Bengal's Heart

◆ CHAPTER 13 ◆

Lips, teeth, tongues. The taste of lust, of need and heat, seared Cassa’s senses as Cabal jerked her to his chest and took the hungry caress with a force that fired her desires.

It was better than the last time. It was hotter. It was brighter. Sweet God have mercy on her, it was like being thrown into a vortex so blistering, so bright, that nothing mattered but the sensations ravaging her now.

Arrogance was so much a part of him. It echoed in his hungry growl as she tried to jerk back from him, and it added dominance to the hold he had on the back of her head to keep her in place for his kiss.

Cassa moaned as his tongue swiped over hers and spilled more of the spicy taste she was rapidly becoming addicted to.

She had definitely lost her sanity, because she had known what she was facing in accepting this, in daring him to take her as she had. She had known there could be no easy ending to it, but the need, oh God, the need was tearing her apart, driving inside her like steel stakes burning with hunger.

“Damn you.” The light nip at her lips had her lifting to her toes, desperate for more now. His kiss, even without that damned hormone speeding through her system, was still more than any other kiss she had ever known.

Hungrier, greedier, filled with more desire, with more lust than anything she had ever known.

Tugging at his shirt, she fought to touch skin, to stroke his body as his lips came over hers again, his hard body pressing her closer to the wall at her back.

Her breath hitched as his hands clenched on her ass, lifted her and jerked her closer. Her thighs parted over his. His cock, covered by a layer of denim, was still hard and hungry as it pressed into the cradle of her thighs and stroked over her clit.

Cassa wrapped her arms around his neck and held on for dear life as her hips moved of their own accord against him. Thrusting, stroking against the rigid mound pressing against her, she drove herself mad with the arousal burning through her now.

Her fingers threaded through the silken strands of his hair, the caress of it against her fingertips, erotic, sensual. Everything about Cabal was too erotic, too sensual. She had been losing this battle for months, and she had known it.

“No. Please.” She gasped out the plea as he jerked her head back, one hand gripping her hair to hold her in place as he glared down at her.

“You know what you’re doing,” he stated, his voice like a caress of a hot summer night. “Tell me, Cassa. You know what you’re doing.”

“I know what I’m doing.” Her fingers clenched in his hair to drag his head back. “You’re damned right I know what I’m doing.”

He was hers. A part of her refused to accept anything less than the fact that he did belong to her. She would pay for it later. She might well die for it later. But for now, he would belong to her. Hers to hold. She had never had anyone, or anything, belong solely to her, until Cabal. And she had never belonged, not really, not where it mattered.

“It doesn’t change anything.” He lifted her closer against his body and began to move through the cabin to the stairs that led to the loft bedroom. “Nothing, Cassa. This story is still off limits to you.”

That was what he thought. Let him think it. Let him believe whatever he had to believe for now; she’d show him different later. She wouldn’t be dictated to in this mating any more than she had been dictated to before it.

Her lips parted, and she allowed her teeth to nip at the line of his lower lip as he moved slowly up the stairs. Her tongue licked over the little wound and she wished she knew how to purr, because she would have purred with the pleasure coursing through her now.

“Stop ordering me around,” she panted as his hands clenched on her ass. “Kiss me again, Cabal. Just kiss me.”

His lips covered hers again as a soundless cry vibrated in her throat. It was a kiss made of gossamer desire and fiery need. It stroked over her senses as his tongue stroked over her lips, then her own tongue. The spill of the hormone spread through her, slowly at first, heating nerve endings, throwing her body into chaos as she felt herself being lowered to a bed.

Cabal’s bed.

Her arms lifted as he caught the hem of her T-shirt and pulled it slowly from her body.

The chill of the room washed over her lace-covered breasts for only a second. Only as long as it took for him to toss the shirt away, and for his palms to cover the heavy, swollen mounds.

“So pretty,” he sighed, his voice thick and husky. “I dreamed of caressing your breasts, Cassa. Of holding them in my hands and seeing that pretty flush on them.”

