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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 semen 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 cock 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 cock was stroked by the snug grip of her pussy.
Damn, he was still hard. Still hard and so fucking 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 nipples 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.
And Ria couldn’t afford that shame, that hurt. Just as she couldn’t afford to appear to be more than the employee the Vanderales depended so highly upon.
There it was. He frowned at the thought. Ria couldn’t afford to become visible, because she feared losing the advantage she had in her job. Wallflowers faded among the crowd. No one noticed them. No one feared them, she had told him. But it was more than that. She held an advantage. One the Leo approved of, needed. She was a tool he used quite effectively. And the Vanderales were the only enduring thing in Ria’s life.
She feared losing that one certainty. The family that had saved her. They hadn’t raised her, but they had overseen her raising. They had educated her. They employed her. She was the poor orphan child everyone thought the powerful family felt sorry for.
The inner woman had no confidence in herself, in her ability to command the attention and power Mercury knew was her due.
He growled at the thought of it, his eyes narrowing into the dusky light of the room as he considered each avenue open for him to proceed.
He was her mate. It was his job to protect her, to assure her security, her happiness.
She was never going to believe he had mated her. That part of her that refused to allow her to accept anything as her own would always pull back. Because the mating heat hadn’t made itself fully known until Alaiya’s appearance.
He couldn’t fully blame her, and yet he did. And he knew when she awoke, the fury of a woman terrified that she had something that didn’t belong to her would blaze as high and as hot as the mating heat.
