She touched his cheek with one hand, her eyes locked on his. She witnessed the moment his control shattered. Teeth bared, eyes wide, he tore his mouth from hers to look up at the sky and roar.
She cried out wordlessly as an orgasm blossomed deep inside, sending her mind spinning as her body bucked and tightened around him.
Dazed and panting, she drifted in a bliss-filled fugue. Instead of withdrawing, Havoc remained buried inside her, his cock expanding and the ridges swelling until they were locked together.
Another orgasm swept over her, softer than the first yet somehow more intense.
Havoc purred again, the sound soothing and sexy at the same time. They stayed that way for a perfect, unforgettable moment before he lowered them both to the ground. Every bump and jostle gave her another aftershock of pleasure. Once he was seated, he drew up his knees and cradled her against his chest.
His soft purrs continued as he nuzzled her face, covering her cheeks and mouth with surprisingly gentle kisses.
She was still trying to pull together enough of her brain cells to speak when something strange happened. The skin on her wrists tingled, the sensation quickly intensifying into a flash of heat that immediately faded away.
At the same time, Havoc stiffened, one hand slapping at his chest. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know what it was, but something just made my wrists burn.” She held up one hand, but it was too dark to see anything.
“My chest, too,” Havoc said.
He looked at her wrist curiously and then his brow creased before he grabbed her hand and twisted it gently from side to side.
“You have the marks.” He didn’t seem concerned. In fact, he seemed pleased. She felt no such thing.
“What marks?” she demanded.
“Mating marks. Bysshe mentioned that the others had them, and I saw them on Menace when we met him and his mate.”
“Mating marks? Where? Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier? What else do you know about all this?” She gestured to him and then to herself while still trying to see these marks for herself.
“I’m not even sure what it is, or why it happens. None of us has ever experienced something like this.”He caught her by the wrists and gently moved her hands into a beam of moonlight. “There and there. Do you see them now?”
She did. Delicate black lines started at the heel of her hand and wrapped around her limb to form a crisscross pattern over the top of both wrists.
“And these mean something?”
“They mean I was right. We are mates.” Havoc glanced down at his chest. She had to lean back a little to see what he was looking at. Black lines now appeared on the golden fur of his chest. Thick parallel lines started at each shoulder and ran diagonally across his chest to form an X over his heart. To her, they looked like claw marks.
“Do they hurt?” she asked, concern pushing away her other questions.
“No.” He touched the marks and then spread his fingers to match the black stripes. They lined up perfectly.
“And you knew this could happen?”
“I didn’t know until I touched you. That was the trigger. That’s what happened to Risk and Joy. When he caught her as she fell, that’s when everything changed for them. I imagine Loris was affected when Vengeance carried her out of the shuttle.”
That made sense. “So the next time I see them, they will have these same marks?”
“I think so. I don’t know how any of this works. You’re the first female I’ve ever touched.”
She flinched and tried to put more space between them. Not that it was really possible given the way they were tangled together. “So, this was all random chance? If you’d touched someone else, you’d have fucked them instead of me?”
“No.” His voice held that edge of command again, but this time she didn’t find it sexy. Well, notassexy.
“Explain.” She turned his earlier statement against him. It was easier to use one word than to try and verbalize what she was feeling. Hurt. Confusion. Doubt, and a little fear that she’d somehow gotten everything about this situation wrong and wound up tying herself to another man—or male—who would never love her.
“Bysshe thought it was chemical. Pheromones. Biology.” He shrugged. “But none of us understands it. Hell, the scrawnies don’t even have sex, so why did they create us with a sex drive at all? Maybe it’s a leftover genetic trait from the species they made us from. But it is not random.”
“You don’t know that.”
