Wouldn’t he?
His breathing was rough, hard as he stared down at the offending part of his body as he forced himself to release it, watching the flesh pulse like a heartbeat just beneath it.
It had to be something else, he told himself as cold water sluiced over his flesh and covered his cock, having little effect on the burning hunger ravaging his senses.
He was powerfully sexual, he knew that. He couldn’t count a high sex drive as a possible mating sign. He had a high sex drive anyway. Most male Breeds did. They simply loved to fuck and did it whenever, wherever they could. They loved sex and they loved women, and petting them, rubbing against them, sensing their pleasure and satisfaction.
It was like a drug. A high.
And Gypsy’s pleasure had been like no high he had ever known in his entire life. Hell, he had been so attuned to her pleasure that he swore he felt the echoes of her release beginning to strike so deep inside his senses that he wondered if it sank to his soul. Something else he’d only heard of happening with a mate.
But the mating signs weren’t there.
He couldn’t even call the strength of her echoing pleasure a mating sign without anything else to go with it. And the feeling of—something—a heat and sudden building tightness beneath the head of his cock just before he came had been so damned odd he’d jumped from her and rushed to the shower before he could risk the mating barb extending from his cock.
Once it was free, there was no going back.
How many times had he heard that?
Once the mating barb extended and locked inside his mate, there was simply no stopping the mating.
He shut the shower off, standing there, his flesh still hot, the need for Gypsy still pounding through his system like a fever he couldn’t stop.
But not just the need to fuck her.
He wanted so much more from her than just the incredible pleasure that had raced through his senses.
Mating Heat was all about the sex. It wasn’t about the rubbing, the touching, seeing the laughter in a lover’s eyes or feeling her joy as it wrapped around him.
Mating Heat was weakening. It took over the senses and erased everything but the need for the mate. He’d sensed that ravaging force in his twin, Lawe, when he’d found his mate. His brother’s lack of control, the inability to sense anything around him but Diane.
And he’d sensed it even before then, years before, confined in a cell, all too aware of the scent of his mother and the Coyote they called Elder in the labs. The scent of their need, of their building desperation had haunted that fucking lab. The scientists never forbade the Coyote soldiers from taking the female prisoners. But never before had one of them mated a breeder.
Morningstar had literally birthed a pack, four offspring, before her body had suddenly become infertile.
Or it had been, before Elder.
Before her Coyote rapist had mated her and caused her death.
That desperation to set her and her young free, to have her, no matter the cost, had been the cause of her death as well as her mate’s.
Rule knew he couldn’t let that happen to any woman he mated. If he mated, if he let himself weaken that far, then it would be far too easy to take Gypsy from him.
She wasn’t a fighter.
She wasn’t a Breed.
She was resourceful, smart. She’d spied for the Unknown for nine years without ever being identified until Jonas put his too-intelligent mind to work on finding one of their contacts.
But she wasn’t trained to survive.
And she couldn’t be his mate.
His dick slowly lost its desperate stiffness as he stared down at it, frowning in confusion, wondering what the fuck his body was doing.
What crazy shit was happening to him and how the hell was he supposed to fix it?
It couldn’t have been the mating barb. He wouldn’t be losing the hard-on if he were even close to the beginning stages of Mating Heat. It wasn’t possible from what he’d heard.
So it couldn’t be a mating, he thought desperately. It had to just be one of those damned anomalies Breeds came in contact with damned near every day of their lives.
They weren’t human and they weren’t animal, and their bodies weren’t normal. That made some interesting reactions sometimes.
That had to be what had happened this time.
A smothered grunt of amused irritation left his lips as he began thinking hard. Jerking a towel from the towel rack, he fought to come up with a reasonable explanation for what was no doubt going to be a furious lover once he left the bathroom.
Had he really told her he’d drive her home after he washed up?
He ran the towel quickly over his hair, shook the remaining water out of it and drew in a quick, hard breath. There was no such thing as a reasonable explanation, but maybe a partial truth would work. She made him feel a pleasure that no other woman had ever made him feel, and it simply shocked the hell out of him.
That was the truth, and he thought maybe Gypsy could sense the truth sometimes. A certain expression, the way her eyes darkened when he held something back from her, or when he hadn’t exactly told her the truth.
It was a suspicion he couldn’t prove yet.
Snapping the towel into the bathtub, he exhaled roughly and opened the door, stepping back into the bedroom.
“Gypsy, baby, I’m sor—” He looked around the empty room.
Before he could stop it, an enraged snarl erupted from him, an animal’s fury pounding through his veins with such suddenness that it was shocking.
The man he was became the secondary part of his senses. The animal jumped forward, suddenly free, suddenly enraged, though not at the woman. No, the animal was enraged at the man and clawing beneath his flesh as he tore free of the inner restraints.
Because of the man, his mate had run.
Before Rule could stop the impulse, his hand slashed out, claw marks raked across the wall, the shock of seeing that primal, impossible sight snapping inside him.
Claws?
His fingers, blood smeared, the tips of strong, lethally sharp claws extending from the tips—
Another snarl tore from him, nearly a roar as animal instincts clashed with human ones and nearly overwhelmed him once again.
“Back off, goddammit,” he snarled furiously, reining in the animalistic impulses tearing through him.
He had to think.
Blood pounded hard and fast through his veins, chocolate and peppermint teased his taste buds, and that sure as hell didn’t make sense because he hadn’t had one of the sweets in days.
Drawing in a deep breath, her scent, her emotions, he clenched his teeth against another snarl that rose from the animal trapped inside him.
Gypsy was gone.
Her dress and her shoes were gone.
The little clutch purse she had carried was gone.
There was nothing left of her but the scent of such overwhelming pain—and God help him, shame.
He’d shamed her, humiliated her.
Pushing his fingers through his hair, the animal growled out at the silence of the room as self-disgust filled him with a suddenness that was shocking.
What the fuck had he done now and how the hell was he going to fix it? Because as God was his witness, he would have to fix it. Mate or no mate, barb or no barb, he had to get her back. He was beginning to suspect she was far more than any lover, and even without Mating Heat, a mating mark or mating hormone, he wasn’t going to be able to do without her.
He hadn’t marked her, but he knew that somehow, some way, she had marked him. The thought of that wasn’t as distasteful now as the thought of it had been, even hours ago. As though in the midst of their pleasure, in acknowledging that he’d never known so much with another woman, he’d dropped his guard enough to realize she was much more to him than he’d allowed himself to believe.