Shifter's Claim (The Shadow Shifters)

by A. C. Arthur

  He moved again, this time placing his hands at her hips, looking up into her half-closed eyes. “Come to me. Bring all that sweetness to me,” he whispered hoarsely.

  With the words he lifted her until her knees were now planted on either side of his face.

  “Hold on,” he instructed her as he tightened his hold on her hips, pulling her center down until it was like a desired dessert only inches away from being devoured.

  She was warm to the touch, hot plump vulva lips drenched in her nectar. The sweetest taste to ever touch his tongue, he licked her once again, loving the soft dampness moving over his tongue. Deep in his chest something pulled and swirled like a brewing storm but Bas ignored it and licked her again. Her legs were spread wide as she bucked above him, breath hissing out of her. He licked inside her lips this time, noting the even softer contrast, the warmer center. All the while inhaling deeply, exhaling slowly. It was all over him now, her scent that is, like a heavy blanket covering him, coddling him. Another lick, a suckle that pulled one plump fold into his mouth and Bas dug his fingers into her hips. A growl rumbled in his chest as he released her, licked again, sucked some more. She bucked over him, rocking her hips in encouragement. He speared his tongue into her center, moving in and out as his hips mimicked that same motion. He couldn’t get enough of her and hungrily angled his head to take more.

  Above him Priya held onto the top of the bed frame, riding his mouth as she’d previously ridden his dick. Bas’s hands slid back to cup her buttocks, spreading her wider. He touched her rim, couldn’t resist the urge his cat had to join into this moment. Pressing inside the tight warmth made his mouth water and move quicker over her juncture, her sweetness coating his tongue and slipping in hot rivulets down his throat.

  As she came she yelled his name, her thighs clenched, holding his head tightly, assuring he did not stop what he knew had to be a sweet kind of torture. And as Bas’s tongue speared inside her, his own release broke free, hips tightening and lifting from the bed, spurts going up then dripping down onto him. He couldn’t whisper her name, couldn’t thank her for a momentary end to the agony of desiring her. All Bas could do was hold her as her body continued to spasm, lick every drop of her essence as her body released, and he loved every goddamned second of it.

  * * *

  The hot water was a blessing, the big fluffy bubbles that smelled of honey and musk a luscious treat, the man sitting behind her using a loofa sponge to send rivulets of water cascading down her shoulders an unexpected, yet desperately needed distraction.

  Priya sighed, letting her head loll back and rest on Bas’s shoulder. Closing her eyes, she tried not to think about the cat he’d become, the one he wore on his back and carried deep inside him. She tried not to think about the fact that the cat was a deadly creature and that she should have run like hell to get away from it and this place. But what Priya really tried not to think about was how good the night had actually turned out to be.

  Each time Bas touched her, licked her, caressed her, Priya felt inches of herself giving over to him, to this power that he had over women. On one level it was degrading as hell. Bas was an overconfident, too-slick womanizer, or at least that was what he appeared to be at first glance. Upon a little deeper reflection—and on a purely physical level—he was downright mesmerizing in bed. She couldn’t deny that even if she wanted to.

  On yet another level Priya felt like something else was going on between her and Bas, something just a little more serious than she figured either of them could have ever imagined. As they lay in the darkness of his room last night each of them had drifted into their own thoughts. She knew full well what her thoughts had entailed but really had no idea about his. Stunningly enough, she wanted to know. If she were being drawn to this man—not the story of his other half or their species and not simply the best sex she’d ever had in her life—but if this man were somehow pulling her closer to him, she wanted to know if her feelings were at least reciprocated.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she whispered without thinking twice about broaching this subject with him.

  He remained quiet at first. Priya expected nothing less. In the time she’d known him she’d noticed how he contemplated all of his responses before giving them. Whereas she was the exact opposite, saying what she wanted the moment she wanted, sometimes to her own detriment.

  “You don’t really want to know what I’m thinking,” he replied finally, moving so that the thick rigid length of his erection now rested beneath her buttocks.

  “That’s the obvious, Bas. I know you can do better than that.” He was also damned good at attempting to deflect her attention away from what she really wanted to discuss. He’d tried this each time she’d asked about the cat people and for the most part it had worked, up until she’d come face to face with his cat. This time she wasn’t going to be swayed, couldn’t be because there was still too much at stake.

  “So it’s not more sex that you want,” he continued with a lightness to his tone.

  Priya turned then. It was perhaps not the smartest move since water and bubbles sloshed over the lip of the tub, landing with a messy splatter on the marble floor. She didn’t care, she wanted Bas to look her right in her eye and deny what was really happening between them. Or at least, she wanted him to try.

  “I want to know how you plan to save my brother. I have no idea who they are or why they’re holding him, or why they chose me. Lolo, that’s my friend from work, the one you saw that day on the street. He’s been trying to track the IP address but hasn’t been able to do it and—”

  He touched two fingers lightly to her mouth. Priya closed her lips after her tongue had swiped quickly over his skin. A jolt of heat speared straight through to her center and she swallowed hard.

