The sidewalk ended on each side at two solid arched private metal gates. The gates were each padlocked with thick iron chains. She and Jack were alone behind the club, cut off from the rest of humanity by a metal back door, two locked exits, and the San Francisco bay.
“How is your shoulder feeling?” Jack asked as he moved them to the lower wall and gestured for her to have a seat. His voice drew her attention at once back to him. There was something in the timber of it that cut through her senses with skillful mastery.
“It’s… healing,” she said slowly, her head spinning. The salt air was cool and clean, and the night was clear, affording a rare glimpse of the stars overhead. But the stars couldn’t hold her attention when Jack stepped in front of her, caging her between his body and the wall. She gazed up at him – way up.
As if to make her more comfortable, he knelt in front of her, graceful as ever. “Let’s have a look, shall we?” he said as he reached up and curled his fingers beneath the lapel of her jacket. They brushed her skin as they grasped the leather, and there was no way in hell it wasn’t on purpose. Sam pulled back, just a little, turning slightly away so he wouldn’t see the color rise in her cheeks.
She knew he was watching her. He was catching every single detail in that keen way that reminded her of large cats and wolves in shadows.
The San Francisco air hit her flesh as he peeled the jacket back, exposing her shoulder and its barely healing wound. She turned back to face him just as he used his thumb to pull the spaghetti strap of her dress off her shoulder. Something went off in her head, and her body kicked into action.
She stood, using both hands to shove him back. He rose and stepped back, but of his own accord. She’d had no physical effect on him. “It’s fine, I said!” she stated quickly, trying to ignore the fact that he was so much stronger than she was. But she could barely hear her own words over the roar of blood through her ears. His presence was getting to her in ways she never would have imagined.
He was so damned tall. He was so beautiful. His suit was so dark, his hair looked so fucking silky – she just wanted to run her fingers through it just to feel it. His breath smelled like cinnamon, and she imagined it would taste hot and clean and…. And that eye – Christ, it was electric blue, as if actual power was moving through it. The black leather eye patch that should have marred his appearance was somehow sexy instead, and it was insane. That was insane. She was insane!
Sam could barely stand to look at him as she pulled her jacket back up and into place and shivered, turning to pace a few feet away. But it wasn’t from the cold that she shivered. More of those blasted images were playing through her mind, and she closed her eyes, running a frantic hand through her hair. Her hand nearly caught on the massive curls; the sea air was turning it into corkscrews.
But the sound of a leather-soled shoe coming closer had her eyes snapping back open again. “Wait,” she said desperately, spinning to face him. “Just – just stay where you are. I can’t… you’re confusing me, Colton. I can’t think.”
“It’s Jack,” he said. “And perhaps you should give thinking a rest for a little while, Samantha,” he said softly.
Sam’s eyes widened. She felt his words go through her like the salvation they promised. It would be so nice to stop thinking. To stop worrying about things, about what was right and what was wrong, to just do what she felt like doing for once and not be afraid of the consequences.
“Aren’t you tired, Sam?” he asked as he re-claimed the step he’d taken and closed the distance between them once more. In turn, she stepped back, not quite ready to relinquish it. He was un-fazed, though. “Aren’t you tired of running? Tired of fighting?”
Oh gods, yes, she thought. And then she hated herself for thinking it. But it was true. Twenty years she’d run. Twenty years, she’d fought – for survival at its core, living on the streets, begging for food or flat-out stealing like some kind of orphaned rat. She was exhausted. Spiritually and mentally exhausted.
And he was getting to her. He was reaching inside of her and pulling it all out, and he was doing it without even trying.
“Wouldn’t you like to let someone else take care of you for a change?” he asked as he made that final advance and she had nowhere left to go as her back bumped up against the cold locked gate. She spun to face it – and then spun back around.
He’d moved in like magic, and now he was inches away, a shadow over her, his strong right arm braced against the gate near her shoulder.
