by Ava Frost
“Oh, Rhys. This is your home?”
“The house and the surrounding valley, and a good deal up the mountainside too,” he said softly, speaking into the gathering shadows of twilight which spiderwebbed across the windshield. “Not sure how high up it goes, though. No one’s ever come all the way out here and said anything to me.”
“It’s beautiful.”
They parked in the driveway, right in front of the garage. “And it will be even more so with you inside.”
They came together around the front of his truck, holding each other sweetly and kissing as though they couldn’t get enough of each other. Natalya thought she could stand there for eternity and be as a statue, carved into that moment forever.
“Natalya? Might I show you something?”
She looked up into his eyes. He looked very grave but also troubled, as though this something he spoke of was either very important or a trap of some kind.
But she remembered how he bit her when they had sex, so carefully as to keep from actually hurting her when he could easily have overpowered her if he was any other man, and knew she trusted him.
“What is it?”
Rhys looked away, the collar of his shirt ruffled up his neck unevenly by the chilled wind rolling down from the mountains. “It might make you change your mind about me. It’s a secret I’ve had for a long time.”
There is no way he’s about to tell me what I think he’s about to tell me, she thought.
“It’s the reason I gave up on American girls. Everyone here is just so much the same as the next.”
“You wanted someone different.”
“Yes.” Rhys lowered his head, looking stoic and tragic. The sun sank down closer to the horizon, casting hazy golden rays over him. “From everything I know about you, I think you might be the only woman I’ve met who could understand. You’re so open with everything.” His shoulders shook. “I don’t want anything between us to change. I don’t want to lose you just because of who I am. I like you so, so much.”
Natalya blinked, taken aback. Until now, she hadn’t considered the depth of his feelings for her as being so expansive. He was always so stoic and perfectly polite, even after they warmed up to each other, that she simply shrugged and let it go so many times. After intense phone conversations, or intimate pictures of a different sort than sexual, showing the parts of themselves they dared not show anyone else, she felt a powerful surge of emotion which extended far beyond the realm of simply liking him. But she had not known until just now he felt the same way.
Stepping closer, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and leaned against him. He did not hold onto her as he normally would, but leaned right back against her for comfort.
“No matter what,” she said quietly against his neck, “this won’t change how I feel.” Taking a deep breath and a leap of faith, she added, “I think I already know.”
His body stiffened. “You can’t.”
“Are you werewolf?”
And now Rhys jerked away from her and stared, eyes wide and chest heaving. Their eyes met and she knew now she’d been right all along. And she saw fear on his face, and astonishment, and knew from the way he held himself he now had no idea in what way to proceed from here.
So she said simply, “Show me.”
He continued to look at her for a long, long moment. After almost a minute, she started to wonder if he’d heard, or if he had frozen as he had in the airport when they first met in person. And then it happened.
Sunlight slashing across the mountain fell upon a patch of red on his arm which hadn’t been there before. As she watched, it began to lengthen and spread, gaining richness and an undertone of brown. The red swirled across his entire body like a hazy blood misty, and then he fell forward onto his hands and knees. Shadows obscured his body for a moment as a cloud passed over the sun, and then when the shadows finally lifted she saw him.
Rhys crouched before her as a wolf, russet and beautiful with distinguished features and ragged ears. The insides of his legs and the underside of his chest and stomach were swirled with white through the brown, and all of his toes were snowy-pure. But he crouched before her in supplication, those sweet ears laid back fearfully with his tail drawn forward between his rear legs. The fur on his hackles stood up in terrified spikes.
Natalya fell to her knees with the beauty of him, and finally she knew. He truly was a nomad wolf, searching all this time for someone to love him. And it only took forty years, and a crossed ocean.
“Come to me,” she whispered, and watched as her wolf rose to trembling paws and sidled towards her. Knowing it was dangerous, beyond caring, she reached out to hold his face in her hands, marveling at the stiffness of his whiskers, the wet nose, the fluffy fur, and pulled him in closer with a hand buried in his scruff. Rhys nearly fell forward into her lap and in that instant transformed again with another bloody mist. And they embraced silently as true dusk fell around them.
Chapter 6
The last morning of their luxurious week together, Rhys woke to find Natalya’s hand firmly buried between his legs, stroking his half-hardened member.
So this is why my dreams were so pleasant, he thought and smiled sleepily, rolling over slightly to part his thighs for her. Her grip adjusted around him, her thumb pressing ever so slightly deeper into his fragile rigidness. In an instant he rose fully to attention, breath coming faster as he reached out and gently held onto a handful of her trailing hair –silver in the pale dawn light filtering through the curtains.
“Good morning,” she whispered sweetly, sliding her hand up higher to rub her thumb back and forth over his swollen tip.
