by Lynn Red
“This isn’t a dream?” I asked, feeling slightly flushed and more than a little confused in the afterglow of our kiss.
He stared down at me as though he was trying to memorize my face. “No,” he said with stony finality. “At least, not anymore. And I’ll explain that, too. For now, we need to run again, and instead of having you watch me transform, I’ll just do this.”
In the next breath, he kissed me again, forcing my head back against his muscled arm, and exploring me again, tasting me deeply, drinking in my essence.
Then I realized I had been bewitched, or something like it.
I closed my eyes, and just let him hold me, let him have me.
When I opened them, I was home.
Home.
“Where am I?” I asked, opening my eyes, blinking a few times, and trying to adjust to the darkness. The barest orange glow filled the room that I immediately realized was the cave from my dream. “Wait,” I said, as though someone was listening. “Wait a second, I—”
“You’re home,” a voice whispered.
It came from so near that my hair rustled from the warmth of breath that came with the voice. “And even though you already know us, or at least you do from your dreams, I’m Craze.”
Craze’s voice was nothing like I expected. It was soft and reserved, but I’d seen his ferocity and the mixture of his power and his protective kindness sent a trill of excitement all the way down my back and around my belly. I felt a stir between my legs, and slow heat seeped out of me.
Without thinking about it, I reached out a curious hand and felt Craze’s face. There were whiskers along his cheek that rasped under my fingertips. All I could think was that I couldn’t think of anything but him.
“Where are the others?” I asked, almost hoping for him to say gone somewhere, just us right now. I couldn’t help my weird, greedy lust. I’m not the sort of person who gets thoughts like that, but then again, I’m not entirely sure how many changes I’d gone through in the past four hours since that damn bus pulled into the forest picnic area. I’d become a ready soldier, I’d become by turns fearless and terrified as I charged into the forest after a girl who didn’t actually exist.
“Hell,” I said out loud, “I became bait.”
Craze grunted a laugh. “That you did,” he said. “But you certainly didn’t go easily. You realize you killed four werewolves by yourself? I mean, killing a regular wolf is one thing, but you killed werewolves. Not only did I learn that you can actually kill one by caving its head in with a fireman’s axe, but I also learned that whatever that fireball you shot out of the pipe in your hand did the trick too.”
“Flare gun,” I said. “Sorta shoots a fireball, I guess, but yeah it’s just a sort of gun.”
Nodding, he turned his blazing eyes toward me and pulled me slightly closer. That’s when I realized that my head was nestled in the crook of his arm, between a muscled forearm and peaked biceps. “Only seen hunting rifles before,” he said. “Didn’t know you people made things that shot fireballs.” For a moment, he was silent, apparently lost in thought. “Maybe I have seen a fire gun before, but I’m not all that sure.”
His breath was soft and warm against my skin. Each time he spoke, the heat from his skin and from his lips raised a wash of goosebumps where the air caressed me. I wanted so badly to kiss him, to run my hand down his arm and find the sensitive skin between his legs that was warming one of my thighs. He was long and thick, and that part of him was hotter than any of the rest of his body.
“Grave told me that—”
“He’d explain everything,” Craze cut me off even as my hand moved, apparently on it’s own. Some force was driving me to touch him, to feel and explore him. When I felt the soft, curled hair above his cock, another charge went through me, shocking me to the core and then thrilling sweetly through me.
“That’s going to have to wait,” he said with a sort of smirk. “I think he can do it better than any other of us, but he’s also out ranging. That’s sort of the thing with all this, the war with the wolves, the half-century rest, the whole bit.”
He exhaled gently, blowing the hair out of my eyes. “It’s just that,” he continued before pausing momentarily, “I don’t know what’s happening. I’m not entirely sure why all this is happening, to be honest with you. Wild and Grave, they know, but,” he looked back down at me again, taking his eyes off the orange glow on the ceiling and letting them rest on me again. “Like I said, not here.”
“I’m not sure I care,” I said softly, blushing even as I did. “I,” I took a breath, considering how to proceed momentarily, “had a dream about you.”
“You did?” he was drawing closer to me with imperceptible slowness. The only way I noticed was that his breath was closer and warmer than before. I had also let my hand slip all the way to the base of his cock and drawn my fingers into a ring around him. He hadn’t reacted, but I can only imagine he was closer because of something, so it must’ve been that.
As he began to thicken, my fingers no longer touched, and a moment later, I felt his hot iron against the small of my back.
“Must’ve been some dream.”
“It was,” I said. My voice had gotten dreamy and distant, the way I imagine someone does when they’re in the throes of the deepest, most unavoidable, helplessness-inducing lust they’d ever felt. Only… this wasn’t lust. I’d felt that plenty of times; seeing an attractive man at a bar, or watching Jake Gyllenhaal on the big screen. This was something different, something infinitely more desperate and something so unexplainable, I thought I was going momentarily insane. “Nothing compared to actually being here, though. Nothing compared to feeling your fingers and your…”
I moved my eyes away from his, trying to distract myself from what I was doing. I tightened my grip though, and gave him just the slightest tug.
“What’s to be embarrassed about?” Craze asked, looking down at my face and apparently sensing why I’d looked away. “We’re all animals, aren’t we?”