She looked down. Sure enough, her breasts were as flushed as the rest of her body felt. Her nipples pressed hard and de mandingly into his palms, and she knew they’d look ripe, cherry red with the need for his touch, his kiss.

She was almost panting as his hands moved, his fingers flipped over the closure of her bra and peeled the fabric away while she fought to hold back a cry of complete surrender.

It was a cry that fell from her lips anyway, as his head bent and one of the hard, tight peaks disappeared into the heated depths of his mouth. His lips closed over her, his cheeks drew on the sensitive point and sent shards of pleasure racing to the throbbing knot of nerves in her clit.

The feel of her juices flowing between her thighs had her hips flexing, arching against him. She wanted him naked, she wanted to be naked with him. She wanted to feel every inch of him caressing her, touching her.

When his head drew back, his lips releasing her damp nipple, she nearly orgasmed from the sight of it. The look of building lust on his face, the hunger that suffused it.

Reaching down, he gripped the hem of his T-shirt and jerked it off, displaying the impressive muscles of his chest and abs. The tattoo of a blood-dipped fang lay against his shoulder. The opposite bicep held what was becoming known as a Breed tribal tattoo: barbwire, canines and daggers in a circle around his muscle. It was impressive, sexy as hell, and looked as dangerous as she knew the Breeds could be. Funny that until now, she hadn’t paid as much attention to the tattoo. She’d seen it, known it for what it was, but it had been on the periphery of her attention before.

Her hands moved, her fingers gripping the hem of his jeans as she pulled and popped the first metal button free. The head of his cock peaked above the opening now. Wide, flushed, throbbing for attention.

“Not yet.” He pushed her hands back to the bed. “Later.”

“Like hell later.” She panted, fighting to get her fingers back in place to touch him. “I didn’t say you get to make the rules here, Cabal.”

He chose that moment to release her jeans and jerk the tab of the zipper down. The low-rise jeans parted, revealing the flesh of her lower abdomen as she froze beneath the hunger in his look.

She couldn’t move beneath his gaze. His expression was absorbed as he moved lower, pulled her boots and socks from her feet, then gripped the bottom of her jeans and shifted them down along her legs.

Cassa was mesmerized by his eyes, by his expression. The glitter of gold in a field of vibrant dark green as he revealed her.

Silken panties came down with the jeans, removed with a long, slow caress of his calloused hands and dropped to the side of the bed along with the denim.

She was naked beneath him now. Chill bumps of sensation raced over her flesh as his palm pressed against her belly, stroked over it until his fingers encountered the soft curls between her thighs.

“The mating hormone treatment,” he growled. “I can smell it on you. It’s what’s allowed you to stay away from me.”

“It’s allowed me to survive,” she informed him tartly. “I’m not a mating puppet, Cabal. I refuse to be one.”

She watched as his eyes narrowed on her, his lips curling in amusement as his fingertips moved slowly through the saturated center of her body.

Cassa gasped and arched against the caress. She swore she could feel flares of explosive heat in each pore that his fingers touched.

“Trust you to keep trying to stay a step ahead of me,” he murmured before moving back, his fingers going to the metal buttons of his jeans as he toed his boots from his feet.

“Who’s trying?” She could barely breathe, let alone talk. “I succeeded.”

He grunted at that, but arguing wasn’t her first impulse as the impressive length of his cock was revealed, along with the subtle Bengal stripes on his thighs.

Cassa shivered at the proof of the animal inside him and how close to the skin it truly was. The orange stripes, three in all to each side, curled around the teak flesh from the outside of his thigh to the inner flesh.

The stripes flexed over the muscle as Cassa’s fingers curled with the need to touch them, to run her nails along them.

“I love these stripes.” A wave of sensuality raced through her belly as he placed his knee on the bed and moved closer to her.

“The stripes aren’t up for discussion,” he warned her, his look completely carnal.

“Yet,” she agreed, entranced by the gold glitter of need in his gaze as he came over her.