  “I have equipment here that I’m positive is years beyond what your friend Lolo has. I ran the IP addresses through a thorough search last night before I came up here. As soon as you discontinue the Q-and-A and let me out of this tub I’ll go to my office and find out where the e-mails originated.”

  His fingers had traced a heated path around her lips, over the line of her jaw, down to caress her neck. Tiny pricks of heat covered the surface of her skin. Priya wanted to shiver even though she wasn’t cold. She wanted to lift slightly, adjusting herself so that she was aimed directly over his thick length. She wanted him again. It was crazy and it was intense, like an addiction, she thought with an inner sigh.

  “Malik hasn’t always made the right decisions,” she told him. “He’s always been controlled by the drugs. No matter how many rehab programs I convinced him to join. It’s always been his crutch. I don’t know how to fix that.” It was the first time she’d said that aloud, the first time she’d admitted that she could not fix everything that was wrong with her family.

  “We are not responsible for our family or the decisions they make,” he told her. “It took me years to figure out that my parents’ divorce was their own doing, their own decision. We can only hold ourselves responsible for our own actions and decisions. Malik’s addiction is not your fault, neither is it your job to cure.”

  “But if he dies…”

  Bas shook his head, reaching up to cup her face with both hands. “I’m not going to let him die. I don’t think I could watch you endure that amount of hurt.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that, didn’t know how to respond. As it turned out she didn’t have to because he was kissing her by then, his mouth working slowly and most assuredly over hers.

  His hands moved down to rub over her shoulders, down her bare back to cup her cheeks. Priya let herself drift into the kiss, loving the stroke of his tongue over hers. As his tub was much wider and longer and more sumptuous than the one in her apartment she was able to spread her legs wider, her hands gripping his shoulders as she moved into his touch.

  His touch that slowly slipped between her crease, the pad of one finger resting against her tight sphincter.

  “You have a gr
eat ass,” he whispered when he’d moved to kissing her jaw and then her ear. “I watched you that night at the fund-raiser. Every time you got up and walked around I watched you. I wanted you in this position from the first time I saw you.”

  Sex talk had never been high on Priya’s list, then again, foreplay had been condensed to kissing, minimal touching, and then the actual act. In these last few days with Bas she’d learned just how much her sex life had been lacking, before the self-imposed celibacy.

  “I was celibate,” she said without thought.

  He pulled back to look at her quizzically. “Celibate?”

  “Yeah, long story short, it just wasn’t worth the headache.”

  Bas nodded as if he understood, gripping one cheek with one hand, pressing that other finger inside to breach her. Priya gasped with the pressure and the flow of new sensations.

  “Never pain, Priya,” he whispered as they locked gazes. “Nothing I do to you will ever hurt you.”

  She wanted to believe that, desperately needed to have a silver lining to all that had gone wrong in her life, but he was just a man and his reputation …

  Bas’s other hand slipped between her legs, finding her clit and massaging until she moaned.

  “Never pain,” she heard herself say, dropping her forehead to his and biting her lip. The pressure of his finger sinking deeper into her rear while he expertly titillated her clit was intense and overwhelming and deliciously naughty all at once. She lifted her hips, felt her thighs shake, and she moaned.

  “Only pleasure, pretty girl,” he said and then nipped her chin. “Only pleasure.”

  “Yes,” was Priya’s reply, the only one she could manage.

  The first orgasm came with a rush as she tightened like a bow above him. The moment she assumed she might manage a coherent thought Bas removed both hands, replacing the pleasure they’d evoked with the thick fullness of his dick, stretching her, filling her until she mumbled his name.

  “I want you like this every day, every night,” he told her. “I love you in this position.”

  She loved her in this position, or rather she loved how deeply he penetrated her from this position. Empowered by his words she lifted until she was sitting up straight, her back arched and she began to ride. Holding onto the sides of the tub for leverage she worked her hips over him, loved the look on his face as she lifted slightly then lowered down onto his length. His face didn’t contort like her previous lovers, but stayed in its perfect and gorgeous state. Only his eyes told of the intense pleasure he was receiving. They’d darkened until they were almost black, his lips drawn into a thin line as she continued to move. On impulse Priya planted her toes on the floor of the tub, pushing upward until only the tip of his dick remained at the base of her core. Bas hissed, a deep purr rumbling from his chest.

  “Priya.” He whispered her name, drawing it out until it was more like a moan.

  He grabbed her hips then and his eyes shifted. No longer dark, they were now a golden yellow, with tiny black slits down the center. His cat’s eyes. She didn’t know what she was about to say but she opened her mouth, only to swallow the words when Bas pulled her down hard on his dick. More water sloshed over the rim of the tub as he began pumping mercilessly inside of her. Her teeth chattered at the force, her breasts jiggling their own protests and Priya cried out.

  The next orgasm was even stronger than the first and Priya fell against Bas, out of breath and out of coherent responses. He held her tightly against him as his own release ripped free, caressing his hands up and down her back.

  “I didn’t plan for this,” he said quietly after they’d sat for too long in the now-tepid water.