A half second later, his mouth enveloped mine in a kiss. Where Grave had been cautious in his passion, Craze was furious. He devoured me, sliding his tongue between my teeth and exploring every line, every crack in my dried lips before clutching me to his chest and driving it deep, swirling it against mine.
“We,” I gasped with pleasure, “yeah, uh, we are. And you seem to be more animal than anyone I’ve ever met.” And then, almost like I’d woken from a dream, I stopped myself. My hand didn’t leave his erection because I didn’t want to let that go, not for a million bucks… or a million regrets, as the case may be. “I can’t,” I whispered, “I shouldn’t,” came next, very much weaker in the conviction department. “I’m… I have a boyfriend, I’ve got a job, I can’t do…”
“No you don’t,” he whispered, before sucking on my neck in the hollow right behind my ear lobe. A soft, gentle, white heat worked down from where he warmed me and made its way underneath my shirt. My nipples hardened into sensitive, pink peaks. If I hadn’t been turned with my chest toward Craze’s body, anyone walking by would have seen them they were so hard and so sweetly aching. “There are things that I can’t explain but you must know that this isn’t some decision you made. This isn’t some thing that happened. This is… I can’t think of the human word for it, but it’s not any of those things. Not luck, not coincidence.”
I studied his face for a second, feeling incredibly foolish even though he was completely naked and vulnerable. Somehow he wasn’t. Even if he was moving against me like he was powerless to stop, I knew that wasn’t true.
“What is it then?” I asked, arching my neck to kiss him again and taking a deep breath when his lips took me.
“An old thing,” he said. “You boyfriend isn’t really who he seems to be, just like that girl who lured you out into the woods.”
I screwed up my eyebrows, and pulled back from the kiss for just a moment. “Wait, how is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” Craze sai
d. “Grave’s the one to ask.”
I frowned, but not for long. It’s hard to be irritated when something like this is happening. Craze kissed me again, then slid a hand underneath my shirt. I felt the warmth of his palm slide up my belly. He cupped one of my breasts, sucking again at my neck and squeezing his fingers around my nipple in a circle, just like I had the tip of his cock. He matched my motions, and shortly my breath fell into time with his.
His tongue painted a hot, sweet track along my jawline and down to the collar of my shirt. He pulled it downward so he could kiss further. Craze’s tongue explored the line between my breasts, and then he effortlessly lifted my shirt off over my head before smothering one of my aching peaks with his mouth.
My breath came in hot, short hitches as that tongue flicked back and forth across the tip of my nipple, and he squeezed my other breast, circling my areola with his thumb. There was nothing in the world to me right then except the warmth coursing through me and the softly clicking rasp of his fingertips across my bra. “Take it off,” I whispered as I finally released my grip on his shaft. Immediately I wanted him back, just to feel that heat in my hand. “I want to be just like you are.”
It made no sense. I kept having these short flashes of confusion, these tiny glimpses of regret and confusion, but I couldn’t stop myself. Just like that fainting spell—or whatever it was—had taken my consciousness back in the forest, the energy crackling in the cave between us had me helpless. And from the way this giant bear was moving against me, bucking his hips against my thigh and moaning gently into my ear, I wasn’t the only one having trouble with self-control.
Then again, self-control’s only a good thing when you need it. Otherwise? Just gets in the way.
He lay me back on what I realized then was a bed made of furs, pine straw and grass. I’d never felt anything so soft and so natural in my whole life, which sort of surprised me given how whiny I usually was about mattresses. I pushed myself up on my elbows as he slid my bra off and lifted my knees to help him with my jeans.
Again it struck me how gentle and smooth everything he did was.
The chill air, very different from the strange warmth of earlier, wrapped me up like a blanket fresh from the dryer. He slid his fingers down my naked legs. Craze kissed my collarbone, then the hollow of my throat. I drew a soft breath, filling my nose with the smell of him, and the scent of the fire, as he sent electric tingles radiating out of my core with each kiss. And with each press of his lips he was lower on my body. First between my breasts he kissed, slowly circling his tongue before sucking.
“Here,” I whispered, more breathily than I thought I’d be, and guided his hand to my breast. He squeezed briefly, but then took his hand away.
I was almost aching for him to just take me, to grab me and throw me around, to make me his. But this bear wasn’t interested in something brief. He shook his head when I tried to grab his hand again, and pulled it away.
“I’ve been looking for you for longer than you can possibly know,” he whispered. “I’m not going to let this go by quickly. Every inch of you is driving me wild, but I’m fighting my own need for you with every thought, every breath that I take.”
He sat back, taking my hand in his and guiding it to his erection. He ran his fingers down the line in the middle of my body again, swirling them softly through the hair above my sex, and then cupped me, testing the wet heat creeping out of me by dragging his fingertip along one side of me, then up the other.
“Take… me,” I whispered. My voice was crackling and broken with a gasp.
When he dipped his finger just past my entrance, a fire immediately exploded between my legs. “I need you,” I was almost begging, “I don’t know what’s going on in my brain but I can’t handle this.”
