I was in Heaven when I was in her.
“I’m always happy to see you.”
Rolling in my arms, she faced me and put a hand on my cheek. “That you are.”
My leg coaxed hers over my hip, and she went willingly. Jess hummed with teasing curiosity as she waited to see what I would do.
Using just the tips of my fingers, I found the warm, welcoming juncture of her thighs and already-waiting bundle of nerves. Trailing slow, soft fingers over her clit, she moaned and closed her eyes, her body moving ever-so-slightly on the sheets.
I just played there for a while, not serious about my movements yet. My mornings never started better than watching the pleasure traipse across her features as she let me play with her body.
Slipping a finger inside her, I was met with a warm, willing channel and greeted with a moan that asked for more without words.
Coaxing her hips closer to me, I fisted my cock and slipped it between her legs, finding her entrance. She rocked her hips forward, impatient, and took me inside. I moved so I could seat myself completely in her.
Her pussy squeezed me, and I let out my own moan of delight.
Together we found a simple, careful rhythm that moved us together toward our climaxes. I watched her, my other hand occupying itself at her breast, strumming lazy fingers over the taut peak that had appeared.
God, I was so lost for this woman. I could do this every moment of every day and never grow tired of her here with me. My wolf wanted so desperately to mark her, but I just held him back and knew this was all we were allowed to take until she said otherwise.
Lazy and hazy lovemaking had happened more than once since she’d opted to stay with me the whole summer. There were other moments, faster or more greedy, but these where we were just there for the sheer pleasure of being were the best.
I pumped in and out, in and out in a slow loop, her wet desire making the trek easy and welcoming. One hand had stayed by her clit, and I had never stopped teasing her. I knew the power that rested in the tiny bundle. It was deceptively small, hugely powerful. Science had told some men what the rest of us already guessed: the clitoris was not just that little button some chose to ignore, but a superhighway of stimulation, a full orchestra of delight, and if you played it just right, if you obeyed all the signs—
“Sssshit.” Jess’s pussy fluttered over my cock, and her climax washed over her, forcing her to close her eyes. “Oh, shit yessss…Garrett…”
Feeling the grip of her entrance, the utter pleasure that ran through her, my climax was right behind hers. I pressed in deep and held myself there. My cum raced to fill her, and when she felt me spill inside, she gasped and was held at the peak of her orgasm.
Holding my cock inside her, I waited until she had stopped trembling and fluttering around me, enjoying the aftershocks of her body.
“You are a terrible habit,” she whispered.
“Quit me if you dare.”
Her pink, lush lips kissed mine with cotton soft kisses, never going beyond the press of just sweet butterfly caresses.
This woman was good for my soul.
As predicted, she had another question for me. She always did after I took her like this.
“Tell me about this house?”
That one was loaded. But I loved to tell her stories, answering her questions. I wasn’t going to hold back anything.
“It’s an arts and crafts house I bought the plans for in 1917. You were a man at eighteen back then, and I wanted to build a house for myself. My father and brother helped me build it, and the only thing we modified was the front porch. Exposed porches aren’t good for much in Alaska.
“What I didn’t tell them at the time was I thought I had found my mate. I was building this for her. She was a pretty girl from Whitehorse. I had made the trek to see her a few times. Today, you get to Skagway, and it’s about an hour and a half into the Yukon.
“Back then, that was a hell of a trip. You had to get up White Pass on the Chilkoot Trail, and there was a gulch there called Dead Horse. You guess what happened there. And that was only about sixteen miles to the top of White Pass. Once you cleared the pass, you had to go through an area around Summit Lake that some called The Dead Fields. And you had about three months a year to do this.
“The first town over the border was Fraser, which is nothing but an old, abandoned mine now.”
Jess cocked her head, and I tapped her nose with my finger.
“I’m getting to it. So, obviously this pass was an issue. Not even me getting from here to Skagway. That pass was the issue.
