Rule Breaker

CHAPTER 32

Gypsy stared at the sight of her bruised, banged, freshly showered lover . . . mate, she amended, and had to hold back a smile as she watched him sleep.

Bullying him into the shower hadn’t been as hard as she had anticipated. Of course, she’d had to put up with groping hands trying to pull her in with him. Thankfully, her full-grown Lion Breed male had simply been too damned drunk to really put much strength into it.

Come morning, his eye was going to be horribly swollen, and his lip was split. He swore Loki had cracked a rib, while Dog must have punctured his lung with a fist.

Lawe was still laughing like a loon when he and Jonas dumped Rule inside the suite and glared at her as though it was all her fault.

And maybe it was.

She’d felt the horrible aloneness circling her as she dealt with her family and her own emotions. It was only for a few hours, she’d told herself, and then she intended to fix it.

She hadn’t intended for him to get all drunk and rowdy while he waited, but that was exactly what he had done. Though Lawe assured her Dog and Loki looked worse.

Thinking of Loki brought her sister to mind. Kandy had listened as Gypsy had explained Mark’s death, and her father had explained, or tried to explain, their mother.

When it was over, Kandy had just shaken her head, turned and left her parents’ home. When Gypsy had left as well and looked over to the apartments, she realized that the black heavy-duty pickup that had been parked just down the street wasn’t there any longer.

Loki had been all but staying with her sister for weeks and Gypsy hadn’t realized it. Until now.

What had happened that the Coyote Breed was no longer taking up space in one of the few parking spots on the back street, or in her sister’s apartment?

She would have asked, but as she started down the walk Kandy had left again. Moving quickly to her own truck, she had sped from the parking lot before turning and heading into town.

Now, well after midnight, Gypsy sat next to her drunken, abused mate and couldn’t help but let a small grin tug at her lips. The entire time she’d been with her sister and parents she’d felt him, just beyond the shield she’d placed around her thoughts.

Rule hadn’t seemed to be as autocratic, as dominant as she was learning he could be. Still, he’d respected the shield, even if he had gotten drunk and apparently started a fight with Loki and Dog instead.

“Silly Lion,” she murmured softly, her heart softening as slowly she allowed her senses to meet his once again. “Did you really think I wouldn’t be back?”

The man might be staggered from drink, but the Lion, those animalistic senses that guided so much of him, was there. She could almost imagine the exhausted, morose creature as he lay with his head on his paws and stared back at her dejectedly.

Running her hand caressingly along her mate’s chest, she found herself completely unable to be angry with him. She’d learned so many things in the space of such a short time. More importantly, though, she’d learned how this Breed who’d sworn to run the moment he sensed his mate had been checking on her since the night Mark had been killed. The trips he had made to New Mexico. The years and favors amassed in an attempt to ensure that no matter what might happen to him, she was always taken care of.

Her quiet, often witty, too-intense Breed had given Jonas a run for his money when it had come to the games played to ensure her protection, and what happiness she could have found.

Warmth curled against her senses, a weary sort of nudging, as though he were leaning against a door, barely open, knocking softly.

“I saw you across a crowded bar and our eyes met,” she whispered as she let her fingers stroke down his still-damp hair. “Neon blue, shadowed but warm. You drew me in. You warmed me. Confused me. Made me want, made me ache and made me sigh.” With her fingertips she caressed the line of his shoulder where his hair ended. “I dreamed of you that night and every night after. I looked for you wherever I went. I held the image of you close to me, no matter who I met. And I ached. Until I felt your embrace.” Her fingers trailed along his chest. “The warmth of you, the taste of you, the pleasure of being possessed by you.” His heart was racing.

Gypsy restrained her smile. Perhaps he was a little more aware than she was giving him credit for.

“I should have told you.” Her hand paused at the edge of the sheet just below his ribs. “How each time I saw you, I saw your eyes, I saw the Breed that saved me that night. Each time I saw you, I loved you a little more. Loved you deeper. I loved you truer.”

She lifted her eyes to his to see the gleam of that rich, heated blue staring at her beneath lashes that dipped with drowsy arousal.

Her hand slid beneath the sheet and found flesh hardened with hunger and throbbing beneath her fingertips.

His jaw bunched as she ran her palm down the thick shaft to the tightly bunched spheres of his testicles, where she cupped gently.

“You shut me out,” he accused her, his voice heavy, husky.

“I had to think, Rule,” she chided him. “There will be times I have to think, times I’ll have to sort my emotions for myself before I express them. If you get drunk and fight every time, then Dog and Loki are going to start protesting.”

He grunted. “Fuck that. Next time, I’ll find a human to pound on. They don’t hit nearly as hard. Dog punctured a lung, Gypsy.” He affected a wounded-hero look that almost broke her resolve not to laugh at him. “And Loki cracked a rib. I know he did.”

