Kitty cried out and dug her heels into his flanks. "Wait," she gasped. "Please. Wait. Just a second. I just need a second."
His aroused body screamed a protest, but Max ignored it. He didn't care if his heart gave out from the strain. If she needed him to wait or to slow down or to stop, that was exactly what he'd do. Never mind the roar in his head that told him slowing down was impossible and stopping unimaginable. He didn't care if it killed him so long as he never had to face seeing this woman look at him with disgust.
Another long, slow breath teased his cheek; another slow, deliberate wave of relaxation moved through her body until her passage unclenched enough to allow him to move.
"Okay," she whispered. "It's okay. I'm okay." Then the idiot woman shifted her hips to urge him even deeper. Again, she prompted, "More."
He tried to resume his slow pace. He intended to do the right thing, to ease inside her one bare inch at a time, to give her body time to stretch for him, to adjust to his presence within her. He wanted to treat her like the delicate treasure she was, but when he began to ease forward one more time, his cock nudged hard against her inner walls and she went wild in his arms. She cried out, breathless and hungry, and her hips jerked hard up against his, forcing him deeper inside her. That was all it took for his hard-fought control to snap like a worn-out rubber band.
With a roar, Max threw back his head and thrust deep within her, burying himself to the hilt in her tight, clenching passage. Kitty screamed, a frantic combination of pleasure and pain, and her hands flew to his shoulders, her nails digging unknowingly into his flesh.
He didn't even notice. How could he feel such an inconsequential pain when his body was being flooded with the most intense pleasure of his life? He could feel the head of his cock nudging the entrance of her womb, feel every ripple of her muscles as they clenched and released along his thick length. Even when they relaxed, she gripped him tighter than anything he'd ever known and he wanted to stay inside her until he died.
Displaying a mind-boggling flexibility that Max vowed to remember the next time she let him touch her, Kitty pulled her legs higher and hooked her knees over his shoulders. The movement drove him hard against her inner limits, and the two of them shuddered in unison.
"Never," Kitty mewled, her breathing quick and ragged, "never… thought… you'd fit."
Max swore and slid his hands beneath her to cup her ass and hold her steady against him. "Little idiot," he growled, slowly circling his hips and savoring her broken cries of pleasure. "I could have… hurt you… You taunted me… one… too many times."
She lifted one hand from his shoulder and tangled her fingers in his sweat-dampened hair. Pulling insistently, she urged his mouth down to hers and kissed him with a heat that threatened to melt his bones.
"You did," she whimpered. "It did hurt." When he swore and attempted to draw back, she yanked his hair and kissed him again. "And it was worth every minute."
He read the truth in her eyes and snarled with satisfaction. She had just given herself to him, completely and irrevocably, whether she knew it or not.
Digging his fingers into the soft flesh of her backside, Max lifted her into his thrusts and set about establishing a pounding rhythm guaranteed to drive them over the edge. It started slow, out of necessity. Her passage was too tight to allow him any greater speed, but gradually her body began to grow accustomed to him and he began to pick up speed. By the time she was throwing her hips up against him, he knew he had only seconds before he exploded.
With a shrug of his shoulders, he freed one hand and eased it carefully between their bodies, searching for the point of their joining. He found it with two gentle fingers and pressed lightly, hearing her breath break and her moans accelerate into desperate whimpers. His own breathing felt like sandpaper in his chest, and he could feel his balls tightening, the base of his spine tingling. Grunting, he thrust even faster and spread his fingers until his thumb flicked lightly, just once, over her engorged clit.
She flew apart in his arms and came screaming his name. It was the sweetest sound Max had ever heard.
Finally unclenching the fierce claws of his self-control, he threw back his head, lunged forward to bury himself as deep as he could go, and let himself flood her depths with hot spurts of semen.
In the back of his mind, beneath the incredible, mind-numbing pleasure, he detected the insidious thought that it was too bad she hadn't come into heat yet. He wanted her body to welcome his seed, to embrace it and nurture it, to let it divide and grow until her belly swelled and her breasts ripened and her pelvis broadened for his cub.
