by Amanda LeMay
“Yes...” I moaned as our lips touched.
“Ah fuck. You feel so damned good. I can’t...get...enough.” His hips thrust up and then retreated, then back up again, sliding his entire length as deep as he could go.
“I’m yours,” I murmured between one deep kiss after another. “All yours.”
A growl rumbled up from inside his hard chest. “Mine...always.”
Our lips and tongues tasted and teased as our bodies began moving together at a slow, sensual pace. His hips rocked in and out as my hips rolled back and forth. My next climax moved through me so slowly I barely caught my breath. I waited to reach that amazing peak Dain’s body never failed to take me to, before I shattered into a thousand pieces.
With his knees planted in the soft quilts that covered his bed, his strong arms held me close, his big, calloused hands so tender and gentle as he touched every inch of my body from, the ends of my fingers to the tips of my toes, while he gazed into my eyes. With each deep thrust, we moved together like a slow, rolling storm, traveling over a landscape of flesh and muscle and bone. As our mutual climaxes spiraled higher and stronger and harder, we moaned desperately into each other’s mouths, gasping, then crying out as our combined release swept us up and washed away everything else in the world.
When the full moon passed beyond the horizon and the crazy, broken rooster announced the coming of dawn—there was only me and Dain, and the rest of our lives together.
EPILOGUE
WELL, FUCK. WE ARE really doing this.
“I do.”
Jessy’s ruby red lips spoke those two words loud and clear as her sparkling, amber eyes twinkled up at me so full of love, my heart nearly exploded right out of my chest.
I didn’t realize this getting married stuff really mattered that much to me, since the sakana bond went deeper than anything did or ever would.
But...my heart pounded...
Making my breath short...
And...my palms sweaty...
And, shit, why couldn’t the old Justice of the Peace dude, (whose name I couldn’t recall, but his uncanny resemblance to Colonel Sanders was a little scary), just skip straight to the “man and wife” part so I could grab Jessy and kiss that serious look off her beautiful face?
Well, fuck.
I guess...gettin’ married really did mean something to me, after all.
Besides, after the hell she’d been through a little over six months ago, this day was one more good thing I gave her to prove I wouldn’t have done anything differently.
I’d do whatever was necessary to keep her safe and happy.
I had absolutely no doubt she would do the same for me.
I’d waited two long years for her while she was up in San Francisco—and yeah, she had no clue I was waiting, but I was. Kern was correct, she came around—though it was one of her older brothers who set her on her path back home.
Back to her family.
Back to me—and again, she didn’t have an inkling of what she was in for when she arrived.
She hadn’t realized that empty space in her heart wasn’t really empty at all. I was already there. Dug in deep from the moment we’d crossed paths at the Albuquerque Moon Dance.
She hadn’t intended on sticking around Comfort. She’d made “plans”. Had a new job. Made commitments, which she followed through with, no problem, because I wasn’t about to stand in her way. But I wasn’t about to let her go alone, either. Mother Nature had grabbed me by the balls, told me to sack up, and shouted, “she’s the one!”. Two years without Jessy was more than enough misery. I wasn’t about to spend six more months seeing her only on the weekends.
No. Fucking. Way.
I had plans of my own...for her. For us.
Though the day she showed up—a surprise visit neither my mom or Kern informed me of—everything I’d intended to say over the last two years, everything I’d wanted to tell her, disappeared from my head like a tiny thought-bubble filled with words, vanishing from an illustration in one of those graphic novels.
She was right there. Finally, under my roof.
I marched through the house, on a mission to claim my mate with the pretense that I was looking for food, being all cool and shit. But, hell...when I saw her beautiful face, a mouthful of food, milk mustache and all, I stood in my own kitchen staring at her with my heart lodged in my throat, my lips goin’ about as numb as my brain, saying the only word that came to mind from my entire you-and-I-are-meant-to-be speech: Jessy.
And it didn’t come out all manly and possessive and I-mean-it-sweetheart.
