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  “Never mate,” Vanessa repeated in a whisper, and she couldn’t resist nuzzling back against the wolf shifter despite his dour turn. Because of it even, because she felt an urgent need to comfort him. “Is that what you’ve decided? That you’ll never mate?” He didn’t answer, not beyond his forlorn silence, but that said enough. “Can… can different shifter species mate?”

  “No.”

  No? Surely that wasn’t right, Vanessa thought, then realized how ridiculous to hold such conviction when she knew next to nothing about shifters. She knew about loneliness, though, and what it was like to have someone ease that just by sitting beside her. She knew about caring for someone. Maybe she knew a little about love. And surely that wasn’t a matter of lions breeding with lions and wolves mating with wolves.

  Once Vanessa had shrugged Eric off to make him rear away, she craned her neck and turned as much as she could to find his mouth with her own. The fiercely possessive, fiercely protective lioness in her rose as she kissed him, as she tasted and sucked his lips and tongue. Vanessa tried to use that strange sensory connection to Eric to make him feel what she was feeling, how it felt to feel him. To make him feel her need, how frustrated and vulnerable and even resentful it left her. But also how alive and how hopeful even when she didn’t want to hope that there was something real building up between them.

  Was it working? When Eric’s tongue responded to hers by writhing slowly, sensually and then more demandingly into her mouth, was it because he felt her, mirrored her? When his hands released her wrists and slid up her arms to dip beneath her and gather her breasts? When his kiss shifted to work his mouth down the side of her tingling neck while he needed and squeezed her flushed and aching breasts in his strong grip? When the circular motion of his hips began to grind his rigid cock between the full globes of her upturned ass and her tender clit against the couch and the snug inseam of her jeans? Because it was working for Vanessa in all kinds of ways.

  She groaned his name and practically felt the wolf in him lauding its power and hunger and possession over her, as the beast and the woman overruled and undermined the caution in the man. His hands roamed and explored her lush body greedily, one slipping boldly under her shirt, under her bra to pluck and pinch and torment her nipples until they burned for rougher and harder pressure. The other hand deftly popped the button at the waistband of her jeans and slid down her trembling, tensing stomach, along her softness and into her panties. Into the heat of her. She could hardly believe this was finally happening—

  that this was happening at all. A wash of vertigo at the realization made her closer eyes against the sensation of the room starting to spin around them, against the sense that the whole world was turning sideways.

  And maybe it was. What were the chances that Vanessa’s dreams and delusions were really the proof that she was a latent werecat? How often did it happen in real life that a gorgeous 6’4” specimen of Nordic male perfection looked on a chubby girl, one trying to play a quiet mouse at that, with true lust and primal possessiveness? How likely was it Vanessa would have found herself pinned beneath 200 plus pounds of hard muscle and melting male heat while Eric Salo kissed her and played maddeningly with her tender nipples while—oh god—he slid two long fingers smoothly, deeply into her wet and trembling pussy while his thumb rubbed circles around her clitoris? As likely as gravity failing, and the sun coming up in the north, and Aubrey not having a kitten when he found out everything Vanessa had done.

  She throbbed now. Her quick, her nipples, her head all throbbed in time with the painfully labored beating of her heart. And then Eric added a third finger, filling her, stretching her as he thrummed the pearl of flesh between her legs faster and more firmly and oh god oh god oh god.

  “Why do you have to be so soft?” Eric said, his low voice a rasp at her ear, a rumble vibrating through her bones. “Why do you have to be so goddamn warm? Do you know...? Do you have any idea what that does to the wolf in me? What he wants to do to you....”

  In a whisper, Vanessa pleaded, “Let him. Do it to me.” Fuck me. Take me. Make me.

  No more arguments. Eric, breathing as heavily as Vanessa was, withdrew his hands from those private, deliciously vulnerable places on her body and shifted himself aside just enough to reach the button and zipper on his pants. He was doing it. Fuck, he was doing it. When Eric’s fingers curled down under the waistband of Vanessa’s unfastened jeans to tug them down with her panties, she instantly felt the velvety heat of the wolf shifter’s huge cock as he laid it against her bare ass. Goose bumps prickled along her skin like a wildfire spreading through dry grass, and she shuddered so hard underneath him that she writhed.

