No, it wasn't blood; only DNA bound them.
Jonas shook his head before moving into the vehicle and sliding it into drive.
The ride to the cabin was made quickly. Darkness surrounded them as they reached the tree line and Jonas headed the Raider to the cabin above.
"What was he talking about?" Rachel finally asked as he pulled the vehicle into the small attached garage and shut the engine off.
He stared into the dimly lit interior, wishing that just once, the past could be forgotten.
"We have a lot to discuss," he finally said quietly. "Things I'm certain you need to know."
Things he had swore he would never tell anyone. The truth might be told, but he had promised himself it would never be told by him. He had no desire to destroy himself in his mate's eyes, or in anyone else's.
"And it's something you think that will change what's between us?" she asked.
A mirthless laugh escaped his lips. "I've lived in a fool's paradise since bringing you here. Perhaps in a way, I've lived in one since the day I allowed myself to become the director of the Bureau. Your past always returns, Rachel."
He turned to her as he felt her hand touch his jaw, urging him to look at her.
And she was much too close for his self-control. Her lips were too close. Her deep, dark green eyes stared too deeply into his. For a moment, just a moment, he allowed himself to sink inside her, to feel the peace, the contentment he should have been able to find with her.
"And you think it changes the man you are now?" Her question threw him off.
"Nothing can change who I am." The arrogance in his tone nearly had him wincing in self-disgust.
Rachel only smiled. "I didn't think so."
Then before he sensed what she was about, before he could counter the mouth, her lips were touching his, her tongue flickered past his lips to the hormone-rich interior of his mouth. And she freed the animal raging inside him.
CHAPTER 16
Logic. Sanity. They fell by the wayside the moment her tongue touched his. So sweet and cool, tempting, stroking against the tortured flesh of his own, Jonas lost what little control he had been hanging on to.
He felt that final thread snap as the man was pushed aside and the animal he'd sworn he would never become took over.
There was only the most distant awareness of the baby sleeping peacefully on the other side of the room. Just enough awareness so that when his hand clamped on the back of her head to hold her to the kiss, the other arm wrapping around her hips, lifting her, he knew he had to get her to the bedroom.
The journey there was endless, torturous. It was hell trying to stumble to the next room, his senses, his entire being focused on the rush of adrenaline-spiked pleasure tearing through his body. His leg caught the corner of the chest. He banged against the dresser. He kept his mate carefully sheltered from harm as his tongue pumped in her mouth, his harsh, "Suck it," a rasp of demented hunger before he filled her mouth with the mating hormone.
He was known as a graceful, predatory lover. A man who knew all the right moves. A Breed with the patience and experience to drive a woman wild for hours at a time.
That was the man.
The man wasn't in control now.
The graceful, predatory lover of the past was now primal. Possessive. It was starved for the mating, obsessed with the taste of this woman's kiss, the stroke of her hands over his body.
He was the animal that even he feared.
The glass doors on the two-sided fireplace had been secured from the bedroom earlier, but the fire blazed warm and bright, sending flickering fingers of red-gold over her face, along her body. The room was quiet, cool, but nothing could pierce the haze of fiery heat raging through his body.
A heat he knew he would regret, come morning. A pleasure that overshadowed anything that had come before it. Jonas knew there was nothing in his life that would ever compare to the complete, sensual bliss to be found in Rachel's touch. In touching her. Stroking her. In pumping his tongue in her mouth and feeling her suck at it lightly, tentatively.
Tomorrow, she would regret it. She would regret him, and he knew it. For now, his tongue was thrusting into his mate's mouth, fucking it with wild, primal hunger. The hormone spilled freely from the glands beneath his tongue now, as though the warmth of her mouth, the touch of her tongue, the gentle, pulsating sucks as she tried to capture it, had been all that was needed to end the agony he'd suffered for months.
There was no pleasure so great as holding her to him, feeling the soft, hesitant little licks and sucks against the agonized flesh of his tongue. As though each small stroke touched more than those swollen glands. It touched his soul, warmed it. Built a fire inside him where once there had been nothing but cold emptiness, a hollow, haunted shell of a man.
The more she gave him, the more he wanted.