her ass back, opening herself to his penetration. He couldn’t resist and slid his cock into her until she’d taken all of him into her tight, wet channel. Her muscles clasped him snugly and he shuddered, biting down on her neck. She cried out, her body jerking against him, her dampness increasing in a hot rush. “Deus, Hunter! Fast. I want it fast. Now.”
“Good.” At this point, he wasn’t sure he could go slowly even if he had a gun pressed to his temple. He plunged deep into her pussy, her slickness coating his cock with each thrust. Molten heat flooded his body, and he barely clung to his sanity…and his control. Touching her was better than any pleasure he’d ever known—he couldn’t get enough, and he didn’t want to. The thought alone should have worried him, but he was beyond caring about anything other than the ecstasy he found in possessing her.
Their bodies shuddered with the impact of his thrusts, his hips driving hers against the railing. She met each of his movements with her own. A low, husky laugh slipped from her throat. “I really. Love. This view.”
“It’s the best.” His fingers tightened around hers, and his breathing hitched every time he slammed into her. Her slick sheath clenched around him each time he withdrew, as though trying to keep him inside her, and the fire racing through his blood reached a boiling point. He was going to come soon, but he intended to take her with him. Rolling his pelvis against her, he changed the angle to one that never failed to make her scream.
“Yes! Deus, yes!” Her slim body bowed and her pussy fisted around his dick in rhythmic pulses that dragged him into orgasm with her. He came deep inside her, grinding his pelvis into her with each hard jet of come.
The lights of the city blurred before his eyes, and he knew he’d never look at it again without thinking of his mate. Her cries were lost in the relentless wind off Lake Michigan, and only his ears would hear their sweet sound. He pressed his sweat-dampened forehead to the back of her shoulder and breathed in her scent. His muscles shook with the effort it took to remain upright, but he didn’t want to withdraw from her. Not yet…not yet. She was here, she was safe, and she was his. That was all he needed at the moment. Everything else could wait.
It wasn’t until she stirred against him that he pulled away from her, gritting his teeth at the drag of his flesh in hers. He drew her pliant body against his, nudging her in the direction of his bedroom. Every room in the house except the kitchen had indestructible polyglass doors that led out on to the balcony. The main space had several. There was another set beyond his room before the building curved around a corner. He never went in there.
“Where does that lead?” As if she’d read his thoughts, she jutted her chin toward those doors.
He considered not answering her, but thought she’d investigate on her own if he didn’t. And the last thing he wanted was the cat’s curiosity prying into his past. “That was my parents’ room before they died.”
“Oh. Well, what’s in there now?” Glancing down, he saw her head had cocked in question.
He blinked and frowned, nonplussed by the odd question. “It’s their room. What else would be in there except their things?”
“I see.” Something close to sympathy glimmered in her wide green gaze. “They died in an accident, right?”
He smoothed his hand over her silky hair, bending forward to kiss her forehead. “No, it wasn’t an accident.”
“How did they die, then?”
Sighing, he let her go and stepped around her to enter his main space. The whole evening had his insides churning. The nightmare. His fear for Delilah. Pierce’s message. Tarek trying to bring back the worst moment of his life while destroying the business the Avery family had been building for generations. His hands shook, rage and terror and a million other emotions he always avoided coursing through his veins.
Delilah’s palm stroked down his back. “Hunter?”
He pulled away from her, pacing in a tight circle. “My uncle was using one of our factories as a front for the slave-labor trade.” A fact Hunter hadn’t known until much later, that a man his father had trusted because he was family, because he was his beloved mate’s brother, had betrayed them all. “There was an escape that turned into a riot when my parents and I were visiting. We got caught in it. They didn’t survive.”
Her eyes widened, latching on to the scar on his face. The question was there in her gaze, but she didn’t give it voice.
Scrubbing a hand down the old scar, he sighed. “I got this as a memento of the occasion. A lovely reminder every time I look in a mirror.”
He hoped to Deus she dropped the topic, but that didn’t keep the memories at bay. There was a riot, true, but it was much, much worse than that. His father had discovered the truth about the factory when he arrived and nothing the manager told him made sense. They’d been on vacation, and his father decided to spot-check the site on their way home. Only an hour out of their day, he’d sworn.
They’d lost far more than an hour.
The air of desolation about the place had made both his parents suspicious. While his father had gone to question the manager, Hunter and his mother had looked around. She found a double reinforced mercurite door that latched from the outside and popped the seal on it.
His father and the manager had come around the corner then, their argument heated. Every scrap of color had left the shorter man’s face when his gaze locked on that door. He’d shouted for them to close it, but it was too late.
Shifters of all species came boiling through that opening. An enormous man, half-shifted into a grizzly bear, swung his hands around wildly as he fought for balance in the melee. His roar echoed over the crowd, a claw ripping through Hunter’s flesh as he rushed past. Hunter’s young body had flown back, slamming into the side of the building. He watched his father dive after his mother and into the mass of emaciated shifters, their sunken eyes bereft of anything except an animal’s survival instinct. No humanity remained there.
It had taken only moments for Hunter to lose sight of his parents, and for the people to scent the manager who’d caged them. They’d turned on him so fast he’d had no real chance of escape. When Hunter finally regained his footing in the rioting mob, it was to see the one memory he would give his entire fortune to erase.
His parents’ deaths.
They hadn’t just been killed, they’d been ripped limb from limb. When the authorities arrived to clean up the mess, they’d found the corpses mangled and half-eaten.
Bile rose in Hunter’s throat, and he desperately shoved the waking nightmare away. It shouldn’t haunt him anymore, shouldn’t have the power to make him sweat and shake. He balled his trembling hands into tight fists, dragging in slow, clean breaths that didn’t carry the acrid stench of blood and fear and death.
“How old were you?” Delilah’s voice sounded from a distance, but when he turned to face her, she was right behind him.
He cleared his throat. “Fourteen. The trip had been to celebrate my birthday with just the family. It was so rare that we had time to ourselves.”
“I thought…If your uncle…Did you stay with other family after that?”
“No, my mother’s brother received guardianship of me. And the company.” The man had done everything in his power to make sure Hunter would never take over his inheritance.