For the first time in his life, Max understood the drive to reproduce, to see his child be born and grow, knowing a part of him lived on in a new generation.
Kitty dissolved beneath him, her arms and legs slipping from around him to tumble limp and useless to the mattress. He heard her struggling to breathe a prayer his shaking arms would hold out for a few more minutes until the last spasms, until his orgasm had passed, because there was no way he could keep from crushing her until the last drop of seed had left his body.
When it did, he groaned and let himself collapse, but as he did, he gathered his mate's limp body in his arms and rolled so that she landed on top of him instead of the other way around.
Her head fitted perfectly beneath his chin, and her arms and legs hung limply over his sides as if she were a rag doll spread across his chest. No doll, though, had ever felt this warm and alive in his arms, and no one else's body had ever clung so sweetly to his cock, as if it couldn't bear to let him go.
Max closed his eyes and let himself relax, Kitty cuddled safe and motionless in his arms. By the time he finally caught his breath, her lack of motion almost had him worried, and he cracked an eye open to look down at her.
"You okay, kitten?" he asked, his voice gruff and low.
Still, she didn't stir. But her lips parted on a sigh. "Well, I'm going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, but other than that? Sure." Then she frowned. "On second thought, scratch that. I'll just be bedridden. There's no way in hell I'm going to be sitting anywhere for the foreseeable future."
Max winced even as he felt his ego swell. "Poor baby. I'm sorry I hurt you." He stroked his hands gently down the length of her spine until they closed around her hips. Pressing a kiss to her forehead, he gritted his teeth and swore to himself. This was not going to be pleasant for her. "Take a deep breath, kitten. Ready? One, two, three."
On the count of three, he lifted her and pulled his cock from her battered body. She let out a long, shuddering moan and bit her lip against the pain. When he slipped free, she swore softly.
"Damn." She drew in an unsteady breath and slowly forced her muscles to relax until she lay limp atop him once more. "I have to tell you, that was my least favorite part."
Max brushed her tangled hair away from her face and kissed her softly. "I'm sorry, kitten. I promise it won't be so bad next time."
Her eyes slitted open and she glared up at him. "I don't know about that, mister," she warned him. "The way I feel right now, I doubt you're getting that thing near me again for a good solid year. Maybe two."
Gently, he cupped her face in his hands and lowered his mouth to hers. "I'm sorry I hurt you," he repeated, "but I'm not sorry I took you. It was the most amazing thing I've ever felt in my life. If I have to wait ten years to have you again, I'll do it happily." He saw her eyes mist and her mouth soften into a tender smile and couldn't resist a little devilment. Sliding a hand to her bottom, he kneaded gently and brushed his mouth over hers. "Of course, that doesn't mean I won't spend all ten years trying to change your mind."
Laughing, Kitty grabbed his hand and wrapped it back around her waist. "Go ahead and try, sweetheart. At this point, even if you did manage to change my mind, my body would still be exercising its veto power. I feel like I have a bad case of internal rug burn."
Max sighed, not because he couldn't have her again right then—though he would
n't have fought her off if she'd tried to force him—but because the knowledge that he'd hurt her ate at him. He wanted to fix it, to make everything all better.
"How about a warm bath?" he suggested, stroking her back soothingly.
Kitty shook her head. "Maybe later," she mumbled, her voice muffled against his chest. "Sleep first."
He smiled and cuddled her closer. "Whatever you want, kitten."
He pressed a kiss to the top of her head and felt her go even more boneless as she slipped off to sleep.
"Stay here," she breathed just before her dreams claimed her. "All night."
"You couldn't make me go anywhere else," he murmured, then pressed his cheek to her shining red-gold hair and followed her into sleep.
* * *
Chapter Twenty
KITTY GUESSED THAT SHE'D CAUGHT HIM BY SURPRISE the next morning when she followed him outside after breakfast and faced him in the bright morning sunshine. "I want you to teach me how to shift."
