Soul Deep (11 page)

But Kiowa was none of those. He was a man, with plenty of faults, she admitted, but he wasn’t bloodthirsty. If he had been, he would have helped the kidnappers rather than rescuing her. The Feline Breed leader seemed to accept him well enough; he actually seemed to like him from what Amanda had seen.

“Stop thinking so hard.” Kiowa moved her empty plate from in front of her as well as the glass that had held the milk he forced on her.

She watched him curiously as he washed up quickly.

“I need to take a shower.” He placed the last dish in the drainer minutes later. “Stay in the cabin. The mountains are heavily patrolled by Feline guards and they don’t know you yet. We also have several trained wolves and a mountain lion or two patrolling. They definitely won’t like you. If you don’t smell like a cat, they eat you.”

She knew her expression reflected her shock.

“Go on to bed and try to sleep. It’s been a hell of a night.”

Weariness seemed to drag at her anyway, but it did little to dim the need burning bright in her womb.

“Where are you sleeping?” she asked him.

He stiffened.

“On the couch. If you need me, just let me know. I won’t bother you otherwise.”

If she could handle it. The words seemed to linger in the air around them despite the fact that she hadn’t voiced them.

Could she handle it?

Could she handle the consequences if she didn’t?

“How did your mother conceive you?” She didn’t know where the question came from.

He watched her closely for several, long moments.

“She was taken while coming home from college one night. The Breed scientists often kidnapped their breeders. If they were ovulating, they kept them and bred them. If they weren’t, they tried to force ovulation. If they couldn’t make them take, then they let them go.”

“How did your mother escape?”

“She was ovulating. She was artificially inseminated with the altered sperm and then locked in a cage. A week later, tests were negative for conception. They released her. Evidently, there are very few women compatible enough with the altered genetics to actually allow conception.”

“How was it negative?”

He smiled sarcastically. “You’re a smart one aren’t you? Coyote sperm is evidently viable for much longer periods of time within the female womb. Up to two weeks was the latest report I believe. The unique hormone created by the altered genetics can also force ovulation on its own. As it did with my mother, I guess.

“Once they learned this, they started searching for the breeders they had turned loose. It was years later unfortunately. Shit happens. My mother died in a car crash when I was five, no one but my grandfather knew of my existence. Even her new husband had no idea I existed. By then, there was no checking the body for previous birth since she was more or less cremated in the crash. Too bad, so sad. Kiowa got away.”

“Then…” Her heart was racing in her chest now, a hard anxious beat that unfortunately had negative results.

“You’re ovulating now.” He nodded. “I’ve locked inside you twice and chances are you have all kinds of little Coyote sperm racing around in your womb. But you might hit it lucky, baby. As I said, most Breed sperm isn’t compatible with a normal female. Chances are good it won’t catch.”

That was not regret she heard in his voice, she reassured herself.

“I’ll go to bed.” She rose quickly to her feet and headed out of the room.

She had to think, but thinking and being in the same room with Kiowa wasn’t going to work.

Immature, he had called her. A child. Unfortunately she wanted to rage at him just as she would have her father or brother when they were doing something unreasonable or enforcing a rule she disagreed with. If it were merely a question of disagreeing, then she would be in his face now.

From what she had overheard, it was much more than that. The hormone that was making her crazy for his touch was no more his fault then it was hers, though. How could she fight that?

“You do that.” His quiet snarl behind her pricked at her heart and she didn’t even know why.

Chapter Fifteen

How was she supposed to sleep? Her mind wouldn’t settle, but even worse, neither would her body. She stared at the dimly lit ceiling, tracking the fragile motes of light that managed to slip through the heavy dark curtains and tried to find some way to accept this new reality she had been dragged into.

Kiowa was furious. She could see that now. Where her father and brother turned icy, letting their anger freeze rather than burn, Kiowa pushed it back. He buried it under years of acceptance, beneath the tragedy of a childhood that never was and dreams he didn’t dare have.

