Bears of Burden: HUTCH

by Candace Ayers

  His thumbs glanced beneath her rib cage and hooked themselves on the hem of her shirt, yanking it up and over her head without even the briefest break in contact. Now the black pushup bra he had first seen at the Fun Fair bleeding through her wet T-shirt was in full evidence. He palmed one of her proud breasts and squeezed, and Kira went wild; she wanted to throw her head back, but his mouth kept hold of her, swallowing her impassioned moan.

  He whirled away from the door, carrying her with him. She wrapped her long legs around his waist to secure herself to him as he deposited her on the edge of his desk. Papers scattered beneath the careless sweep of his hand and fell to the floor in fluttering clumps. He pushed his hard body between her legs, and Kira opened to receive him, her form-fitting camel-colored skirt riding all the way up her thighs. His right hand detached itself from the desk to aid in its ascent, and she shuddered.

  "I can't count the number of times I've wanted to throw you across this desk," he growled into her neck. He followed up his dark admission with a nip beneath her ear, and Kira gasped. "Did you ever think about that, Kira, all the times I had you in here? Did you think about what you would do if I tried to have my way with you? Would you let me?"

  She cried out as his hand delved beneath her skirt and cupped her between her legs. Only the cotton of her panties remained as a barrier between them, but it suddenly felt as thin as tissue paper. Donovan's hand rubbed her, and she moved her body in time to his deep caresses, latching onto him with her mouth once more.

  "I'll take that as a yes," he concluded as he thrust his tongue past her parted lips. His kiss was hot and penetrating, and her awareness narrowed instantly in that moment to the way their mouths danced and joined. She barely noticed how he shifted their lower bodies closer until his pelvis was grinding her back against his desk.

  The fingers caressing her between her legs gave a firm, intrusive press over her entrance, and Kira nearly shot off the desk. Donovan's strong body barricaded her, forcing her back until she was situated precisely the way he wanted her to remain. There was nowhere for her to escape to… nowhere to turn except to the release his touch promised… she opened her legs wider, and the pads of his fingers slid at last beneath the damp fabric of her panties…

  A low knock at the door had them separating from one another in an instant. Kira gave a flying leap across the room as Donovan dove for her T-shirt, which was still hanging off the door handle where they had left it. He turned, reared back, and pitched it to her like the outcome of the ninth inning depended on it. Kira caught it handily and yanked it down over her head as Donovan straightened himself out.

  "Yep! Just a minute!" His voice sounded rough around the edges and much deeper than usual, and he hastily cleared his throat. His thumb flicked the lock and he leveraged the handle down just as Kira tossed herself down onto the couch and grabbed a book off the nearest shelf. She flipped it open to a random page and lost herself behind it just as the door opened. She didn't look up to see who it was.

  "Was this door locked?" Dr. Kilman's voice resonated from the other side. Kira pushed her hair back and glanced up incuriously. She was certain the frantic beating of her heart could be heard miles away, with or without heightened werewolf hearing. Donovan's glance in her direction seemed to confirm this.

  "No." His voice was neutral. "What's up, Kilman?"

  Donovan's fellow faculty member leaned around the corner to look at Kira. She raised her hand in a bored little wave. "Just waiting for Professor Donovan to finish grading my last essay," she explained, her tone implying it was the most inconvenient thing on earth and she was so over it. Dr. Kilman's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly behind his glasses, but he nodded in acceptance of this. He withdrew and started back down the hall to his own office. Donovan pulled the door closed once more. They both expelled a simultaneous sigh of relief.

  "Holy shit!" Kira tossed her book aside and covered her mouth to keep from laughing uncontrollably. Donovan collapsed behind his desk and dropped his head into his hands. He looked like he had just lost years of his life.

  "Jesus. That has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever done," he muttered.

  Kira raised an eyebrow. "Does that mean we're done?"

