She moaned and reached out to stroke his hair, her buttocks planted against the windowsill.
She posed like that, a living pulp novel cover, her golden hair cascading around her lust-filled features. He switched from one nipple to the other, then he took the nipple his hand was now neglecting between his lips, his tongue bathing all around its tip. His hands roved down over her taut belly and undid the button on her waistband.
She leaned her head back against the window glass as he licked and nibbled her breasts, his hands slowly undoing and peeling her jeans down her thighs. She groaned softly as he exposed her tiny panties, which barely covered her mound. Impatiently she helped him strip off her jeans until she could step out of them.
He moved his mouth—and his tongue—down from her breasts to her belly, down to where the material was stretched tightly across her most intimate, responsive spot. He sank to his knees and her hands came to rest on his head, fingers combing through his hair as he gently nuzzled aside the silk triangle and exposed her bare mons. She leaned into him forcefully and he smelled her excitement.
His tongue now gently circled down from her pierced navel, closer and closer to the center of her need, and she curled backward so she could thrust herself at him, at his face. He could see her labia now, blooming like a flower as she parted her thighs, and when his lips approached that delicate array of petals she gasped with pleasure. A tiny red jewel glinted there, another piercing. Her hands tightened on his head as his breath brushed across the secret folds she was now opening to him and him alone.
But then he backed off and she groaned in frustration, hands working against him when she thought he was planning to abandon her after all the teasing.
He wasn’t.
Forcefully his hands began to turn her around to face the glass, her reflection in the window like that of a goddess imprisoned in a black mirror.
Fighting him for a brief moment, then letting him have his way, she now leaned on the window, her hands spread out to both sides. He was still on his knees, but now his view had changed and the globes of her perfect buttocks had come under his searing touch. The thin strip of black fabric that barely protruded from between her buttocks was just inches away from his face. He stuck a finger under the material and started to slide the rear of the thong out of his way, even as he began to drag his tongue across her hot skin. The shape of her toned ass further excited him as he pulled her back toward him and parted her legs at the same time so she leaned forward into the window, spread-eagled. He spread her rounded globes apart so he could see her dark-tipped pussy lips, dappled with the dew of her excitement, hanging open wantonly beneath her. The piercing and jewel glittered in the bright light, a metaphor for what she was revealing to him, what she would grant him.
He kissed and licked her buttocks in tiny, widening circles, then straight up and down where they met.
She hissed softly as he pleasured her, his mouth seeming to burn her soft skin as he centered on her most secret of places. Her hiss turned into a groan at what he was doing.
After a few minutes, he rose and undid his belt, dropping his trousers and briefs with altogether too much ease. Then he hunched over her shapely back, reaching forward and around her to fondle her breasts and nipples as his erection prodded her from behind. She gasped and reached back with one hand to take his length in her violet-tipped fingers and guide him toward her. She rubbed the tip of his swelling penis on her moist, sensitive skin. He pulled her hair firmly and turned her face around, and their mouths and tongues met above as their flesh united below, and then he thrust into her and she gasped again, her lips hungrily devouring his.
As the speed of his thrusts increased, sweat pouring off both of them, he sensed the Creature beneath the veneer of his humanity beginning to claw its way to the surface. Tufts of dark hair began to bloom on his hands and arms, and he felt them blooming across his back as the wolf inside him demanded his release.
He thrust more rapidly now, their skin slapping together more violently. Their slick bodies united, rocking against the window harder and harder, their flesh screaming in unison, he felt the always tenuous control he held over the Creature slipping away, and…
In the throes of his passion he threw off the mantle of his human skin and visualized himself going over—could no longer help himself, really—and then he was Over.
The usual feeling, the it’s a fact, Jack! he’d felt since the earliest days of his curse, boiled through his system, made his blood scream.
He was no longer human.
Heather’s eyes opened wide in shock, but then she screamed in the throes of her own orgasm, and her body blurred as she, too, gave herself over to the needs of the monster within, and he saw the glowing silver disk of the moon high up in the corner of the window, and he howled—
Lupo awoke in a sudden rush that tore the blood from his veins and left him dizzy and disoriented, covered in a sour sweat that clung to his nostrils, and with a raging headache that squeezed his temples mercilessly.
Jesus.
He blinked repeatedly, checking his surroundings. He was home, in his bed, and Heather wasn’t there. Neither was Jessie. He was alone, but his body ached as if he’d run miles over a jagged landscape and, to his shame, he realized he was also painfully aroused.
And tufts of black hair on his arms and hands were only just starting to retreat.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Heather
It had been all she could do to sleep in his guest bed and not head down the hall, slip under his king-size sheets and put her lips on the erection she knew he’d probably secretly harbored ever since he’d seen her.
She loved pleasuring men with her lips and tongue and she did it well. She’d used the skill many a time to turn a man into an ally. She was pragmatic about it. No different than bringing someone a favorite coffee or pastry, no different than offering a nice meal and a drink. It was a payment, sometimes a down payment, and it could be its own reward. She was all about their reciprocal offerings, too, never you mind, but she’d truly learned to get her way in this way, of all ways. Heather was all about the goals she set for herself, and getting to them was just part of the game.