“Never.”

His lips cut off any protest she may have had in mind to make. They covered hers as she felt his hard, naked body come over her. Heavily muscled thighs parted her slimmer ones, and the tip of his cock kissed the heated wetness of her inner lips.

Cassa reached into the kiss with a desperation she had never known for another’s touch. Her arms curled around his neck, her fingers dug into his hair. She could feel her thighs clenching on his as her hips arched in a wild attempt to force the hardened flesh of his erection deeper into the embrace of the wet folds between her thighs.

“Not yet.” He pulled back, his lips moving down her neck, sending hot pulses of pleasure racing along the nerve endings there. “Not yet, baby. I get to taste first. You’ve tempted me with the scent of your arousal; now you’ll give me a taste.”

She shuddered at the dominance in his tone, at the need.

Cassa lifted her head to watch as his tongue licked over her nipple, then he began moving down her body. A kiss here, a nip there. His tongue played over her flesh and left her shaking for more as he moved down her abdomen to the blazing heat of her sex.

“So sweet,” he whispered, his voice rough. “You smell as sweet as sunshine.”

His tongue swiped through the narrow slit as something part growl, part purr left his throat and sent a punch of lust flexing through her womb. Her hips arched closer, her hands dug into his hair and wicked flares of sensual heat began to ignite through her senses.

Her head tipped back as the pleasure wracked her. Cabal’s tongue was wicked. It stole her senses as it caressed around the sensitive bud of her clit, then swiped over it before his mouth drew it in.

“Cabal.” Her cry was a thick wail of hunger as pulsing shards of need echoed through her flesh.

Arousal was a never-ending hunger. It throbbed and ached from her clit to her nipples and beyond. Each inch of flesh was sensitized, each portion of her mind consumed by it.

She could feel the drugging response of the hormone whipping through her bloodstream, burning through her veins. She couldn’t get enough. She needed his touch, needed all of it.

“Oh God!” She nearly screamed the prayer as she felt his fingers burrow into the clenching depths of her vagina. They stretched her, burned her, thrust inside her until she was certain she couldn’t hold on to the last shreds of her sanity.

Cassa couldn’t stop her hips from moving, from driving onto his fingers. She felt as though she were being torn apart by the need now, the desire to be filled, to be taken. She was lost in the pleasure burning through her, and she had no desire to be rescued from it.

Cabal’s tongue raced over and around her clit. He suckled at it delicately, then firmly. All the while his fingers fucked her slow and easy, pushing her past the point that she could keep so much as a measure of control.

A control she didn’t want in his arms.

“More,” she panted out breathlessly, her fingers digging into his shoulders as she arched closer.

Her legs opened wider, desperate for more kisses, more touch, more of anything he wanted to give her, because she had no idea what the hell she needed other than to be possessed by him.

She had sworn she would never allow a man to possess her. She had made that promise to herself when she realized her husband was more monster than lover. Now, eleven years later, she wasn’t lying to herself. Her lover was more animal than man, and she promised herself that this time she would handle her emotions, she would handle what she didn’t have, for this. For what she could have.

She could immerse herself in this. Here and now. She twisted beneath him, pressed her hips higher, drove her clit deeper into his mouth as she felt the winding pleasure tighten through her warningly.

“Cabal.” She cried out his name when she fought and couldn’t hold back the sensations.

His answer was a low growl, a flick of his tongue over her clit and a sudden, powerful thrust of his fingers inside the core of her.

Pleasure exploded through her, shocking her with the strength of it, the force of it. Her body tightened with the suddenly harrowing pulse of release and the fire streaking through each cell of her body.

She could have sworn she heard herself scream his name. She was certain she had, despite her attempts not to. Her fingers were locked in his hair, holding his lips between her thighs as she jerked and shuddered beneath him.

Perspiration soaked her body even as sexual need climbed through her again. Writhing beneath his caresses, Cassa fought to find the relief she needed from the heat flooding her senses.

