Tall, Silent and Lethal

by R. L. Mathewson

  “You’re not going to get me pregnant,” she said, threading her fingers through his hair in that way she knew drove him out of his mind and pulled him down for a slow, passionate kiss that had him groaning in defeat.

  “Are you sure?” he asked as realization dawned on him. She probably had an IUD or something to keep her from getting pregnant.

  “Yes,” she answered against his lips, and with that he gave in and slid back inside her until his balls rubbed against her ass.

  After that he stopped thinking altogether. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly against him as he thrust inside her, loving the way that she suckled his tongue while her body tightened around his, refusing to let him go.

  As he rolled his hips, he stared into her beautiful red eyes and realized that he couldn’t go another minute without telling her that he loved her.

  “Ich liebe dich, mein Schatz” he said hoarsely, wishing like hell that he could tell her so that she would understand what he was saying, but it was too soon.

  “What-”

  He cut her question off with a kiss as he quickened his pace, doing his best to distract her so that he wasn’t forced to lie to her. He didn’t want to scare her off so for now he would keep his mouth shut and hope that she didn’t get her hands on a German dictionary, because-

  “I love you, too,” Cloe blurted out against his lips, making his hips still in mid-thrust.

  “What?” he asked, sounding like an idiot, but he didn’t care.

  “If you stop I’m going to have to kill you,” she groaned, rolling her hips to force him back inside her.

  “That’s not what you said,” he said, struggling to focus as she found a way to ride him by simply rolling her hips, back and forth.

  “Well, I’m not going to say it again so you might as well get back to doing that thing you were doing with your hips,” she explained, riding his cock no doubt to distract him.

  “I see,” he said softly as he took over again, trying his best not to grin, but after a few seconds he gave up trying to hide it and grinned hugely, earning a murderous glare from the woman that he loved.

  “It was a slip of the tongue!” she snapped, sounding adorably irritated.

  “I see,” he said, grinning hugely simply because he just couldn’t stop.

  “I hate you,” she muttered, looking disgruntled.

  “Would it make you feel better if I told you that I loved you more?”

  “No.”

  “Would it make you feel better if we both pretended that it never happened?” he suggested, doing his best to stop smiling.

  “Yes!” she hissed, wrapping her legs around his waist, no doubt thinking that he was going to forget the sweetest words that were ever spoken to him.

  “Sorry,” he said, shaking his head as he leaned down and kissed her, “I can’t do that.”

  “Bastard,” she mumbled against his lips.

  “Would it make you feel better if I pulled out and used my tongue to help you forgot that little slip of yours?” he suggested innocently as he stilled inside her.

  She licked her lips hungrily as his words sank in and then, once they did, she was shoving him off and sighing heavily, sounding put out as she said, “Fine, I guess we could give it a try.”

  Smiling once again, he kissed his way down, pausing at her breasts to lick and suckle her nipples in his mouth while he enjoyed the sweet scent she was giving off before moving south. She smelled so damn good, he thought as he licked and kissed her skin, wondering how he was going to stop from coming at the first swipe of his tongue through her delicate folds. Once he came to her navel an unexpected scent hit him. It was weak, barely noticeable, but while he inhaled, his smile disappeared as he caught the scent of something he’d never expected.

  She was pregnant.

  Chapter 53

  “If you stop,” Danni said, panting heavily as she pulled her mouth away from his cock, “I will kill you!”

  “Ditto,” Caine growled against her slit as he reached between them, wrapped his hand around his aching cock and brought the tip back to her mouth. The little tease flicked the ring with her tongue, making him growl against her pussy as he stroked his cock.

  He speared her with his tongue as he continued to stroke himself, moaning with pleasure as Danni licked and teased the tip of his cock. She loved to tease him, driving him out of his goddamn mind. Her favorite thing was to reduce him to a snarling animal that only cared about mounting her and fucking her until neither of them could barely move, which he was about five seconds from doing.

  “More,” she moaned, rocking her hips so that she was riding his tongue, sliding her core up and down his tongue while she took the tip of his cock in his mouth and-

  “Fuck!” he growled as she scraped her teeth over the sensitive tip.

  “What did I tell you about stopping?” she asked with a long, drawn out sigh that she’d learned from that bastard Chris, as she released her hold on his needy cock and moved to climb off him.

  “The same thing I told you, little tease,” he growled, grabbing her as she moved to climb off him, his control snapping as he shoved her face first on the bed.

  The little tease laughed as she folded her arms beneath her head, spread her legs just enough and sighed as he covered her with his body. He kissed the back of her neck as he positioned himself between her legs and pushed in, his cock slid inside her tight wet hold, loving the resistance this position created. They moaned in unison once he was in as far as he could go, her beautiful bottom pressed against his stomach.