Which was why it annoyed the hell out of her that Nick Lupo not only ignored her once he’d given her the guest basics, but that he’d also locked his door loudly enough that she could hear it. She’d figured she was the one with the power here.
Of course, she could have ripped the knob off the door, but she wasn’t sure that ploy would work on this particular subject.
No, he’d been felled by an acute case of the Jessies again, and after she’d done so much to break them up. Hell, she thought the bitch’s gambling addiction—where the fuck had that come from?—would have done it, in the end, but it hadn’t. It had soured things, sure, but they’d gotten past it somehow and now they were all cuddly again.
Well, Heather was here now, and the Jessie-bitch wasn’t.
Heather loved a challenge.
She was sure he’d looked rough this morning, and she’d driven her point home by eating her breakfast while wearing one of his robes, one she left nice and loose, her nipples poking through like the Twin Peaks sign. She chuckled at that. Then she’d taken her time and put on her makeup where he could hardly avoid her, taking over the kitchen table as he tried to eat and drink coffee which he’d almost spilled.
Yes, she smiled, he’d looked rough indeed.
She’d introduced a deadly strain of Heather into his veins, she was sure of it.
Marla Anders
She looked around her office and shuddered.
Two people who had sat in this chair, leaned on this desk, had died while on the job.
She still felt freakish about occupying an office belonging to two murder victims. One victim, Julia Barrett, had most definitely been found. The other one, Marcowicz, was technically missing, but Marla had no doubt he was dead.
It was just a matter of time until they found his body, she
was sure of it.
She didn’t like to advertise it, but the dead sometimes spoke to her.
Not in a movie sense, showing up like ghosts clad in white, or rattling chains like bad imitations of old Jacob Marley.
Nor in a dreaming sense, where they spoke to her or whispered in her ears while she slept.
No, the dead gave her messages in other ways. They left items arranged in a specific order, or left notes made up of highlighted words from different sources. Sometimes she would pull three random books from her shelves, turn to a random page from each, find an underlined passage and, when she put the three passages in the right order, they formed a perfectly correct sentence. A sentence which was relevant to something she was doing, or which would prove somehow prophetic or explanatory.
She’d become used to this sort of personal Ouija board situation, once famously freaking out a dinner party until the gathered friends all decided she’d been putting them on with a prepared bit of theater. She had reduced the whole thing to the level of a parlor trick, which made her uncomfortable, but doing so had allowed her to face it. And then she’d become accustomed to the strange messages.
Used to them, that is, until she accepted this position with the MPD and learned about her office’s previous occupants and their fates. She’d peered at the perimeter of her office and wondered whether she’d have reason to regret taking the job.
And then the messages started coming, messages that seemed to be from the two previous therapists and no one else. It was as if Marla’s ghost river had dried up, except for two small trickles that kept her on her toes. Indeed, the Marcowicz and Barrett notes had become the stuff of nightmare for her. For once started, they seemed to want nothing more than to send her cryptic notes. Most of which she tried to ignore.
Less than a month after arriving, she’d stumbled upon a notebook stuck in a drawer of her desk and it turned out to be some of Marcowicz’s notes. Since then, she’d met with Detective Nick Lupo a half-dozen times for mandated therapy sessions, and she’d been immediately intrigued. She watched and listened more carefully than with any other patient in a long time.
Marcowicz had written long, rambling notes and observations on something Lupo had discussed. While Marla knew she wasn’t meant to have seen the notes, she had and there was no unseeing them. And what Lupo had confessed to David Marcowicz had given her a strange sense of déjà vu she could not shake. Coupled with the notes directed at her, she both feared and looked forward to her meetings with Lupo.
And at today’s meeting she planned to ask him a serious question.
DiSanto
He was driving when he caught himself picturing Lupo’s friend, Heather Wilson.
Pretty much out of the blue, too.
Just like the way she’d shown up again.
The woman was a goddess. He had only met her a couple times before, but she had made an impression that popped up in his mind at the most inopportune times.
She was amazing. Picturing her fuck-me body topped off by her suck-you lips caused him an instant physical reaction, and he felt a guilty flush rising on his cheeks.
Plus there was the very good chance she was also one of Lupo’s kind. He wasn’t quite sure, because no one—not Lupo, or Jessie, of Heather herself—had ever confirmed anything either way. But DiSanto sure remembered the day of the Wolfpaw compound raid, knowing she was supposed to be present. He had seen Lupo bounding away from the compound in his wolf form, accompanied by another wolf. A smaller one.
Was it Heather?
He was almost sure it had to be her. The animal’s lithe grace had reminded him of the reporter’s, as if her inner beast reflected the way she looked in her everyday form.
So much was wrong with that day, the day of the raid, besides the political and military hoops they’d had to jump over. Fortunately Wolfpaw’s bad behavior and nasty hearings had predisposed everyone to the possibility their actions were criminal rather than mere “bad apples,” as they’d first been painted. But even so, the sense of utter wrongness that he still felt was like an annoying itch on the portion of his back he couldn’t reach.