It kinda just slipped out on a weak wisp of air.
And all I thought next was, Well, fuck. What a way to impress her.
When she looked at me, I swear, my heart stopped beating. Her gorgeous, amber eyes did a slow head-to-toe sweep and back again. I’d changed—grown a few inches, bulked out—and, oh yeah, she liked what she saw.
Of course, my heart sped up, pumping every drop of blood to the general region of my groin in a sudden rush of hunger, and longing—and love.
Somehow, a plate full of food ended up in my hand and I stumbled like a light-headed idiot, retreating out of the kitchen and back to my bedroom like a damn chicken. A chicken with a flamin’ hard-on.
But I made it up to her.
I marked her.
In the barn.
Chuck standing right there.
Fuck.
I made that up to her, too.
Then, like a total fucking cowardly dick, I avoided her, and not because I’d regretted what I’d done by marking her, and not because I didn’t want her. No. I needed to calm my own shit. Slow down a notch.
When I’d finally worked up the balls to face her, everything moved so damned fast. I was all over her. She was all over me. We were all over each other, doing things I only dreamed I would do with her.
All. Night. Long.
And...
Every moment we could find after that.
I needed to touch her. Taste her. Kiss her. Hold her. Crush her beneath me while I pounded my body into hers as she moaned my name over and over.
I was crazy for her.
Fucking. Batshit. Crazy.
Still am.
Always will be.
Jessy was suddenly as essential to my survival as oxygen.
And if that wasn’t scary enough, when my wolf half plowed forward, taking me with it in a crazy, jealous fury to claim her as mine, and even though what I did terrified me, Jessy saw me as I was and embraced me with her entire being. At that moment, I thought there was no way I could ever love her more.
I was wrong, of course.
I could love her, a hell of a lot more.
And, I did. Do.
Every. Damn. Day.
I endured the punishment from my pack to keep Chuck, Cindy, and their little boys safe for life. I dealt with Seff’s challenge, though after he healed up, he apologized and explained he’d felt this crazy pull to Jessy the first time he saw her. It wasn’t exactly the same as mine, but by the way he described it, it sounded like a milder form of finding your sakana. I couldn’t blame him. I even kinda felt bad for him. Still, Gunner exiled his ass, which again, I felt bad about, since I’d broken more than one bone in his body and thought that was penance enough.
Nevertheless, Jessy didn’t see it that way.
And neither did Gunner.
With all that shit behind us, I still needed to have Jessy’s lovin’ touch every chance I got.
Not that I had any regrets about killing Bobby and GW, not a second thought, because I didn’t.
I just...needed...her.
I needed to know she was safe and happy and to do that, I needed to go where she went, even if that meant leaving the ranch and moving into a tiny, two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Albuquerque.
But three days after all that crap went down, after I found her tied up in that barn, after I tore two humans to shreds, after my punishment, our mating, and the nig
ht of the full moon and non-stop sex, she and I had our first harsh words.
Jessy was packing her stuff, just throwing it all willy-nilly into suitcases and on the verge of yellin’ the entire time.
“Let me give you a hand, sweetheart.” I bent to lift a lacy, little bra off the floor.
She yanked the bra from my hand. “I can do it.”
Pissy little thing.
But still, a mighty cute pissy little thing.
“I’ll help you if you tell me what you want me to do.” I told her.
“How can you be done packing already?”
And whiny, too.
Where that whiny tone came from, I had no idea. I shook my head, finding myself bewildered as she flung clothes from one suitcase into another for no apparent reason.
“I packed what I needed.”
She threw up her hands and shouted, “I need all of this!”
I kept watching her move, and even though her movements were sharp and jerky and pissed off, I couldn’t stop wondering why she wasn’t naked. Why the hell did she have all those clothes on when all I wanted to do was grab her, strip her, rub my bare skin all over her bare skin as we rolled around on the floor like horny animals?
“Okay...fine.” I stared at her, baffled, and wondered where my sweet, level-headed Jessy had gone. “I’m not saying you don’t need all this. I’m trying to help, if you’ll let me.” My patience was slipping.
