“—I want to touch you so badly that my fingernails are carving up my own palms, from clenching my hands. So is that okay?”
“Is what okay?” I appreciate the fierce nature of her words, but I’m not sure I followed them.
“If I touch you. I mean, it’s not so much that I want to, really. But I feel like I need to. So maybe if I indulge that impulse, it’ll just…go away. Like scratching an itch.”
“You’re welcome to touch me.” Though I desperately hope this doesn’t feel for her like the time-release stimulant felt for me and Dreyer—an artificial and impersonal attraction.
“Can you keep your hands to yourself, if I do?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“Of course it’s not what I want!” Her brows dip, her fiery gaze burning straight into my soul. “But it’s what I’m asking for. Because I just met you.”
I nod, though it takes all the willpower I have. “I won’t touch you unless you ask me to.”
You’re a fool, the beast growls at me. Claim her.
“That’s not good enough.” Her hand finds my chest, though she seems wholly unaware that her own fingers have jumped the gun. “I’m definitely going to ask you to touch me. I may ask for something more than that. But I want you to say no, when I ask. Okay? Because that won’t really be me asking. I’m under the influence of your chocolate sex scent, and that’s not fair. Okay?”
I make myself nod again. “I’ll turn you down no matter what you ask for.” I only pray my willpower is up to the challenge.
“Great. Now take off your shirt. But only your shirt. No matter what else I ask you to take off.”
Growling, I sit up and grab the hem of my prison-issued tee in a cross-armed grip. I am not accustomed to being ordered around. I don’t like it. I want to give an order of my own—a demand that she reciprocate with an article of her own clothing. “I’m confused about how I’m supposed to know which of your requests to grant,” I admit as I pull my shirt over my head.
Lilliana’s eyes widen and she chokes on…nothing. “Good god almighty.” Her heated gaze focuses on my torso. “Have you been walking around looking like that under your clothes all day?”
“No. I looked like your friend Warren for most of the day.”
She snorts. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. Warren doesn’t do it for me.”
I desperately want to do it for her.
Her hands softly skim my pectorals, and my pulse leaps so hard that the flashlight on the floor seems to be…strobing. “You’ve just been walking around all day long,” she murmurs. “Naked as the day you were born, under these clothes.”
I laugh. “You are also naked as the day you were born, beneath your clothes.” The very thought of which makes my cock throb miserably. “That’s the definition of ‘clothed.’”
“Whatever. Lie down,” she orders, but before I can comply, she pushes me onto my back and flops onto her left side next to me, her head propped on one hand. “Were you like this before they…changed you?” Her fingers wander my chest, her touch both blissful and inadequate.
“Like what?”
“Ripped. Bulging.” Her glance darts toward my erection, and I resist the urge to thrust my hips upward and show off what I have to offer her.
My shrug is awkward, because I’m lying flat. “I didn’t exactly spend my days wrapping a tape measure around my biceps.”
“What did you spend your days doing?”
“Fighting. Surviving.” Leading my men.
“Oh yeah. Soldier.” Her hand trails down my arm, and it takes an inhuman amount of self-control not to press into her touch. To demand more. Lilli groans, then she licks her lips. “I’m sorry, but I need…” She leans down, and her sweet little tongue licks the tip of my right nipple.
“Fuck.” My cock jerks, and I nearly shoot into my pants. “Don’t do that. Please.”
“I can’t help it.” She leans down for another taste, and I catch her throat in my hand, my grip loose and open, so I don’t hurt her.
Her pulse flutters beneath my fingers, and I am so fucking hard. “Lilliana—”
“It’s Lilli.”
“Lilli. If you don’t want to be touched, do not do that again.”
“But…I do want to be touched.”
I shift us both, and in a heartbeat, she’s beneath me on the bed, my knee wedged between her thighs. I can feel the heat from her body seeping through both her clothing and mine. She smells so good.