  “Hold still,” he groaned from behind her, hot words breathed against her mussed hair. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Eric said in a warning even as his knees pushed hers apart to spread her legs. His hands, big and warm and lightly calloused, first caressed and then kneaded the cheeks of her naked ass. Then he was gripping her hips to arch her up, his thumbs dipping low to pry her open as the broad head of his cock probed her wetness for the sheath of her pussy.

  Again Vanessa squirmed, at the stomach-melting sensation of his thick, hard shaft sliding against her flushed skin, and again he moaned. “Don’t, don’t, don’t”, he chanted in a husky murmur. “If you keep doing that,keep feeling like that under me, I won’t be able to control.... Fuck, it’s just right there, Vanessa. The wolf is always right there.” Salo’s cockhead found the tender, tight ring of her entrance and pushed in just enough to make her muscles flare and give around him. She whimpered in unison with his growl.

  “Fuck,” Eric snarled, his hips tensing against hers as his weight pushed forward a fraction of an inch, then retreated. It was never enough to force the broad head of his cock all the way up inside her, only enough to keep her open, stretched, her entrance filled with her aching pussy empty. “Fuck, Vanessa, it takes everything I have every day to control the beast. I’ve wrestled him so goddamn long. And now.... Now we both want to fucking ravage you from the inside out.”

  “I’m a werecat,” Vanessa reminded Eric in a shallow pinch. “I can take it.” She hoped.

  “You can take it, kitten?” Salo asked. There was an edge of both hunger and mirthless humor in the wolf shifter’s grating voice. “You can take all this?” And then he was pushing himself forward, pushing his long cock up the tight channel of her sex. God, but he was long, thick, satiny smooth and steel hard. He just kept driving deeper, impaling her, pinning her to him.

  “All of it,” she keened suddenly, pleading for more, pleading for mercy, begging for every inch of him at the same time she hoped she’d already taking it. She hadn’t. There was more. As Eric shifted the weight of his upper body to rest more on his bent arms on either side of Vanessa, it only angled his hips all the better to force himself deeper into her body. If she hadn’t taken Eric at least twice the length of any other man, it still felt like it.

  It burned, the painful rapture of how big Eric was and how deep Vanessa took him. Part of her that had never been touched—Inside—bristled at the unfamiliar contact, the agony of pleasure where she’d never felt it before. When Salo’s drive halted, only a change to a rhythmic thrust as he tied up with Vanessa and rode her, her thoughts blurred so badly behind her fog of bliss that she wasn’t entirely sure she was conscious through all of it. Through the pounding of the massive wolf shifter’s body against hers, into hers. Through the abrasive delight of having her tender clitoris ground against the harsh fabric of the cushion beneath her. Through the animalistic chorus of growling, snarling, mewing, purring struggle of his length to reach her depth, of the wolf harrowing his lioness in body and soul.

  Thrust by thrust, Eric’s body tensed as Vanessa relaxed and surrendered into the heated languor of his increasingly ferocious rhythm, breaking her down. Her resentment, confusion, doubt all cracked and crumbled under the force of Salo’s hunger. The wolf in him, evident in the growl beneath his panting breath, in the short
, hard grunts of effort behind each pounding impact, drew his muscles up taut against her. They both began to shake with tension, with exertion, as their bodies worked at each other. He was hot inside her, the friction of flesh against flesh burning her from within as their mating mounted and crested. Eric took on that pale shimmer she’d seen right before he’d shifted into his half-form, into a huge werewolf in the truest representation of the word. Eric’s beast was literally just under his skin.

  The shifter fucked Vanessa like he was going to claim one of the werecat’s nine lives. Like he couldn’t get deep enough fast enough. Like his cock was going to keep swelling and stretching her aching pussy until he taken all the space inside her, both figuratively and literally.