She growled. “I don’t need your help!”
Annnnd...my patience was gone.
“What the hell, Jessy?” I shouted, though the second the words left my mouth, I wanted to yank them back and apologize. “Jess, I’m sorry...”
The bedroom door opened suddenly and both of us jerked around to stare at the intruder. Kern.
He had the hint of a smile on his face as his gaze flicked back and forth between me and Jessy.
“Stop what you’re doin’ and come to the kitchen,” he ordered quietly.
“I don’t have time,” Jessy snapped, as her arms swung around, like Kern didn’t already see what was going on there. “I’m not done packing.”
“What? You gonna be late getting to the truck? The last I heard, you two were driving over. Dain gonna leave without you if you’re not ready?” There was laughter in Kern’s voice, though his lips didn’t move from the tight smile he wore already.
“No. I just—” Jessy started.
“Then get to the kitchen,” Kern interrupted.
“Dad, I’m packing.”
“Baby girl.” Kern smiled. “Kitchen.” He nodded toward the door.
“Dad, c’mon.”
“Kitchen.”
“Dad!”
“Now.”
“Okay! Okay! Okay!” Jessy stomped her foot and threw what she had in her hands into the nearest suitcase before trudging out of the bedroom, with me following on her heels, feeling less like a mated couple and more like pups about to get a scolding.
Mom had been baking all morning. The warm aroma drifted all through the house. Chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate.
We sat down at the table, big mugs of hot cocoa and plates loaded with brownies, chocolate chocolate chip cookies, and little dark chocolate Dove candies sat before us.
Mom pointed at our plates. “Eat.”
Jessy sat back, her hands dropping into her lap. “Thanks, Maygan, but I’m really not hungry, or even in the mood for sweets.” She raked her fingers through her perfectly messy golden blond hair. “I just need to finish packing so Dain and I can get on the road.”
“You got time.” Mom smiled and picked up her mug of hot cocoa. “Eat. You need this more than you realize, and your dad and I are gonna tell you why.”
Kern continued where Mom left off. “You’re feeling out of sorts, baby girl, and it’s normal.” Kern looked over at me and nodded toward my plate. “You eat up too, Dain.”
I wasn’t in the mood to fight with anyone, so I gave in and grabbed a brownie. When Jessy picked up a cookie and took a bite, she seemed resigned to sit there and listen.
“What’s happenin’ with your emotions, being all bitchy and snippy and the like, is normal.” Jessy’s body jerked and her mouth dropped open, but Kern’s low, comforting doctor voice kicked in. I’d heard it a thousand times when he’d been explaining to someone about how soon to expect their horse or cow or whatever to recover from an injury. “You two have been through hell the last couple of days and if that wasn’t enough, you mated and experienced your first full moon together. Each and every one of those things would bring this emotional slump on, all on their own and you two were slammed with all of them in a short space of time.”
Jessy seemed to relax. I didn’t say anything, just kept eating and staring down at the plates in front of us. I’d gotten up extra early to help Kern with feeding the livestock and by the time I got back in the house, Jessy was up and packing. We’d missed our morning sex, our chance to connect before the sun came up, and that was why I was feeling antsy.
Mom set her cocoa mug down. “Do you know why I insisted you have a supply of food and plenty of water to drink the other night?”
“Replenish our energy.” Jessy said quietly, then shoved another bite of cookie in her mouth and washed it down with cocoa.
“And if you hadn’t eaten all Maygan left for you, this depression, this emotional crash you’re feeling now would be much worse.” Kern tapped at Jessy’s plate. “Keep eatin’. You’ll feel better, not so snippy.”
“I’m not snippy.” Jessy grumbled.
Kern just smiled.
I smiled too, already experiencing a little sugar rush. I grabbed my mug and drank half of it down in a couple of gulps.