  She’d turned her head so that her cheek rested on his shoulder. “Neither did I. And now I’m not so sure it was one of my smartest ideas.”

  “Impulsive, tenacious, and stubborn as hell,” he replied.

  “I don’t think criticizing me is one of your smartest ideas,” she quipped.

  He had the audacity to chuckle.

  “My father used to tell my mother she had a stubborn jaw and that she’d poke it out each time they argued. Considering how frequently that was, I was privileged enough to see that jaw more than I cared to. It looked just like yours,” he finished.

  Priya didn’t reply. Okay, she didn’t really know what to say to that. Bas had never talked about his parents to her before and she’d certainly never thought he would compare her to his mother.

  “Then they were divorced and I didn’t see either of them again,” he finished.

  “My father left, then my mother had so many men in and out of our tiny apartment I never knew what marriage was until I watched a few sitcoms on television,” she added.

  His fingers were making lazy circles along her spine. “I doubt my parents planned for their divorce and your mother probably didn’t plan to have all those short-lived relationships.”

  “But that’s how it ended,” she replied, thinking she already knew where this was leading.

  “Neither of us planned for this, we’ve already admitted that,” he said.

  She was getting a bad feeling. The mood had definitely shifted and not in her favor, she suspected. What the hell happened to the afterglow of sex? She didn’t want to sound needy or desperate or whatever, but she couldn’t help saying, “But it is now.”

  He nodded. “So it is.”

  She sat up then, covering her breasts because now she felt chilly and exposed. “And how will this end, Bas?”

  At first he looked at her as if he wasn’t really sure of what to say. Then the Bas she’d seen that first night, the one that stared back at her each time she Googled his name and the one that ran this resort with ease stared back at her.

  “It will end, these things always do. The how and why doesn’t really matter,” was his aloof response.

  And that was that, his close-lipped appearance seemed to say. He’d answered her question in another one of those roundabout ways and he had no intention of continuing with this conversation. Most men chose this moment to walk out of the room, to put some distance between them so the overly emotional female could have time to cry in private. Well, Bas was not most men. Besides, he couldn’t move as she was still sitting in his lap. And Priya, well, she’d never considered herself a woman who needed a man to complete her. All her life she’d told herself she didn’t need a man, didn’t want one if it meant she’d end up like her mother, pregnant every other year and dead broke every day. No, she had bigger and brighter plans for herself and up until the moment she’d been thrust into Bas’s world, she’d been living them out just fine. There was no way in hell she was going to let him change any of that. No matter how much the tightening around her heart threatened to choke her.

  “Well said,” she replied flippantly. “And now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’d like to find my brother and save his life, so I can get on with mine.”

  She moved as she talked, scooping up the loofa sponge and soaping it up once more. Priya didn’t talk any more as she soaped and washed her body, ignoring the fact that Bas was still in the tub with her and that he was once again powerfully aroused.

  In the next few minutes Priya was out of the tub, reaching for a thick soft towel from the gleaming silver rack by the door. Wrapping it around herself, she went to the sink and brushed her teeth before turning back to Bas. A small bubble of triumph floated through her as she saw him still in the same position, watching her quizzically.

  “If you leave me the directions, I will meet you in your office,” she told him.

  He looked like he’d swallowed that loofa sponge she’d just washed with. His gray eyes giving her a cool glint, his fingers gripping the sides of the tub. When she thought he was going to continue with his brooding silent treatment she opened her mouth to speak again. Bas stopped her with a raised hand.

  “I’ll send for you when I’m ready.”

  She thought about telling him she wasn’t his captive, again. Then she
thought about the clutching pain in her chest—the freakin’ emotions she hadn’t intended to develop—and figured distance might be the best decision here, it might actually keep her heart from breaking in front of him. “Right. I’ll be ready.”

  Chapter 22

  “I need you,” Bas spoke into the phone.

  He’d locked the door to his office and immediately booted up his computer. After printing all the e-mails Jacques had sent him from Priya’s account and the new list of her most recent text messages, he’d forwarded that e-mail and placed a very important phone call to Washington, D.C.

  “What’s going on out there? Rome and his two sidekicks have been in a closed meeting all morning. Training of the new soldiers is on a fast track and everybody’s on edge about what might happen next,” she told him.

  There was immediate concern in her voice, but no fear, never fear. Nivea Cannon was one of the toughest Shadow Shifters Bas knew. She was also the closest thing he’d ever had to a sibling. Bas’s parents and Nivea’s parents had known each other through their social circles in New York. As those social circles often included humans, Bas, Nivea, and her two sisters spent a lot of time together as the only shifters amongst the other kids their age. Bas was so proud when Nivea decided to leave New York and join Rome and his team in their work for the Assembly. And just recently he’d warned Nick to take extra special care of Nivea as she’d been given a very high-level assignment.

  “It’s probably about that shipment we intercepted a few days ago,” he told her. “How’s your other assignment going?”

  There was a moment of silence on the phone line that concerned Bas.

  “It’s going slow. If Agent Wilson was still looking into Rome and his dealings he’s decided to lay low for a while. I’ve been tracking him for weeks and keep coming up empty.”