Page 84 of Hungry Like the Wolf

She cut him off with a kiss.

She kissed him while she yanked the T-shirt over the heaps of his shoulders, breaking the kiss only long enough for the neckline to clear his chin and lips. She reached between them and unbuttoned his pants, drawing down the zipper. But she couldn’t reach what she wanted from this angle, couldn’t reach him. And she needed to feel the heaviness of his cock in her hands again, needed to distract him from this conservation, to stop him from calling her his mate, from breaking her heart every time he did.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said, shifting their bodies so that he could lay back and push his pants and boxers over his hips and down.

“I know what I’m doing, too,” she said as she lined the head of his cock up with her entrance and lowered herself slowly down. “I’m fucking you.”

“Nadja,” he said, his hands gripping her hips. He held her still, preventing her from rising, from riding. He held her pelvis down against his so that she couldn’t move any more than to squeeze him with her body. “Look at me.”

She shook her head and closed her eyes, clenching against him with her inner muscles as hard as she could, disobeying him in every way possible. Because if she didn’t, if she looked at him, if he called her his mate one more time, she’d break. For good.

He sighed.

“Fine. We’ll do it my way then.”

She didn’t have time to ask what that meant before he rolled, flipping their positions so that he covered her, his cock thick and hard inside of her and his body hard and heavy atop her, pressing her into the floor with his weight, even though he rested his forearms and elbows on the floor on either side of her ears.

She gasped and writhed, needing him to thrust. Needing him to fuck her into the floor, through the floor if he could manage him. Anything to distract her from so much feeling that she thought she might die from it.

“What does my mate need?” he asked.

“I’m not your mate,” she protested, gasping for air.

“Let’s just pretend, then. What does my mate need?”

“Everything!” she shouted. “I need everything!”

He loomed over her now, pressing up to his hands so that his torso lifted off of hers. She wanted to weep from the loss of contact and weight. But he grinned down at her, smug and smirking and insufferable. She wanted to bite him.

And so she did, turning her head and sinking her teeth into his forearm, the closest bit of him that she could reach.

His smile widened, revealing his teeth, glinting and dangerous looking in the lamplight.

“My mate wants everything,” he purred.

Her teeth were still tight against his skin, not breaking through but certainly bruising. She wanted to mark him, to hurt him the way he was hurting her with this “mate” business.

He balanced on one hand and took her jaw in his other hand, turning her face to look up at him. And then he bent down and whispered in her ear, “My mate gets everything she wants.”

With that, he pulled back and thrust into her so hard that she shouted her relief to the ceiling tiles.

CHAPTER 35

“Please,” she gasped, begged. “Please stop calling me that.” She sucked in a breath when he bottomed out inside of her.

“Why shouldn’t I call you what you are?” he asked, forcing himself to thrust into her heat slowly, in and out, hard and forceful, but not hurried. This might be his only chance to make her understand and he wasn’t going to fuck it up by finishing before he made his point, before he convinced her.

“Because it’s cruel!”

“How is it cruel to call you my mate?”

She sobbed then and he froze, his cock buried deep inside of her, his pelvis pressed against hers. Her legs had been wrapped around his hips but the fell to the floor now and she covered her face with her hands.

“Doc?” He said, his lips against the backs of her hands. “Baby, talk to me.”

“I talked to Rose about fated mates. And Halphas—Halphas said you would have known right away.” Her voice was muffled by her hands, thick with her tears. It gutted him. He felt her pain in the depths of his chest, a sharp, stabbing sort of agony. “If they even exist, you would have known.”

He watched her cry, helpless, and tried to remember the day they met. He’d walked into her office and almost immediately blacked out.