“If you two were sticking around, we would’ve worked through this with you, but since you’ll be on your own, you’re gonna have to work it out together. This emotional crash is gonna happen every month after the full moon. Sometimes it happens a few days later, but it can also happen after a couple of weeks. You two are getting a huge dose of it right now. See, it’s like you’ve been on a natural high and you’re coming down from it. During the full moon, your brain produces all these amazing little chemicals that drive you to search out your mate and spend hours doing what nature made us for, procreation.” Kern took mom’s hand and squeezed before going on. “What happened with Bobby Sanders—”
“Dad, please, I can’t...” Jessy closed her eyes and shook her head. “I really can’t.”
I reached over, grabbed her chair, scooted it across the tile, and pulled it up against mine, then wrapped my arm around her shoulders.
“Jess, sweetheart,” I whispered. “Bobby Sanders is dead.” Her head nodded up and down. “He can’t hurt you. Don’t let his name have any power over your life.”
Kern reached across the table and took Jessy’s hand. “Baby girl, you’re gonna have to let that stuff go and it won’t be easy, and it won’t happen overnight or even over a few months, but you gotta work on living your life and being happy.” Kern looked at me. “Dain, I’m trusting you to take care of her, especially after the full moon when her emotions will be all over the place and this crap is gonna be harder to fight. The full moon is that one night of the month where you both have to plan ahead, stock up on food for the night, and chocolate for afterward. Jessy?” She looked up at her dad. “I expect you to take care of Dain, too. When you feel the crash coming on, all you need is some skin-on-skin contact, even if it’s nothin’ but cuddling on the couch in front of the TV. You don’t be afraid to ask for what you need.
“This first year will be the hardest. You’ll both be gettin’ used to the other, used to livin’ together. Used to dealing with the emotional crashes together. No matter how much love you share between you, you still gotta work on the other stuff. You still gotta talk about shit you may not want to talk about, like Bobby Sanders, but that’s how you work through it.”
Jessy and I listened to everything else Kern and my mom had to say, and ate an entire pan of br
ownies among the four of us, before heading back to the bedroom Jessy had left her mess of clothing and shoes in, waiting to be packed.
Once inside, with the bedroom door closed behind us, I stripped her naked as she stripped me and we rolled around on the bed, skin to skin, just cuddlin’ and kissin’ until doing just that wasn’t enough anymore and we ended up making love, slow and easy with as much full-body contact as we could manage.
Afterward, Jessy lay there all sleepy-eyed and satisfied, the fight gone out of her, not giving me any grief while I packed up every last thing she had laying around.
A road trip that should’ve taken us only about ten hours ended up taking longer with a stop in Lubbock and a couple of nights’ stay at the Embassy Suites before heading all the way in to Albuquerque.
The first thing we did once we got there was buy a new king-sized bed. Jessy’s twin was not gonna cut it, with my big body taking up all the space and Jessy sleeping the way she does, on her side of the bed, flat on her belly, only her hand resting on whatever part of me she can reach.
She started her new job, working Wednesday through Sunday, along with a few nights a week. I started my new classes, two online, which I could work on at any time, and two on campus, both in the morning. I also volunteered with a local vet Kern referred me to, so I’d get called out for emergencies at night and on the weekends. With the little bit of time Jessy and I actually had together, we put it to good use, shut off all electronic devices and, as Jessy put it, we banged like bunnies every chance we got.
The full moons came and went and we took good care of each other throughout. Taking the day off after, no matter what, to help minimize the crash we’d both suffer later in the week, and it always did the trick.
Sometimes she had bad dreams. Sometimes she had outright nightmares. I had them, too, but not nearly as often as Jessy did. We both suffered—she more than me—but we talked about it. We worked through it, keeping each other close, not shutting the other out, no matter how horrible the dream.
And like everyone else, we had our little...misunderstandings...but, hell, what is life without a little awesome make-up sex?
Those six months passed faster than we ever thought they would and the next thing I knew, I was slipping a pretty little ring on my mate’s finger and she was trying on wedding dresses, picking out flowers, and tasting cake.
