Mark of the Wolf; Hell's Breed (13 page)

Living without his brothers wasn’t
something that he could contemplate without a great deal of grief.
They were far more than ‘brothers in arms’. They’d been developed
in the same facility, ‘born’ there, taught and trained there. He
shared DNA with Lucien, but Basil and Kane were as much his
brothers in every other sense of the word. They functioned together
as a team. He wasn’t sure any of them were actually capable of
functioning normally without having each other to fall back
on.

Well, he decided, Laurie first and
then he would convince the others that they had to stay, that there
was no reason to go back and every reason to stay!

Ok, there was the monster thing, but
they didn’t know that going back through the vortex would undo
it.

They could control the change—mostly.
At least here they weren’t considered monsters even when they
looked as human as anyone else! At home they were.

It wasn’t as if the bastards had
designed mates for them—women that would accept them for what they
were because they were the same!

They hadn’t wanted them to breed. He
realized that now, although he hadn’t before.

It infuriated him. They’d been bred to
die, pure and simple!

“
If I’d been an assassin,
I’d be handing your head to you right about now,” Lucien
growled.

Damien looked up at him, his anger
instantly switching directions even though he knew it wasn’t
reasonable. “I heard you coming.”

“
And you knew it was
me.”

“
I know your scent as well
as I know my own,” Damien responded sardonically, coming away from
the tree he’d been using as a prop. “I don’t need a lecture on
doing my job.”

“
You were distracted,”
Lucien said grimly.

“
I was thinking,” Damien
retorted. “No law against that, is there? I was completely aware of
everything around me.”

Lucien studied him for a long moment
and finally relaxed fractionally. “Dare I ask what had you so
pissed off?”

“
Long story,” Damien
muttered. “I doubt you’d be interested in hearing it.”

“
Try me.”

Damien considered it but he’d been
thinking in terms of trying to talk the others into dropping the
effort to find a way home. Lucien was the man to talk to. Whatever
he decided, Basil and Kane would agree to. “I was thinking they
didn’t breed mates for us. It made me realize we’d never been
intended to have lives of our own, regardless of that bullshit they
fed us about serving our government and then retiring on one of the
colony worlds. We were just bred to die.”

Lucien’s response surprised him. He
merely shrugged. “You just figuring that out?”

Damien’s lips tightened. “It doesn’t
piss you off?”

“
I try not to waste time
beating my chest over things I can’t change.”

“
And you still want to go
back … to that?”

Lucien frowned. “We belong there. We
don’t belong here. Who’s to say we have a choice?”

“
We might not. It might
just happen like it did the first time. But we
do
have the choice of whether
to
try
to go back
or to try to make a life for ourselves here.”

Lucien studied him a long moment. “Go
get some rest. We’ll discuss it later—when we aren’t supposed to be
on watch.”

Damien hadn’t been gone five minutes
when Lucien was wishing he hadn’t dismissed the subject so
readily.

Because he couldn’t think of but one
reason to explain Damien’s sudden interest in settling
down.

Laurie!

He was going to
kill
the bastard with
his bare hands if he touched Laurie before
he
had a chance to mate with
her!
He
was the
alpha!
He
had
breeding rights! It was
his
right to decide whether to share her with the
rest of the pack or not! And he
damned
well wouldn’t be doing that
before he’d had the chance to breed her!

* * * *

Lucien was still seething when his
watch was up and he could return to the cabin. Fully expecting to
discover that Damien had returned hours earlier and gone
immediately to Laurie, he was surprised to discover that wasn’t the
case at all. There wasn’t a hint of the scent of sex.

He was mollified—somewhat—the
discovery at least deflated the rage that had dogged him every step
of the way back to the cabin.

He wasn’t completely satisfied. Damien
had all but stated his intentions toward Laurie as far as Lucien
was concerned and he had no intention of standing by and waiting
for it to happen.

He
was the alpha.

Laurie was his.

Regardless, he hadn’t completely lost
his mind or his first objective—which was simply to guard Laurie
from harm. If she’d stayed in her bedroom until he’d had time to
gather his wits better and tamp his raging need to mate she would
have been safe—from him—at least until she was released from
protective custody.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
Roused by the changing of the guard, Laurie decided it must be
close to morning and got up. Still drugged with fatigue since it
was actually only 3:00 AM, she didn’t smell the coffee she’d grown
accustomed to smelling and decided to head into the kitchen to put
it on herself before she got dressed.

That was mistake number two because
the moment she staggered out of her room in her panties and
transparent t-shirt, Lucien shifted into mating overdrive, unable
from that point of preventing his instincts from taking over. He
strode purposefully across the room toward her and the closer he
got the more his control slipped and the closer his beast edged
toward the surface. By the time he reached her he was running
completely on instinct—mating instincts. Grasping her upper arms,
he bore her back against the wall behind her and plastered himself
full length against her, nestling his engorged cock at the juncture
of her thighs.

Still thoroughly sleep disoriented,
Laurie’s first impression of the situation was that there must be
some sort of threat she wasn’t aware of. She tipped her head back
to stare up at him in confusion. “Lucien?”

“
Damn right!” he growled,
spearing his fingers through her hair as he cupped the back of her
head and lowered his own head to match his lips to hers. His last
grasp on reason vanished like mist before the sun when he did. She
was soft and pliant with confusion his mating mind interpreted as
surrender. That tamed his more aggressive urges, but the sense of
triumph he felt at what he saw as her acknowledgement of his right
to her further enflamed him. He forced her lips to part, plunging
his tongue inside the warm, wet cavern and raking it across hers
possessively, absorbing in that one act much of what he hungered
for—her heat and essence surrounding him.