  As Salo’s thrusts turned fast and short, pulses of furious force vibrating through Vanessa from as deep as he could drive himself, his satiny lips and nipping teeth found the lobe of her ear. “You going to come for me, kitty?” he asked in a low, taunting snarl. “On your big bad wolf’s big hard cock? You going to squeeze down tight with that sweet pussy so I can come inside you and fill you up?”

  Vanessa, panting too hard to speak as her clitoris began twitching madly at the friction and the onslaught of their frenzied mating, could only nod. It wasn’t enough for his wolf.

  “Say it, Vanessa. Are you going to come on the cock of the wolf who is mating you? Not a fucking werelion, a wolf. Say it.”

  She swallowed hard, hesitating, bracing herself between Eric and the cushion beneath her as the first tremors of a savage orgasm gnawed at her insides.

  With an especially ruthless thrust, Eric demanded, “Say it. Whose cock is in your pussy? Who are you going to come for, Vanessa?”

  Was that what she wanted? As the strongest orgasm of her life licked at the aching bundle of nerves between her legs while the relentless pounding of the rod inside her threatened to break her open utterly for Eric’s pleasure and possession? Did she want to belong to Salo, to his wolf? In defiance of the werelion pride and Aubrey and the modern feminist ideal of the perfectly independent woman who was above the primal desire to be owned body and soul by a ferocious lover, protector, beast, mate?

  “Vanessa,” Eric groaned in a long, low keen of frustration.

  “Yes,” she choked out at last. “Make me come for you. Mate me. Mark me. Come inside me.”

  The first request he granted instantly. Eric angled his hips to drive himself root deep into his curvy werecat while she growled in surprise, in ecstasy. The circles he made with his renewed thrusts assaulted her tender clitoris and pushed her over the edge. Vanessa’s climax rumbled, then tore through her. The burning walls of her sex shuddered and tensed inside her, clamping her down around Eric’s cock and making it feel twice its already inhuman size.

  Fingers clawing at the couch, toes curling into a painful cramp, Vanessa cried out—literally cried. “Fuck, Eric, do it. I can’t stand it anymore.” She couldn’t stand the agony of waiting to feel him come, his heat at her core, fluid and thick. Couldn’t resist her need to be mated with his cock in her pussy and his teeth at her shoulder. His mark in her flesh and his brand in her soul.

  Vanessa’s mews became a shuddering keen as Salo’s ravenous kisses travel down her neck. She knew the neighbors—the neighborhood—could probably hear her. And what it must have sounded like to Aubrey from the porch, right before her front door burst open with her brother standing there wild-eyed.

  That brown-haired, square-jawed, all-American boy-next-door brother of hers was considerably less than human as he seized Eric by the shoulders and tore the wolf shifter off his sister. The telltale gold shimmer along Aubrey’s skin, the fangs breaking out along the smooth row of pearly, straight teeth, the lion’s roar.

  Under the unbearable sexual frustration of being denied the feeling of Eric’s orgasm, of the mating unfulfilled, Vanessa’s mind closed around one oddly clear thought. Amid the snarling and fury of the two males grappling. Even as glass shattered and wood splintered.

  Aubrey was not a latent, and goddamn him for it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In the debris field of glass and wood that had been Vanessa’s living room minutes before, Eric squared off again with her brother. Both shifters panted hard, ignoring scrapes and gashes and rising bruises. The lion and the wolf in them shivered and shimmered just beneath the skin, lending both men an otherworldly—almost angelic—aura that was entirely misleading of their savage natures. Neither had shifted yet, but fur rippled and prickled along Eric’s nape, and probably Aubrey’s too. And both men were flashing their elongated canines.

  “How many, you asshole?” Eric demanded in a roar of temper. Equal parts rage and adrenaline supplanted the blood boiling in his veins.

  Vanessa stood between the Odin’s Wolf and her brother, but with her arms folded. She wasn’t putting much effort into keeping them apart. Despite what Eric had said earlier about her thoughts and emotions all passing over her face, he couldn’t read any reaction at all in her glumly set expression. Whose side would she take in this? And how could Salo even conceive of the idea that the latent lioness might stand with him over Aubrey, her own brother and a fellow lion? Why did the hope that Vanessa would cling to the wolf shifter for protection ache like a wound in his heaving chest?