Her gaze is glued to mine, but she looks…confused. Unsure how she wound up beneath me. My hand slides down her side, over her shirt, and she inhales deeply. She arches into my touch—until my fingers find the hem of her shirt and slide beneath the material, indulging in the soft warmth of her bare flesh.
“Wait. Stop. This isn’t what I wanted.” But she’s lying. I can hear that in her voice. I can smell that in her scent. I can feel it in the way her hand clutches my arm, as if she’s anchoring herself with that grip, to keep her fingers from wandering.
“Yes, it is.” That thrumming begins low in my throat again, and the scent of her arousal swells. She wants me as badly as I want her.
“No!” Lilliana shoves me over and rolls off the mattress. Leaving me panting in a dissipating cloud of her arousal. Alone on the bed.
A growl rolls up my throat before I can stop it. I’m on my feet in an instant, stalking toward her. Sniffing the air. Desperate for another whiff of her scent.
“Carson…” There’s warning in her voice. She raises one finger like a teacher scolding a child. “Stay back.”
The room looks different, suddenly. Brighter. Crisper. My focus has sharpened, like it does when I hunt Brennan’s latest challenge on the playground. The beast inside me is a predator, and by backing away from me, she’s established herself as prey.
Fuck.
It’s all I can do to keep from charging her at full speed. From pinning her to the wall, ripping her pants off, and lifting her until her legs settle over my shoulders, so I can lick her until she screams my name. That’s what capturing this prey would mean. Winning her over. Showing her what I can do for her.
Instead, I move slowly, every motion tightly controlled. Yet that seems to make her even more skittish. As if she can’t trust my slow, careful movements.
Smart girl.
“Carson. Please. This isn’t funny. Stay back.”
“I would, if that were really what you want. But it isn’t.” My voice sounds odd. Deeper and more gravelly.
“You don’t know what I want.” She props her hands on her hips, and my gaze snaps into focus on them, instinctively tracking the sudden motion.
“You’re wet, and I can smell it, Lilliana. Like I can smell the fucking rain.”
“I… You’re serious?” Her cheeks are red again, but that hasn’t dampened the scent of her arousal. She likes knowing I can tell. “You can smell…that?”
I nod slowly. “I’ve been smelling it all night. I want to taste it too. Do you want me to taste you?”
She groans—a sound she should be making as I slide deep inside her. Then she shakes her head, but that fib is already crumbling around her.
“Don’t lie to me.”
Her temper flares, a jolt of a sharper heat spiking above the warm scent of her lust. “Don’t tell me what to do!”
I smile as I steal closer, on alert for any sign that she might bolt. “So you admit you were lying?”
“It’s none of your business what I say. Or what I’m feeling.”
But that’s not true either. She belongs with me, whether she understands that yet or not. And the beast is thrilled by her insistence upon being caught. Being won over…
I’m willing to play that game, because I know that in the end she will be mine. And I desperately want to be hers.
“Just breathe,” I whisper, hoping to calm her.
“I don’t want to breathe! Because then I smell you, and I want other things!” Her gaze flicks over
my shoulder, toward the door, and a growl rolls up from my chest. She’s overwhelmed and looking for a way out. I understand. But I can’t let—
She darts to the right, and I lunge into her path, my arms out, my pulse racing. This is fucked up. She’s frightened, and all I want to do is set her at ease, so she’ll give me a chance. Yet the scent of her fear only makes my cock harder.
The beast glories in the chase. He thinks this is normal. That he’s supposed to catch her to prove he can. To prove himself worthy of her attention.
“Carson, stop!” The sour scent of fear overwhelms the warm musk of her lust, and my mouth starts to water. My hands twitch, eager to clutch at tender handfuls of her soft flesh.
Lilliana glances at the door again, and my growl swells into a snarl. She jumps, uneasy gaze glued to me.
I take a deep breath, forcing my pulse to slow. Then I speak clearly and slowly, hoping she can hear the urgency in my voice. “Lilliana. Do not run.”
10
LILLI
“Do not run.”
Chills race up my spine, and I freeze.
