Leopard's Run (Leopard People 10)

She heard her soft cry, felt his hair bunched in her fists. She wanted to watch him, see that dark lust and the lines of sensual hunger carved deep that drove him on and on, but the world had narrowed to that of just sensation. Her eyesight seemed to fade as did her hearing so there was only feeling. She felt beyond sensitive so that she could hardly take what he was doing.

Her first orgasm hit like a freight train, rippling through her with a force that shook her, but he didn’t slow down. He didn’t stop or decrease the way he was using his mouth and teeth and tongue. His fingers slid into her, massaged and stroked. The second orgasm had her crying out, trying to find a purchase with her heels to back away from the relentless pressure. Over and over he flicked and pinched. He stroked and caressed. He stabbed deep and licked. There was no way to combat those things and her body coiled tighter and tighter.

Ashe was afraid she would pass out. Her lungs felt raw and burned with the need for air. She never wanted him to stop, yet he had to if she was going to survive. She found herself resisting the urge to fight him, and then the tsunami was there, sweeping her up into a vortex of pleasure, sending her careening over the edge.

She screamed, loud enough, she was certain, for the neighbors to hear. He lifted his head just enough to wipe his face on either thigh, the shadow of bristles dragging across the sensitive skin there, sending another strong aftershock that caused a shudder to run through her body.

Ashe lay on the counter, staring up at the ceiling, her body limp and pliant, fighting for air that refused to come.

Timur pressed a kiss into her belly button and carefully lowered her legs. He went to the sink and washed his face and hands before turning back to her. “Are you all right? Do you need help?” There was amusement in his voice.

She didn’t care how much enjoyment she was giving him, lying there, making a spectacle of herself. Her body was alive. Humming. Every cell sparking so that if felt as if electricity ran through her veins and spilled over to every organ. She could just stay right where she was and not care about anything.

She closed her eyes. “I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much.”

His soft laughter tempted her to open her eyes, but she didn’t. Instead, she threaded her fingers behind the nape of her neck and listened to the sounds he made as he moved around the kitchen. A drawer opening. Water running. His footsteps. It all blended together and was comforting. Then a warm cloth was between her legs. That felt soothing and caring and deserved at least a peek through her lashes.

His expression was intense and focused completely on her. Her heart lurched. She could get used to that attention. She’d had a happy enough childhood. Her mother was barely sixteen when she had her and for whatever reasons, she’d remained a little distant from Ashe. Her father had been the main caregiver, of both of them really. Of her mother mostly.

“My mom was beautiful,” she murmured aloud. “She really loved my father. She would look at him with this one expression, as if he was her entire world. It made me envious. I wanted her to look at me like that.” And now Timur was looking at her with that focused intensity, that look that said she was everything to him when they’d only known each other a couple of days. But it was there. Undeniably. And she liked it far too much.

“He had to be her world, baby,” Timur said softly and pulled her into a sitting position. “He saved her from being the wife of a man like my father, a man who would have beaten her. Abused her. Forced her to have children, all the while taunting her that she was nothing and someday he would end her life. She knew what the lairs were like. Any male shifter in the lairs was expected to take a wife and then kill her to prove his loyalty. Your father saved her from being passed around to his father’s friends before she suffered that fate.”

“What was I to my mother then?” She pushed at the hair tumbling around her face. The thick strands annoyed her, mostly because she needed to be annoyed rather than feel the way she had as a child—unwanted by her mother.

“She probably was terrified that if she had a female child rather than a male, eventually, her husband would get rid of her. That was ingrained in them. Every female child in our lair knew what her fate was going to be. There was no way out for them.”