haze of furious need, ravenous lust, insanity. But she just tipped her
hips back and melted against him, opening her groin to his merciless thrusts as
his body pistoned wildly in and out of hers.
As his orgasm overcame him, Will found his
extended canines in Kim's shoulder, the taste of her blood in his mouth. It
wasn't enough to tip his wolf over the edge and into a frenzy, but just enough
that he knew her. He knew her scent and her feel and now her taste, and there
would be nowhere his mate might go that he would have been unable to find her,
protect her, defend her.
Her sheath squeezed him tight, and the
shifter came. And came. Spine bowed, hips tensed, and throat emitting a howl
that started even deeper than his chest or his gut, from the base of who he
was. Man met wolf inside the embrace of his mate's voluptuous body.
His mate. Will’s mate. The idea overcame the
shifter as sleep weighed him down, while he cradled this human woman in his
arms. There was hope for his kind, he thought as he drifted in a darkness that
for once was peaceful and comforting, in her bed. If the voice of his mate’s
spirit was strong enough to call him back from the wilding…. The shifters had
always believed mating with a female were was the only hope, but they had so
few females—the result of intentional hunts carried out by the government
and by Fenris Wolves. He knew only a couple of stories about weres finding
mates among humans, and he had always wondered if those women had really been
wolfkin, latent shifters themselves. Kim was no wolfkin. Her smell told him
that much. And yet she had not just staved off his wilding but reversed it.
It was late afternoon when Will untangled
himself from his sleeping mate. She lay exhausted, battered and bruised from
their joining. He felt guilt bite into his gut at the sight, right before the
urge to take her again started gnawing at him. Too dangerous , he
thought. Give her a couple of days to heal . But the idea of not holding
her and kissing her and fucking her…. One day , he amended, gritting his
teeth even at that. He licked at the faint streaks of blood on her shoulder and
kissed the pink bite wound. His sense of her was even stronger now, overwhelming,
dangerously stirring. Will had to leave the bedroom to keep from disturbing
her, from taking her when her body was too tender to withstand it.
He was standing naked at her kitchen table
and staring blankly at a day-old newspaper—one that displayed a date twenty-five
years later than the last one he’d seen—when someone started pounding
on the cabin door. Will growled under his breath, considering responding to the
rude interruption himself and in all his natural glory, but Kim scurried from
the bedroom hastily wrapped in a dark bathrobe that left her unmarred shoulder
temptingly bare. Such a distraction, this woman. She still had bedhead, that
sexy as hell “I just got fucked into oblivion” hair, tangled in sensual curls.
A snarl of appetite from the shifter stopped her cold, and she stared at him
like a doe catching a sudden glimpse of the wolf that stalked her.
A male voice called from the porch. “Kim, I
know you’re in there. Your service jeep is out front. Open the door.”
The note of demand in the man’s tone bowed
up Will’s back and his wolf’s. Whoever that was, he thought he had some
special authority over Kim. The shifter wanted it
known—violently—that wasn’t the case. Kim held her hands out to
stop Will, though, her eyes pleading. He called his wolf back inch by inch,
bristle by bristle, and folded his arms across his chest, waiting sullenly. She
was being diplomatic, reasonable , something he hadn’t had to deal with
in, well, more than two decades, apparently. The reflection of himself he’d
seen in Kim’s bedroom mirror didn’t show those years. He still looked about
thirty-five, the same as when the wilding took him, though his actual age at
the time had been closer to fifty-five. Weres’ bodies