“Hell yeah, baby.” The animalistic growl echoed around her as Cabal suddenly came to his knees between her thighs. “Come for me again.”

She stared down her body, watched his fingers curl around the heavy length of his erection as he bent to her. She watched, entranced as the broad head parted the swollen lips of her sex, her juices glistening as he parted her farther.

“You’re mine, Cassa,” he stated, his voice uneven, rough, as he began to press inside her.

She wanted to laugh at the claim but couldn’t find the breath. Instead, she stared back at him fiercely.

“Other way around,” she gasped. “Mine.”

She wouldn’t let him possess her. She would possess him. She wanted to wrap him so deep inside her soul that when the truth came out, he could never walk away from her. So deep that he would try to see, try to understand what she knew could never be understood.

A hard, heated chuckle met her statement before her eyes widened and jerked back down the line of her body. He was entering her, pushing inside her. She watched, sobs of need leaving her throat as her flesh parted for him, burned around him.

He filled her. Inch by inch as she felt another contraction of release tear through her. She hadn’t thought it was possible to orgasm with no more than the act of penetration. Just the feel of him pushing inside her, the heavy length of his cock caressing her sensitive inner muscles. She threw her head back as pleasure suffused her in a violent cascade of light and color. It whipped through her senses, tore through them and left her shaking as Cabal began to thrust inside her with deep, measured strokes.

His body covered hers; his hands held her hips to him as his lips moved to her neck, her shoulder. She could feel each harsh growl that rumbled in his chest, as it echoed through her chest. She felt each pulse of blood that throbbed in his cock as it shuttled inside the tender tissue of her sex.

Her moans echoed around her; his harsh, rasping breaths filled her senses. Wrapping her legs around his hips, Cassa fought to hold on to something, anything, that would anchor her to earth as the spiraling ecstasy began to tighten inside her.

She couldn’t bear it. She could feel it burning, racing, creating a whirlwind inside her that she didn’t have a hope of resisting.

Pleasure had never been like this. Lust had never been like this. She had never known anything as deep, as filled with pure ecstatic sensation as the feel of Cabal taking her.

It shouldn’t be like this, she thought distantly. Just lust wasn’t this consuming, this dangerous. She could feel things she didn’t want to feel, a connection, a bond through the pleasure that terrified her.

It was just a chemical reaction, she warned herself. That was all. She had to make herself remember that. She couldn’t let love interfere. Cabal didn’t love her. He wasn’t going to love her. She couldn’t allow her own love for him to get in the way of this.

His hand smoothed along her hip as he held his weight on one elbow. It caressed up her side, cupped her breast. His fingers flicked over her tight nipple as his tongue laved at her shoulder and his hips moved faster. Harder.

His cock thrust inside her with powerful, even strokes. Sensitive nerve endings fired further to life. Cassa felt her flesh becoming swollen, felt her womb tightening, her clit throbbing.

So close. She could feel her orgasm moving through her, feel it building, edging closer. It was tightening, drawing her body closer to him, making her arch and writhe against him as the wildness of it began to burn through her.

Her legs tightened around him, her nails dug into his back. She could feel it, it was there, so close, so filled with sensation that when it poured over her, she swore she was dying.

Cassa heard herself scream his name as his canines sank into her shoulder. Then she felt her breath lodge in her throat, her body contract, her sex swelling with rapture, as the barb, the small, thumb-sized erection, swelled from the flared head of his cock, locking him inside her and spilling its hot hormonal essence into her, binding her further to him. There were no words for the ecstasy shooting through her now. There was no way to explain or to describe the strength, the depth of her release.

She felt as though she melded into him, became a part of him. She felt her body taking him, accepting him, and knew that in her lifetime she would never know this pleasure with another man. She had never imagined such pleasure could exist.

The feel of the barb locked inside her was animalistic, ecstatic. It was hers. This happened with only one woman, she knew. That additional erection happened only with a mate, no other. She was the only woman Cabal would ever know this with. And she was the one that had betrayed him.