“Jesus, Jack… I….” You what? she thought. You what? You want to kiss him is what. Her eyes flicked to his lips. Oh shit, I really do. And if she was honest with herself, the shocking truth of the matter was that she’d wanted to kiss him since the first moment she’d laid eyes on him at that high school twenty years ago. Two decades hadn’t put a dent in that desire. If anything, they’d intensified it.
Jack’s left hand rose to curl beneath her chin. He cupped it and lifted it ever so slightly, forcing their gazes to meet once more. “You have so many tricks up your sleeve, Firebird. Is it no wonder that you have yet to use any of them against me right now?”
Sam blinked. Holy shit. He was absolutely right. She could have turned into a bird and flown away. She could have become a snake and slithered under the gate. She could have become a bear and torn it down. Or a million other things, not to mention the plethora of animals from fantasy that would have laid waste to the man standing before her. A unicorn’s horn would have made mince meat of him. A goblin’s claws and teeth would have ripped him to shreds. A phoenix would have incinerated him, and unlike her, he would not have risen again.
But she didn’t do any of those things. She remained human. Because rather than give her hope, the thought of harming Jack Colton gave Sam uncomfortable pause. It felt wrong. She didn’t want it. She’d never wanted it.
And she’d caused him enough hurt. She glanced at the eye patch and guilt tore through her like ice water.
No, that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted… I want….
“You will always have the upper hand with me, Samantha O’Neill,” he told her, his words once more whispering across her lips. It was surreal to hear him say such a thing. This monument of a man, all muscle and magic and power. This man who seemed to have been one step ahead of her for two decades, who had scores of shifters scraping to follow his orders, who seemed to command the very world with his mere presence. This man who knew her every desire, and had no problems bringing them to life… he thought she was powerful?
“My victories are illusions,” he said with a slight shake of his head. Sam’s eye slipped to his lips again, to the perfect teeth just beyond them, and the way his canines were longer and sharper than the others. Her heart felt as if it would crash through her chest at any moment. It beat hard and painful, and warmth was once more moving through her. This time it pooled between legs that were growing weak and wobbly, no matter how long and sexy they might look.
Jack’s one blue eye gleamed unnaturally, flashing with that very same magic she knew he had in spades. “You will always be able to lay waste to me, Firebird,” he assured her softly. His thumb brushed her cheekbone, caressing softly, intimately. His tone was low, nearly desperate, and filled to the brim with honesty. She would recognize it anywhere. “You’re the one with all the power,” he told her. “You always have been.”
“Oh hell,” Sam finally gasped as fate at last took her by its puppet strings. She stood on her tip toes and threw her arms around his neck, claiming his lips with her own. And in that heated, desperate, crazy-ass moment, every last ounce of reluctant indecision flew its final exit from Samantha’s fevered brain to make way for the very real surrender that would be her undoing.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Jack’s mind exploded. It took him a fraction of a moment to realize that what was happening was real, not a dream. Not one of the many, many, many dreams he’d had of this very same moment, this very same hope. Sam really was in his arms, h
er hands around his neck, her lips pressed against his.
She was kissing him.
In the fraction of a moment that came after, the beast in Jack, the hunter – the man – took over. He crashed into her like the tidal waves that collided beside them, slamming her into the metal gate behind her. Passion and hunger drove him, the smell of her in his head, the feel of her against him forcing him to want to get closer, go deeper, feel more.
His left hand was at her throat, where he felt her crazed pulse beneath his fingertips, and his right arm pulled taut around her waist, drawing her as close as he could humanly get her. Her chest rose and fell against his with painful abandon as he pressed her lips open with his and took possession of their kiss.
He felt her tongue find his growing, sharpening teeth and could smell the adrenaline that coursed through her when she realized what they were – what they meant. But a growl rose from deep within him, one of possession, one of no-going-back, and that hand around her throat began to squeeze. In response, her heart beat even faster, and he caught the scent of something else. Something hot, wet, ready.