  His pencil holder sailed across the room toward her in response, and she laughed as she shielded herself against it. They hadn't consummated their feelings, but she still felt good. Really good. Apparently all the wolf in her had required to be satisfied for the moment was a quick tryst at the hands of the man who sired her.

  "You're going to get me fired, Kira. I'll be blacklisted from ever teaching for the rest of my life." Donovan raised himself up from behind his desk and straightened the front of his sweater. Kira licked her lips playfully, and he noticed this immediately. Donovan raised a finger and pointed it at her. "No. No more. I don't care how fucking sexy you look or how good you smell. We're not doing this again here. There's a lot more at stake than either of us can easily remember when we get like this."

  "Fine." Kira pouted. "But there goes your perverted fantasy of having me over your desk."

  Donovan groaned and dropped his head into a stack of papers; unnoticed by Dr. Kilman, most of them still resided on the floor. Content that she had won, Kira picked up her book and resumed pretending to read. She didn't even notice that her tag was sticking out in front.

  CHAPTER 13

  "Professor Donovan?"

  It was Tuesday, a day later, and Donovan was sitting behind the desk in his classroom. It was unbearable being inside his office after his near-transgression with Kira Bentley; the scent of her still lingered, and it made grading papers or engaging in anything else remotely related to his career as a professor impossible. More and more often these days he was contemplating finding a new line of work. Remaining an upright instructor who taught in the hallowed halls of Rider University and being a horny werewolf were proving increasingly impossible to juggle. To think all of this might have been easily avoided, if he had only made better decisions on a full moon…

  Then again, given the chance, would he have done anything differently? Who's to say he wouldn't have found himself entangled with Kira Bentley in some other way? There was more than animal magnetism at work between them, of that he was now sure. He found her irresistibly attractive, and infinitely fascinating, and his feelings for her were…

  "Professor?"

  Donovan glanced up sharply over the rims of his glasses. There was a female student standing in the doorway, one who looked vaguely familiar to him. He sat back and removed his eyewear to have a better look at her.

  "Yes? You're…"

  "I'm Shannon Drieling. You had me last semester," the girl explained. "I'm Kira Bentley's roommate."

  "Yes? What can I do for you, Miss Drieling?" Instinct already told him what this was about. "Is everything all right with Kira? She missed my class again today. Not unusual," he added out of a bit of playful spite. If she insisted on keeping up their old pretense, even in the face of everything that had come to pass between them, then he was certainly game to continue giving her a hard time.

  The expression on Shannon Drieling's face instantly took the fun out of it for him, though, and his wan smile curled into a thoughtful frown. "Is she ill? If she is, tell her she can makeup her assignments when she gets back. Either that, or I can send them with you now." Donovan pulled open a drawer to hunt for a spare copy of the reading assessment. "Classic literature will always be here. It's more important that she remains healthy."

  "She talks about you all the time, like you're her advisor or mentor or something," Shannon blurted out as if she hadn't heard him at all. Donovan froze. Now he could definitely see that something was wrong. Her eyes were nearly brimming over with tears, and he could smell her heightened anxiety suspended like a cloud above them both. He eased the drawer shut.

  "What is it, Drieling?" he asked quietly. "I assure you that you have my complete confidence." It was a promise he might have to break, depending on what she told him no
w. If he was her first point of contact… if there was an emergency…

  "I came home last night and our room was completely trashed!" Shannon sobbed. "All the furniture was overturned, and there were clothes everywhere. It was all Kira's stuff—none of my stuff was touched. Even her bed was flipped over. It looked like… it looked like… oh God." Shannon sank to her knees, and Donovan came instantly out of his chair to join her on the floor. He could still hear her voice muffled behind her hands. "It was like someone tore through it with a knife. There were these long jagged marks in it…"

  "And Kira?" he demanded. "Where's Kira?"

  Her sudden silence unnerved him, and Donovan grasped her shoulders to force her to look up at him once more. Her eyes were streaming, and her face was deathly pale.

  "I think someone broke into our dorm room," she said. "I think something has happened to Kira."