“Poor little Lion,” she sighed, brushing the sheet aside as she lowered her head to a nasty bruise forming just below one side of his broad chest. “Would it help if I kiss it better?”

She blew a light kiss over the bruise.

“You keep kissing and I’ll let you know,” he suggested with affected pain. “I’m certain it will eventually.”

A hint of certainty nudged at her senses. The bruising was tremendous, but Breeds didn’t feel pain as their human cousins did. The faker—the pain might have been bad for an hour or so, but she doubted it would be more than a twinge no matter what he was doing.

He stretched lazily against her, the fingers of one broad hand threading into her hair to press her lips closer to the abused flesh.

“I could need a lot of those kisses,” he rasped, the deep, rough sound of his voice adding to the heat building beneath her own flesh and between her thighs.

She licked over the bruise, feeling his big body tighten, flex at the sensation.

“A lot?” she asked breathlessly. “It could take a while. I’m sure you’re tired.”

“Yeah, I should be,” he groaned. “But I’ll try to make sure I stay awake for it. Just to make certain you get each bruise.”

She couldn’t help the light laughter that escaped.

“I love you, Gypsy Rum. For so long, I’ve loved you.”

The words had her pausing, blinking back tears and lifting her gaze to meet the somber, deepening emotion filling his.

“You should have told me.” Lifting to him, she let her lips settle gently against his, careful of the flesh a heavy fist had split. “You should have let me love you, Rule.”

The long length of her dark hair fell over her shoulders, shrouding them in an intimate cocoon as he stared up at her, drawing her to him, his lips parting.

Chocolate and peppermint filled her senses, heated spice and the sweetness of a love that knew more than selfishness, more than greed. A love that had watched, waited, and when the life she had chosen was no longer what she wanted, he was there.

That knowledge seeped into her, not from the man, but from what she was beginning to call the animal that tempered the man.

“Yeah,” he breathed. “Because had I known what you were to me, I would have played hell having to wait until you were eighteen. Greedy. Impatient and selfish. I’d have taken everything I could and begged you to like it.”

Their lips came together again, her tongue rubbing against his, the addictive taste of him infusing her senses further until they came up for air.

“You would have run.” She continued the sensual debate in which, as words were spoken, emotions awakened and knowledge whispered into both of them.

“Think?” He nipped at her lips. “I was there the night you turned eighteen, Gypsy. Standing at the back of the crowd, watching, aching for you as you showed off your new leather pants and those sinfully high-heeled boots you wore. And all I could see was the aloneness that surrounded you and how I ached to replace it with a hunger for my touch, my kiss.”

His lips slanted over hers as she gasped in pleasure, in surprise.

His lips stole reason, stole objection if there had been any. As his hands held her to him, one buried in her hair, the other gripping her waist as his tongue pierced her lips, penetrated her mouth and spilled more of the rich taste to her senses. Over and over again, as though he were fucking her mouth . . .

The image of him doing just that dragged a shattered groan from both of them.

She tore her lips from him, raining kisses down the tough line of his jaw, the surprisingly sensitive plane of his chest and along the tight abdomen where the throbbing crest of his cock waited impatiently.

Oh God, she was hungry for him.

Following his guiding hands in her hair as she moved between his thighs, Gypsy found herself becoming lost in the pleasures and fantasies that filled his mind as she touched him.

When her tongue licked over the blunt head of his cock and the wild, dark taste of his pre-cum exploded against her taste buds, the fantasy was obliterated, though. Shockingly, gentle hunger, protective greed and an overwhelming need circled her own emotions. As though he were wrapping his senses around hers, ensuring that she never feared allowing them free. He alone knew them. And he would never mistake the vulnerable sexuality she hid inside her soul for weakness.

As though that knowledge were all that was needed to release the hungry woman inside her, Gypsy felt it escape. Everything she had held back over the years, everything she had denied herself.

Her lips parted, her mouth sinking over the head of his erection, feeling it penetrate her lips as they both cried out in pleasure.

His pleasure whipping around her. Hers meeting and merging with it. Like a storm that threatened to never end.

Sucking at the blunt head as it thrust back and forth between her lips, Gypsy gave herself to the flames licking around her, inside her. She tongued the sensitive little spot beneath the head that throbbed a little harder, felt a little hotter. There, where the male mating barb released, locking him into her.

Her pussy clenched in hunger then, slick heat spilling to the swollen folds and distended bud of her clit as she pressed her thighs tight together and sucked him deeper into the depths of her mouth.

As she held him as deep as possible, her tongue rippling against the sensitive flesh beneath the head now, her lashes drifted open, her gaze meeting his.

