anything better than sex and a wild, hot woman, then he hadn’t found it.
It was better than a good bloody fight, and he loved those, too.
Adrenaline was the spice of life, be it sexual or life-threatening. But he had never taken a woman who wasn’t a Breed. And he had never taken one as fragile as the woman sitting beside him. The one burning, slick and wet and ready for him.
From the corner of his eye he watched her rub at the earlobe he had nipped the other day. He had broken the skin. The small curve was abraded, though it didn’t look as though it should cause her any problems. But she kept rubbing and tugging at it as though it bothered her.
“I didn’t bite you that hard,” he grumbled as she continued to toy with it. “You’re not making me feel guilty for it.”
“Think what you want to.” She glared back at him. “It’s still sensitive.”
He flashed her a lazy smile. “That little nip was nothing. You need to toughen up, sweetheart.”
It was nothing compared to what he had ached to do to her earlier. As his tongue had licked over the little abrasion on her lobe, he had longed to move to her shoulder, to taste the sweet flesh there, to rake his teeth over it, to mark her in a way no other man could ever mistake.
That need surprised him. He had never known a desire to mark a woman. This woman he wanted to mark in all ways, so that no other male could ever mistake to whom she belonged.
“You need to refrain from biting,” she parried with an edge of nervous arousal. Oh yeah, she felt it too. The need was burning inside her just as hot, just as fierce as it was burning in him. He could feel it, could smell it.
He shifted in his seat to relieve the pressure against his swollen cock. The scent of her arousal was driving him crazy. He wanted nothing more than to hold her beneath him, his teeth gripping her sensitive shoulder as he worked his engorged cock as deep inside the melting depths of her pussy as he could go. And she was melting. So hot, so wild that her frustration was making her angry. Making him impatient.
“I’ll see what I can do about that,” he grunted as he turned and made his way down the inclined entrance into the gully. The same path Megan had taken the day before.
“You stopped here before coming into the gully the other day,” he remarked, determined to do the job he had been sent to do before he did the woman. “Why?”
He watched her as she stared into the entrance to the deep gully, her gaze reflective. He could feel the subtle tug of her ability to pull his natural shield around her. It was…intimate. As it enfolded her, shallow though the protection was, it bonded him to her, made his spirit a part of hers.
“Someone followed the jeep down on foot, wearing hiking boots. The tracks were fresher than the tire tracks. Did you see who it was?” she asked then, peering from the side window as she pushed the dark shades above her eyes to see the ground clearly.
He shook off the knowledge of the deepening bond, relaxed his guards against her and allowed her to pull the shield further around herself.
“That was me.” He eased the Raider into the wide gully before coming to a stop. “I found the jeep about six hours before you came through. I made it to about here, smelled the stink of the Coyotes around the bend.” He pointed to a fissure at the other side of the gully. “I noticed this area is riddled with fissures and caverns. They’re like a maze inside, many of them connecting together. I was able to slip through those to work my way closer to the cavern they were hidden within.”
Megan nodded. “We had a particularly hard rainy season about ten years ago. The gullies stayed flooded and many of them washed out deep grooves into the stone. This is one of about a dozen of the hardest hit areas. The floods in these washouts would come hard and fast, many revealing small caves that go deep beneath them and now collect water when it does rain.”
“I