A curse ripped through his mind. His strong body that was so accustomed to moving fast, to fighting and winning, suddenly could not move fast enough. He needed to taste what had been denied him for so long, needed it like he needed air. No, he needed it more than he needed air. Fuck air. At that moment, in that sudden earth-shattering flash of bliss, there was simply nothing else he could think of, nothing else that made it into his head.
Nothing. Else. Mattered.
He was suddenly bending, his hands gripping her round bottom, his strength lifting her against him, and she cried out in surprise against his lips. But she didn’t pull away. She didn’t break their kiss. So he smiled into it as he spun with her and strode to the higher partition of wall abutting the city’s bay, where he set her down.
A wave hit high on the wall, and water played over them in a misted shower. A brief concern highlighted itself in Jack’s mind; the water would be cold on Sam’s naked flesh – and he wanted her naked like there was no tomorrow. But there was a tomorrow, he would make damned sure of it, and there would be other nights and other chances, and right now he had no patience anyway.
Her red silk dress was already hiked up, exposing long, pale legs highlighted by the moon overhead and gleaming with sea salt moisture. He broke their kiss, trying hard not to scrape her lip with his now fully-exposed fangs as he withdrew. Her eyes were closed, her cheeks flushed, her lips parted and red and bruised. The sound of her pants, short and quick, was like rocket fuel on the combustion already raging inside him. But he steadied himself, reigning in the beast with a sharp pull of the leash.
“Sam, look at me,” he said, his voice ragged and deep.
Sam opened her eyes and settled them on him. They gleamed in the night, lit from within by her own rising power. They were amber magic, like liquid gold… and Jack was rocked to his core. For a moment, he forgot the world. He forgot his words, his actions, he forgot himself.
But the animal in him was primal, raging and impatient, and he came back to himself like whiplash. “Samantha, I want you right here and right now,” he told her as he held her gaze and ran his hands up the smooth, smooth skin of her thighs. She dug her nails into the top of the cement wall on either side of her body, but didn’t look away. “So if you have a problem with that, you’d best speak up.”
But he waited all of two precious, gracious seconds before he took her lack of a response as a green light and moved in. His hands made his way to the tops of her luscious legs and found the satin material of her underwear. His fingers curled around the delicate lace band at the top, his body tensing, his very soul ready for his next move.
Then he moved over her, a waiting shadow, and reclaimed her lips. She made a helpless sound against his mouth, and he was tempted to ignore it. But he knew better, and nothing – including his own selfish need – was going to fuck this moment up.
So he released her once more and slowly pulled back enough to let her breathe. He waited. Not patiently. But he waited nonetheless. “Well?” he said, a note of edginess to the word that spoke of his mounting, craven yearning. His teeth throbbed, and he knew they were clear as hell in the San Francisco moonlight.
He was a monster with a glowing gaze and fangs. When she looked up at him and took a breath to speak, he was frankly expecting the worst. But Samantha licked her lips, the scent of her own yearning hit him like a ton of bricks, and she smiled, flashing her own perfect set of bright white fangs. “We’ll talk later.”
And just like that, those long legs were wrapped around him, hooking at their ankles, and Jack was slamming his lips back down onto hers and ripping the delicate panties off her beautiful, willing body. The sound of the crimson material tearing was a sweet lullabye. He left it in shreds and curled his fingers under her legs, pulling them further apart to effectively expose her to the night.
She made another helpless sound, and this time it was Sam who broke the kiss. But he let her go. He could hear her heart beating, calling to him, a siren song that mingled with the scent of her blood and begged him to make his mark.
“The door!” she gasped. “What if someone –”
“They won’t,” he told her flat-out. No one would be coming through that back door tonight, and no one would be going near the gates. They would die if they did, and they knew it.
Sam’s fingernails had given up on the cement wall and were now digging into his shoulders. She was scared; he felt her tremble beneath his touch and caught the chemicals of fear in her blood. But she was also on fire; her skin was feverish with a nearly unnatural heat.