“God, that’s good,” he groaned, panted. “Fuck, Gypsy, your mouth is so good. Sucking me so good.”

Strong fingers clenched in her hair again, tugging at the strands as she began moving her mouth over him, meeting each upward thrust of his hips as he fucked into her mouth.

“Ah, fuck, yeah,” he growled. “Tongue it just like that, baby. Damn, it’s so good. So hot and so good.”

Holding the base of the shaft with one hand, she stroked the rest of it to where her fingers met her lips. Her head bobbed up and down, her tongue licking, stroking, making them both crazy as desires met, married and swirled around them as one incredibly fierce need to please, to pleasure, to explode.

Strong thighs were taut, hard, like silk over iron as they flexed next to her shoulders. Controlled and fierce, her Breed growled, almost purred and cursed as the pleasure heated and the feel of moisture trickling from her vagina to the outer folds pulled a helpless moan from her.

Rising until her lips covered just the sensitive head to where the barb throbbed beneath his flesh, she sucked him tighter. Curling her tongue around it, licking, flicking against the narrow slit where the taste of his pre-cum tempted her, Gypsy teased and tempted the animal growling beneath her.

When he took her—when he came behind her, gripped her hips and surged inside her without pausing—she would be branded by the pleasure-pain of it.

She let the image of it fill her head, the remembered sensations torturing both of them as she felt his cock tighten, thicken further. He was fucking her lips with hard, short lunges, the head of his cock filling her mouth, rasping against her tongue as he groaned as though in agony.

“Enough.”

Before she could stop him he had her on her back, his lips moving to her nipples. If she had thought to torture his cock head with her mouth, then he did more than think to torture her nipples with his.

Sucking one between his lips, he tightened the wet suction, drawing on her as a slightly rough rasp of his tongue sent one hard flash of exquisite pleasure striking at her womb, at the too-sensitive bud of her clit.

His fingers slid down her abdomen as his teeth rasped the little button of her nipple. His hand cupped her pussy, fingers curling inward to find the clenched entrance to the hungry inner flesh.

Two broad male fingers sank inside the saturated flesh, immediately flooding her senses with fiery pleasure, stretching, agonizing need as he pushed into the depths of her, his wrist turning, fingers reaching high inside her to find that place just beneath her clit.

Gypsy’s eyes flared open.

“Rule, please,” she cried out as he began spreading kisses from her nipples to her stomach, lower, moving between her thighs as his fingers stroked, rubbed and held her poised on the edge of rapture.

“Oh God, let me come,” she cried out, her fingers clenching in the blankets beneath her as she strained toward him. “Rule, please . . . Oh God, don’t stop.”

The penetration pulled back, eased.

Gripping her hips with both hands now, he lifted them, his head lowering.

A wail of hungry need left her lips as he pushed his tongue inside her instead. The hint of a sandpapery roughness licking inside her, pushing into her, thrusting through the slick, tightened tissue was like agony. Like the most exquisite pleasure she’d ever known.

He ate her decadently, licking at her juices, growling in hunger as the impression of senses becoming immersed in her taste, in her need, slipped through her mind.

He fucked her pussy with his tongue as though he’d craved the taste of her forever. And maybe he had. Years of fantasy were drifting through his mind and he made no attempt to hide them from her. And this had been one of his favorites. Lifting her to him, licking her like a favored treat to his starving tongue.

Over and over he thrust into the needy channel, filling it with his tongue, her juices clinging to his lips each time he drew back, his gaze locked with hers.

Holding her thighs apart with his broad forearms, he kept her opened to him, wicked and hungry.

And he let her watch.

Let her watch as he pulled back, her juices clinging between her folds and his lips like nectar. Each inward stroke of his tongue came with the flickering licks inside her as he tasted her. Devoured her.

And Gypsy was certain she couldn’t survive. Her clit was throbbing almost painfully, the need for sensation, the need to come, to explode driving her insane.

God, she needed. Needed him.

Pulling back, his stroking tongue moved higher, his fingers returning, pushing inside her as his lips surrounded the little bud of her clit and burned her senses with his hunger, with her need.

Impaling the heated depths of her pussy, his fingers parted the sensitive flesh there, scissored and stroked, stretching her, spilling more of her juices as she lifted to him, desperate now to escape into the chaotic pleasure awaiting her.

His tongue curled around her clit, sucked it into the heat of his mouth, worked his mouth around it, rubbed at it with his tongue, growled, the sound rumbling with vibrations of sensual greed and striking at a trigger she hadn’t known her sensuality possessed.

She exploded.

Crying out, bearing down on his fingers a second before she dissolved around the penetrating pleasure, Gypsy felt herself flying apart at the seams.

She didn’t exist anymore, not physically.

