Withdrawal. That was exactly what it felt like. Her body was protesting the absence of Kiowa’s, demanding his touch, demanding the heat and strength that was so much a part of him. Amanda couldn’t believe anything could hurt so bad. That arousal could become agony, tearing at the nerve endings and burning into the mind. She had to get away from him. Maybe if she could just get entirely away from him, then it would stop. Withdrawal needed a source, take the source and the body would adjust. Wouldn’t it? It would go back to normal, she could go back to normal. She just had to get away from Kiowa.

Some distant part of her mind was aware that she wasn’t thinking rationally. That the building pain and the need for his touch were becoming so extreme that her ability to process reality wasn’t as it should be. She stumbled from the bed, throwing the blankets aside as her feet tangled in them and weaved her way desperately for the living room. Silence filled the cabin, and rather distantly, she remembered a door closing just after Kiowa left the shower.

Had he left her alone? Didn’t the heat affect him as it did her?

The bastard, of course it wouldn’t.

“Amanda?” He moved from another room instead, one she hadn’t paid any attention to on the other side of the living room.

He wore his jeans low, several metal buttons undone. His cock was thick and hard beneath the material.

“Kiowa.” She clenched her fists as his scent wrapped around her, drugging her with the need to taste him.

“You should be sleeping.” His voice was soft, regretful as he watched her. He didn’t move from the doorway, just stood there, his dark eyes bleak and filled with hunger and need.

“Do you hurt too?” she whispered, feeling her juices trickle down the inside of her thigh.

“Yeah, baby, I hurt too,” he said, his voice rough, a low growl of hunger that had her breath catching in her chest.

“It hurts too badly.” She shuddered with the pain.

“You know the alternative, Manda.” His tone hardened. He wasn’t going to let her hide; he wasn’t going to let her forget.

“I would love my child,” she cried out desperately. “I would.”

She would never force it to be alone, to hunger for love or attention. She would lavish praise on it, laugh with it, love it.

“And what of its father, Manda?” he asked her.

Tears fell from her eyes as her head tilted back and a low, painful moan filled the room.

“I don’t want to love you,” she whispered. “I don’t even know you. How can I love you?”

“Yes, you do.” He was closer now. “You know me better than you think you do. You know I’ll protect you, Manda. You know I’ll hold you close and keep you warm. You know you are my mate. Mates are forever. Just as you know your body will never go hungry for mine, your every desire, your every need fulfilled.”

Her head titled forward, something inside her shattering at his words. Sexuality was something to hide where she came from. God help her if her family every found her books, or discovered her perversions. But Kiowa knew them. He knew what she wanted, what her body craved. Marriages survived on less than that; surely a mating wouldn’t be too bad?

Your hormones are talking,her mind screamed out. Buck up girl. Remember, freedom? Time to be alone?

Time to be alone with her books and her daydreams, she thought. Kiowa was a sexual fantasy come to life.

“You’re manipulating me.” She was panting for air.

“Of course I am.” He shrugged carelessly. “You weren’t far off the mark when you called me an animal, baby. Those instincts are alive and humming and they’re screaming you’re mine. I won’t let you go, Amanda.”

“God you are such a headache,” she snapped, perspiration covering her body as lust built to a feverpitch. “Do you have any idea how impossible this is? This isn’t my life. It isn’t what I want.”

“This wasn’t your life.” He leaned lazily against the doorframe then. “It is now. You take the scraps life throws at you and make the best of it. You’re a smart woman, smart enough to know this isn’t something that’s just going to go away.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to just bow down and give in to it,” she argued fiercely. “Scientists created this curse you have, they can fix it.”

He laughed at that.

“Do you think your eggheaded God-complex scientists had any clue what they were doing?” he asked mockingly. “Do you have any idea the strong, vital men and women who died, created to be killers, but born with such honor and intelligence that their creators knew they could never let them live? No, Amanda, the world’s best and brightest are currently living in a secluded lab beneath the estate here, trying to just understand how this works. There is no cure. They admit that. The best they are hoping for is to ease the symptoms.”

She wanted to scream in denial, but her body was burning so hot she couldn’t think of anything much past getting his cock out of his pants. The heat was consuming her, making her want, making her need things that brought a flush of humiliation to her entire body.

“Kiowa, it hurts,” she finally whispered desperately, flinching as another powerful spasm rippled through her womb.

“What do you want me to do, Amanda?” he whispered. “If I take you, you know what’s going to happen. Do you know, when I’m locked inside you, my cock is pressed flush against your cervix, my seed shooting into it. You’re ovulating,” he reminded her. “Do you want to take that chance again?”

“Do I have a choice?” she screamed back at him, gasping as the anger seemed to build, to feed the sexual desperation climbing within her.

“You have a choice,” he snarled in reply. “You can admit you can’t run from it, Amanda.”

“In less than twenty-four hours you’ve destroyed every dream I ever had.” She was shaking with fury, with lust. “And you expect me to just give up? Oh yes, the great and might Kiowa, king of Coyotes has knotted my cunt, my world is finally right. Damn you, I didn’t ask you for this. I didn’t ask those bastards to attempt to kidnap me and I didn’t ask you to fuck me.”

