The beast let go when she lay quivering, his satisfaction a low rumble in his throat as he rolled her over, propped her up.
“Isaiah?”
“Kneel up.”
The words were thick and hot. Addy shivered but obeyed, nothing in her scent indicating fear. Son of a bitch. Why wasn’t she afraid? Isaiah needed her to be afraid. Maybe then he could subdue the beast.
The beast came over her, ready to take. The man grappled with the animal, not winning the war but gentling the moment. Keeping the beast from thrusting. Easing the claiming to possession, holding Addy firmly with his hands as her pussy spread over the head of his cock. Tight. So tight.
“Oh, my God.”
“Relax.”
She needed to relax. He couldn’t let the beast hurt her any more than he could let go of her breast. Any more than he could stop from pinching her nipple in tiny pulses that coordinated with the controlled press of his hips.
“It hurts,” she gasped.
“I’m sorry,” he groaned.
“But it’s good, too.”
Shit, why did she have to say that? The beast smiled, and damn it, even part of the man liked hearing that. He could feel the beast gathering strength. He was losing control. Soon it would be the beast. Isaiah had to prepare her. Sliding his hand down, he cupped her pussy, slipping his fingers through the slick folds. Jesus, she was wet. So beautifully wet. He found her clit, hard and still throbbing. He stroked it. She jerked back.
“Ohhh.”
Too much. It was too much. Gritting his teeth, he gentled his touch, bringing her back up to the pinnacle as he pressed his cock deeper, ever aware of the beast’s impatience, looking for its moment. Addy cried Isaiah’s name and pressed back. Her pleasure spilled over his hand. God, she was sweet.
The beast, always the ultimate predator, took advantage in the flicker of his attention, took control, and surged deep.
The howl echoed in his head, in the lean-to. Addy screamed and collapsed. The beast followed her down, thrusting steadily, following only one thought. Deeper. His hard cock slid along her slick channel, jerking with every caress of her inner muscles, rejoicing at every quiver. Pushing ever deeper, needing to give her more. Always more. Needing her to take, to claim in return. His groin pressed against the softness of her ass. In a convulsive jerk, he pressed farther still. Enjoying the heart-shaped beauty of her ass, the perfection of his darker skin blending with the delicate white of hers. The utter rightness of taking her.
His. His.
Her pussy rippled along his cock in a prelude to release. Yes. Again the exultant cry came from within.
Isaiah leaned down. Addy pressed back. The curve where her neck joined her shoulder tempted him. His gums ached. More of that exotic flavor spiced his mouth, coated his tongue. His balls pulled up tight. His spine tingled, his release built. And this time when the beast bit, the man didn’t protest. The lust was too strong. The woman too right. The orgasm too intense.
His.
Son of a bitch, his.
When the last spasm passed, when he could breathe, Isaiah pulled from her body, massaged her back, rolled to his side, and opened his eyes, dreading what he would see. He’d hurt her when he’d promised her stars. He’d wanted to make it perfect, but in the end he’d failed.
“I’m sorry.” Such an inadequate thing to say.
“Why?” Addy asked, nestling her cheek on her arm.
“I hurt you.”
She shook her head. “That was to be expected.”
“I’ve never hurt someone like that before.”
Unbelievably, she smiled. “You’ve never made love to a virgin before.”
He brushed the hair from her cheek, belatedly checking to make sure his claws were gone. Jesus, she addled his brain. “Apparently not.”
“Good.”
She had no right to sound so satisfied when she should be crying.
He touched the hollow of her shoulder. The wound was already healing. In a minute it wouldn’t be visible. He put his hand over it, hiding it from her. He wasn’t ready to explain it. “I bit you.”
“Yes.” Her smile turned sultry. “Twice.” Her hand cupped his cheek. “Thank you.”
Two times too many. One more would have been disastrous. Thank God he’d managed some control. She shivered.
“You’re cold.” He reached for the blanket.
“And tired,” she said, turning onto her side and scooting back against him. “Very tired.”
It was the most natural thing to put his arm around her waist and pull her back against him.
“You’re so warm.”
And she fit in the curve of his body as if she were meant to be there. Isaiah rubbed his chin over the top of her head. “A side benefit from what They did.”
“They?”
Shit. He hadn’t meant to let that slip. He never slipped. What the hell was wrong with him? “Nothing.”
Addy yawned. “Who are They?”
“Just some people I once knew.”
“Knew?” She tried to turn. He kept her put. “Did you lose them in the War?”
He remembered Their screams. Their blood. The satisfaction. “Yes.”
She yawned again and nestled her cheek against his upper arm. “I’m sorry.”
He wasn’t. Tucking her closer, he willed the memories away. They had no place here tonight. He didn’t want anything between them except the remnants of ecstasy. He had enough to think on.
“Go to sleep, Addy.”
“But . . .”
“Go to sleep or I won’t make love to you again.”
