by Unknown
And all Eric could think, as his chest began to pump hard for air, as he smelled Vanessa’s skin when she started to sweat, as his balls swelled full and heavy at the base of his rock hard cock and his wolf snapped its jaws with hunger inside him, was fuck. Fuck Ron and all the alpha’s lessons about the Norse virtues, about self-possession and self-restraint. He was a goddamn were-soldier, for chrissake, an Odin’s Wolf, a beast born to fight and revel and rut. Fuck modesty and caution, and fuck treating Vanessa like the shrinking violet she obviously wasn’t. She’d have made a hell of a wolf, and Eric was going to enjoy fucking her.
Threading his long, thick fingers into the silky hair at the nape of her neck, Eric pulled Vanessa to him like an irresistible force was at work between them. This chemistry, this collision of two people was an inevitability. He could only think she felt it, too, when she sealed her still writhing body to his, her head falling back to turn her flushed face upward for his gaze, his kiss. With those stormy eyes glazed by their common surge of lust, Vanessa didn’t seem entirely aware that she was digging her nails into Eric’s waist through his thin blue t-shirt. The sensation made him instinctively shift his bullish hips forward, gouging the demanding ridge of his erection into her soft stomach. In those heels, and with Vanessa being about 5’7” without them, she stood only six inches or so shorter than he was. That put the warm juncture of her thighs lower than he’d have liked, just out of reach as they ground into one another amid the anonymous press of the bodies gyrating and spinning all around them, lending frenetic energy to the sense of need clearly building between Eric and Vanessa.
Fighting down a snarl of possessive hunger, Salo loomed over his tender prey and pressed his lips to her satiny smooth mouth, then dipped his thick tongue in deep for a taste of her. He drank in mint and lemon, the subtle musk of sweat and the heat of moist flesh. When Vanessa whimpered into his kiss, like she was in need of breath but also like she was in need of more, Eric took to roughly, furiously sucking her rose petal lips while holding her head with both hands. While she gasped and struggled to kiss him back. While they kept dancing. He didn’t know how. Their bodies just took over, caught in the pounding stream of such passionate music.
Where, where, where? The question stalked anxious circles in Eric’s head. Where was he going to take Vanessa, for quiet, for privacy, so he could hear her breathing and her whimpering and her whispers? Where was he going to take Vanessa? Did she live nearby? Would she agree if he wanted her to take him home? Would she dare invite a wolf into her house, her bed, her body? Would she—?
A flash of light flared briefly in the street, off to one side, a quick little spark at the edge of the were’s peripheral vision, but it was enough to make Eric’s instincts tense and rise. Pulling back from the kiss, he homed in on a man across the crowd, a man taking photos with a professional grade camera. Salo knew press when he saw them, knew the danger they posed to weres and especially to Eric himself, as he was already on the Agency radar from his younger days and indiscretions. Something as seemingly innocuous as showing up on the Local Events page of the newspaper, even in the background of a general crowd shot, was more attention than he or the pack could afford.
“Goddammit,” he growled low, to himself.
The realization that he was at risk, his pack endangered, and that by extension Vanessa was as well, was like icy water poured down Eric’s spine. With a frown, and feeling her confused and disappointed gaze fixed on his face, Salo straightened up to his full height and drew back from Vanessa practically muscle by muscle. And only with great effort. Inside him, his wolf snarled and paced angrily, denied its feast upon the fiery beauty it had only just tasted.
“Where’s your car?” he asked her, his mouth almost brushing her ear so she’d hear him over the music. It was so tempting to take the lobe of her ear between his teeth, to play with the nerves beneath her soft skin, but….
Vanessa reared back and squinted at Eric, suddenly wary or at least surprised. “My car? In the Maubridge Building parking garage.” Hesitantly, breathlessly, she added, “Why?” As much as her instincts might have flared with alarm at what she apparently thought Salo was suggesting, he could still smell the arousal mounting inside her, wetting her sex for penetration, for him.
Ron would have been proud, Eric thought, teeth gritted. Goddammit. “I want to make sure you get back to your car all right.” And that no other men got to dance that night with his curvy Vanessa, not with her looking so sensually mussed and glistening from the exertion of the salsa and their kiss. His motives were equal parts selfish, possessive, and protectively altruistic.
