On the Prowl

you?”
    “No,” I gasped. “Oh, God.” I wriggled, strained against him, but my hands were captured, held firmly by him, my body forced open by his, pinned by his body in the most primitive and effective way of all.
    He filled my soft emptiness with his hard fullness. Crammingly so. He was a big man, everywhere. And his sudden invasion stretched me almost unbearably, caught me between the prongs of acute pain and acute pleasure, blurring the line between them.
    “I am hurting you,” he muttered and started to pull back, out of me.
    I whimpered, cried out, “No!” and wrapped my legs around him, holding him to me.
    “Are you sure?” he asked me fiercely, his cheekbones slashed red, his face as rock hard as how he felt within me.
    “Yes.”
    His eyes narrowed, his nostrils flared. “All right. Then take me. Take all of me.” His free hand anchoring my hip, he heaved himself into me, pushing in his long thick length until he was buried in me so deep I thought he’d come out the other side.
    I opened my mouth to scream. With pain, with pleasure. I wasn’t exactly sure which. And he covered my mouth with his own. Swallowed my cry. Pushed his thick tongue into my mouth so that I was filled with him there too, held suspended by him, chained by his hands, his male hardness buried deep in my soft feminine sheath.
    He took me as I had asked him to, challenged him to.
    He pulled back out of me—both my inner sheath and my oral sheath—then pushed with slow, insistent deliberation back within me, stretching me, filling me abundantly simultaneously above and below. I mewed, sucked on his tongue, and echoed the action by tightening around him below, within.
    His stomach muscles ridged so hard they felt like stone slabs against me, and he made a desperate sound against my lips as he ground himself even deeper inside me. Pulled out. Then another slow, deliberate, stretching push back into my tightness that had us both groaning, trembling. With the third stroke, it was as if the magical threshold of my body had suddenly been reached. It finally eased its almost unbearable tightness, loosened, became more receptive. And like a leash suddenly let go, Amber began a fast, almost furious rhythm, pistoning, pouring himself into me, his tongue stabbing me above as he stabbed me, pounded me, below. And I welcomed him, clung to him, wrapped my tongue and lips and body around him, and asked him for more with arcing body, sucking cheeks, hungry cries. As hungry to hold him, absorb him, become one with him, as he was to pour himself into me.
    Our passion, our pleasure, lowered the barriers of our flesh. Called forth the lunar lightness that dwelt within us, so that our glow illuminated our skin and filled the night with building incandescence, growing brighter and brighter as I wound tighter and tighter. Until I finally crested and burst. And it was like the world trembled with my release. His climax followed a heartbeat after mine. Light streamed from us in almost bursting luminosity. Then faded gently away until darkness once more cloaked the night.

C HAPTER 2
    I dreamed of flying, of floating in the air above, and the sweet scent of dead flesh below me, and woke up gasping, alone in my bed. Amber had left before dawn, gone back to his men, his people, safe and unaware of where I would travel that day. To High Court, the ruling seat of our people on this continent, set high and remote in the northern reaches of Minnesota, bordering Canada. They’d summoned me for questioning on Mona Louisa’s death, the former Queen who’d ruled my Louisiana territory. The bitch who’d ripped Gryphon’s heart out, literally, from his chest, killing him and a part of me. I’d killed her in return, although it was not truly I who killed her finally, though I’d done my best to. It had been Blaec, the High Lord of Hell.
    The Council had waited for me. They’d had to, while I roamed the forest in my tiger form, in my separate tiger mind, until the day my human thoughts and feelings had finally filtered into my other self, and I could know and control that animal part of me, and realize that time had indeed eased my grief until it had become bearable.
    A Queen had been killed—so had a Warrior Lord, but that was of secondary concern, I learned to my fury—and questions needed to be answered. I was going now to answer them. Up to a point.
    The plane landed and we disembarked, Dontaine, Tomas, and I. I’d left all the others behind,