Hunger's Mate (31 page)

And now he pushed all that foolishness out of his mind, focusing on following the instructions Syfon had given him.

It was dark inside the cave, this part of the entryway left purposely empty so that anyone who didn't have the specific instructions would think it simply a cave and soon turn around to retreat. There were a certain amount of steps to be taken, a right turn and then a left, more steps and then another latch. Before pulling this one he reached for her, wrapping his arm around her waist to pull her close.

“No,” she began to protest.

“I'm not feeling you up, I'm holding you so you don't fall,” he told her when she was fitted firmly against his chest. Moving the hand he had wrapped around her father's legs, he grabbed the latch that only he could see with his nocturnal vision and pulled.

“I'm not going to fall,” she was saying. “I know how to wal—”

Her words halted as she flattened her palms against his chest, then grabbed the T-shirt he wore to keep from losing her balance as the floor beneath them ripped away from the surrounding soil, moving them down farther underground.

“Don't worry,” Ezra said, looking down at her with a smile. “I've got you.”

When the floor was once again stable and Ezra had ushered them down off the platform, overhead lights illuminated.

“This way,” he told her without touching her again. Lights clicked on ahead of him in twenty-foot intervals each time he passed a hidden sensor. His booted feet made a muted sound on the concrete floor, while behind him, the flats Jewel wore clicked with each step.

She was just about to ask a question, he could swear he heard her intake of breath as she prepared to open her mouth, when around the corner came two shifters garbed in waist-length white jackets and navy blue slacks. They were from the medical facility, the black bags each of them carried full of supplies.

Before Ezra could growl his discontent, two more shifters appeared, one on either side of a stretcher. Holding his frown in place he moved quickly to lower Jewel's father down onto the bed. The second team of shifters immediately went to work on the man. But when the first two looked past Ezra and attempted to touch Jewel, she shirked back, staying close behind him.

“I'm not hurt. I don't need any medical attention,” she said.

It was a lie, Ezra knew, but he figured it might be simply bruising, or at least he hoped so. He was no medical expert but he hadn't seen any blood on her and she wasn't limping and her breathing hadn't been hampered, hence his bruising diagnosis.

“I'll take her with me,” he said.

“There could be internal injuries,” one of the shifters said after having looked Jewel up and down, no doubt surveying her for the same apparent injuries and bleeding as he had.

“I'll call you if there are,” Ezra told him.

He started to reach for her arm, to grab her and move her along with him down another level of the hallway. As his hand hovered in that space he thought better and let it fall until he could lace his fingers with hers.

“There are private rooms down this way,” he said when she looked down at his hand in hers then back up at him. “We'll just go inside and make sure you're all right. Then I'll take you to your father.”

She looked like she was unsure, of her father's safety, of being here in this underground place with him, of what he'd said to her and of what she might feel for him. Like a flood, her emotions and concerns ran across her face and Ezra almost stumbled back watching them. He could have sworn the heightened senses, especially where she was concerned, had subsided after he'd left that house. In fact, he'd felt a lightness in his step, in his breathing, in his mind, as if something had been released, or exorcised, he thought with a frown. Now, standing here with her, he felt like a door had been opened, one he'd had no idea was there in the first place.

“He can't die,” she whispered finally, lowering her head so he wouldn't see that tears had begun to well in her eyes once more.

Of course he'd seen them and he'd scented them. He'd wanted nothing more than to wrap his arms around her and hold her tight. He wanted to swear his loyalty to her and to her safety, to claim her with every ounce of breath he had. But he didn't.

“Let's get you checked out and then you can go be by his side,” he told her, moving slowly to lead her down the hallway.

She followed, her steps slow but steady. They were down another fifteen feet when the doors began to appear. Aligned perfectly with the wall, the only indicator that there was a door was the palm-sized control pad that flashed an intermittent red light as he approached. It was another sensor, another one of X's contributions to the safety of the Stateside Assembly. Ezra didn't have a specific code for each of the doors even though he knew there was one. Dyson and Bas would most likely be the only ones with this information. But he remembered that as a default, X had programmed all the higher-level officials in the Assembly's fingerprints into the security access system. By pressing his index and middle fingers over the flashing red light, the locks were disengaged and the door opened with a thunk. It almost resembled the entrance as a chunk of the mountain had opened, peeling back to let them in. This stretch of wall was a six-foot-high, five-foot-wide access that Ezra immediately pulled completely open so that he could allow Jewel to go in first.