His hips rose up, lifting his butt off the bed as her touch urged him up, seeking more of her. “Good morning,” he breathed tremulously, heart racing. The sight of her in his bed, his sheets covering the lower half of her curvy frame, a goddess of temptation, stirred something very deeply in his loins. His inner thighs trembled, and he squirmed while his fingers tightened automatically around his handful of her hair.
She rose up on her elbows and he saw her breasts, her soft nipples gone rigid and peaked with desire. And then she released him. Figuring his wonderful awakening was over with, and having greatly appreciated it, Rhys started to sit up fully.
And he collapsed flat on his back as her mouth dropped down over his entire length, taking all of him almost impossibly far in one fell swoop of motion. Still holding her hair, he pulled her head closer to him, even closer than she already was, and cried out softly as her mouth worked, beginning to suck. The sliding of her lips up and down his shaft, the wet heat of her covering every inch of him, began to pull from deep within him the quivery heat which kindled inside him every time he saw her.
“Natalya,” he whispered, and just the act of speaking her name made him pull at her hair. In response, her tongue pressed hard and flat against his tip, and he lost it.
Some time later, when his shaking eased and his body began to relax down against the sheets again, his girlfriend –or was she more? He hadn’t figured it out yet- crawled up higher over his body and laid her nakedness against his. Their chests pressing together, soft to firm, she tucked the top of her head against his neck and closed her eyes for yet more sleep.
The wolf in him wagged its tail, delighted not only at the thought of sleep but also terribly contented by the idea of having found a mate.
I don’t know if I can call her that, he thought sadly. Wolves mated for life, and this was the only time he ever confided this secret in anyone. Were they doomed to spend the rest of their lives –his life admittedly, as she was half his age- only sporadically traveling back and forth for eleven hours at a time? A fleeting handful of snatched moments together compared to what seemed like years they spent apart.
And now sleep was a very long time in coming again.
Chapter 7
How much longer can we keep doing this?
Natalya would have spent the rest of her life with this man i
f he asked. She knew that, and waited and waited every single day for him to ask so they could begin to plan. She ached to scheme with him like silly high school lovers plotting to elope, but he never broached the subject despite how intensely she saw the same emotion in him.
And then she wondered if she was just being a silly young woman with unrealistic fantasies, and kept her mouth shut. The last thing she wanted to do was embarrass herself in their last few minutes together for who knew how long.
As she walked with him through the airport, Rhys toting her bag, ever the gentleman, she grew sadder and sadder with each step.
Please say something, she pleaded. Please don’t let me leave. Her heart would break if she spent another night alone in dreaded Russia. Yes, the thought of needing to hold him, and be held, but yet be incapable of it because of distance, made her beloved Russia a dreadful place.
All too soon, they stood together again just before the security check. Rhys passed her bag over, and she set it down on the floor despite the expensiveness of it. They embraced and kissed, nuzzling their faces and lips all over the other’s; Natalya kept her eyes closed the entire time, trying to capture and bottle up this feeling for later.
When she opened her eyes again, Rhys was waiting patiently. He stroked her hair, then held her hands. He stepped back, leaving an open space between them, but kept ahold of her hands.
“I suppose this is it, then,” he said mournfully, almost a whimper. She could practically see the lay of his ragged-edged ears. “For now.”
“Yes,” she whispered. Tears burned for escape, but she didn’t know if she dared let him see.
“We’ll keep in touch. We’ll do this again as soon as possible,” Rhys promised, squeezing her hand lightly –lovingly.
All she could do was repeat herself, saying yes like an idiot while mentally preparing herself to rip away from all of this and be alone again.
“Until next time, my dear.”
Hardly able to hear herself, Natalya simply repeated his goodbye. She lunged down, grabbed up her bag, and fled away from him before the pain in her heart could drown her where she stood.
Five steps away from the checkpoint, and then four. Three.
He caught her at two.
His strong hand around her wrist held her back. She stayed still in his grip, poised and motionless with her head down.
“Marry me.”
Natalya turned her head, very slowly. Rhys relaxed his grip on her and she would have fled again simply from confusion, but he took both her hands and went down on one knee.
“We’d have to be apart again for just a little while, while we arranged for licenses and permission,” he began softly, speaking low and urgent. “But I want that to be the last time we’re apart. I love you, Natalya. Stay with me. Marry me.”
Earnest brown eyes watched her face, ringed with wolf yellow just around the pupil. Search as she might, she saw nothing but kindness and intensity in the gaze of her wolf.
“I love you,” she told him, and knew it to be true.
Gently, he tugged her down to her knees and engulfed her in his arms, to let her know he would never let her go again.
I will love and nurture my wandering wolf, she swore to herself. He will never have to search again.
Chapter 8
They married six months later. The ceremony was small but open, as neither of them had any friends to invite. Natalya left Russia, at least for the time being. They would worry about renewing her green card when the time came, but that time was not to be today.