“You’re going to have to,” Craze said as he looked back into my eyes, up from where he had made his way to just above my belly button. His kisses were fluttering, soft and warm, but every few times his lips brushed my skin, it came with a nip of his teeth and a harder suck that was telling me that he needed me just as bad as I needed him.
The growl in his voice and the deeper, hungrier push of his finger inside me sent another charge straight up my back. Every nerve in my body seemed to flare to life at once, and tiny hairs I didn’t even know I had pricked up on my skin.
The two of us were moving in unison, almost like we were two bodies that had separated by accident. Every breath he took, I matched; every throbbing beat of his heart that I felt shudder through his cock and then through me, came with one of my own. I clutched at his face, then tangled my fingertips in his hair. The black curls looping around my knuckles were tugging gently on him every time I curled my fingers.
“How are you doing this to me?” I asked. I moved one of my hands down between my legs, sliding two of my fingers around his as it pushed into me again. “I’ve never been… never been this wet.”
A hot flush of embarrassment shot through me. I’d never said anything like that. I’d never even thought of saying anything like that, but I felt so safe, so impossibly warm and wanted and cared for that I couldn’t help myself. “I need you in me, harder,” I whispered, deciding to just go with the flow. “At least give me more finger, more… yes!”
My words turned into a stream of gasps and sucked, hitching breaths when his tongue made its way through my hair and he lapped at the juice running out of me and down his finger. A slow circle inside teased a place that I thought only I knew. No one, not a single boyfriend I’d ever had, had found that spot that sent tentacles of pleasure all the way to my brain. I’d only found it after a marathon session of “bathing” when I was about twenty, so to have him so naturally gravitate to it made me rethink my whole disbelief in magic.
He inhaled so fiercely that the air he took left my sex cooler than it had been a moment before. The next time I tried to speak, to beg him again to give me what I so badly needed, what I was hurting for, the only noise that came out was a squeak of pleasure, and then a moan. My hands, both back on his shoulders trying to push his face down between my legs, curled against his cheeks. The whiskers that had been there only moments before felt longer, stiffer, like…
“Your eyes,” I whispered in between desperate, hungry moans, “they’re turning… colors…”
“That’s how I know this is real,” he growled, deep in his throat. I felt his voice vibrate through my entire body, shaking me to the core. “I can’t keep my animal inside. I can’t force it… I can’t… I need to taste you, need to drink you in.”
He kissed me once, and the scent of myself on his chin sent me spiraling almost out of control. I grabbed his shoulders again, scratching desperately at him, and then whimpered with a shudder as his tongue found my clit. All I could do was repeat yes, yes, yes over and over. He pushed his face deep between my legs, grinding against my nib with his upper lip, and drove his tongue inside.
First one finger, then a second, effortlessly slid between my lips. I was so achingly wet that there wasn’t even the slightest resistance. Rotating his fingers, he stretched me, bent me to his will. A shock of hot pain that melted immediately to overwhelming pleasure worked up my belly and I arched myself against him, digging my nails in deeper.
“Yes!” he roared, “harder, your claws, they’re…”
That I wasn’t the only one unable to speak with anything resembling a complete thought made me feel slightly better, although honestly there wasn’t much better to feel, at least that’s what I thought.
I thought about begging him again for the pulsing cock I’d felt against my legs, that I’d had in my hand, but before I could manage, he circled my clit once more with his tongue and enveloped me in a suck that sent stars shooting through my brain.
The whole world came to a pinprick of light. Even through closed eyelids, was the orange glow of the cave and the impossible flare in his eyes entranced me. I dug in again, leaving hot tracks with my nails. An almost helpless whimper of abject pleasure echoed off the
walls of our cave, our home, and it took a few seconds before I realized it was me making the sound.
Another jolt shot through me, and I felt my nerves explode as the muscles between my legs tightened into a vice around his finger. I felt my walls constrict on him, and when he finally came up for air, he drove them so deep into me that I thought he’d break me.
Tendrils of cold, then a wave of white heat crawled up my chest, up my neck, and left a red-hot flush all over my body in its wake. I realized that my mouth was open, that I might be drooling just a little from how I couldn’t manage to close it for more than a second, and then in a brilliant eruption, all those nerves and tendons and muscles tightened so that my body went rigid.
“Now,” he whispered. “Let go, don’t fight it.”
“As if I could!” I managed to squeak. “I can’t… oh my God! Oh… oh yes!”
He sunk his teeth into my belly and drove his fingers against that sweet spot he found earlier with a desperation that was as terrifyingly hungry as it was incredible.
I gripped him again and opened my eyes to see his, burning, erupting with color that was impossible to imagine, and then the whole world melted into a pool.
I felt my pussy grip him, I felt my body convulse, and once again I heard a cry of pleasure escape my lips and echo all around us. He held me tight, and I gripped his shoulders, refusing to let him move, as the waves battered my core, and made me shiver so deeply I thought I had hypothermia. But then another pulse of heat radiated out of me, and my whole being relaxed around him.
As I clenched my jaws, then relaxed them in time with the rhythm of my aching, needy sex, Craze kissed back up my body and nestled his cock between my legs as the last pulses of my orgasm shook me and finally let go.