Again, lights were activated by sensors responding to movement. Once he closed the door behind him he could see the six-foot table with four chairs surrounding it. To his left was an empty shelf, a notepad and a pen on top. To his right, a sink with a mirror hanging on the wall. Ezra had no idea what this room was used for, or had been built for, since this was the first time Bas had brought his shifters down here, but for now, it would serve the purpose of examining room.

“Take off your shirt,” he said before turning around to face Jewel again.

Her eyes grew wide, breasts lifting and dropping with the quick deep breaths she was taking.

“Look, I'm not the one that hurt you!” he told her vehemently. “I've never been the one to hurt you and yet you run away from me every chance you get.”

She didn't flinch but Ezra knew he shouldn't have yelled. Adding more intimidation on top of what she'd been through in the last couple of days was clearly not the answer.

“No, Ezra, you didn't hurt me, not with your fists or even your words. But you will,” she said in a huff. “If I let you, you will.”

“I told you I wouldn't,” was his retort.

“Men lie, Ezra! You've been lying to me since day one.”

She lifted her hands, shaking fingers raking through her hair. “Ever since that first day you've been watching me and saying things to me, acting as if you couldn't stay away from me when all the while you knew it would never happen, knew it shouldn't ever happen.”

Ezra shook his head, taking a step toward her. “I never lied to you. Everything I said I felt was the absolute truth.”

“Except you're not supposed to feel anything for a human, are you?” The words spewed from her mouth as if they were actually sparks, stinging against his skin upon impact. “I heard when your leader was here he was thinking of killing Priya because she was a human.”

“And now Priya works for us and she's with Bas, so how exactly did I lie to you?”

“Did you tell me you were a Shadow Shifter? Did you tell me you could shift into a cat and kill me if that suited your needs? No, you didn't tell me any of that. All you talked about was desire and needs and all that other bullshit that men spout to get what they want! You're an opportunistic user, just like him! Just like him!”

With those last words she lunged for him, her arms swinging, tears streaming down her face. Ezra let her land a few licks, figured she needed to exert that anger, that pain that she'd carried around since the day she met Crowe. It was funny how people dealt with their darkest memories, their deepest sorrows. Jewel had created a whole new identity and every day had convinced herself to forget. She was much stronger than he'd ever been. His answer had been to visit a shaman who'd in turn shot some dangerously tainted herb smoke inside his body, almost destroying the shifter he'd once been.

When he finally grabbed her wrists he held them close to his chest, locking her to him, feeling his heart thump wildly at that connection. “He didn't give a damn about you, Jewel. He didn't give a damn about your father. He didn't love you.”

“And neither do you!” she yelled in his face. “Don't stand there and give me that line about falling in love with me after the few weeks that you've been here when you never planned to stay, you never planned—”

“You're right!” Ezra yelled back. He walked toward her, still holding her wrists and forcing her to take backward steps until her legs were up against the table. “I didn't plan for any of this. I never planned to find a mate, to be so drawn to a female that I couldn't breathe without her being near. My past isn't pretty so I made a life in D.C., but you're…” He sighed with the words, sighed as he looked down at her beautiful hazel-brown eyes. “You're here and right now I don't know what my life is going to be in the next minute, or the next hour, or next week, if I can't be with you.”

The last was said in a huff of breath that left Ezra feeling deflated, empty, purged. He'd never spoken like this to another woman, never thought these words would be formed in his mind. A mate wasn't in the cards for him. The darkness inside him had prevented that, had given him the best defense against any type of permanent relationship. It had convinced him he was as wicked and tainted as the female that forced him into the clutches of the darkness in the first place.

