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“Placing you on a shelf is the last thing I want to do, sweetheart,” he promised silkily. “But playing with you is definitely in the cards.”
Rather than removing his jeans after the belt loosened, Lawe shrugged the thin jacket from his shoulders, then tugged the black sleeveless shirt from his body and tossed it aside.
Her little tongue, pink and tempting, reached out to flicker over her lips.
The gleam of moisture on the sensual lower curve had his balls clenching, the need to take her pounding through him.
He was so hard he could barely stand to breathe as he unsnapped the metal tabs of the jeans and, as she watched, stripped them from his body.
“Did you think you could run from me without consequences, mate? I’m a fucking Breed. Run and I will give chase. Challenge me, Diane, and I will accept it. Do you see me as some poor castrated animal you can control so easily?”
“Castrated?” Her gaze flickered to his erection. “Not really. But I’ve been assured by Jonas several times that you’re really quite domesticated. Do you purr on command, Lawe? Or does only Jonas have the power to give that order?”
She was insane, Diane decided, certifiable. Her uncle had made that prediction more than once during the years before his death.
He was obviously right. Only a crazy person dared to manipulate a Breed in such a way, no matter how harmless it was.
But both Lawe and Jonas deserved every moment of it.
Jonas for daring to play his games with her, and she knew he had been. She hadn’t figured out how, but she knew him for the calculating, manipulating monster he was when it came to ensuring every capable Breed mated.
And Lawe, for making her feel. For making her want. For refusing to be a partner and a lover.
She didn’t want or need either to feel the emotions tearing her apart or to ache with such need for any one man. She hadn’t asked him to step into her life and throw all her beliefs and the life she’d resigned herself to into chaos. And she sure as hell hadn’t asked her brother-in-law to help him. She’d begged Jonas for a way to make Lawe understand how it would never work to pressure her into giving up the life that made her feel valued. Instead, he’d suggested she resign herself to giving it up.
He’d warned her about yanking Lawe’s chain more than once.
He had warned her that Lawe was not a domesticated housecat but a fully trained Lion Breed in his prime.
Just as he had warned her that Lawe didn’t take orders worth a damn and he sure as hell
didn’t purr on command.
And the last warning had been that the animal Lawe shared his skin with would one day overcome his determination to hold it back, and it would take the mate it sensed waiting.
If the look on Lawe’s face and his stiff, jutting erection were anything to go by, the animal and the man were pretty much in agreement that it was the time to claim the mate and they were prepared to prove it.
Icy blue eyes flared, then darkened, as his expression tightened and primal dominance suddenly marked it.
This was it.
They had been dancing around each other for more than a year now, deliberately easing in, then pulling back at the slightest hint of emotion, only to be drawn back again.
She’d teased, and she’d forgotten the warnings Jonas had given her.
She’d run from him, fighting to escape what she’d sensed was the inevitable. Jonas had warned her about running. He’d warned her about the predator living inside Lawe, the dominant animal that would move heaven and hell, kill or risk being killed, to possess his mate. And he would give her whatever she needed, whatever he knew instinctively she had to have, just to be happy.
For more than a year he had stayed away. He’d ignored the hunger, just as she had. He had ignored the need and let her run from all the emotions she couldn’t handle, and the knowledge that accepting him meant accepting the cage he would build around her.
Had he somehow sensed the monsters that rose up to slash at her emotions each time she’d fought to escape him, because he’d always let her go. Or had he been concerned with his own monsters and the battle to slip past them instead?
Whichever it was, he’d obviously decided it was time to do something about the hunger clawing through both of them.
Diane exhaled in a breath of surprise as Lawe moved for her, catching her around the waist as she turned to evade him. Gripping her hips, he jerked her back, bringing her ass against the hardened length of his cock as he pressed against her, firm and dominant, the stiff stalk of his erection rubbing against the cleft of her ass.
And she couldn’t keep from pressing back, from feeling him, heated and poker hard. She could feel him against her from her shoulder to her thighs. She could feel the rasp of his flesh, feel those tiny, tiny, almost invisible hairs that covered him from shoulders to ankles like a pelt of roughened silk.
“Living dangerously, baby?” He nipped at the lobe of her ear as her hands fell to his wrists, her grip desperate as she fought to push back the desire, or the fear. She had to let one go because he obviously wasn’t going to allow her to let him go.