She remembered the look on his face when he pulled from her, his swollen cock popping free of her, the knot barely subsided as she stared up at him in horror that first time.

An animal she had called him.

His expression had shut down immediately, becoming quiet, emotionless, as he calmly left the Jeep. It had been the anger. He fought it, just as she fought for freedom. Now, his anger was escaping and she was bound to one person in a way she feared she would never truly be free of.

If what she had overheard Callan saying was true, then nature had taken her choice away from her.

She turned to her side, curling into a tight ball and pushed back the need lancing through her body. It was getting worse. Horribly worse. She closed her eyes and tried counting sheep, she bit her lip until she tasted blood. She covered her head with the blankets, but the ache just grew and grew.

Her breasts were so tight and swollen she feared her nipples would burst. The touch of her own hands against them sent sensation ripping to her womb, warning her she was in for a long hard battle if she meant to deny what her body hungered for.

Would she have wanted him even without the hormone building in her system? She would have, she thought, remembering his natural inclination to touch her as she had always dreamed of being touched. His teeth tormenting her nipples. His hand landing hard and heavy on the waxed mound of her pussy.

She flinched at the thought as a white-hot streak of remembered pleasure seared that swollen button of nerves. And his cock. She clenched her thighs at the thought of it. The pleasure pain of being impaled on that thick stalk had her juices flowing thick and heavy from her hungry cunt.

She moaned in bleak of acceptance of the fact that she would only be able to fight the arousal for so long. The building pain was almost an agony, her womb clenching, spasming as the withdrawal tore through her.

Withdrawal. That was exactly what it felt like. Her body was protesting the absence of Kiowa’s, demanding his touch, demanding the heat and strength that was so much a part of him.

Amanda couldn’t believe anything could hurt so bad. That arousal could become agony, tearing at the nerve endings and burning into the mind. She had to get away from him. Maybe if she could just get entirely away from him, then it would stop. Withdrawal needed a source, take the source and the body would adjust. Wouldn’t it? It would go back to normal, she could go back to normal. She just had to get away from Kiowa.

Some distant part of her mind was aware that she wasn’t thinking rationally. That the building pain and the need for his touch were becoming so extreme that her ability to process reality wasn’t as it should be.

She stumbled from the bed, throwing the blankets aside as her feet tangled in them and weaved her way desperately for the living room. Silence filled the cabin, and rather distantly, she remembered a door closing just after Kiowa left the shower.

Had he left her alone? Didn’t the heat affect him as it did her?

The bastard, of course it wouldn’t.

“Amanda?” He moved from another room instead, one she hadn’t paid any attention to on the other side of the living room.

He wore his jeans low, several metal buttons undone. His cock was thick and hard beneath the material.

“Kiowa.” She clenched her fists as his scent wrapped around her, drugging her with the need to taste him.

“You should be sleeping.” His voice was soft, regretful as he watched her.

He didn’t move from the doorway, just stood there, his dark eyes bleak and filled with hunger and need.

“Do you hurt too?” she whispered, feeling her juices trickle down the inside of her thigh.

“Yeah, baby, I hurt too,” he said, his voice rough, a low growl of hunger that had her breath catching in her chest.

“It hurts too badly.” She shuddered with the pain.

“You know the alternative, Manda.” His tone hardened. He wasn’t going to let her hide; he wasn’t going to let her forget.

“I would love my child,” she cried out desperately. “I would.”

She would never force it to be alone, to hunger for love or attention. She would lavish praise on it, laugh with it, love it.

“And what of its father, Manda?” he asked her.

Tears fell from her eyes as her head tilted back and a low, painful moan filled the room.

“I don’t want to love you,” she whispered. “I don’t even know you. How can I love you?”

“Yes, you do.” He was closer now. “You know me better than you think you do. You know I’ll protect you, Manda. You know I’ll hold you close and keep you warm. You know you are my mate. Mates are forever. Just as you know your body will never go hungry for mine, your every desire, your every need fulfilled.”