She buried her face against his chest as he shuddered above her, his own release jerking through his body as Cassa fought back the tears that would have dampened her eyes.

For now, she held him. He would belong to her as much as she would belong to him. He couldn’t deny her now. He couldn’t make her leave; he couldn’t turn her away. The mating heat would ensure that. For now, he would have to share himself with her, and not just physically.

She felt his bite at her shoulder like a brand into her flesh, marking her forever. The little wound would never fully heal. It was a physical mark that would never go away entirely, just as she knew that her own bite on his palm still hadn’t fully healed.

The Breed’s and the mate’s bodies changed during mating. They shadowed each other, the essence of each blending. Cassa knew that, just as she knew that there hadn’t been a mating that hadn’t ended up in love. In a devotion between the two mates that had always made Cassa envious.

There was no longer a need for envy.

“My mate,” he growled at her shoulder.

Cassa held on to him tighter. She was his mate, for now. She would revel in him while she had him. She would pit her will against his, enjoy the hell out of the time they’d have together, but she promised herself she wouldn’t let herself depend on it. She would never fully become her Bengal’s heart, because she’d betrayed him. She would lose him. She was resigning herself to it. But she had never expected the pain that was coming from it. It had done her no good to steel her heart against this man, because she had a feeling it was going to be ripped from her chest anyway.

Losing him might well kill her.

Cabal held on to Cassa, his arms wrapped tight around her as he slowly loosened the bite against her shoulder. He could taste the primal mating hormone in his mouth as he licked against the wound, spreading it over the tiny bite marks he had left in her flesh once again.

Mating wasn’t easy, it wasn’t gentle. He was still shuddering at the force of the pleasure that had torn through him. The violence of his release left him shaking and suddenly much too aware of what would happen to him if he ever lost this woman.

Brushing her hair back from her perspiration-damp face, he let his fingers caress her cheekbone, her jaw, as he stared into her dove-soft gray eyes.

His woman.

He fought to hold back the possessiveness rising inside him, the feeling of something belonging to him. Just to him. He knew fate, and she laughed at him for sport. She snatched happiness from his fingertips with a sneer and a laugh.

He stared into Cassa’s eyes, and once again saw a flash of that ever hated fear in her eyes. Even now, seconds after the most incredible pleasure he had ever known, he still sensed her fear of him.

Perhaps it was something time would take care of for him, if he had time with her, he told himself. She would learn she had nothing to fear.

He would give his life for hers without thought. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that living without her now wasn’t something he could face doing. This hunger, this need, this total fulfillment of sexual pleasure was unlike anything he had ever known in his life.

And her touch. Her touch was a stroke of pleasure and of comfort. Living without that comfort wasn’t something he wanted to ever risk.

She was the other half of him, the one thing he had longed for ever since he had learned of the mating phenomenon. She was the part of his soul that had been missing and was now complete.

“I don’t like seeing that fear in your eyes,” he told her softly as the barb slowly receded and her inner flesh released its grip on it.

Her eyes flickered and he saw the lie coming. Placing his fingers over her lips, he held back the words.

“No lies, Cassa,” he told her softly. “If you can’t tell me why, then don’t bother to tell me I’m not seeing what I know I see.”

Her lips were pressed tightly together as a frown worried at her brow.

“When you’re ready to discuss it, then I’ll be here,” he told her rather than demanding the answers.

A man didn’t get far when demanding anything from Cassa. She was as willful as a woman could get, and twice as independent.

“Will you?” she finally asked, her lips whispering over his fingertips. “Will you, Cabal? Or will you walk away like you always do?”

His lips quirked mockingly at the thought of walking away now.

“I think we’re both very well aware of the fact that there’s no walking away now. Even if it was something either of us wanted to do.”

He moved against her, his hardening erection filling her flesh as her breath caught.

“See, Cassa? There’s no walking away, honey. We’re bound. Just as you knew we would be.”

He could see it in her eyes, in her expression. The knowledge, and the fear.