by Q. Zayne
I nodded. “A pleasure to meet you. Will you walk with me?” I had to get her away from the others. Even as we spoke, a cluster of older women eyed us and slowed their progress to the door to eavesdrop. They were doused in what was aptly called toilet water. Even a sick wolf didn’t have a reek that foul.
She glanced at them. “Yes.” for the first time her voice had an uncertain note. I didn’t allow her time to change her mind. I presented my arm and gestured for the ladies to proceed us. Agog, they walked to the door with dragging steps, but like my pack members, they had conditioned responses.
They finally got through the door and moved aside to let us pass, standing with their heads so close together their church hats overlapped in a tapestry of birds and flowers.
A buzz followed our exit as Charity held my arm and went with me down the steps and into the church yard. I took a deep breath of sweet air. The church women had perhaps more reason to speak and be alarmed than they imagined.
I didn’t want to imagine the females of my pack commenting on my behavior, so I kept my back to the clusters of women in front of the church and led Charity through the garden, not so far away from the church as to alarm her, but far enough to evade her nosy neighbors.
The thought of myself as the big, bad wolf came close to disrupting my composure. My old man read me that story when he first took me to the home of his human friend. The story delighted me and made me more at ease my first time indoors. My gaze kept sliding to the woman beside me. I caught her glancing at me and we both looked away at the tumult of roses, tulips, dahlias and flowering vines that surrounded us.
This was as close as I’d come to a date in my life and my thoughts rippled with instincts hard-wired from a life as a predator after prey. Her position as an outsider, as someone not of my pack, not of my kind, triggered other instincts. There was no wolf in her and I hadn’t expected there to be. My instincts fought with my hard-learned human manners; I wanted to nose her, bite her or mount her. Damn, acting a man came harder than I expected, despite all my practice. I wanted to make a favorable impression but had no idea what to do.
At least I’d succeeded in separating her from her pack. I took deep breaths, cleansing my nose and lungs from all the church smells and becoming intoxicated with her sweetness.
Blowsy roses tipped in the wind on each side of the path. Her yellow gown glowed in the sun against the deep brown tones of her skin. In the sunlight, she gave off prisms all over her skin and hair, red, orange, blue, purple, yellow. I wanted to breathe her, swallow her, eat her up. All my senses feasted on her. I wanted never to stop. I probably should have said more to her, made a gentleman’s attempt at conversation, but her company satisfied me so much I savored the silence. I listened to her heartbeats, her breath, the rush of blood in her body. Her breath smelled good. I wanted to feel it on my ears, on my body. I wanted her to lick my face. I swallowed, mastering myself.
“Thank you,” I said, drinking in her presence, her loveliness. As quiet as she was, her alert expression intimated a keen intelligence. Her hand on my arm impressed me with her strength and gentleness. The world over, women of courage with the honor and pride she exuded were the heroes of their people. She stood, strong in frame, only a head shorter than me in her high heels. Overcome by her nearness, I peeked over her shoulder. Her hips flared with dangerous, hot curves and flowed into a gorgeous heart-shaped ass.
She arched a brow, glancing up at me. Her shapely brow spoke plenty.
“Thank you for walking with me. I had to meet you. I’ve never been struck like that. Your voice —.” I clawed for words, snapped at them wolf-jawed in my mind, but they refused to come. Nothing prepared me to be entranced like this.
She lowered her lashes, her thick, curled, jet lashes, and spared me from continuing the struggle. The warmth of her arm through mine became the focus of my body.
We walked the garden’s meandering path out of sight of the church and Charity seemed content with the silence. Squirrels set up an alarm with their tails ratcheting and jays scolded us for our encroachment. I wanted to stay there all day with the sun on my enlivened body and Charity at my side, her tantalizing hip brushing me as we walked.
We meandered through a jungle of roses, neat bushes, tree-sized ones with saucer-sized blooms, trellised baby roses dropping pale pink petals that I brushed off Charity’s springy hair as she gazed up at me with her deep, dark brown eyes.