  Kira woke in the woods.

  She blinked blearily up at the sky as she tried to remember how she had gotten outside in the first place. She could see a patch of blue through a fringe of autumnal leaves, but nothing about the canopy above her recalled any memories. She overturned herself to look for any familiar landmarks, and was greeted by a terrible discovery.

  She wasn't naked—that, at least, was a relief. But her clothes were torn to ribbons, and the skin beneath her tattered clothing was scratched as if she had been in a scuffle with some wild animal. Even her jeans were ripped beyond recognition.

  Panic flooded her system, and Kira sat up quickly. She was hit by an immediate dizzy spell, but it didn't succeed in knocking her back down again; if anything, her lightheadedness forced her to take quick stock of her surroundings in case she happened to pass out again. Aside from her clothes and the superficial wounds, she appeared otherwise unharmed. Judging by the noonday sky overhead, she was able to guess that she had been out for a while, which would account for some of her dizziness—her stomach felt empty, and she was likely dehydrated. The surge of energy she had felt upon waking was only due to adrenaline, and that would probably deplete itself shortly. She needed to figure a way out of here before then?

  But where was she? She wanted to say Gosling Park, but she couldn't be sure how she knew. Relying on her largely-untested wolf instincts to tell her where she was seemed risky, but it was all she had to go off of at this point. She thought she could tell from the position of the sun that time had passed, but what was the last thing that she could remember?

  She had been up late studying well into the early morning. Her roommate was out—likely sleeping over with a new guy she didn't want Kira to know about yet. So Kira had been in her dorm room alone, and then… chaos.

  Someone had splintered the door in. She remembered that much. No knock, no trying of the handle first—the door had caved upon first impact. Her body had reacted out of instinct, and shifted her partway before she even had time to draw a startled breath. She remembered a whirlwind of claws, teeth, and fur… but whose? Surely it wasn't Donovan who had attacked her.

  Was it possible she had done this to herself?

  The prospect was starting to seem more and more likely. She knew that werewolves occasionally blacked out, depending on the circumstances—Professor Donovan was a testament to that. Could it have been lack of sleep that allowed the wolf to take her over with a vengeance? Oh God, what if she had hurt someone?

  Kira staggered to her feet, pressing a palm to her forehead in shame. The only blood on her was blood that she could readily identify as her own, and there wasn't much of it. Her mouth was dry, and as she swept her tongue between her teeth for a telltale taste of copper, she came up short. All signs were pointing toward a positive conclusion, but that still didn't explain what had happened, or why she was here.

  A rustling in the undergrowth drew her attention, and Kira froze. Her sensitive ears picked up on something close, something large, moving steadily toward her location. She turned and planted herself in a defensive position, legs wide and fists raised. Whoever, or whatever, it was, they were approaching at a speed that couldn't be mistaken for anything other than intentional. They knew her location, and were banking on her still being there.

  She wasn't out of the woods yet.

  CHAPTER 14

  "And this is how you found it?"

  Kira Bentley's roommate, Shannon Drieling, nodded.

  Donovan stood in the doorway to the girls' dorm room for a long, terrible moment; then, taking Shannon's silence for permission, he stepped over the threshold.

  The room was a disaster—exactly as she had described it to him and then some. The bed was overturned, assignments and clothes were scattered everywhere, a desk lamp was shattered and pillows were torn to ribbons. There were goose down feathers littered everywhere, covering half of the room like a fresh powder of snow.

  Donovan's stomach lurched at the sight. He knew what this was all too well: this was the handiwork of a werewolf out of control. Was it possible that after all of their time spent together—after all of his advice and teachings—Kira's wolf side had still got the better of her? He could see now how lucky it had been that Shannon had been out for the evening.

  "Your side of the room is basically untouched?" he inquired. He moved through the wreckage, but couldn't bring himself to touch anything that had been overturned or destroyed. It was probably for the better—they would need to notify campus police if Kira couldn't be located, and having his fingerprints at the scene of the crime would open an entirely new can of worms.