“I got trapped for the winter on her side of the pass. The north side. I had to winter in Whitehorse. It was wonderful the first few weeks. I took a room in the apartment and my little filly would come visit me, and we’d go down to dinner, or spend time in front of the fire talking or playing games.
“Then, one day, while we were more intimate—and mind you, back then, intimate was kissing—she called me Benjamin.
“Turned out this little hussy was playing four different men for money, food, and potential wealth. Me, Benjamin, Frank, and a husband named Alexi. Four of us.
“We left her out in the cold. Not literally, of course, because we were still gentlemen, but her name got passed around as an unscrupulous woman right quick.
“Alexi left to go back to Russia alone during the spring melt. Human me walked off into the Yukon cold, never to be seen again, and spent the rest of my time in Whitehorse as a friendly wolf who kept Benjamin company. Frank opted for a mail order bride—and she wound up being just the prettiest and sweetest thing when she arrived the next spring.
“Benjamin opted to leave Whitehorse and head down to Vancouver and settle there. I went with him as far as Juneau. It was hard to say goodbye to such a good friend, but he got it. You couldn’t have a wolf in Vancouver.
“So I reappeared here, at St. Terese one year after going to Whitehorse to claim my mate, and came back barely able to shift back to human.
“Dad found me on the front porch of the mostly completed house, hunched down and sickly. I had lost the woman I thought was my mate, and the man who had been my best friend for months.
“He got me inside and got a fire going. He stayed with me, fed me, and told me all the stories he had when I was a child. He would shift and go running with me. Longer and longer every day, more and more food. And while he was there with me, he was carving the fireplace with the Tlingit legends.
“I realized he was doing that as both a prayer and a plea for me to come back. It was six months since he’d found me on my porch. My mother had come by and Darius. Several of the elders.
“Gregor, one of oldest pack members, was the one who finally convinced me it was time. My father was willing to give me years, but some of the more hot-blooded of the pack were not. They said that if the Alpha could not control his heir, then he didn’t need to be Alpha.”
God, these memories sucked. Old ways, old thinking, used up ideas, terrible plans, and angry threats. I was so glad we had come so far in our thinking. No one in the pack today would ever think of suggesting that a father should control his son that way. Or that he should be forced to shift one way or another after such a god-awful experience.
Psychology had permeated the pack, thanks to Tati.
“I didn’t want to disgrace my father, so I shifted. Finally. I remember my wolf slept more than he was awake in the next few weeks. This house was my refuge, my pride. It was my therapy.” I snorted. “It’s still all that. After Anil’s death, I gutted it.”
“Anil. He was the wolf shifter you found wandering in Vancouver, packless.”
Jess had a great memory.
“Yes. He was a red wolf, from India. I can’t imagine they ever had it easy there. But he was welcome here. He just could no longer find his wolf to shift.”
“He’s in the graveyard.”
“On my family’s plot, yes.”
“So you used the house as therapy. How many time
s have you refurbished?”
Sweet and perceptive. I didn’t want my thoughts of Anil to interrupt us. “The kitchen is every fifteen years without fail. The bathrooms are usually twenty. The rest of the house every twenty-five. But I gutted it and got rid of everything but the fireplace.”
I moved and my cock slipped free of her confines. I grimaced as she whimpered, the sound going straight to my shaft. “Oh, Jess. I wish. We have to get to the cabin. We have the solar battery to install today.”
“Damn it,” she whispered, but sat up with me. “Well, meet me in the woodshed at ten.”
“A quickie?” I was falsely offended.
“Unless you want everyone to know we’re fucking madly in the back of your truck for twenty minutes?”
The roar of a laugh escaped me. “I seriously doubt anyone hasn’t found us at some point in the past month, Jess. We’re…obvious.”
She grinned. “Whatever. Never really tried to make it secret.” Pausing, she picked at the bed sheet. “Um. The girls want to go out for dinner. We haven’t really had time to just sit and chat for a while. And that was half the idea of coming up here. Relax and chat and just be girls.”