He smiled slightly when she immediately went still. Staring off into the dark, he rolled the night’s events over in his mind, too restless to sleep. His gums still ached and that strange taste still lingered in his mouth. He’d bitten her hard enough that she should have been screaming. Hard enough that she’d have a scar, but she’d come in a torrent of ecstasy that he’d felt all the way to his soul. He checked her shoulder. The marks were gone now. He didn’t know what that was about, but his beast was silent and satiated in a way it had never been before. Almost content. That couldn’t be good. Son of a bitch, what the hell else could go wrong?
10
“JUST GOING TO SLIP INTO TOWN UNDETECTED, HUH? TAKE up as if nothing ever happened?” Isaiah asked dryly.
If she hadn’t thought she’d damage her elbow on his rock-hard stomach, she would have elbowed him right then. If telling him to shut up would have had any effect beyond tickling his sense of humor, she would have told him to shut up. Unfortunately, the meeting with her cousins was going to be dramatic enough. She didn’t need to be in the middle of a dispute with her rescuer as soon as they rode up. Never mind the issue that ladies didn’t tell gentlemen, no matter how disreputable, to shut up, and women who wanted to give the illusion of being in control didn’t lose their tempers.
“So I was wrong.”
Addy watched as the riders came over the hill, recognizing her cousin’s big palomino right off. Cole only rode that horse when he was out for blood.
“Uh-huh.”
She set her jaw and reached for her worry stone, stroking her thumb over the smooth surface ten times before stating calmly, “This just requires a slight adjustment to my plan.”
He chuckled, his chest vibrating against her side, reminding her again how little she knew about the man and all that she did know was hard and uncompromising. She watched the approaching riders, noting Cole’s ramrod-straight posture.
In contrast to Cole’s aggressive posture, Isaiah seemed relaxed against her, almost as if he was anticipating the coming confrontation. Nothing in his drawl indicated tension, either.
“A big change, if you ask me.”
Good grief! What was it with men? Why did they always look forward to a fight? “No one asked you.”
She cut him a glance out of the corner of her eye, very aware of his body behind hers, his thighs beneath hers. To anyone watching, they presente
d a very intimate picture. Hot on the heels of that thought came another. Her cousins would kill Isaiah if they knew just how intimate he had been with her. She’d seen enough fights to know how Isaiah would look after her cousins vented their displeasure. That was not acceptable. “Do you or do you not want me to tell them you’re not my kidnapper when they catch up with us?”
That grunt could have been laughter. Contrary man.
“That’s not an answer.”
“I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
“To see how aggravated your rescuers are before I make a commitment.”
She looked at him over her shoulder. “Did you just make a joke?”
“I’m a killer. A sense of humor isn’t something I brag on.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t have one.”
“Doesn’t mean I do, either.”
“I think you have one.”
“I don’t.”
He was lying. She remembered the night before, how he’d made her fly without hurting her. She touched her shoulder where he’d so erotically bitten her. And then she remembered how he’d spooned around her afterward, his concern, the way he’d stroked her arm soothingly and rested his chin on the top of her head. “I think maybe you’re not so much a killer as you’d like me to believe.”
“Don’t chase fairy tales with me, little girl.”
Gruff and hard, the order brooked no resistance. The tone irked her as much as that “little girl.” “I don’t believe in fairy tales.”
Another snort. “You do if you think I’m anything less than a killer.”
He was always trying to make her think badly of him. “Huh!”
Addy didn’t have any doubt that Isaiah could kill. But to define himself as solely that? No. That she didn’t believe. And darn it, it irked her that he always made himself look so bad when he’d been nothing but good to her. “Maybe I just see you as more.”
“Shit.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d watch your language.”
“That’ll cost you more.”
She rubbed her worry stone between her fingers. She didn’t have any more money to spare. “Fine. Swear to your heart’s content, but I’m still believing what I want to.”
“You’re a means to an end, lady.”
Addy rubbed the stone harder at the likely truth of that, pushing away the hurt that last night meant nothing to him. “Because you want the money?”
“Why else?”
She didn’t know. But she found it very hard to believe money was the motivation for anything this man did. He’d looked too settled in the barren lean-to. Too comfortable in the remoteness of his home. The riders ahead veered to the left. Cole had spotted them. “Well then, you’d better give me my money’s worth when my cousins get here.”
“You afraid of them?”
Cole had a tendency to yell. “Cole can be unpleasant.”
The muscles beneath her thighs tightened. “Toward you?”
Did she imagine it, or did Isaiah’s grip tighten, too?
How much to confess to? “Sometimes.”
“Why?”
“Cole thinks I’m headstrong.”
“That’s not necessarily always bad—”
“Thank you!”
“But I can see a few cases where it would be,” he continued dryly, as if she hadn’t interrupted him.
She wasn’t opening that door if he was going to leave it closed.
Isaiah was persistent. “So why does your cousin think you’re headstrong?”
“He has the silly notion that I don’t take the proper precautions with my safety.”
“I think I’m beginning to like him already.”
“It’s not your job to like my cousins. It’s your job to keep unpleasantness away from me.”
His hand dropped to the butt of the rifle in the scabbard by her right thigh. It was a well-formed, lean, and sinewy hand. “You want me to shoot them?”
“No!”
“It would cut down on unpleasantness.”