Vaguely, I remember my father telling me on a camping trip, when I was a kid, that if I were to meet a bear in the woods, I should… Um… Tell the bear to leave in a loud, firm voice and keep my pepper spray handy.
But I’ve already tried my firm voice, and I seem to have left my pepper spray back on my homeworld. Not that any of that matters, because Carson isn’t a bear. I don’t know what kind of beast he is.
He doesn’t know either.
“What’s happening?” I ask in a low, steady voice. I get that he’s wrestling urges and impulses that he doesn’t understand. That he’s never felt before. But so am I.
“You’re acting like prey,” he growls. “That makes the beast want to hunt you.”
“That’s you! You’re the beast! Two sides of the same coin, remember?”
“Yes…and no. This is new for me too. In two years of wrestling with the beast, I’ve never felt like this. Not on the lab table. Not hunting any of Brennan’s ‘challenges.’ I’m not sure who’s in control right now, so I need you to be smart.”
“What does that mean?” I’m afraid to move. “What does the…um…beast want?”
“You. He wants you. For the record, so do I, but he has a different idea of how to go about…getting you.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” One breath slides into the next, and suddenly I’m panicking.
“Calm. Down.” That weird thrumming sound echoes from Carson’s throat, and I swear to god, the rhythm matches my pulse. As if this sound were engineered specifically to lull me into…relaxing. It makes me crave his skin. This sound makes me want to crawl on top of him and rub my body all over his. It makes my stomach tense and is echoed in the fierce, aching throb between my thighs.
The compulsion to touch him is so strong that I’m already reaching him before I realize what’s happening.
I snatch my hand back. “Stop that! Stop making that sound! Is that how the beast plans to…get me?”
“He doesn’t want to hurt you. He just wants to catch you. My body is telling me this is part of some weird courting ritual.”
“Hunting me? That’s fucked up, Carson.”
“It’s not hunting. It’s chasing. He expects you to run. He wants you to run. So he can catch you. He thinks that’s what you want.” Carson blinks, but his gaze refocuses on me in an instant. “Obviously I can’t question whoever donated these genes, but this feels to me like a game. Like a…a courting ritual. The beast expects to have to catch his woman.”
“His woman? Like I’m some kind of possession?” The very thought pisses me off, yet at the same time, the idea of being wanted that badly…
No. That’s an irrational thought. A rabbit doesn’t feel flattered when a wolf wants it for dinner!
“Not a possession. Yet still his. Mine.” Carson’s voice devolves into a growl on the last word. His eyes are dilating. “He wants to catch you and earn your affection, by—” His mouth snaps shut, and for just a moment, a very human look of surprise overtakes the tense, hungry snarl that his features have become.
“By what?” Though I’m not sure I want to know.
“By fucking you. By giving you pleasure.”
“Screw that, I don’t need any man—or beast—to ‘give’ me pleasure. I’m damn well capable of taking whatever pleasure I want.”
That thrumming rises from his throat again, like the oscillation of a tiny fan, and my lady parts clench. “I think he and I would both be just fine with that.”
“It wasn’t an offer,” I snap. Yet the ache between my legs is fierce, and knowing he can tell—that he can fucking smell my need—just makes that need worse. “You’re not going to win a woman over by demanding she sleep with you within hours of meeting you.”
“I know that,” he growls. “But the beast isn’t into a slow burn. He wants what he wants, when he wants it—”
“Because he’s wild?”
“—and I’m doing the best I can to hold him back. So I need you to stop acting like prey, so he’ll stop acting like a predator.”
“Why am I responsible for how you and your ‘beast’ behave?” I demand, and when I prop my hands on my hips, his gaze follows the motion again, eyes dilating even further. No sudden movements, Lilli. “That’s classic abuser rationalization. ‘Officer, I wouldn’t have lost my temper if she’d just done what I wanted her to.’ Fuck that! Control your own damn temper.”
