“Stop.” The order was a hoarse growl, the anger in it flashing in his jungle green eyes.
“Stop what?” Her fists clenched, unclenched, the restlessness she couldn’t ease like an itch beneath her flesh.
“Stop remembering,” he ordered, his voice stark, dark with whatever emotion flashed in his gaze.
Cat felt that heavy thud of her heart, the pulse of adrenaline that hit her bloodstream and the breathlessness that always seemed to afflict her whenever she saw the somberness in his gaze as she did now.
“Stop remembering,” she repeated softly with a shake of her head.
Clenching her teeth against the anger that tore at her, she had to glance away. She had to stop looking at him, stop weakening.
“Is that easy for you to do, Graeme? Is it easy for you to just push back what you don’t want to affect the moment or the mission? How do you just not remember?” Was it so easy to just forget her?
Of course it was. She was just a child when he’d deserted her.
Twelve years of work he didn’t want to see destroyed. And now she was a potential biological match that had his Breed genetics in an uproar.
Just another form of an experiment, nothing more.
He was on her before she could move. The jungle green of his eyes obliterated the whites, the primal instincts of his extraordinary genetics making themselves known in the fierce, furious glitter of amber pinpoints of light amid the dark green. “We’re not going back. The past is just that, and it can’t be undone.” Savage anger filled his voice as well as his face. “There are too many things I can’t explain, too many I can’t revisit without risking the control I’ve gained over the months, Cat. That doesn’t mean you’re not more important to me than you ever were. Nothing means to me what you mean.”
No explanations. Now, wasn’t that just like Graeme?
“Not going back?” She tried to jerk away from him, only to find herself pulled against the hard, muscular frame of his body. “Graeme, I never moved forward. My life was stolen before I was able to live it, and my safety came in the form of living another girl’s life and suffering the hell no one knew she lived in.” Her hands flattened against his chest, claws emerging to prick the shirt he wore. “To save you. Because no matter how much you hated me, you would have come for me if they took me. No one would be allowed to own the experiment you created but you,” she cried painfully, staring up into the harsh features above her. “That’s all I am to you or anyone else. A fucking experiment. A means to an end. And I hate it.”
Her claws dug into his chest, all the anger and pain she’d been forced to hold in over the years rising inside her like a storm she couldn’t avoid.
Hard hands gripped her wrists, pulled her around and pushed her against the wall, her hands pulled above her head, body arched into him.
The feel of his erection, hard, heavy, pressed into her lower belly and set off a heated response she wanted no part of. She couldn’t want it, but her body did.
“I won’t give you explanations,” he bit out, his voice low and hoarse. “Believe what you need to about the past, Cat, I won’t fight it. But you damned well better believe this about your present and your future. You are mine. And not because of the genetics included in that fucking therapy either.”
The declaration of ownership was a growl of primal intent that had her eyes widening and her senses sharpening.
He did that. He made the genetics she fought to keep under control rise inside her with a strength she’d never felt until he’d touched her the first time.
“I was your experiment,” she cried furiously. “Just your experiment.”
“My mate. Mine.” His free hand moved to the back of her head, strong fingers pulling the pin free that held her braid secure. Then he was raking through the heavy strands, gripping them and pulling her head back as he stared down at her.
Swiping her tongue over her dry lips, she raked it against her teeth as she pulled it back, the slight itch beneath it as irritating now as it had been for the past year.
“I’ll never belong to you like that, Graeme,” she swore fiercely despite the need to give in, to be just that. Anything, everything he needed her to be. “Not now and not ever.”
His eyes narrowed on her lips.
“Your tongue itches,” he whispered, tightening his grip on her wrists as she struggled against him. “When I touch you, your flesh aches for more but you want my kiss first, don’t you, little cat? You want my lips covering yours, my tongue touching yours . . .”
Her dreams were filled with that hunger. Since she’d come into her sexuality just after her eighteenth birthday her dreams, her sexual dreams, had always featured Graeme.
But how did he know? How did he know her tongue itched, that she ached, hungered for his kiss?