She stood in the bathroom, half-dressed on her way to a job interview in the city. Rhys waited outside for his turn, neither of them wanting to be distracted on such a busy day. But before she left, there was something she wanted to check before leaving. A thing she’d been meaning to check for the past several weeks, but had been putting off in favor of adjusting to their new life together.
The slender box lay open and empty on the countertop, the stick in her hand as she watched first one blue line develop, and then, faintly, the second.
Her hand went over her mouth, disbelief and wonder surging up to strike her heart. With her other hand she gripped the edge of the sink until the waves of emotion passed. In their place, she found only excitement.
“Are you going to stay in there all day?” Rhys teased her from outside the door, unaware of what she was doing. A smile broke out across her face, and she opened the door to show him that very soon they would welcome someone new into their life together.
THE END
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Bonus Stories
Wolf Frenzy
Chapter 1
Everybody knew about the dragons. They didn’t know about the others that came with them.
Anatowok Island sits quietly in the middle of the Straits of Georgia between Vancouver Island and the mainland. It’s uniformly covered with pine trees and has one mountain range running down the middle of the island. Only ten thousand people live on the island.
Dragons abruptly appeared on Earth, and on Anatowok Island, two hundred years before today. Everyone on earth went to bed in a dragon-free world and woke up to huge animals marauding around the countryside. Two hundred years of selective breeding eliminated the trouble makers and gave the dragons a soft, gentle nature. Scientists created small implants that sat under the skin just behind the ears that turned off the urge to fly or breathe fire. Slowly, dragons took the place of horses and were bred and kept by those with money enough to keep them.
People accepted the dragons completely. Unfortunately, the dragons weren’t the only creatures that came to earth.
Jack Butters backed the dragon out of the trailer carefully. He whistled softly and patted its side. One of his assistants approached the animal. Butters barked, "Get away from him. He's mine."
The dragon being unloaded from the truck had a moment of discomfort due to a buildup of gas in his stomach. He burped; a small, polite burp that would have been accepted at any dinner table. A small flame a foot long came with the burp. Nobody looked at anybody else or said anything. This was the boss's dragon and none of them were going to interfere.
Inspector John Knowles kicked a burning piece of wood on the floor of the small house; or, what would have been the house if three walls and ceiling hadn't been consumed in a fire of extraordinary ferocity.
John noticed burns splashed on the remaining wall as if someone pointed a military flame thrower at it and held the trigger down.
A man in a fireman's uniform said, "There's no accelerant, John. None. The place should smell of jellied gasoline."
They looked at each other. Neither one wanted to say it out loud. Finally, John said, "It could be an unrestricted dragon."
"We haven't had a dragon-caused fire in fifty years. They're too tightly controlled."
"What else could have done it?"
"I don't know. This is the fourth one in two months."
"I know."
The fireman had to look up to John Knowles who stood six feet five inches tall and weighed two hundred and forty pounds. The bulk was muscle. John had a stubby beard, green eyes and sandy hair, an impressive chest and shoulders and a grim expression. His face looked coarse and angular as if it had been created by a workman who only had access to the big tools. John turned around in a circle. "Damn it."
“Do you think they’re related?”
“The Mafia and the fires? I don’t see how. This looks like vandalism on a big scale instead of traditional organized crime.”
Chapter 2
A few blocks away Becky Stimson stared at herself in the mirror. She wore an expensive bra and panty set that cost more than triple the cost of the simple, ugly cotton ones she used to wear.
She had been staring
at herself in amazement for three months now. She said to herself, “Seventy five pounds is a lot to lose.”
She spread out the men’s magazine on the counter and compared her body with the body of the woman on the foldout. She had the same breast and hip measurements and legs that showed curves. She took a deep breath. She’d been doing the same thing for three months and it never failed to amaze her. She closed her eyes and ran her hands down her ribcage. When she reached her waist, she gasped. It was there. She had a waist, defined and graceful. It spread out to womanly hips that pleased her deeply.
The phone rang and she answered quickly, “Hi mom.”
“Are you standing in front of the mirror again?” Her mother’s tone held approval and appreciation. “You know that’ll make you feel beautiful and feminine.”
Becky smiled. “Yes, I know, mom. I’m addicted.”
“I’m happy for you, sweetheart.”
“Thanks mom. Something else is going to happen today. I’m going to start looking for a man to marry.”
“Good. Good for you.”
“I want a man who’s everything good. A perfect man. I’ve been waiting a long time. The universe owes me.”
“That sounds pretty demanding.”
“I know that. I’m aiming high.”
“Good luck on your first day of work, dear.”
“Thanks mom. I love you.”
“I love you too, dear.”
Just as Becky was about to put the phone down, her mother said, “Are you going to look for your father?”
“Yes, I have to.”
“We only have that entry in his appointment book to tell us he had anything to do with Butters and Butters.”