Carson’s jaw clenches, like he’s grinding his teeth. “Under rational circumstances, you’re absolutely right. And I agree with you. It shouldn’t be up to you to tame my beast.” His brows draw low. “But this isn’t a rational circumstance, and that’s no more fair to me than it is to you. I didn’t ask to have this bastard’s genetic material woven into my own, and if I’d met you without the influence of an obviously barbaric alien’s DNA, I’d offer to buy you coffee. Or a drink. But right now, my body is demanding that I pin you down and fuck you with my tongue until you beg me to do it all over again with my cock.”
“Oh my god! Bold, much?” I’ve had customers at the Resort who wanted much more from me, without offering me any pleasure at all, but they rarely laid it out so…brazenly.
Still, a tongue fucking sounds…
I press my thighs together again, and his fucking mating thrum swells until the whole damn room seems to be humming. “Stop that,” I snap. “You’re only making it worse.”
“Sorry.” He frowns in an obvious effort to hold back the sound—an audio panty-dropper. “Lilliana, I’m asking you, nicely, to help me. This seems to be about body language. I need you to signal to the beast that you’re not prey—not even of the erotic variety. That you’re not going to run, so he doesn’t need to chase you.
“How do I do that?” I have a feeling I’m not going to like the answer.
“Come closer on your own. Hopefully that’ll ease this need to...well, to bring you closer.”
Drag. He means drag me closer. I can practically see his effort to censor the beast’s demands into something that won’t offend me. Or scare the shit out of me. And to my surprise, I find that reassuring. He seems to be a decent man—an evolved man—at the mercy of some rather barbaric urges.
“Well, if it’ll save my clothes from being ripped off…” I take a single step forward, holding his gaze as boldly as I can. Trying to communicate to this “beast” that I am not prey. “It’s not like I have a huge wardrobe to choose from.” Fresh clothes are hard to come by on a prison planet.
I take another step, but Carson’s eyes only dilate further, until there’s little left of his oddly light irises. “Now what?” I edge a little closer to him, even though this approach flies in the face of my instinct, which is to keep as much space as possible between myself and any predator I encounter.
“Now we lie down and try to get some sleep.”
But I’m not sure I want to spend the night alone here with him, even ju
st sleeping.
I like Carson—I think—but I can’t trust his beast. The absurdity of that thought draws a near-hysterical burst of laughter from me. Yet as bizarre as it sounds—as it still feels—this is real. I saw him let go of Warren’s shape and take on his own. Well, this one, anyway. Though I have no way of knowing for sure that this is Carson’s real face. I know nothing about him, other than what he’s told me, and I don’t know how much of that I can trust.
What the hell was I thinking? I can’t leave the planet with him! His offer to let me leave, if I’m not happy with him and his men, depends upon his beast letting him let me leave.
I should go home. Right now.
He frowns, as if he can hear what I’m thinking, but when his nose twitches, I realize it’s more likely that he’s smelling it, somehow. Is there some change in my scent that hints at what I’m feeling?
“Okay. But first I have to pee.” Yet I regret the words as soon as I’ve said them. I’m pretty sure he can fucking smell it when I lie, and even if he somehow believes that I have to go to the bathroom, how am I going to explain bringing my stuff with me?
Screw the bedsheet. He can keep it.
My gaze flicks toward my backpack before I can resist the impulse, and Carson begins to growl again, low and steady. “Lilliana…”
“For the last fucking time, it’s Lilli!” I snap. The growling stops, and his irises retake some of the territory his pupils have claimed. Either I’ve surprised him out of some kind of alien mating fever, or I don’t feel like prey to him when I shout.
“Lilli, if you need to relieve yourself, I can escort you into the woods.”
“You mean you can follow me, stalker-style?”
His oddly pale brows dip into a frown. “This is a prison planet. Would your friends let you venture into the forest on your own?”
Damn it. “No, we go in pairs, when we have to go outside. But that’s not very often, because our building has two functioning toilets.”
“This one might too. Would you like me to check?”
“No,” I snap. “I can hold it.”
Escape (Project Vetus Book 1) Page 11