"Why now?"
Kitty leaned her hip against the railing of the cabin's small porch and shrugged, her mouth quirking. "Because time is fleeting."
When Max remained silent, she sighed. "Because learning how to shift, how to control what I can do, is the real reason I came here. As cold as it makes me sound, it wasn't so I could meet my father, and it wasn't so I could get to know the pride. I just wanted to learn how to tie a leash on the lion inside me so that I wouldn't have to be afraid of losing control and hurting my friends or my family one day."
"But now?" Max prompted.
"But now things look different," she admitted, gazing out at the landscape to avoid having to meet his eyes. "Nothing is what I expected here, well, except maybe Drusilla and her awful offspring. But everything else is different. Martin. Ronnie. You. The pride. Yesterday really brought that home to me."
"How?"
Kitty searched for a way to answer that wouldn't make her sound like a small-minded bigot, but she couldn't find one. Maybe that was a sign that she had been and now she should take her lumps for it and move on.
"I was horrified when I realized I wasn't human," she admitted, wincing as she admitted out loud something she hadn't even admitted to herself before. "I was afraid that being a Leo meant that I wouldn't think the same way or feel the same way or be the same way. And when I thought about the pride, I thought it would be this primitive thing, that somehow a bunch of Leos together were even less human than one alone."
"A lot of people think that," he said, and the lack of judgment in his voice made her feel even worse somehow.
"But it's not true, and now I've seen that with my own eyes. I saw the way everyone pulled together to save those kids when you thought they were in danger and I saw the pride itself endangered." She struggled to find the right words. "Now that I know you all, I hate myself for thinking that my father's blood was some kind of curse. And I don't—"
She broke off and Max caught her chin in his fingers and forced her to look up at him. "What?"
Kitty searched for strength, felt her breath caught when she found it in his eyes. "I don't want my father to die still thinking I'm not part of his family."
"The only one who thinks that is you, kitten."
She shook her head. "No, I know I don't belong here, and that's the problem. That's why I need to learn to shift. Maybe after I do, I'll decide that I'm not meant to be a real member of the pride, but I want it to be my decision. I need to know that whereever I end up when this is over, it's because that's where I wanted to be, not because I wasn't strong enough to make a place for myself anywhere else."
"Why now?"
Kitty shrugged, her mouth quirking. "You're the one who told me we heal faster when we shift. Maybe I don't want to wait a year or two after all."
"Nice try." He caught her chin in his fingers and forced her to look up at him. "While I'm flattered to think you can't get enough of my expert sexual technique"—his sarcasm was obvious—"I'm not buying that story. Why now?"
His expression was calm and serious and patient, just like he was. When he looked at her, she couldn't help but tell him the truth.
"Because I don't belong here, and I know I don't belong here," she told him. "And maybe after I learn to shift and learn how to be a Leo, maybe I still won't belong here. I don't know. But if that's what happens, I want it to be my decision. I want to leave here knowing it's because this isn't what I wanted, not because I wasn't strong enough to handle it."
Max was quiet for a long time, his face set in that unreadable mask she hated.
"You know, you don't always have to be the strong one," he finally said, his tone just as even as his expression. "Sometimes you're better off letting someone else take care of things for you."
"I'm not arguing with that. I'm a modern kind of feminist. I think it's all right for a woman to let someone else take care of her, but only when that's what she wants. The only way I could ever let someone else fight my battles would be if I already knew I could still win them on my own."
Kitty wasn't sure why she'd told him that, especially not why she'd phrased it that way, but Max didn't even blink. He just studied her for another long minute, then nodded and drained his coffee.
"All right. Let's do it, then."
Suddenly, Kitty shifted uncertainly. "Should I change?" She tugged at the hem of the blue man's dress shirt she wore. "I don't want to ruin your clothes."
"Don't worry. You won't be wearing them long."
THE MAN WAS TRUE TO HIS WORD.