In the underground parking level of the old art nouveau building, Salo shut Vanessa into her sensible blue Japanese sedan and pointedly waited for her to drive away while he watched. While he stood there in the echoing concrete structure with the taste of her still in his mouth. While his groin ached like it was on fire, the acidic heat spreading up into his gut.
“Should have just gone hunting Fenris Wolves,” Eric muttered to himself once Vanessa’s car was gone and a hollow silence had set in around him. Maybe it wasn’t too late to catch up with Dustin and Soren.
If not sex, battle.
CHAPTER THREE
So much for life settling down. So much for sanity. So much for deadbolts, Vanessa thought as she sat up in the moist, cool soil of the garden in the backyard of the Yancy house. She was bare-ass naked again, in all her Rubenesque glory, sun just coming up over the rows of suburban fences. At least, she had to admit, the cool morning air felt nice on her skin. At least she was only a few doors down from her own little townhouse, where she’d lived since she and Aubrey had been taken to raise by Uncle Oren and Aunt Fay, who weren’t really her relations, though no one seemed to want Vanessa to know that. At least it was paid for and they’d let her stay after they had decided the arid climate of Arizona better suited their aging bodies. At least Norman Yancy was too bleary-eyed in his senior years to realize the girl who kept getting into his garden was naked most of the time. And at least Gloria Yancy still believed in hanging wash out to dry.
Vanessa picked herself up and brushed away most of the dirt and leaves before borrowing a pastel pink housecoat from the Yancy clothesline. She was just buttoning up when she heard the screen on the backdoor bang lightly, and she looked up to find white-haired Gloria standing on the porch with what was getting to be a customary cup of coffee for poor crazy Vanessa.
“Thank you, Mrs. Yancy,” she said, having padded sheepish and barefoot across the yard to collect the steaming mug.
Gloria wore a matching yellow housecoat, a flattering compliment to her sleek white updo with perfect little waves curling softly around her ears. There was just something about the women who grew up as young ladies in the 1950’s. No matter the havoc around them or the time of day, they never had smeared makeup or a hair out of place. And lord, but the fashion, with the pencil skirts and pointy-toed heels and the Marilyn Monroe hourglass figures!
The elderly woman smiled at Vanessa with a gentle compassion that was both touching and embarrassing. “It’s no problem, dear. Do you want me to have Norman drive you home?”
Vanessa, mouth full of coffee, shook her head no and waved the suggestion away. She’d already been enough of a nuisance, and Norman’s driving was a little scary with that eyesight of his, not to mention his distracted habit of expounding on what he’d been listening to that morning on NPR instead of paying attention to the road. Or the curb. Or the trees next to the sidewalk.
Gloria nodded and then motioned toward the extra pair of house slippers sitting outside the door as though the lady had put them there just for Vanessa. And she probably had.
This was all Eric Salo’s fault, Vanessa thought to herself as she walked home and showered for work. He was the one who’d gotten her so worked up Friday night, before inexplicably bundling her into her car and practically ordering her home. Neither Aubrey nor Jeremy Koller could have done a better job of it, of bossing Vane
ssa around and making her feel like she really ought to do as he said. Salo had obviously unsettled something inside her, and that was making her sleepwalk again and….
And it was total bullshit trying to blame Eric for Vanessa’s obsession with him, for her libido kicking into overdrive after too many months of neglect, or for twenty years of sleepwalking and hallucinations and nightmares.
The thought brought a sudden memory vividly to the fore of Vanessa’s mind as she tried to pick out a suitably mundane Monday morning outfit from an otherwise overly colorful wardrobe. She even froze for a few seconds, one hand reaching out into midair for one of her blouses in the closet. Her arm sank slowly to her side as, with the back of her neck and her scalp tingling, snippets of a dream she’d had the night before slowly coalesced into a memory.
Vanessa had been walking along…prowling along Neville Street in the dark, in the small hours. Even now, she could feel the strange emptiness of the commercial district at night, nothing moving but her as it seemed the city held its breath while she passed. She could feel what it had been like to stalk the sidewalk as it still emanated the day’s heat, under the weak glow of the old-fashion light posts. Even now, even just recalling her dream, Vanessa retained the sense of a rather catlike grace in her limbs. Of muscles rolling and flexing under her skin, under her…fur? It made no sense to think that.