She was opened up before him, bared to her core, and Jack had officially run out of patience.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Sam had gone off the reservation. There was no other explanation for it. And the craziest part about it was that she honestly didn’t care. Jack Colton’s tall body was in charge, orchestrating her every move, playing her like the wanton instrument she’d become. His lips blazed a trail down her neck to her collar bone, and his teeth followed, scraping their warning as they went.
Deep down, she knew what was happening with those teeth. Sam was a shifter, and in the end a wolf was a wolf, a man was a man, a dragon was a dragon. Each had fundamental knowledge, instructions for life, love, and loss braided into their DNA. She knew what his long, sharp teeth meant, and she knew what hers meant as well, because those teeth and their ultimate bite were a part of this night. They were a painful, meaningful destiny.
Jack’s skilled hands slid slowly down her arms, and her red leather jacket slid along with them. It hit the ground at Jack’s feet; she saw it at a glance, a red pool of leather that left her only in her thin red dress and strappy heels. She was being stripped, in every sense of the word.
For the second time that night, Jack’s thumbs slid under the spaghetti straps of her dress, her last defense. But this time it wasn’t her well being he had in mind. It was her undoing. And this time, she didn’t try to stop him.
The straps came down, and freed from the only thing holding it up, the silk slip dress slid like a whisper past her full, milky breasts and the nipples that stood so painfully erect in the cold night air. Sam moaned, her head falling back in a mixture of shame and abandon, and Jack moved in on the exposed column of her throat.
*****
He kissed her once upon that pulsing, precious lifeline. But then he straightened. Now that there was no barrier between them, nothing keeping him from seeing and touching her every precious secret, Jack stepped back just for a moment, just long enough to imprint the vision of her on his brain forever. Her hands slipped from his shoulders and once more gripped the wall, her body quivering slightly in either cold or anticipation or outright fear, but he could not pass up this moment. He would not. It was a long time coming.
She was a painted masterpiece, alabaster limbs, crimson dress draped around her waist, her breasts full and bared
and shimmering with late evening mist and west coast fog. Jack’s body was rock hard, every single part of it rigid with insurmountable need. He could feel the wolf in him, the wild cat, the predator a flash away, a breath away, clawing at his insides for ultimate release.
She must have seen something in his face, because Samantha’s lips parted, and her eyes widened. As if she were the prey about to bolt, the hunter moved in. He rushed forward, and slipped his arm around her waist, pulling her hard against his chest. He felt the warm softness of her body against his like a holy blessing, tender and delicate and yet stronger than anything he’d ever known. She smelled faintly of soap and the leather he’d relieved her of, but mostly of blood and of need, and the scent filled his nostrils and poisoned his mind.
He felt Sam’s head drop onto his shoulder and heard her soft, ragged breathing in his ear. The animal in him reared its head. A flash of concern zapped through his mind, like a brief shorting-out light that buzzed in a dark room and then popped. In that brief flash, he thought of her past, of all she’d been through. Was she ready for this, for what he was about to do? For what nothing in the world was going to be able to stop him from doing?
But the dark was there again, deep and thick, and filled with shadows that danced in wickedness. He smiled and turned his head into her to again kiss the pulse in her throat. His lips brushed the sweet, taut skin with all the tenderness in his heart before he pulled his lips back, exposed his fangs, and sank them deep into the side of her neck.
Sam’s body arched against his. She inhaled sharply, and he felt her nails dig deep, drawing blood of their own. It was heaven.
“Jack…” His name sounded like a magic spell on her lips, breathing across his shoulder, and his cock was absolutely throbbing in his pants. Her blood in his mouth fed his fever, tasted like candy and wine, and fucked with him like both. Do it, he thought. He knew she was getting there. Her confusion was melting away, and her body was taking over. Any second now, she would do what she knew deep down she had to do. She would take what she wanted, just like he was.
The Shifter King (The Kings Book 10) Page 16