“It would also cut my family down to three.”
“That your cousin Cole on that big palomino?”
“Yes.” Isaiah’s chin brushed her temple as he checked out her cousins’ approach. For an inconsequential contact, it had too strong an impact on her pulse. “Might not be a bad plan. Your kin’s driving those horses with the intent to kill.”
She wished she could argue, but her cousins were riding hard. “Well, they should be happy, not mad.”
“Why’s that?”
She sighed and shifted, wishing it wouldn’t be indelicate to rub the inside of her thigh where Isaiah had bitten her. It itched now as much as it had burned so exotically the night before. “For sure, this incident will be ammunition in Cole’s arsenal of arguments as to why I should not live by myself.”
She felt more than heard Isaiah’s chuckle. “I’m liking him more and more.”
And she was beginning to like Isaiah’s dry sense of humor that he supposedly didn’t have. “That won’t last.”
They were getting closer. Their expressions clearer. From here she could see the dark shadow of three days’ growth of beard on her cousins’ faces. The darker spots of sweat on the horses’ chests. They’d been riding hard. Their tempers were going to be short.
She had the irrational urge to grab the reins and turn the horse and run. Cole was not going to be reasonable about this. He, Reese, and Dane might just hog-tie her and drag her back to the ranch. She couldn’t let them do that. They just didn’t understand how the totality of their love combined with their definition of protection was as much a prison as the one from which they’d rescued her. As much as they wanted to wrap her in cotton wool and tuck her away on a tidy shelf, she’d lived too much to be content being sheltered. Experienced too much to believe that anybody’s opinion of what was right for her was better than her own. She was a woman, not a child. And she’d make her own choices.
Isaiah’s fingers brushed her thigh as he reached for the rifle. Ahead of her, Cole reached for his. Addy braced her feet on top of Isaiah’s and stood, plastering a huge smile on her face and waving. From what she’d seen of Isaiah and what she knew of Cole, both were more likely to shoot than wait for her to get out an explanation. A tug on the back of her skirt plopped her back down.
Isaiah was as difficult as Cole in his own way and that just wasn’t going to work. She’d had enough of violence. Tending bullet wounds was bound to end in delay and she wanted to get home, back to her bakery, her house, her china, her things, her order.
She smiled and waved again to the oncoming riders. “Cole!”
Cole braced the rifle butt on his thigh. Slightly behind him and covering his back as always, her other cousins rode, sun glinting dully off the barrels of their guns. They were an impressive sight. Hard, deadly men on a mission. She shivered. Sometimes she forgot just how lethal her cousins could be. She wanted to throw her arms wide and shield Isaiah as soon as Cole focused on him.
“Put your gun away,” she whispered.
“Not a chance.”
“You’re supposed to be looking harmless.”
Another one of those grunts. His chest pressed against her back, pushing her forward. He tucked his arm around her waist and pulled her back against him.
“Nobody’s going to believe I’m your bodyguard if I go lookin’ harmless.”
Cole was close enough that she could see the frown between his brows as his gaze dropped to Isaiah’s hand on her stomach. She gave a tug, but Isaiah didn’t let go. She dug her nails in. All that got was another of those contrary chuckles.
“Take your hand off me.”
“Why?”
“You’re upsetting Cole.” She looked over her shoulder and was just in time to catch the edge of his smile. “You want to provoke him!”
“It’s been a dull ride.”
Elbowing him in the stomach was looking better and better. Too bad it might cause Cole to shoot h
im.
“I hired you, remember? You’re supposed to do what I say.”
“I’m supposed to do what you say up to the point of obtaining your goal. If you roll over and play dead now, or make me roll over and play dead now, you’re going to be back at that ranch faster than you can blink those pretty blue eyes.”
He had a point. But still, he didn’t need to keep his hand so intimately pressed against her body. “Find another place for your hand.”
It slid upward.
“A decent place,” she clarified. They were running out of time. Isaiah didn’t remove his hand, which could only mean one thing. She looked back over her shoulder again. She was going to have a darn crick in her neck from doing this so often. “What do you want?”
He didn’t pretend not to understand. “I want you to let me handle this.”
“They’re my cousins.”
“Exactly.”
“And what does that mean?”
“They’re not going to be reasonable.”
“And you will?”
“Didn’t say that, either.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m just saying, I’m better at handling unreasonable.”
Well, he probably did have a better grasp on it, seeing as how he was the most unreasonable person she’d ever met, but that didn’t mean she was just going to roll over. “You think that means that it qualifies you to handle my cousins?”
He pulled the horse up. “I think I’ve got a better shot of getting you what you want than you do.”
She glanced back at Cole. His eyes were narrowed against the sun, his jaw set. This wasn’t good. She knew that look. It meant he’d come to a decision. She bit her lip. In another minute he’d be close enough to overhear.
Cole cocked his gun and centered the muzzle on Isaiah. And her.
Addy dug her nails deeper into Isaiah’s hand. “Then start handling it.”
“THAT’LL be far enough,” Cole ordered.
Their horse took two more steps before Isaiah pulled it up.
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