He had provided the cavalry once again, sure, but he knew damn well some bad stuff had gone down in there. The fact that he was on Lupo’s side didn’t mean he wasn’t uncomfortable with what might have happened.
Might have, my ass.
He knew something had happened. That CEO, Schlosser, had shot himself.
Or had he?
He shook his head, wishing he could unthink these thoughts.
The shooting had happened while DiSanto and a caravan of state and federal law enforcement vehicles wended its way down the private drive, arresting sentries along the way. They’d laid down their guns without firing a shot, which was fortuitous because there would have been mass casualties.
And then he had seen the wolves.
Well, anyway, that second wolf…was it Heather? He was in a betting mood, and he bet himself a million dollars it had been her.
How many of these creatures existed?
He bet another million he didn’t have that there were more than they, including Lupo himself, knew or expected. According to Lupo, the ranks of the Wolfpaw corporation had been rife with werewolves.
Shit, he got goose bumps just saying the words in his head.
And it was so weird that Lupo’s name meant wolf, and he was one. DiSanto had grown up in a very superstitious household, a very patrilineal, repressed, stuck-in-the-past kind of family, and although he had disappointed his parents tremendously by not becoming a priest, or for that matter sticking with the church-going, it was hard for him to dismiss all those years of indoctrination.
Was Lupo a monster, a creature of the devil? Was he evil?
And if werewolves existed, what else might exist? Were vampires and witches that far off the realm of the possible?
And…
And what did Heather Wilson look like naked? She was fresh in his mind, so he could picture her quite clearly and it was something to behold. What would it be like to have sex with her? With a werewolf? Would she change—turn—while having sex?
Hell, he didn’t know, but if the bulge in his pants was any indication, he’d like to find out.
He turned into the precinct’s underground parking, wishing he could take his mind off the Amazonian beauty and focus on his task force. There would be lab reports to read, meetings to officiate, assignments to hand out. He’d worked late, caught hell from his wife yet again for barely coming home to sleep a few hours, then he’d left again.
Nick, I wish you were the guy. Not me.
Still he wondered how much he could trust his partner. Nick had been distracted lately, and why not? Two beautiful women after him, a fuckin’ werewolf army gunning for him, his mother dying—and something strange going on there, with his father…
Just based on all the distractions, he had to wonder.
Would Nick be there when good old Rich DiSanto needed his partner?
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lupo
He was heading for the precinct after not enough sleep. He was still trying to shake the nightmare—well, most of it had been very pleasant indeed, but that was why it was also a nightmare—when Colgrave called.
“I’ve had a hit on your names,” she said, speaking softly so he knew she was already at work.
“That was fast.”
“I had enough favors to call in,” she said. “My contact had to make some calls himself, but he tells me there’s a pretty good chance this Johnny and Marty are goons who work for a mob guy who works out of Vegas.”
“Crap.”
“Yeah, I thought you wouldn’t like to hear it. His name is Gus Bastone. They call him The Stick.”
He barked a laugh. “Cute. His last name actually means stick or rod in Italian. What else?”
“His father died recently and he took over the family business, started calling himself a Don, like the old days. He’s young, but old enough to re
member the old days. Godfather stuff, you know? He owns a casino in Vegas, the Old Italy—it’s new and not doing great, but it could start doing better. He’s hired some pretty famous chefs for his two restaurants, gets in some old-time Italian acts. He ripped off the New York New York idea, and since somebody beat him to Venice he has a Streets of Palermo, a fake Coliseum, the Naples harbor complete with fake ships…more like that.” She paused.
“I’m guessing there’s more than just what’s in his crappy little casino.”
“Yeah, word is that he’s a little nuts. Wants to be like the old man, longs for the old ways. Has some thugs working for him who go further than the usual leg-breaking…”
“Like what?”
“Well, one guy is known for making people disappear. Like, they are never found again. Your friends Johnny and Marty—one of them, or both I suppose—seems to enjoy using a bone saw and hand torch combo on guys who’re getting a message.”
“Jesus!” He felt his stomach dropping through the floor of his Maxima.
“Yeah, there’s a little more.”
“Okay?”
Colgrave was being cagey. Lupo heard a tapping sound, like a pencil hitting her teeth in rhythm. A weird nervous tic. He’d noticed it before. It had grabbed his attention when he was in the room at some department meeting or other, partly because it was so unconsciously phallic.
He pictured her, that glossy auburn hair—or would you call it chestnut?—which reminded him of Jessie. Her long, straight nose separated dark, smoky eyes beneath untweezed eyebrows. Her mouth was wide, generous and sensual, yet he’d thought it seemed made for laughing, if the curl at its corners was any indication. When she smiled, strong straight teeth glinted between her full lips. Her figure was lithe, but mature. She’d always reminded him of a slightly older version of Jessie. He had to admit he’d always liked her and wished he had had the chance to work with her more.
His attention was wandering. He forced it back on track.
After a pause, she said, “Word has it he’s bought a large house in Eagle River. It’s a log cabin mansion with a guest house and a compound of about two acres. There’s been activity there, like they’re getting ready for the boss to visit.” She paused. “Or move in.”
Wolf's Cut (The Nick Lupo Series Book 5) Page 18