“Tonight?” I asked.
“Yeah, tonight.”
“What’s today?” I wasn’t fooled by this charade.
She put a hand over her eyes, and I could feel the sudden sadness in her. “It’s a year since I lost the baby. They think wine and food will help me.”
“Will it?”
Her head fell into her hands. “No. Nothing but time will help. But I love them, and I know they mean well. We were supposed to be here together.”
“And the only ones staying in the cabin are Brandy and Zanna.” I smiled at her.
“It’s Brandy’s cabin. I hope she’s staying there.”
There was a different undercurrent in her voice, and I had to know. “You’re worried about them? Why? You know there’s always a patrol there now.”
“I’m worried about them. Not them in the cabin. Brandy has held a torch for Zanna for years. It’s an unspoken thing with all of us. We all know about the attraction but never say anything.”
“How does Zanna feel?”
“Heterosexual.”
* * *
I tried—desperately—to smile, but the tension in the car had been palpable and it had leaked into the dinner, and now was leaking into dessert.
We’d all tried making small talk, but Zanna just sat there brooding and sending out waves of anger.
I could almost say I smelled it. I’d been around Garrett too much, and at the same time I knew it was his fault that I was thinking like that.
Addi poured the creamer into her coffee. “It’s kind of crazy. We came up here to hang out, and we’ve barely seen each other.”
“Right?” Delia dumped four sugars in hers. “I mean, who knew this was going to end up being so crazy.”
Zanna leaned forward and the smile on her face was not a good one. “So, Jess. Did we help you forget your miscarriage?”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Brandy snapped. “Why would you ever ask that?”
I nearly saw red. “Oh, you mean the miscarriage of the child I shouldn’t have been pregnant with? That I wasn’t ready for, but was going to have anyway to keep my cheating fiancé in my life because I thought keeping him happy instead of me was more important. The fiancé who tricked me into getting pregnant in the first place? The fiancé I found dick-deep in Lily when I got home from the D-and-C I had to have? Yeah, you did a great job, Zanna. Just wonderful.”
“What’s going on here?” Delia’s voice was quiet.
“What’s going on is nothing!” Zanna pointed at me. “You moved out to play house with your fuck toy.”
Her finger moved to Addi. “You’re never around, and if you are you’re with Patrick and he’s banging away on you.”
Her next victim was Delia. “You. I have no idea where you go. You show up with food, cook it, and disappear for another two days.”
“So you can all suck a big one on your ‘let’s play everything is just fine.’ This was supposed to be a summer for us. For the five of us, to hang and chat and drink and relax. And do you know what this is now? It’s the Brandy and Zanna show. We just sit around staring at each other, trying to figure out how the fuck we’re supposed to have fun when our friends are off doing whatever.”
“Zanna—” Delia, Addi, and I all started in at the same time.
“Clam it. All of you. I know what you’re going to say.” Her tone parroted our voices. “Zanna, this is more complicated than that. Well, I don’t care. I don’t care. Because you all don’t care either. You’ve left me and Brandy in that cabin alone, after the damn coyotes got into the house. Of course who the hell knows if that was true because it was only Jess in there at the time. I mean, maybe she was just lying about it because all the doors were open when we got back the next day.”
“Patrick locked it up—”
“Do. Not. Care.” Her finger was in my face again. “Don’t care. Not even a little.”
She balled up the napkin from her lap and threw it on the table. “Excuse me. There’s a bar down the street and I’m going to go get shitfaced and maybe fuck a rando. Have fun with your excuses.”
She marched out of the restaurant and the four of us just sat there, staring and confused.
“Um…” Delia bounced her gaze around the table. “What just happened?”
“Zanna’s apparently pissed at us,” Addi answered.
I folded my hands on the table. “Where did that come from? I didn’t know you all weren’t there all the time? I thought that was only me.”