  Eric aimed that frustration as well as his considerable sexual frustration at Aubrey Dreyer. “How many of us have you killed? How many supernatural? How many were shifters?”

  Notwithstanding the shimmer of Dreyer’s rising transformation, Aubrey had the same coloring his sister did, brown hair and storm blue eyes. Only he had that sort of military/law enforcement buzz cut Eric had always associated with pricks who got off on abusing their authority. He was much bigger than Vanessa, of course, as tall as the wolf shifter but with a leaner body packed tight with muscle. That body pressed right up against Vanessa’s shoulder as she stood wedged sideways between the male shifters.

  “A lot,” Aubrey spat out in response. “I’ve killed a lot of you.”

  “A lot of you,” Eric snarled back. “Shifters like you.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “For the Agency!”

  “Yeah, I have.” The special marshal, the Agency hunter, stabbed his finger at Eric. “And all of them were vargs and rogues who broke your fucking laws by hunting humans and killing for pleasure. They were a goddamn menace. So you can thank me now and just back the hell up off me, can’t you, puppy dog?”

  Vanessa finally reacted with a tsking sound, brief, low. “Save the piss and stop goading, Aubrey.” She didn’t look at him when she said it. She wouldn’t look at either of them. Eric wanted to take that out on her traitor of her brother, too, out of his mangy lion hide.

  “Vargs and rogues?” Salo threw Aubrey’s words back in his square-jawed face. “That’s it? Never an Odin’s Wolf caught out? Never a Panthera werecat who slipped up and revealed too much of himself? Never a starry-eyed little fey who’d fallen in love and told her secret to the wrong person?” Aubrey’s jaw clenched tighter, and he glared. “That’s what I fucking thought. Is it the thrill of the hunt, or is the money just too good? All that black ops money flowing out D.C.’s backdoor buys a lot of dangerous toys for little boys, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t need toys to skin a wolf,” Aubrey said, emphasizing his taunt by sprouting claws from all ten calloused fingers.

  Eric did the same. “I’ve got those, too, pussycat.”

  As both men leaned forward, Vanessa did finally take a half step to stand more squarely between them. It still galled Eric said he didn’t know which of the men she was protecting, or protecting most. It galled him that it mattered so much to him.

  “Do they know about you at the Agency?” Salo asked. “Are they giving you a pass for killing us? Or do you hold back a little bit and just let them think it’s the college athlete in you that gives you the edge when you’re chasing down weres?”

  Aubrey jostled his sister as he led with his chest, inching toward Eric. Vanessa st
ill didn’t react. No fear or concern. No real attempt to calm them, just this cursory effort to keep the men separated.

  “I’ve done what I had to do to get myself into a position that would help me protect my sister. No intelligence comes into my branch without passing through me. When I think it’s warranted, if I can, I alter reports. We lose track of targets. Names get changed in the database. Files get corrupted or mislabeled. When I can, if I can. And I make sure my sister doesn’t do anything worth putting her on some fucking watch list.” Aubrey finished his speech with the carefully aimed barb, “Like fucking around with some whelp stupid enough and hotheaded enough to shift in the middle of a goddamn driveway in a residential neighborhood.”

  Salo grimaced. That was the best hit Dreyer had gotten in on him so far. “It was my only choice when I realized the Fenris Wolves had followed us.” Then, in the only guilty defense he had, Eric added, “And with the Agency sniffing around after that news photographer got a shot of Vanessa and me in the crowd, knowing they’d probably run it through face recognition software and ping on my old records.... After they got a look at Vanessa when we ran from the police car.... I did what I had to for her protection—.”

  “And took my sister straight to the goddamn Panthera,” Aubrey interrupted with a snarl. “Stupid son of a bitch.” Dreyer snorted. “Literally.”

  “Watch your fucking—,” Salo started to say.

  “Vanessa wasn’t even on our radar,” Aubrey told him, pinning Eric with a glare, jolting him with the nonsensical statement. “The photos from that street festival....” The lion shifter glanced down at his sister, a downward crook to the corner of his broad mouth. “Which she shouldn’t have been at in the first place....”