  “That feels so good,” Danni moaned as he gently rocked inside her, making sure that his piercing hit her in just the right spot as he reached over her, entwined their fingers and held her hands above her head as he slowly rode her.

  As he pushed inside her, his balls rubbed against the comforter, adding immense pleasure to what he was doing to her. She was so wet, so tight, and still hiding something from him, he thought as he spotted that white gauze bandage that she’d been wearing for over a month now. He’d asked her a few times about it, but each time she managed to change the subject, mostly by dropping to her knees and making it impossible for him to focus on anything other than just how good her mouth felt wrapped around his cock.

  But now……

  He released her left arm, continuing to thrust, but mostly now just to distract her. Keeping a firm grip on her right hand, he reached over and-

  Danni squealed as she tried to pull her hand away, but he held tight, keeping a firm hold on that hand as he reached over and tore the bandage off. “No! Stop!” Danni cried, desperately trying to wiggle free, but there was nowhere to go, not with him on top of her and buried inside her. The only thing that she managed to do was to ride his cock harder, which he was more than fine with.

  As soon as he had the gauze off, he turned her hand and-

  “A tattoo?” he asked with a frown, because he hadn’t smelled the ink when she’d first started wearing the bandage, but he had a feeling that he knew the reason why.

  The cancer had hidden it from him.

  It was getting stronger and becoming more aggressive, something that terrified and frustrated him, but right now his focus was on the tattoo that his mate had kept hidden from him.

  “I hate you,” Danni groaned pathetically as she buried her face in the comforter.

  He frowned down at the large Celtic cross with the small crescent moon. It took him a minute to realize that he was looking at the Sentinel mark, only in reverse. Each Sentinel was born with a crescent moon with a small cross marked right below their navel. This was……

  “Why do you have the Sentinel mark tattooed on your arm?” he asked, wondering how to tell her that the tattoo artist had seriously fucked up and switched the positions of the cross and moon.

  “It’s not the Sentinel mark,” she mumbled against the comforter only to add after a pause, “well, not really anyway.”

  “Then what is it?” he asked, tra
cing his fingertip over the black tattoo.

  She sighed heavily as she said, “It’s something I designed when I was a kid.”

  “For……?”

  She grumbled something inaudible into the comforter.

  “What was that?” he asked, pulling his cock out until only his piercing touched her core, knowing that she’d get him back for this and not really caring, not when she was hiding things from him.

  “I wanted my own Sentinel design,” she muttered stubbornly as she tried to push back and force his cock back inside her.

  “I see,” he said, pressing a kiss against the back of her nape, because he knew his mate well.

  The Sentinels had been her life. She’d worked her ass off, training, fighting and doing whatever she could to prove her worth. While most humans born to Sentinels liked to bitch about the unfairness of their situation, Danni had accepted her fate as a mere human with grace and dignity. She’d never used the fact that she was human as an excuse, never hid behind it, because she considered herself a part of the Sentinel world.

  “Why didn’t you get this sooner?” he asked, sliding back in, her wet walls making the move easy.

  “You know why,” she answered with a disgruntled snort.

  “Because they would have mocked you?” he asked, chuckling when she tried to throw him off.

  Human children that got the Sentinel mark tattoo were usually mocked and ridiculed and for good reason. They usually believed they were just as good as or better than Sentinels and had the attitudes to match, which was mostly why they were mocked. They were cocky little bastards.

  “Yes!”

  “And the reason that you hid it here?” he asked, feeling like an idiot because the answer was pretty obvious.

  “Chris.”

  He chuckled as he pulled her hand closer so that he could press a kiss against her tattoo. “Is that why Chris and Ephraim have been wearing matching bandages?”

  “They’re mocking me, because I’ve been wearing this thing for so long,” she mumbled pathetically. “Just imagine what they would do if they knew what I’ve been hiding.”

  They would make fun or her day and night, because they viewed her as a little sister and saw it as their responsibility, and right, to torment her. Even he’d admit that they did a great job. They took their job seriously, very seriously.

  “Do you want me to kick their asses?” he asked, linking their fingers back together as he adjusted the angle of penetration.

  “No,” she muttered, sounding pathetic and making him glad that she couldn’t see him smile. “They’d just make fun of me more. I’ll deal with it, I guess,” she decided, finishing it off with another drawn out sigh that had him biting back a chuckle that would probably end with him taking a very cold shower.

  “Do you want me to distract you?” he asked, punctuating each word with a slow roll of his hips.

  “I suppose,” she said, sounding put out.