“There. Pardon me. I brushed off the petals,” I stammered.
The trill of her laughter set birds to flight. Flashes of black and blue wings all around us. “It’s all right. If I thought you were doing something you needed to be kicked for, I’d kick you.” Her words came out in her honey contralto. I nodded. I believed her about the kick, yet caught the flirtatious tone and felt encouraged. I sensed steel in her. She’d had to defend herself, that was clear in her posture. I held up my hands in the movie gesture for unarmed. Charity laughed at my surrender and took my arm. If I weren’t so much more at ease as a wolf than a man, I’d want to be a cowboy. It’s what I played when I was little, shooting a cap gun in my mentor Cody’s yard, mindlessly happy. As I was today, for the first time as an adult.
I had no practice at all for this. A suave James Bond type I was not, and it seemed the grab and go style of courtship had gone out of style and could result in grave bodily injury. As we walked in step again, most of my cares drifted away like the puffs of clouds visible above the magnolias and pines. But not all of my concerns fell quiet.
My father and most of the pack had wanted me to choose Aria for my mate. She was arguably the strongest female, already dominating most of the others, and clearly the fastest. She seemed well suited to life as an alpha. Yet she inspired nothing in me, only the same affection and concern for her well being I felt for any of them. Vira intrigued me at times. She was as voracious to learn about human history and customs as I, and not for my father’s reasons, to know an enemy, but with my same crazy passion to learn and understand things outside our lives. I treasured that in Vira, and she was one of our finest hunters. We’d brought down prey together and the thrill of it made me feel close to her in ways I rarely experienced with anyone.
All the females were athletic and comely enough. None had inspired the attraction, the mad desire Charity roused in me. The thought of ravaging her as a wolfman, in that half-wild state between forms that always made my dick hard, lanced through me giving me a huge boner. Damn it, no.
Lust was nothing. I wanted more with Charity. It made me shake, made me senseless. I sweated as she swayed against me and I wanted the passion and love of the great old blues songs. I wanted to feel her want me. That’s the only way I’d ever have her.
The lean bodies of Aria and Vira held less enticement for me than ever. I’d never choose one of them. The more the pack pressured me to mate, the more I’d dreamed becoming a lone wolf. That morning I’d awakened sweating from running alone on an unknown savannah, bare in all directions of familiar scents and wolf calls. I felt it all over me, the barren yet free life of the rogue.
A fearsome, yet tantalizing prospect, to leave them all, leave the life I’d known and do whatever I wished. I was too different from all of them, always had been. My father tried to fight it out of me but died without succeeding. I missed the old man. But now I was free.
Charity stopped beside me and I stopped with her, on alert. Quick glances and scenting the air in all directions assured me nothing approached. I smelled a fox in the woods but she was occupied with a chase for food. I curled my toes in my handmade Italian leather shoes, shutting down the reflex to shift into wolf to protect Charity. I suspected she possessed skills for taking care of herself, but generations of instinct were hard to fight.
A monarch butterfly (yellow & black) flexed its wings on a peace rose. Charity smiled, watching it. Her nimbus of hair caught the light with the same prismatic art as the butterfly’s wings. She bent toward the butterfly and the nape of her neck presented itself.
My arousal urged me to take her. I longed to mount her. I rooted myself to the spot, bending with her, keeping my head level with hers, projecting good intent. I wanted her to trust me, to feel safe. I must do nothing to trigger the fear so many people harbored for our kind.
All I knew was I wanted to keep her with me. How could I manage that? I pawed through everything I’d read and viewed on human courtship, rejected asking her for dinner or drinks. The prospect of being on display in close quarters in enclosed places repelled me, and I didn’t care to get close to the foul odors of most people. Besides, I wanted her all to myself, without the strain of having to recall all the niceties of phony human manners. I wanted to focus on Charity.
“Lovely. You’re lovelier.”