And like a blanket Jewel had lifted all that away. His darkness had never been as powerful, as close to the surface as it had been once he'd laid eyes on her. The conflict within him had stayed on a low boil all these years, until the second he scented her. Then the war had begun and she'd won, goddammit, Jewel Jenner had won, she'd beaten the darkness and freed him. And now he wanted to do the same for her.

“Don't tell me I don't love you,” he said to her, his voice measurably lower, his heart still thumping wildly. She turned her head and he shook her until her gaze met his again. “Don't fucking tell me that I. Do. Not. Love. You!”

“Stop it, you're hurting me!”

Ezra softened his hold on her before replying, “I'm not sure that's true or if that's just the excuse you want to use. That's what you want to accuse me of so you can walk away. Otherwise, you'll know what I'm saying, what I've been saying about us has been true all along.”

“I don't need or want you or any man, Ezra. Why can't you understand that?”

“Prove it,” he said simply. “If you don't need or want me, then you'd damned well better resist me.”

With those words Ezra pushed her back on the table, and his fingers were wrapped in the collar of her shirt before she had a moment to gasp as he ripped it off her. She looked startled at her second ripped shirt of the day. That may have made her feel a certain way, may have incited some memory that made her feel uncomfortable. But she didn't lash out again, only told him in no uncertain terms, “Stop it, Ezra. This doesn't prove anything.” She spoke but didn't lift a hand to stop him.

To the contrary, the moment he released her hands, she'd grasped the edge of the table where she leaned, so that now with her breasts all but falling over the rim of her bra, her back was arched as she gripped that table, staring up at him with not fear, but lust in her eyes.

“It proves everything,” he mumbled as he dipped his head, using his teeth to rip the thin wisps of lace away from her breasts. Once free, the heavy mounds bounced against his cheeks because he'd buried his face in the crevice, inhaling deeply at the spot where her scent was the strongest.

Not her normal scent, not the fruity freshness he'd first lifted from her when he'd met her in Bas's restaurant. No, this was sweeter, edged with a familiar spiciness—his scent. This was their
companheiro calor,
it was the blending of their lovemaking, their physical compatibilities bleeding through the surface. He inhaled again and again, loving that scent, wanting it to encompass every pore of his body.

“This is just sex,” Ezra heard her say.

“Right,” he nodded, lifting a hand to cup one breast in his palm, positioning his mouth over the other one. “Just sex,” he repeated about two seconds before suckling the mound deep into his mouth.

Her puckered nipple rubbed enticingly against the coat of his tongue, filling the inside of his mouth like the sweetest delicacy. He sucked and sucked, squeezing its twin, while his dick grew harder every second, pressing painfully against the zipper of those damned fatigues.

She arched beneath him, her fingers still holding onto the table, her bottom pressing against the steel. She didn't speak again, but gasped as he drew her into his mouth deeper, clenching her other mound tighter. When her body began to shift he released her breasts, letting his tongue create a hot path down her torso, delving deep into her navel.

With a yank he undid her pants, pushing them and her panties down her hips and pulling them from her feet. He didn't give a damn about the shoes, they weren't in his way at all. On his way back up her body, Ezra kissed the backs of her knees, the inside of her thighs. He lifted them then, placing them on his shoulders, inhaling again another sweeter-than-life scent, her essence as it dampened the thick folds of her vagina.

Jewel made a sound but Ezra couldn't tell if it was a whimper, or his name whispered, or whatever, all he could focus on was the milky center of her, the outpouring of delectable nectar that tempted him. Licking his lips he lowered his head, loving the soft brush of her thighs against his cheeks as he went down. He speared his tongue, going as deep inside her as he possibly could without drowning. Then he loved her with his mouth, licking and suckling every ounce of desire she had for him. Beneath his ministrations Jewel undulated her hips, she whimpered, refusing to cry out or to lift her hands to touch him. Ezra knew that wouldn't last forever. He cupped her ass cheeks, lifting her farther off the table, bringing her closer to his mouth and feasted like a man starving all his life. He licked her from the hard bud of her clit to the tight rim of her sphincter, once, twice, until her entire body convulsed around him.