by Loki Renard
Adam growled in response, locking his hips hard against hers, her clit grinding against his pubic bone as he came. It felt as though his cock was impossibly thick just inside the entrance of her pussy, as if it had swollen to twice its size. She was locked on his cock, held in place as his cum bathed her womb. This was sex as she had never had it before. This was sex that turned her into a sweat-drenched, cum-filled, eager slut for him.
After a few moments, the thick swelling subsided—but Adam did not. He pulled out of her, flipped her onto her stomach, and plunged himself back into her cum-drenched pussy, slapping her bottom as he fucked her for a second time. Flat out on the bed in front of him, Addie took him again, floating in an erotic haze as he showed her what her body was truly capable of. All the orgasms, all the sex, everything before this coupling was like nothing. She had never known what sex could be, what fucking really was, but now that she knew, she would never forget.
Chapter Four
Armel was furious. The wolf had taken his woman. Particularly galling was the way the weapon he’d given the girl to protect herself had been turned against him at the very last moment. He was suffering a defeat torn from the jaws of victory, and now he tracked the wolf paws through the snow, knowing full well where they went—deep into the pack’s territory, a dangerous place for a bear intent on reclaiming a woman from a den of wolves.
He didn’t care about the danger anymore. His primal instincts were aroused, the human part of his reasoning suppressed. The alpha should have known better than to cross lines of territory and take what Armel clearly intended to claim. To take her from Armel’s own cave, no less!
He growled to himself as the village came into view. The base parts of his animal brain told him to charge in and take what was his, but the remaining human consciousness knew better. He could smell her scent, even at a distance. She had been taken this way and he was certain that she would be inside the alpha’s home.
What if he had already mated with her? Ordinarily that would have ended the matter, but Armel didn’t care about that. His interest in Addie went beyond his desire for her flesh. A wolf pack was no place for a mortal, and he doubted Adam would have given her a choice as to whether or not she wanted to be there.
Armel and Adam had known one another their whole lives. As boys they had played together, and as they had grown and matured, they had established territories that overlapped in a few places—though not where the girl had been camping. That was Armel’s territory.
There had been respect between them for many years, each doing the other a favor from time to time, but being fundamentally different in their natures meant they also kept their distance. Adam’s brash invasion had eroded the trust and the unspoken pact between them. Armel now not only intended to reclaim the girl. He was going to teach Adam a lesson in the process.
It took some effort, but Armel calmed his more aggressive impulse to go rushing into the pack’s territory and tear it apart until he got his woman. This battle was not going to be won with brute force. He had defeated Adam by sheer physical force once, and Adam had still managed to make off with the prize. This was going to take cunning.
* * *
“I don’t care if it’s cold outside! I want to go! I can tramp back to my campsite and send up a flare or something. You know they’re looking for me.”
Addie’s orgasmic submission had faded, her clothes were back on, another night had turned into another day and after a decent sleep, she and Adam were butting heads in a serious way. His insistence that she obey him was much less interesting to her absent any arousal. The novelty of a man with a firm hand was wearing off, and both their patiences were wearing thin. They were glaring at one another, gray eyes meeting a crystal blue stare. Addie wished she wasn’t so short compared to him. It was really difficult to maintain any kind of gravitas when she had to crane her neck up at the person she was trying to intimidate into caving to her will.
“We haven’t heard a single helicopter,” Adam pointed out, his arms folded over his chest. In the fresh light of day, he was even hotter than she remembered, and bossier than she could have imagined. “And I won’t send my people out into the storms that have a good chance of killing all of you.”
“It’s not even snowing anymore!”
“Winter is dangerous here, Addie. It kills. The storm that covered your camp could reappear at any time.”
What he was saying made some kind of sense. He was probably right. But Addie was too used to being independent to just settle down and agree with his plan to stay for the winter. In the hours since she’d been awake she hadn’t even been allowed out to explore the village beyond gazing at it from the window of Adam’s room because Adam said she might wander off and get hurt.
“Well… I don’t want your people to go with me. I want to go by myself! You’re treating me like a prisoner!”
“I’m treating you like a spoiled little whelp who almost got herself killed by coming out here in the first place,” Adam growled. “Prisoners get kept in cages, not in heated houses with all the food they can eat. There’s no way I’m letting you go anywhere by yourself.”
“You can’t keep me here!” She stamped her foot and scowled at him with the full fury of her will. It made absolutely no impact on him whatsoever.
“You are about to get another thrashing,” he informed her gruffly. “Go and lie down. You need your rest.”
“You even try to think about putting a finger on me and you’ll find it…”
Addie’s threat was interrupted by a sudden howling and baying that cut through the thick walls and well glazed windows of Adam’s home and startled them both. Something had caused a commotion among the dogs that clearly guarded the village. Adam responded to the sound immediately, ignoring her rudeness in favor of whatever was outside. She followed him to the window and saw what had caused the stir.