“Smooth talker.” She laughed and struck me lightly on the arm. Good, she liked to play. How sweet it would be to wrestle like pups, nipping at each other, taking deep sniffs of her most intimate scents.
I cocked my head toward the old gravestones and tilted statues under the magnolia trees. A cluster of small, moss-covered mausoleums stood at the foot of the hill.
A few distant howls reached me. Up above, someone wanted to know where I was, wanted an answer. It didn’t matter.
Right there in the sunshine shifting to dappled shade under the huge trees with their mottled tan bark, leather leaves and head-sized creamy blossoms, it became real to me that I could leave, stop belonging to the pack, stop having them all nip at me and demand that I choose a female I didn’t want.
I gazed at Charity, the way her dress flowed over her lush curves, the sure way she placed her feet in her matching Sunday shoes. Her bare legs gleamed, hairless, shapely. The buttery leather revealed her toe cleavage. I didn’t need anything. All I wanted was to stay here, stay with her.
Amid the graves that told the history of the town and its families, I breathed in my freedom along with Charity’s delicious scent. Peace washed through me, a peace I’d never known before.
“I don’t know how to say this —.” I drew in a breath, lost.
“You don’t know how to say much.” She said it with a smile, with a sassy arch to her voice, and laughed. “Actually, I like that you’re different.”
“Different?” Of course I was, but I wanted to know what she meant, how she perceived me.
“Other men, the few who approached like gentlemen,” her fierce eyes gave me a sense of men’s coarse behavior as she’d experienced it. The urge to bite anyone who’d ever insulted or harmed her rose and made me taller and larger. Her pupils dilated, making her exquisite eyes more captivating. “They talk about themselves non-stop. Themselves and their things.” Her skin heated and her scent became stronger. “I mean their stuff, their junk.” She laughed, embarrassed. “Not their junk-junk, their material things. Their cars, their trucks, their boats, their gadgets, their tools and toys. Do I look like I care about horsepower or how much some doohickey costs?” She laughed again, a rich, melodious laugh that rang through the graveyard and filled me with happiness. Sunlight seemed to have gotten inside me, deep in the shade. Whatever was happening, I wanted it to never stop. She looked right in my eyes. “Why, you know, Wyatt, I don’t think I’ve ever before in my life made a man tongue-tied.” That arch look, yet sweetness all through it, nothing mean, her pure pleasure in the moment matching mine.
Perhaps this was why literature was full of stories of witches, sorceresses, female creatures of all kinds who ensorcelled men, took away their wills. Men desire and fear women who have such power over them.
This was why packs were led by an alpha pair, when you met your match, nothing was more powerful, nothing could motivate you more to be your best. Nothing else could make you more protective and infuse you with a sense of being invincible.
I grinned. My face seemed to want to wolf-grin and I didn’t stop it, although I stopped short of shifting. I gave her that full smile that was in my heart from looking at her, from my joy at the sound of her voice, her scent, the feel of her body close to me. I might as well have never wanted anything in my life. Wanting Charity burned through me, leaving nothing else.
“Charity Washington,” I savored her name. “This is the happiest day of my life because I heard your song and when I came down and caught sight of you, you were more beautiful than I could have imagined. And because you’ve given me the gift of your company.”
A chill went through me, the life-long sense that if I didn’t hold fast to what I got and wolf it down, someone stronger would attack and try to take it away. I wouldn’t trust my brother or any of my pack mates near Charity for an instant, not in wolf nor human form.
The wind whipped through the magnolia, setting up susurrations and an eerie song from the woods. Charity shivered next to me.
I opened my jacket and pulled her into my arms to share my warmth. Slight resistance, then her soft flesh met mine and her hands slipped around my waist, held me. I sighed, content.
“When you do talk, you sure talk sweet. My momma warned me about men like you.” Her breath on my collarbone, oh yeah.
“I’d like to meet your momma.”
“You forward thing,” but she giggled, sounding pleased.