Her head titled forward, something inside her shattering at his words. Sexuality was something to hide where she came from. God help her if her family every found her books, or discovered her perversions. But Kiowa knew them. He knew what she wanted, what her body craved. Marriages survived on less than that; surely a mating wouldn’t be too bad?

Your hormones are talking,
her mind screamed out.
Buck up girl. Remember, freedom? Time to be alone?

Time to be alone with her books and her daydreams, she thought. Kiowa was a sexual fantasy come to life.

“You’re manipulating me.” She was panting for air.

“Of course I am.” He shrugged carelessly. “You weren’t far off the mark when you called me an animal, baby. Those instincts are alive and humming and they’re screaming you’re mine. I won’t let you go, Amanda.”

“God you are such a headache,” she snapped, perspiration covering her body as lust built to a fever-pitch. “Do you have any idea how impossible this is? This isn’t my life. It isn’t what I want.”

“This wasn’t your life.” He leaned lazily against the doorframe then. “It is now. You take the scraps life throws at you and make the best of it. You’re a smart woman, smart enough to know this isn’t something that’s just going to go away.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to just bow down and give in to it,” she argued fiercely. “Scientists created this curse you have, they can fix it.”

He laughed at that.

“Do you think your eggheaded God-complex scientists had any clue what they were doing?” he asked mockingly. “Do you have any idea the strong, vital men and women who died, created to be killers, but born with such honor and intelligence that their creators knew they could never let them live? No, Amanda, the world’s best and brightest are currently living in a secluded lab beneath the estate here, trying to just understand how this works. There is no cure. They admit that. The best they are hoping for is to ease the symptoms.”

She wanted to scream in denial, but her body was burning so hot she couldn’t think of anything much past getting his cock out of his pants. The heat was consuming her, making her want, making her need things that brought a flush of humiliation to her entire body.

“Kiowa, it hurts,” she finally whispered desperately, flinching as another powerful spasm rippled through her womb.

“What do you want me to do, Amanda?” he whispered. “If I take you, you know what’s going to happen. Do you know, when I’m locked inside you, my cock is pressed flush against your cervix, my seed shooting into it. You’re ovulating,” he reminded her. “Do you want to take that chance again?”

“Do I have a choice?” she screamed back at him, gasping as the anger seemed to build, to feed the sexual desperation climbing within her.

“You have a choice,” he snarled in reply. “You can admit you can’t run from it, Amanda.”

“In less than twenty-four hours you’ve destroyed every dream I ever had.” She was shaking with fury, with lust. “And you expect me to just give up? Oh yes, the great and might Kiowa, king of Coyotes has knotted my cunt, my world is finally right. Damn you, I didn’t ask you for this. I didn’t ask those bastards to attempt to kidnap me and I didn’t ask you to fuck me.”

“No, you begged me to,” he shot back at her, making her grit her teeth at the memory. “You screamed it, Amanda, you demanded it. And lady, I didn’t ask for you any more than you asked for me. At least I have the God-given sense to realize that fighting is a waste of strength.”

“I don’t belong to you!”

She was screaming. The anger pouring through her was like a spark to the building, surging tide of lusts she couldn’t control. She hated it. She needed it more than breath.

“Wrong, baby,” he snapped, finally moving toward her, his long-legged stride eating up the short distance, powerful muscles flexing along his upper body, his eyes hot, singeing her. “You do belong to me. Every inch of that sweet, hot little body is mine now. If you don’t believe that, try to let another touch you.”

She remembered Callan Lyons touching her, catching her as her legs faltered beneath her earlier. The pain had been excruciating.

“You bastard!” she raged.

“Yeah, I am,” he agreed as he walked around her, not touching her, letting her smell the intriguing scent of man, honey and spice. “But your bastard it would seem.”

She shuddered at the feel of his warmth surrounding her as he passed her on the way to the kitchen.

“God, what a mess.” She sighed deeply pushing her fingers roughly through her hair as she watched his lips quirk. Not really a smile, but almost.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said softly. “Some things look pretty damned good from where I’m standing. You clean up real fine, Ms. Marion, I have to say that for you.”