Even at a distance she could see that there was an incredibly handsome man with caramel brown hair falling to his shoulders standing outside the house. He was of a stature and size that dwarfed everyone in the village. She knew that because he was ringed by villagers standing at what Addie would have called a respectful distance. There was no sign of the dogs that had been barking; she figured they must be staked out or kenneled somewhere else. They had fallen silent now.
There was a tension to the scene outside the window and in the air in the room in which she and Adam stood. Adam’s posture had stiffened, he was holding his head higher, his shoulders further back, his eyes narrowed. She had heard descriptions of people bristling before, but never seen it incarnated quite so vividly. Her curiosity was growing by the moment. Whoever this man was, everyone was scared of him—everyone including Adam.
“Stay inside,” Adam ordered curtly as he opened the door that led out onto the second floor balcony.
Addie ignored him. He was not her keeper.
“Armel!” Adam called a name that must have belonged to the big man. “You have some nerve, coming here.”
A broad smile spread across the man named Armel’s face. It was a smile that made Addie want to smile too; there was something warm and sort of reckless in it, something wild and free. She had the immediate sense that this Armel was an outsider, a troublemaker not unlike herself.
“I wanted to see if there was anything left of the girl you took,” Armel called back to Adam.
Girl? What girl? It took Addie far longer than it should have to realize that she was the ‘girl’ in question. Her heart leaped. Maybe Armel was a one-man rescue party of some sort. She stepped out from the shadows where she had been avoiding Adam’s wrath and leaned out over the railing.
“You’re looking for me?”
“Yes,” he said, that knee-weakening smile broadening at her. He had very nice features, a wider face than Adam and a plainer expression. With Adam there was mystery. Armel projected openness and warmth, the sort of charisma that made Addie trust him immediately. “Are you alright?”
“I’m okay,
” Addie said. “Did the college send you?”
“No.” Armel shook his head. “I live in these woods and saw that your campsite was snowed under. I’m here to help if I can.”
“He’s not here to help,” Adam interjected in irritated tones. “He’s here because he wants the same thing from you that I do.”
“What’s that?”
Adam’s reply was as blunt as it was unexpected. “He wants a mate.”
Addie blushed brightly. The word ‘mate’ gave her an unexpected thrill of excitement. Under other, more civilized circumstances, she would have taken offense at being referred to in such a base way, but out here, far from any typical human community, the rules were different. Her rules were different too. She normally wasn’t in the habit of falling into bed with overbearing alpha males like Adam, for instance.
It had been apparent almost from the moment she’d opened her eyes in Adam’s house that the rules had changed. Civilization was far away, not just in terms of distance, but in the values these people held. They were uncharted in every sense of the word and she was deeply curious both about the village and its inhabitants, but also about this stranger who Adam said wanted a mate.
“I’m sure he doesn’t want a mate,” she mumbled as the blush continued to spread across her face, turning her pale skin red as a tomato.
“I want to make sure she’s okay,” Armel replied, his deep voice booming through the cold air. “And that she’s not being held here against her will.”
“I am being held against my will!” Addie piped up almost immediately. “He won’t let me leave this house.”
“You should leave now, Armel,” Adam said, his demeanor growing increasingly annoyed. “Go back to your hole in the hill.”
“You can’t hold her against her will,” Armel replied. “You know that’s not right.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying!” Addie agreed vociferously. “He’s been saying I have to stay here until the snow melts.”
“You don’t have to stay anywhere you don’t want to be,” Armel said, his voice lifted with a gruff baritone that she liked very much. Everything he said sounded as though it were emanating from some deep, dark growly place.
“I like that guy,” Addie said, turning to Adam with more than a little spite in her tone. “He tells me what I want to hear.”
“The last thing you need is someone telling you what you want to hear. The last person that did that let you come up here all alone and almost die,” Adam pointed out. “Armel won’t take you home any more than I will. Even if he wanted to—which I promise you, he doesn’t—the pass is closed for winter. It will be months before it opens.”
“They will send a helicopter when they realize I’ve lost contact.”
“Maybe,” Adam agreed. “You have a rich family, do you?”
Addie furrowed her brow. “No, why?”
“It costs thousands to mount a proper search. The terrain we live in is quite literally uncharted, most of it. You were on the border of nowhere. And now you’re in the middle of it. It’s expensive to search the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter. How many people do you expect to risk their lives for yours?”
When he put it that way, Addie almost felt guilty for wanting to be rescued. “But…”
“Did anyone warn you about coming up here? Did anyone tell you that there was a risk of losing your life if anything went wrong? Did a single person do you that service?” He snapped the questions at her so quickly and assertively that if Addie had a tail, it would have been between her legs.
“Yes, but…”
“But you wanted to do what you wanted to do and you told them it would be alright. But it wasn’t alright. I’d be surprised if they do more than a flyby of your site in the next week or two, and once they see it’s under snow, they’ll send their condolences to your family.”
“Asshole,” Addie muttered with narrowed eyes.
“You’re going to be disciplined for that,” he informed her sternly before turning back to the man standing in the middle of the village round. “You don’t want this girl, Armel. She’s willful and headstrong. Too much for a suckler like you to handle.”
“Suckler?” Addie asked the question curiously.