The surrogate mating briefly satisfied
his need for immediate and complete possession, but it only made
his cock throb harder, more painfully with demand and, almost as
soon as he began the assault, he began to think of his need for
total possession. His satisfaction ebbed with the realization that
his cock was merely nestled against the V at the top of her thighs,
not embedded within her as he needed it. He could feel the heat and
dampness of her nether lips each time he curled his hips into hers,
but that only frustrated him more.

He needed more of her, but his mind
was so overheated by that time that it was sluggish in presenting
him with a solution to his dilemma.

It occurred to him finally that the
bed was a better place for what he had in mind and he pulled her
away from the wall, broke the kiss long enough to determine the
direction of the bedroom door, and waltzed the two of them towards
it while he sampled the tender skin along her neck and ear with
light, sucking kisses.

They bumped into the doorframe instead
of ringing the hole and Lucien’s patience vanished altogether.
Reaching down, he swung her up into his arms and crossed the room
in a handful of long, impatient strides. Dropping her to the bed
when he reached it, he followed her down, sprawling across
her.

Lucien’s mouth was hot as it settled
over hers, hungry, demanding. His touch was completely
debilitating. Laurie’s disorientation and confusion deepened. ‘What
the fuck?’ flickered through her mind, but it was gone again before
she felt any sort of alarm, suffocated by a wall of heat that rose
up and engulfed her as his taste and scent invaded her system with
his first kiss.

She decided it wasn’t
important—whatever she’d forgotten.

What
was
important was that she was still
dressed and
he
was dressed in far more clothing than she was. She wanted to
see what he looked like under his clothes, feel his skin gliding
across her own. He was probably the most beautiful man she was ever
going to get the chance to see firsthand and touch. She didn’t want
to miss anything.

Apparently Lucien was of a similar
train of thought. He broke the kiss he’d initiated as soon as he’d
dropped her on the bed and leaned away long enough to pull her
t-shirt off. A touch of dismay flickered through Laurie when she
heard a series of ominous pops, but Lucien dove over her again the
moment he’d removed the offending garment and began stroking her
with his hands and she lost track of everything else. The faintly
abrasive skin of his palms sent tingles along her flesh in a wave
that moved beyond the actual contact. The downy hairs on the
surface rose like tiny antennas, funneling the sensation to the
network of nerve endings that covered her and her body responded by
flushing the tiny capillaries with blood. It warmed her skin,
awakened it to receiving more stimulus, made her dizzier, more
disoriented—delighted her, made her hungry, impatient.

She lost awareness of everything
beyond the touch of Lucien’s hands as they skated lightly over her
in a restless, endless caress, settling on first one breast and
then the other for a few moments, squeezing and molding them to fit
his palms. Her nipples rose and tightened at the attention,
flooding with blood that made them ache with fullness. Conflicting
desires arose, vied for dominance. She wanted to feel his mouth on
her breasts, explore him, and feel him inside of her all at one
time.

She was in a rush.

She wanted to enjoy everything as long
as she could.

She contented herself with the feel of
Lucien filling her senses with his warmth, scent, and touch for
many moments, but her palms itched to explore him as he was
exploring her. She began pulling at his clothing, too far gone to
figure out how to remove it but determined to feel his bare skin
against her own.

He seemed to get the message. Rolling
away, he stripped, tossed his clothing aside and then rolled back
over her. Laurie hummed her appreciation as he settled over her
once more, yielding to the urge she’d felt to explore him with her
hands, eyes closed, focusing her exploration on the sense of
touch.

His skin was smooth and warm. She
followed the contours of his flesh like a blind woman, exploring
the texture of his skin, the bumps and hollows formed by hard,
ropey muscles beneath the silken sheathe of skin. The feel of him
thrilled her even more than his caresses and those were beyond
lovely, bringing warmth and then turning the heat up until she felt
parched with thirst, feverish, scalded.

“
Laurie, baby, you feel so
good,” he murmured against her throat, having taken a quick detour
to suck open mouthed kisses along her throat that had her gasping
for breath. Heat spiraled between them like steam rising off hot
pavement as he stroked one hand down her back to cup her buttocks,
pulling her almost bruisingly against his erection.

He sought her mouth again, settling
his lips firmly over her mouth and plunging his tongue inside to
taste her, to give her a taste of himself. The stroke of his tongue
along hers, the heat of his mouth, was intoxicating. She found
herself gripping his shoulders frantically, surging with him in a
rhythmic dance to bring their bodies closer, to brush, meld with
the heated current that passed back and forth between
them.

They seemed to arrive at the limit of
their endurance of pleasurable torture at about the same moment.
Laurie had just begun trying to figure out how to get him to enter
her without breaking the spell by vocalizing her demand when Lucien
lifted away from her far enough to push her thighs apart and
settled between them, probing her with the head of his
cock.

Oh for a smooth penetration when she
was desperate for it!

But no! The moisture she’d generated
seemed to have glued the lips of her sex together. Lucien was too
far gone to figure out why the entrance seemed to be blocked. All
he managed to do in the first couple of surges was to stuff the
lips of her sex into her vaginal channel. She bucked a few times,
trying to dislodge him or wiggle the flesh out of the way to
accommodate him. Neither worked and she struggled to get a hand
between them. That also seemed doomed to failure for several
moments, but she finally managed to get one hand down between them
and part the flesh that was giving both of them hell. As soon as
she parted the flesh, he plugged the hole. She snatched her hand
from between them and grabbed a handful of his ass cheek, pulling,
planting one heel under his buttocks and shoving at the same
time.