Forty-five minutes later, Kitty crouched naked in the sandy hills behind the cabin and swore. Half the words she used didn't even make sense to her—not surprising, since she'd never heard them before Max had used them last night—but that didn't seem to matter. Her own vocabulary had already proven woefully inadequate to express the frustration that had been building since they'd begun this ridiculous exercise.
"Come on. Try it again."
Kitty glared up at her tormentor, who sat cool, clothed, and unruffled on a boulder about ten feet in front of her. When he had started her lesson by ordering her to strip, she'd looked at him like he was crazy, an expression that didn't alter when he explained that if she wanted to have undamaged clothes to put on for the return trip to the cabin later, she had better not try shifting while fully dressed.
She had taken them off reluctantly, blushing every time she released a button or pulled off a garment. To his credit, Max had behaved with admirable restraint, not touching, not so much as leering, as she bared herself to the warm sun and his hot gaze. If it hadn't been for that heat, she might even have been insulted by his apparent uninterest in her body. But the glint in his copper eyes told her he wasn't uninterested at all; he was just biding his time.
Now, she barely even noticed her own nudity. The heavy layer of dust that coated her from head to foot almost felt thick enough to qualify as cloth, and her temper had been worn so ragged she didn't have time to feel self-conscious.
Or energy. Max had sapped every shred of that from her with his endless exercises.
"I've already shifted three times," she snapped at him. "Why are we still doing this? I just wanted to know how to shift on demand. Clearly, I've accomplished that."
"The first time took you fifteen minutes," he said bluntly. "If you're in a situation where shifting instantaneously means life or death, are you going to ask everyone else to hold on and give you a quarter hour or so to prepare yourself?"
She hated when he had a point. "The last time wasn't nearly that long."
"Five minutes and forty-seven seconds."
"What? Are you carrying a stopwatch?"
He just stared at her, wearing his superior expression.
Kitty swore again. "You know, I've never used language like this in my life," she said with a pointed glare. "Not before I met you, anyway."
He grinned. "I'd apologize for corrupting you, but since I have every intention of doing it again as soon as you're able, it would feel a tad
ingenuous." He glanced at his watch. "Ready?"
"At some point, I am going to make you pay for this."
"Just let me know when you're ready to start, kitten."
Grumping and grousing under her breath, Kitty took several deep, cleansing breaths, then closed her eyes and nodded.
Just like he'd taught her, she pictured herself standing just as she was, then began to visualize the transformation to take place. She saw herself bending over, her spine stretching, her hands and feet broadening, fingers shortening. She saw her face pull outward, her ear sliding up toward her scalp, a tail emerging from the tip of her tail-bone. She saw fur growing from her skin, the same strawberry blonde as her hair, saw the joints in her knees reverse themselves, and felt the warm earth of the desert against her haunches as she crouched in the dust.
Felt!?
Her eyes flew open and she gasped, a sound that came out as something closer to a sneeze. Glancing down, she lifted one huge claw-tipped paw, and her gaze flew back to Max. He was grinning from ear to ear.
"By George, I think she's got it."
Kitty felt the thrill of success and for the first time experienced the comfort of feeling at ease in her own skin. Or at least, this version of it. For the first time, she wasn't wondering what had happened or how she was going to get out of it. She was just feeling the pleasure of the novel arrangement of muscle and sinew and wondering what incredible things she might be able to accomplish with all this power and strength at her disposal.
I feel as if I could take on the world, she thought, licking her chops and surveying the desert around her with her eyes. I could climb a tree. Jump a river. Catch a rabbit. I could hunt a gazelle, if there were any around here and I didn't get squeamish at the idea of killing my own dinner.
She felt Max chuckle. Or maybe she heard it. It seemed like she heard it, only she heard it with her mind and not her ears.
Slow down, Miss Queen of the Forest, he said, voice rich with amusement. How about we start off slow? Like a nice game of chase.
Walk on the Wild Side Page 21