“No, you begged me to,” he shot back at her, making her grit her teeth at the memory. “You screamed it, Amanda, you demanded it. And lady, I didn’t ask for you any more than you asked for me. At least I have the God-given sense to realize that fighting is a waste of strength.”

“I don’t belong to you!”

She was screaming. The anger pouring through her was like a spark to the building, surging tide of lusts she couldn’t control. She hated it. She needed it more than breath.

“Wrong, baby,” he snapped, finally moving toward her, his long-legged stride eating up the short distance, powerful muscles flexing along his upper body, his eyes hot, singeing her. “You do belong to me. Every inch of that sweet, hot little body is mine now. If you don’t believe that, try to let another touch you.”

She remembered Callan Lyons touching her, catching her as her legs faltered beneath her earlier. The pain had been excruciating.

“You bastard!” she raged.

“Yeah, I am,” he agreed as he walked around her, not touching her, letting her smell the intriguing scent of man, honey and spice. “But your bastard it would seem.”

She shuddered at the feel of his warmth surrounding her as he passed her on the way to the kitchen.

“God, what a mess.” She sighed deeply pushing her fingers roughly through her hair as she watched his lips quirk. Not really a smile, but almost.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said softly. “Some things look pretty damned good from where I’m standing. You clean up real fine, Ms. Marion, I have to say that for you.”

“I clean up fine?” She rolled her eyes, fighting the arousal as she watched the slow amusement dawn in his eyes. “You are a nutcase. Has anyone mentioned that to you?”

He shrugged powerful muscles. “I think that was Simon’s line the night I caught him trying to break into the bar I worked as bouncer for. He wanted to blow the place up. It was my bread-and-butter at the time so I took exception.”

“A bouncer?” Oh, her father was going to love this one, but suddenly, it made him seem more real, less of a puppet.

“Yep. Bouncer in a rough-assed brothel/bar called the Raging Lilly just inside this dirty little French town. Filled with terrorists, low-lifes and pond scum. He was itching to blow it to hell and back. Took me a few minutes to convince him of the error of his ways.”

“Simon is the guy who drove the jeep?” She fought to concentrate as he handed her a glass of chilled water.

“Drink that. Dehydration is a problem sometimes with these damned matings I was told. And yes, Simon was driving the jeep.”

She drank the water, but it did nothing to stem the fever running rampant through her body.

“So, how did you become friends of the Feline Breeds? The last reports I heard, Coyotes were the most feared Breed.”

“Not the most feared, the most hated.” He shrugged. “Somehow, Simon must have figured out what I was. My best guess is he got a glimpse of that birthmark low on my back. It’s a genetic marker of some sort. He was friends with Sinclair, and when he learned the significance of it, he and Sinclair dragged me out of my life of disuse and into this. I’ll have to thank him for that. Again.”

There was a wry amusement in his gaze. He had a way of making her want to laugh, even when she wanted to hit him with something.

“Kiowa.” She licked her dry lips nervously, shaking in the grip of a need so powerful, she knew she was lost to it as he watched her closely. “Please.”

He sat his glass then hers on the coffee table, before he moved behind her, his body heat surrounding her.

“Please what, Manda?” he whispered at her ear, his breath wafting over the wound at her neck. “What do you need?”

“You.” Stark, blinding, she didn’t bother to lie or to deny it to herself any longer. “I need you.”

Not conversation, not explanations. His kiss, his touch, the blinding release she knew she was going to find no place but in his arms.

Chapter Sixteen

Before she could do more than gasp, Kiowa lifted her in his arms, his lips coming down on hers, his tongue pushing demandingly into her mouth as he carried her to the bedroom. She wasn’t certain how he got the gown off, and she didn’t really care. All she cared about was the touch of him, the heat of his body, and the need coursing through her blood. His lips were on hers, his tongue sharing the intriguing, addictive taste of honey and spice, as he laid her on the bed and came down over her. He was as naked as she. She promised herself that next time, she would figure out how he managed to undress both of them so quickly.

“Don’t rush this,” he growled as she rubbed against him, stroking her nipples across his chest and gasping at the pleasure of it.

“Me?” she groaned in response. “I’m not the one who has some kind of freaky aphrodisiac pouring out of me. That’s your fault.”

He grunted at that, a distinctly male sound of frustration that had a smile tugging at her lips. But his eyes crinkled with hidden laughter as he levered himself up to stare down at her, the black centers, despite their heat, soft with tenderness.

“I watched you a week before the kidnapping attempt,” he whispered as his hand cupped her cheek. “I followed you to school every morning, I followed you home every evening. If you went out, I was on your ass until you arrived at your destination and back on it until you got home. For a week, I listened to you laugh with your neighbors and coo over their children. And each time I saw you, the need for you grew inside me. No aphrodisiac. Not mating complications. Just a man slowly falling in love with a woman he had no right to.”