swollen curves and find the honey beyond.
She jerked, shuddering as his finger slid along the narrow cleft to find her swollen clit.
“You’re close,” he growled. “I can smell your heat. Feel your pleasure growing. You’re so close to coming you’re having to fight it.”
“No.” She shook her head, fighting him, fighting the pleasure.
“No?” When she was this close? “Sweetheart, you’re so primed I could get you off with a few licks of my tongue. Wouldn’t you like that? To feel your hard little cl*t in my mouth, sucking you, tonguing you?”
“I don’t f**k animals,” she snapped, desperate anger filling her voice as the words whiplashed in his mind, causing him to still above her, his fingers poised to rub against the distended little knot of nerve endings awaiting his touch.
Before he could stop himself, an enraged snarl left his lips, causing her to pale further before he managed to jerk back from her, whipping the blanket over her na**d body as he fought for control.
“You’ll f**k me,” he growled furiously. “Before you leave here, you’ll be on your knees begging me to f**k you.”
“Not even if you had the finest carpet covering the floors,” she shot back furiously. “If I wanted to f**k one of your kind, I could have had my pick of you at any time. Coyotes aren’t the only Breeds still beneath my father’s command, Tanner. Remember that.”
He bared his teeth, the predator raging inside him, roaring for release, for surrender. Her surrender.
“Get dressed,” he snapped. “Now. And the next time you call me an animal, Scheme, I’m going to show you exactly what your goddamned father helped train for all those years.”
He stalked from the room, taking the nearest tunnel, and headed topside again. If he didn’t get away from her, if he didn’t get the smell of her out of his head, then he was going to end up forcing that surrender. And that was something he had sworn he would never do.
CHAPTER 7
Oh God, what had she done? She had a death wish; it was that simple. Because she had seen murder in Tanner’s eyes the second she’d thrown that final remark at him.
Desperation. Fear. Scheme Tallant was rumored to never know fear. She was ballsy. Deceptive. Scheming. She did not know fear.
Not true fear anyway. She had grown used to the threat she lived under beneath her father’s command. That threat, to a point, had been controllable, though, until she began taking more and more chances.
Running her hands over her face, she fought for a way out of this one. Even now, her skin felt fevered, burning for him. One touch and he made her hotter than she had ever been in her life. He made her weak. He made her remember what it was like to be young, to need to feel warmth. The brief affairs she’d had in the past were pale comparisons to what she needed now.
She was thirty years old, but sometimes she felt twice that age. Right now, she felt a hundred. As long as Tanner had been watching her, she had been watching him. He was on her short list of suspects where the Breed spy was concerned. He was privy to the Breed Cabinet’s innermost secrets. He knew security, communications and long-range plans. Things her father’s Breed spy seemed to know as well. He was exactly where he would need to be to destroy the Breeds. And to destroy her. He was a weakness.
Pushing herself to the edge of the bed, she let her feet dangle, watching the soft shadow they cast from inches above the floor.
She had needed to be touched like this once before, years ago, and she had let Chaz into her life. Chazzon St. Marks. He had played the game so well. She had needed someone so desperately that she had let him convince her that he loved her. That he needed her. What he had needed was to follow her father’s orders, track her movements and learn if she could be trusted.
She had covered her tracks well enough to keep herself from actually getting killed. But she hadn’t escaped the beatings for being ineffective in her job.
The job of tracking and seeing to the killing of Breeds who’d been entrusted with high-level information and assignments during their training within the labs had fallen to her. And she had gathered much of that information.
Some of the Breeds had escaped. And some—their deaths would always weigh heavily on her soul.
Crossing her arms over her br**sts, she gritted her teeth and fought the arousal still burning through her. It had never been this strong with another man. It had never sensitized every cell in her body and made her ache for his touch.
Even her need for Chaz had never been this strong.
Chaz. She fought back the pain again. He had taken the job to kill her, coldly, methodically. She had loved him once, before she had learned that her father was paying him to f**k her. Before she had learned he was an assassin. Before she had found out he had been part of her father’s plan to abort her child. Her father was well capable of sacrificing Chaz to learn the secrets she was holding, though.
She had to get out of here. By the second it was becoming more imperative that she get as far away from the deceptively lazy Bengal Breed as possible.
Especially now.