  “I could stop,” he offered, releasing her hands so that he could slide his hands between Danni and the bed. He cupped her breasts, making sure that her firm nipples peeked through his fingers so that they rubbed against the comforter as he pushed back inside her.

  “And I could kill you,” she reminded him, earning a chuckle, because he knew that if he stopped right now, she’d kick his ass, make him finish her off with his mouth and then leave him to either relieve himself or deal with blue balls, neither prospect sounding pleasant at the moment.

  Chapter 54

  “Wait. Where are you going?” she managed to ask, panting heavily as she struggled to push herself up on trembling arms.

  “Shit!” Christofer said, rushing across the room towards the door, shoving his hand through his hair, his pants unbuttoned and his-

  “You may want to put that thing away,” she said, trembling as she watched him, torn between amusement and frustration as he grabbed his erection, forced it back into his pants and-

  “God damn it!” he shouted, stumbling into the wall, wincing as he reached down and cleared the zipper.

  “Christofer?” she said, trying to get his attention as he continued towards the door.

  “Be right back,” and with that, he was gone.

  “Okay……….,” she said, watching as the door closed behind him, leaving her to wonder what the hell just happened.

  One minute he’d been driving her out of her mind as he’d kissed his way down to where she really needed him and the next he was falling off the bed, stumbling to his feet and racing for the door. She’d still been able to scent his lust, but there had been another scent coming off him, one that she couldn’t quite figure out.

  As she sat there, struggling to catch her breath, she thought over what had happened over the last few minutes, trying to figure out what she’d missed. Maybe-

  “Go sniff her,” Christofer suddenly demanded just as the bedroom door flew open and Ephraim and Caine came stumbling into the room, struggling to zip up their pants.

  “Ummm,” was her only response, because really, what else could she say when the man that she loved left her naked, trembling and alone in bed only to return a few minutes later, shoving two half naked men into their room and demanding that they sniff her.

  “Bossy bastard,” Ephraim muttered as he finished buttoning his pants.

  “You could have at least waited until I was done!” Caine snapped.

  “Sniff!” Christofer bit out, pointing at her.

  It took a few seconds for what he was asking them to do to really sink in and when it did, her jaw dropped. He didn’t just seriously ask them to-

  With a muttered curse, Ephraim walked over to her, leaned over and inhaled, but before she could die of mortification, Caine followed suit, swearing more vividly as he leaned over, inhaled, frowned, inhaled and muttered a whole new genre of curses.

  “Is she?” Christofer demanded, staying where he was by the door.

  “Yeah,” Caine said, rubbing his hands roughly down his face.

  “It’s fresh. Probably by just a few hours,” Ephraim explained, doing a wonderful job of keeping her in the dark.

  “It shouldn’t be possible,” Caine said, dropping his hands by his sides as he shared a look with Ephraim.

  “She was fully marked.”

  “It must have grown back during the change,” Caine said, shooting her a curious look that had her pulling her sheet up higher as she tried to make sense of their words.

  “We overfed her,” Ephraim explained. “It was probably enough blood to fix everything and restore her body.”

  “What grew back?” Christofer asked, and at that moment she could have kissed him, because she was wondering the same damn thing.

  “Her uterus,” Caine said gravely, his expression full of pity as he looked at her. At least she thought he’d said her uterus, but that was impossible.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Christofer demanded. “What does her uterus have to do with her being marked?”

  And just like that, she lost the ability to breathe.

  They knew.

  “When a shifter marks a human,” Ephraim explained, looking disgusted, “they make it impossible for their property to have a child. They want their property sterile. They might tolerate their property having sex with someone else, but they refuse to allow anyone else to set any type of claim.”

  And just like that, her stomach dropped with the realization of why tearing her back apart hadn’t been enough for the beast that attacked her. He’d wanted to make sure that she could never have a child, because he’d seen her as nothing more than a thing to do with whatever he’d wished, even making sure that she was never able to live a full life and to-

  “She’s definitely pregnant,” Caine announced. “It’s a Pyte,” he added, sounding relieved and making her wonder what else he’d expected it to be when his announcement registered.

  “I’m sorry, but what did you just say?” she asked, absolutely positive that she’d misunderstood hi
m.

  Caine opened his mouth only to quickly close it and shoot Ephraim a panicked look. Ephraim simply rubbed the back of his neck as he muttered, “We fucking suck at this.”

  “There’s no way that I could be pregnant,” she said, expecting all three men to quickly agree, but they didn’t.

  “Can we have a minute?” Christofer asked, suddenly looking exhausted.

  “Congratulations, Cloe,” Ephraim said with a warm smile as he headed for the door. Caine said something, probably congratulating her also, but she couldn’t hear him over the loud buzzing going off in her head as she struggled with the news.