Rule Breaker(107)

            He couldn’t even call the strength of her echoing pleasure a mating sign without anything else to go with it. And the feeling of—something—a heat and sudden building tightness beneath the head of his cock just before he came had been so damned odd he’d jumped from her and rushed to the shower before he could risk the mating barb extending from his cock.

            Once it was free, there was no going back.

            How many times had he heard that?

            Once the mating barb extended and locked inside his mate, there was simply no stopping the mating.

            He shut the shower off, standing there, his flesh still hot, the need for Gypsy still pounding through his system like a fever he couldn’t stop.

            But not just the need to fuck her.

            He wanted so much more from her than just the incredible pleasure that had raced through his senses.

            Mating Heat was all about the sex. It wasn’t about the rubbing, the touching, seeing the laughter in a lover’s eyes or feeling her joy as it wrapped around him.

            Mating Heat was weakening. It took over the senses and erased everything but the need for the mate. He’d sensed that ravaging force in his twin, Lawe, when he’d found his mate. His brother’s lack of control, the inability to sense anything around him but Diane.

            And he’d sensed it even before then, years before, confined in a cell, all too aware of the scent of his mother and the Coyote they called Elder in the labs. The scent of their need, of their building desperation had haunted that fucking lab. The scientists never forbade the Coyote soldiers from taking the female prisoners. But never before had one of them mated a breeder.

            Morningstar had literally birthed a pack, four offspring, before her body had suddenly become infertile.

            Or it had been, before Elder.

            Before her Coyote rapist had mated her and caused her death.

            That desperation to set her and her young free, to have her, no matter the cost, had been the cause of her death as well as her mate’s.

            Rule knew he couldn’t let that happen to any woman he mated. If he mated, if he let himself weaken that far, then it would be far too easy to take Gypsy from him.

            She wasn’t a fighter.

            She wasn’t a Breed.

            She was resourceful, smart. She’d spied for the Unknown for nine years without ever being identified until Jonas put his too-intelligent mind to work on finding one of their contacts.

            But she wasn’t trained to survive.

            And she couldn’t be his mate.

            His dick slowly lost its desperate stiffness as he stared down at it, frowning in confusion, wondering what the fuck his body was doing.

            What crazy shit was happening to him and how the hell was he supposed to fix it?

            It couldn’t have been the mating barb. He wouldn’t be losing the hard-on if he were even close to the beginning stages of Mating Heat. It wasn’t possible from what he’d heard.

            So it couldn’t be a mating, he thought desperately. It had to just be one of those damned anomalies Breeds came in contact with damned near every day of their lives.

            They weren’t human and they weren’t animal, and their bodies weren’t normal. That made some interesting reactions sometimes.

            That had to be what had happened this time.

            A smothered grunt of amused irritation left his lips as he began thinking hard. Jerking a towel from the towel rack, he fought to come up with a reasonable explanation for what was no doubt going to be a furious lover once he left the bathroom.