  In response to his question, Shannon shook her head. "No. I… I think whoever broke into our dorm room was after Kira and Kira only. Everything she owned was trashed," she said.

  "I can see that." Now that he was deeper in the room, Donovan caught a whiff of something he didn't understand. While the damage had clearly been done by a wolf, Shannon's theory that someone had broken in and attacked Kira seemed suddenly and starkly more likely than Kira being the sole party responsible for the damage.

  His nostrils curled as they were assaulted by a third scent. The left side of the room, Shannon's side, smelled like it had been drenched in hairspray and perfume; the right side, Kira's side, smelled like the generic brand of soap she used combined with the more recent aroma of pine trees. Beneath it all, he could smell her wolf's pheromones, indistinguishable to any non-shifter, but his own awareness of them packed a wallop. It was enough to make his pulse quicken and his blood race, even with the girl herself absent.

  But that third scent. So alien, and yet… so like his own. Donovan put out a hand to grab the back of Shannon's desk chair, breaking his promise to himself not to touch anything, and sat down hard. He had never smelled it before in his life, but there seemed to be no mistaking it.

  It was the smell of another male wolf. It was the smell of the brute who had come after Kira.

  "Professor, I think there's something you should know," Shannon mentioned hesitantly from the doorway.

  Donovan turned his head slowly to look at her, eyes still distant as he took in every detail of this new, horrifying reality. "Yes?" he asked finally.

  "I think Kira was… well, I think she might have been seeing someone. In secret." Shannon's voice was hushed. "You could say I know the signs. I've had a boyfriend I've been keeping from her for weeks; I was just waiting for the right time to introduce them… anyway, that's neither here nor there. But she's been really private recently, and there are a few times I've come home early over the weekends to just find her… gone. Without explanation. I mean, obviously she has another place to stay."

  "Is it obvious?" Donovan echoed her without thinking. "I had no idea."

  "And I guess I've just been wondering… well, I guess I wondered if there was a reason she was keeping whoever she's been seeing a secret. Like, maybe he isn't the nicest guy, and she knows that she needs to break up with him. Maybe she tried to break up with him, and…" Shannon cut herself off, as if the very idea of what had become of Kira strangled her like two sets of fingers. "I wish I h
ad been here!" she finished brokenly.

  "There was nothing you could have done," Donovan said firmly as he rose. "And I'm not one to say you were right to find me before you called campus police, but I'm glad you told me. I've advised Kira on more than just her schoolwork this semester, and her location and well-being are incredibly important to me."

  "Where do you think she could have gone?" Shannon moaned. Donovan surveyed the room once more, his eyes taking in the drifts of goose feathers.

  "I have an idea," he said. "But it's only a hunch."

  He turned on his heel and was about to exit the room, but he ultimately paused to lay a comforting hand on Shannon's shoulder. Her eyes were misted over, and she looked as if she had been through a hell equal to Kira's these past few hours.

  "Give me an hour. One hour. That's all I ask. If you don't hear from me or Kira by then…" Donovan sucked in a quick breath before continuing. "Call campus security. Tell them everything you've told me."

  He gave her shoulder a squeeze, and Shannon nodded her understanding. Then he moved off into the hallway and hurried down the stairs, leaving the destruction of the room behind him.

  The goose feathers from Kira's burst pillow had sparked an idea. There was only one wooded area near here that a wolf shifter could hope to escape to, and that was Gosling Park. He thought he knew where Kira's supernatural assailant was likely to have taken her.

  He just hoped he wasn't already too late.

  CHAPTER 15

  When her kidnapper came out of the woods, Kira was ready for him.

  She sidestepped to the perimeter of the clearing and lunged. There was no time to take in his identity, or anything other than the fact that he was male—she threw all of her weight into him and hoped that surprise would give her the upper hand. Her hands fisted in his jacket as she wrenched them both off their feet and spun them down, down toward the ground.