“Well…” Addi and Delia both started in.
Brandy leaned in. “It’s my fault.”
We all swiveled to look at her sitting there. She traced her finger around the rim of the mug and chewed on her lip. It hit me like a ton of bricks.
I hissed the words quietly, “No. Brandy! No! You had sex with her?”
A moment passed and Brandy nodded. “I didn’t mean for it to happen. I would have been happy with my unrequited love. I’d happily go back there if she’d stop being such a bitch to me.”
“How on Earth is this your fault?” Addi asked.
“I gave her one of my favorite lesbian romances and she read it. She started asking questions, genuine honest questions, and when she asked what it was like to kiss a girl… Well.”
Delia sucked in a breath, and Addi and I put a hand to our foreheads.
“You kissed her.”
“We did more than kiss. And the next morning she was like…this. She’s been like this since. One week. And I want to ring her fucking neck for this attitude.” Brandy stabbed the table with her finger. “At any point that night she could have said no. She could have said stop, and I would have.”
“She didn’t?” Addi asked.
“There were a whole of a lot of yeses while my face was in her—”
“Got it,” Delia said, holding her hand up.
I sighed. “So what do we do?”
Brandy’s head dropped onto her fist, clearly exhausted. “I need her to stop making this so absolutely uncomfortable for both of us. I need her away from me for just a little while a week. So we can both cool off, I can collect myself and go back to unrequited status and just get on with my life.”
I poked at the dessert on the table in front of me. “Look, Garrett has a few extra bedrooms. Let me see what he says about putting her up for a few days so you two can get away from each other. I realize that I just kind of abandoned you all…”
“It’s not you.” Delia waved me off. “It’s all of us. We all grew and changed and this trip hasn’t exactly turned out the way we thought it would.”
“Not even remotely,” Addi mumbled.
“Where the hell have you been anyway, Delia?” I asked. “We all know I’ve been with Garrett most of the time, and Addi’s been…uh, shall we say occupied? But you…”
“It’s a dude,” Brandy mumbled.
“The tour guide I hired. He took me up the mountain.”
Addi laughed. “I’m sure he did take you up his mountain.”
“He’s hot! He’s brains and brawn in all the right places. And he can do this one trick—”
“Got it.” Brandy held her hand up, laughing at the little mock she got in at Delia.
“So we really just kind of left you two to deal with it?” My breath escaped in a long slow sigh. “Zanna will come around, and relax. She gets like this and we all know it. But, Brandy, are you going to be okay?”
She squinted at me. “You all knew I was hot for her?”
“Yes. The sexual tension in the room when you two were there was so thick you could cut it with a knife.”
“So you think she…”
Addi smirked. “Hope springs eternal, Bran. Who knows. But I know she couldn’t have missed it after a while. I wouldn’t bank on anything, and just—as you said, return to default unrequited.”
“Damn. It was so good between us.”
I clapped her on the back. “You’ll find her, Brandy. Might just have to look beyond our group, is all.”
Rotating in the chair, she raked her eyes up and down me sitting there. “You interested?”
“Oh, woman, I am in so deep with just one of the opposite sex. You don’t want to get tangled in that mess.”
“I don’t want to get tangled in a mess, just tangled in some sheets.”
Chapter Eleven
We stood in the now basic-paved driveway, staring at the house.
“Except for the turbine,” I said, “it’s done. Six weeks, start to finish.”
“And the bill isn’t even that bad!” Delia grinned at me and handed over an Amex Platinum credit card. “Just put the rest of it on there.”
“What? You’re not using the black card?” Jess teased.
“Daddy got mad.”
The five girls cracked up laughing. I wasn’t sure what the joke there was, but Jess would probably explain it later. I didn’t hesitate to run the card through. This had been a rich job—not only in terms of my earnings, but in terms of my whole life.
Taming Alaska Page 10