She was pleasure. Nothing but an erotic star going supernova in Rule’s arms.

Her hips jerked against the suckling pressure of his lips around her clit and she exploded there a second later. The alternate explosions ruptured through her senses, throwing her higher, taking her further into a world where nothing but sensation ruled her now.

The fierce explosions were still sending aftershocks racing through her when he came to his knees, lifted her hips to him and watched, oh God he watched, as the head of his cock began pushing into the clenched entrance it sought.

She felt every molecule of sensation.

The heat. The stretch of flesh thicker than the fingers he’d pushed inside her to prepare her. The hard throb of the crest, the power in the iron-hard shaft.

“That’s it, baby,” he growled, sweat easing down his chest in thin rivulets as his eyes darkened, glowed brighter. “Take me just like that. All tight and slick, with all those pretty juices clinging to me as that tight pussy sucks me right in.”

Another cry slipped free of her lips as she realized she was being pulled straight into the steady climb to another orgasm before the first one was finished tossing her through the sensual storm that had possessed her.

“Rule.” One hand gripped one of his wrists as the other tore at the blankets beneath her. “Just do it. Oh God, I don’t know if I can stand this.”

Pleasure was a racking, torturous ecstasy as he took her slowly. So slowly, letting her feel every inch of his cock ease inside her, parting her with the wide, blunt head, staking claim, branding her inner flesh with erotic heat.

“That snug little cunt sucks at me like a hungry mouth,” he groaned, the explicit words more involuntary, an expression and extension of his pleasure more than anything else. “Fuck yeah, suck me right in, baby. Tighten that hungry pussy around me.”

A half growl, half snarl left his chest as she did just that involuntarily to the sound of the sexy order.

“Dream of this.” He pushed in deeper, his hips flexing, driving his erection inside her another inch, pulling back, sinking in again as she began to writhe beneath him.

It was so good.

It was too good.

She didn’t know if she could survive it. If she could survive the coming explosion.

“Rule!” She tried to scream out for him as he suddenly powered inside her.

Taking her in a single, deep stroke, burying his cock balls-deep inside the tight inner shudders of her pussy as sensation began to pulse, to throb inside her senses as she felt her orgasm building.

“God, I feel your pleasure,” he groaned as she stared back at him in dazed, nearly uncomprehending hunger. “It surrounds me, Gypsy. Strokes me.”

As his did her.

Pulling back, he drove inside her again, but this time, he didn’t pause. He pushed his arm beneath her hips, lifted her hips and began fucking her with a hunger torn out of his control.

If he’d sensed her pleasure, she swore she had to feel his. The ultra tight, rippling flesh gripping him, stroking him as he sank to the very depths, his cock head burying itself in giving flesh, as if the blunt crest had buried itself in liquid lightning.

Pleasure struck at the sensitive crest, wrapped around the shaft, stroked and flicked and licked with electric pleasure that only built with each inward stroke until he was shafting inside her harder, the pleasure climbing, taking her, sealing her to him, until it suddenly pierced both their senses with blow after blow of such ecstasy that Gypsy wondered if they would survive it.

Her pussy tightened further around him, flexing and rippling as the first hard jet of his release pulsed inside her. Then that swelling extended from his shaft, just beneath the head of his cock. It became quickly erect, tucking in that narrow crevice behind her clit and increasing the sensation, the brutal pleasure with bolt after bolt of sensation even as the pulse of his release ejaculated inside her.

When it was over, his weight partly collapsed upon her, the rest boneless against the bed, exhaustion seeped through her. Through every muscle, every bone and cell, until it came to a shadowed, hidden part of her soul.

But Rule knew it was there. When he had found it, why he hadn’t tried to force it open, she wasn’t certain.

An impression of gentle chastisement touched her senses then.

No, he would never force it from her.

He would never take it from her.

It was hers to give as nothing else ever could be.

It was more precious than her love, more dear to him than her laughter or her smiles, she realized.

Gypsy tentatively released the final shield she’d built years ago between herself and anyone who threatened to touch her heart.

But Rule had done more than threaten to touch it. He owned it. He owned every part of her, even this fragile, so very vulnerable part of her soul.

For the first time in nine years, Gypsy gave her trust.

Completely. Willingly and without hesitation she bound herself to her Breed, both man and inner beast.

He found the energy to lift his head, to brush his lips against hers, then meet her gaze.

They didn’t have to speak.

They could feel.

They didn’t have to make vows.

It was all there already.

In that link that would never have existed if man hadn’t thought he could create life, if the Almighty hadn’t taken those creations and made them his own.

A link that gave her Breed full access, heart and soul.

But gave Gypsy complete, endearing love, dedication and an assurance, even if tomorrow didn’t come, right now, here in his arms, she was finally complete.