There was blood on her shoulder where he had bit her again. He lowered his head and licked at the wound he knew would never fully heal. Not simply because he couldn’t keep from biting her when he took her, but because the hormones always filled that little spot, kept it sensitive, kept it ready for the pleasure he would bring her from his lips and tongue against it.
As he held her tight against his chest, his arms wrapped snuggly around her, he felt the fierce, secondary swelling of his c**k pulse again, shuddering through him as she trembled in response and a low, broken moan came from her lips.
What the hell had she done to him? Surely something he had never known before. Never, even that first time that he had taken her, had he known this depth of satiation, this satisfaction that seemed to echo through every cell of his body.
Hell, a man, or a Breed, should never know this soul-deep sense of belonging. Because it was something he would always remember in battle, something he would always know waited to be snatched from his hands by fate or the cruelties of man. Losing this could destroy him. He would be no more than a broken shell of a man, and surviving that wouldn’t be possible.
He would follow her into death, Del-Rey thought. He’d be of no use to his people if he lost her, because nothing mattered as much to him as this one woman.
Love. He scoffed at the word. This wasn’t love. Love was his joy of a good steak, a hot bath. It was breathing in the mountain air and watching the mists in the valley. What he felt for this woman in his arms, this wasn’t love. It was something he didn’t have a name for, or a way to express. She was his freedom. She was becoming an extension to his soul.
“I have to move sometime this year,” she mumbled against his chest, sweat-dampened and still breathing hard.
“In a minute,” he promised, still locked inside her, feeling the fierce grip and rippling response in the muscles surrounding his cock.
“’Kay,” she muttered drowsily. “But lying on your ass all day isn’t going to get anything done.”
There was the lightest thread of amusement in her voice, a teasing vein that he remembered often filled her eyes with impish delight. She had always teased him, flirted, made it damned near impossible to resist her.
“I could lie on your ass for a while,” he chuckled as he felt the knot anchoring him inside her finally begin easing.
He grimaced at the sensation, another lingering pleasure that he didn’t want to lose. He wanted to stay like this forever, buried inside his woman, his mate, knowing she was forever safe.
A long, low moan left her lips as the swelling finally eased, releasing them from the pleasure that seemed never ending.
Del-Rey lifted her from him, his body tightening as his semi-hard c**k eased from her snug grip and she collapsed to the bed beside him.
Letting her go wasn’t an option though. He turned and pulled her to his chest, wrapping his arms around her and holding her close as he kissed the top of her head.
“Will the heat ease for you soon?” he asked her then, knowing that for Wolf and Feline mates after the initial four- to six-week cycle of the heat, it would then ease and come back for only seven to ten days per month. It was when the females were most fertile and the chances of conception greater.
She lifted her shoulder in a light shrug. “I dunno,” she mumbled. “I was different. Kinda.”
“How were you different?” he asked her as he eased back enough to stare into her drowsy expression.
Her brows creased thoughtfully. “Several years ago, the Coyote, Kiowa Bear, mated with the then U.S. president’s daughter. They learned then why the Wolves and Coyotes take so long to conceive. There’s an additional hormone the males carry that continues to attempt to block conception, even as the other hormones work to create it. Then with Aiden’s mate, Charity, they’ve only just been able to figure out why she conceived, based on the experiments the Council scientists did on her at the labs where she was held for a number of years. The hormone works to ready the ovaries and change the egg being prepared to drop, to ensure its compatibility with the Wolf or Coyote sperm. It gets complicated sometimes, the way the hormones work. That’s why each hormonal therapy has to be different. Dr. Armani begins with a base, a therapy that’s compatible across the board, then she has to add to it depending on the individual female and her heat.”
“So each mating is different?” he asked as she settled more comfortably against him.
“Very much so.” Anya nodded. “She has a lot of trouble keeping mine within an acceptable limit. For the first few months, the hormones she was giving me pretty much wiped out all emotion but kept me on the verge of panic. I couldn’t function. The same hormone didn’t affect the Wolf mates at all.”
His frown deepened. “When Dr. Armani came to the caves that first time, she said I was the first Coyote to mate. Kiowa Bear is Coyote as well, yet he was mating well before that.”
“Kiowa is what they call a hybrid. His mother was one of the women the Council kidnapped and tried to use for artificial insemination. It didn’t work on her. Before she left those labs, one of her Coyote guards mated her, then released her. Kiowa was conceived and born naturally, and as I understand it, that creates a shift in the DNA that doesn’t come about otherwise. But there are other anomalies with him as well. His genetics are actually closer to the Wolf than the Coyote.”
“Has Dr. Armani learned the differences in our mating yet?” he asked her.
Anya snorted at that as she pulled from him and rose from the bed. “Not hardly. Just as with repairing your wounded bodies, Coyote genetics and Wolf genetics are just separate enough to make it dangerous.” She glared down at him then. “We need our own medical personnel.”
“There’s some still living?” he asked, surprised. “What the Council hasn’t killed, I’m certain we must have. I told you, find one and I’ll consider it.” It had been a matter of pride for years to destroy those capable of creating more Coyote Breeds. If the Council left any for them to kill.
“If you can hide from the Council all those years, then I bet there are doctors as well as scientists that have managed to do the same,” she informed him. “I’ll find them.”
His brow arched. The tone of her voice was a warning itself.
“And how do you think you’ll do this?” he asked her silkily.