“He’s still at his mother’s teat,” Adam answered over his shoulder.
“You’re the one who lives with his mother,” Armel replied in the slow drawl of a man who knows he has the upper hand. “Besides, she can make her own mind up.”
“No, she can’t,” Adam replied. “And she’s not going anywhere—except over my knee.”
That did it for Addie. The entire time she’d been standing out on the balcony, she’d been looking around to see if there was any way out. The second story was high, but the snows had brought the ground level up significantly. With Adam’s embarrassing threat ringing in her ears, she hopped the railing, landed softly in a snowdrift under the house, and scampered to the big man’s side. Upon reaching it, she realized that he was even taller and broader than he had looked at a distance. She was not a small girl, but he made her feel positively diminutive.
“Addie, come back here this instant! You don’t know a thing about that man. You don’t know what he is!” Adam called out to her from the balcony in imperious tones that she took a great deal of pleasure in disobeying.
“I know he’s telling me I don’t have to stay here with you,” she flung back at Adam. “He’s not telling me what to do every second of the day.”
“If you think he will be any more permissive than I am, you are wildly mistaken,” Adam replied. “You’re jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.”
“I can’t promise to take you home any time soon,” Armel said to Addie. “Adam is right in a lot of what he said. The pass is closed and the helicopters don’t fly here much. Satellite coverage is limited. That’s what draws people like us up here.”
“You mean, criminals or something?” Addie asked the question bluntly.
“More or something,” he said, his dark eyes crinkling warmly at the edges. She smiled and giggled, even though she didn’t really know what the joke was.
“You’re leaving a village of people to go into the wilds with a man you don’t even know,” Adam said, exasperated. “Armel, you should want to whip her for that.”
“She’s got good instincts,” Armel said, making Addie smile.
“Yeah! And real men don’t spank women anyway,” Addie shot back, feeling much more brave now that she had a behemoth of a man standing next to her.
Adam snorted. “He’s your knight in shining fur, isn’t he?” He shook his head at her as if disappointed. “You’re making a mistake, girl. Again.”
“You made a mistake when you thought you could punish me like some brat,” Addie said. “I’m a woman. I live on my own terms. I don’t need you or anyone else telling me what to do, and I won’t let you either.”
“Well said, girl,” Armel added, placing his large hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go, shall we?”
“Yes,” Addie said with a smirk in Adam’s direction. “Thanks for your hospitality, but I’ll be going somewhere that doesn’t hold me prisoner!”
“Yes,” Adam drawled with biting sarcasm, “because of course I’m in the habit of letting my prisoners wander off with other men. Remember, girl. You’re making a choice. Every choice has its consequences.”
His final words and the way his face sort of somehow became closed to her made Addie feel cut off and bereft. Maybe on some level she’d enjoyed fighting with Adam. Being a bad-tempered sort of person was made much easier by having something to be bad-tempered about. But that wasn’t a good reason to stay. And her rebellion was still in full swing. How dare he speak to her in such commanding tones? How dare he hand down punishments as if she were some naughty girl he had the responsibility of disciplining?
“Thank you,” Addie said as they walked out of the village through the neatly shoveled path. For a brief moment she thought she and Armel might b
e stopped from leaving, but the villagers fell back at Adam’s hand wave. She could feel Adam’s eyes boring into her as they made their way toward the forest, and she felt a little twist of guilt for leaving. He had saved her life, after all. But he had also thought it was okay to spank her, and for that he was a jerk. “Uhm, I’m Addie.”
“Nice to meet you, Addie,” he said, shaking her hand. “I’m Armel.”
“Thanks for coming to look for me; that was really nice of you. I wouldn’t have wanted to be stuck at that village for a whole winter. That guy takes himself really seriously.” She reached back and rubbed her butt at the memory of just how seriously he took himself.
“That he does,” Armel agreed. “He’s used to being the boss, you see. He has a whole pack of people doing his bidding. Here, take this stuff…” He swung a small pack from his back and pulled out some extra furs and over-boots for her. Addie was glad for them. She was already starting to feel the cold through her relatively light clothes.
“God, why do people do as he says?” Addie asked as she scrambled into the furs.
“It’s in their nature, I suppose,” Armel said. “And Adam’s a decent leader for those who want to be led.”
“You must know him quite well,” Addie surmised. Armel and Adam spoke of one another in the way that only old friends—or enemies—could.
“Mhm.” Armel looked over at her and winked. Again, she giggled at a joke she didn’t quite understand but somehow felt deep within her. She liked this Armel a lot. She couldn’t say why. It wasn’t just that he was good looking. She wasn’t that shallow. There was just a sense of connection, maybe even a weird kind of recognition. It didn’t really make sense. They were perfect strangers. Maybe the cold had addled her head. Or maybe it was just that anyone seemed nice compared to Adam’s strictness.
Thinking of Adam made her feel a little hollow in her stomach. It couldn’t be that she missed the overbearing man, could it? She had slept with him. And the sex had been… like no other. He’d told her that he would claim her and now she was a little bit afraid that he might actually have managed to do that somehow.