I wouldn’t care if Charity’s momma wore a drugstore full of products, I was in her debt for bringing Charity into the world and I’d do anything for her acceptance.
How, how could this woman have changed me, changed my life, so fast?
I stopped holding back.
As the wind whipped up stronger at my back I backed up to a broad magnolia trunk to shelter us and Charity matched my steps, still in my arms.
I bent my head and her face met me. I’d planned to ask for a kiss, to make sure to be nothing like the louts I’d seen in her eyes. I didn’t have to ask. Her full sweet lips were right there meeting mine and giving me the kiss I wanted more than anything in my life.
Her kiss, sweet warm pressure from her soft lips, captured me, as pure and rich as her voice, heady as first blood after a long, difficult hunt.
I pulled her tight to me, feasted on her mouth, released my passion. She met me, not pulling away, kissing me back with equal power, frenzy and desire. Fearless. She had the spirit of a queen, a warrior, a hunter.
Charity might be all human, but she was everything I wanted in a mate.
Despite my aching arousal, I contained myself, made my hands gentle as I caressed her. I made my body her shelter, sharing my warmth. We ignored the spatter of rain on the broad leaves. They added more tones to the wind’s music.
Little moans and breathy sounds of pleasure rose from Charity as she pressed against me, rocking her lush body against my erection.
I kept expecting her to pull away. From what I’d seen, I was bigger than most men, my jewels, my tool, my junk, to use the euphemisms that embarrassed her, were outsize, beyond what a woman would expect from a man. I didn’t want to scare her. More than anything, I didn’t want to lose her. So I controlled myself.
Her sweet whimpers made me crazy. I wanted to spend the rest of my life exploring the pleasure sounds she could make. It was all I could do to keep myself from diving under her dress to catch more of her sent and to bury my nose and face in her secret womanly place. I wanted to keep her warm and dry, though. As though she knew I was in pain, she broke the kiss and rested her face on my chest, warming me with her soft breath, giving me a chance to force my passion to subside.
I needed a lair here. Near her. I needed everything she could want. I needed, for the first time in my life, and to the extent that I was able, to live as a man.
Could I do that, live among them, pass myself off as one of them? Pull it off long enough to succeed at courting Charity? and then what?
I couldn’t expect her to leave her life, her music, and live rough in the hills, watching for me to bring back raw meat. No. I shook my head, feeling her nappy hair under my chin. I held her with one hand protecting and warming her neck, the other holding her lower back, quivering with need. She squeeze
d me close, as though she sensed my disquiet, the enormity of the decisions I had to make, the risks ahead. Maybe she did sense them. I didn’t put much past her.
“Charity, Charity? Are you still out here?” An old woman in a lavender suit and flower-bedecked hat came into sight on the path. She clutched her handbag, peering in all directions. In the magnolias deep shade behind the curtain of rain, we were probably invisible, even if the seeker didn’t have weak eyesight.
“Charity!” The woman took a few steps closer, ducking under wet rose vines. If she kept on, she would see us, the yellow of Charity’s dress a bright contrast to the dark graveyard.
No. Damn it. That woman couldn’t ruin everything. An instant’s urge to run down the path and tear out the interrupter’s throat lanced through me. No. That’s not who I was. I wouldn’t harm any of Charity’s people.
“Charity!” She yelled again, voice shrilling above the wind. “Charity, Charity are you still out here? It’s raining! Do you want a ride home? Charity?”
No matter how annoying they were, I would not harm them. I clenched my jaw and made myself use my words.
“Don’t go. Don’t go, Charity.” I couldn’t offer her a ride home. I really hadn’t prepared myself to be a suitor, loping down the hill with nothing but my clothes and movie-inspired gadgets. I had a pocket knife with every tool people made to augment their bodies, but no wheels, no home, no wallet, no bank account. Now I knew how teenagers felt when they couldn’t take out a date. Damn.
“Charity! It’s wet out here! Come on if you’re coming. We put away all the chairs and set up for the bazaar in the basement without you.”