And then she’d stopped—in her dream—and peered into the gleaming black pane of a darkened shop window. Nothing there. Nothing, no display and no shop beyond that, just a vast dark space waiting to be filled by Vanessa’s subconscious. Or superconscious in her case. Vanessa knew she was nothing if not imaginative, creative, quirky, in a pleasantly crazy way, of course.
When her dream self had stepped back from the shop front, as the dim light of the streetlamp caught the curve of her shoulders and head and haunches, the window had shimmered and glinted and finally formed her reflection. She stared, then and in her mind’s eye now, at the image not of a voluptuous human woman, but of a lion. A female lion. Lioness. She was sturdy, thick, powerful, and all the more queenly for it.
Vanessa’s abrupt flush of memory and sensation were just that, a wash of feverish hot-and-cold prickles pattering along her skin like a rain of energy, excitement, intuition. Recalling the primal grace she’d felt while stalking the streets of her dream as a lioness was like wearing one body over the other—one life over the other—and not being sure which was the original.
All the rest of her morning, while she went about getting dressed and going to work, while she filed and managed appointments, Vanessa wore a little smirk of a smile. She could feel it there plumping her cheeks and lighting her eyes, and with nothing she could have done about it if she’d wanted to. The smile was wearing her. It was an I-know-something-you-don’t-know grin. It was the shape of a secret bursting to escape her pursed lips. It was what she looked like when she had a feel-good song stuck in her head someplace she couldn’t hum along.
“Jeez, Vanessa, it was just a dream,” she told herself in a breathy chuckle as she stood up from her desk with purse in hand, ready for lunch, read to head to the café. Ready to see Eric Salo for the first time since they’d dirty danced together at the street festival and he’d kissed her.
The unexpected rumble of Dr. Koller clearing his throat made Vanessa jump and look over her shoulder at her boss where he stood in the open doorway of his office. White dress shirt draped across his broad chest, black trousers that hugged his hips: that was the classic Koller black-and-white style, elegantly intimidating and uncompromising. He must have heard her talking to herself, she thought, but then she saw his piercing gaze rake her body with an equal mixture of hard-jawed disapproval and smoldering ardor, pulse beating a little too quickly at his throat. Vanessa glanced down at herself, noticing only then that she’d worn a dress that was perhaps a tad too short for work, for the administrative office mouse persona she was supposed to be cultivating to keep dear brother Aubrey happy and Jeremy Koller, too. The silky wrap draped her hourglass figure, accentuating her bust and her hips and swishing about the generous curves of her thighs whenever she took a step. And instead of the usual muted tones of her work clothing, it was suspiciously close to the same shade of alluring lay-in-the-grass green as Eric Salo’s eyes. A Freudian slip of a dress! Vanessa had to bite back the snort of a hard chuckle.
Jeremy seemed pointedly unamused as he observed what was supposed to be his milquetoast Girl Friday with that psych of a psychologist’s glare. “Do we need to talk, Vanessa?” he asked. His paternal tone offered her the opportunity to confess. Yes, she had been indulging in unhealthy whimsy, in grand delusion, flirting along the edges of her marginal psychosis.
“No.” Vanessa’s little smirk widened to a full, cheery smile. Nothing to see here, sir. Move along. “I’m just off to lunch. Back in an hour.” Physically, anyway.
But it was more like half an hour, with most of her uneaten lunch in a flimsy foam takeout box. Vanessa had known when Eric Salo hadn’t shown at the café by twenty after that he wasn’t coming. To hell with wondering about his weird behavior the Friday before and whether he was embarrassed now at having gone all Patrick Swayze with a Nikki Blonsky instead of a Megan Fox. What really bothered Vanessa was that his absence had broken the spell cast by the memory of her lioness dream. That and the fact that the thought of her fantasy man had insinuated itself into her mind so deeply that she associated Salo with her dreams, the good ones, anyway. Maybe… maybe people—Aubrey and Koller—were right about her flights of fancy being unhealthy, with dreams that felt so real and lingered so long that they verged on mania. For sure it wasn’t normal to feel such a strong attraction, connection, possessiveness toward a man she only knew from eavesdropped and castoff snippets of his life.
The last thing she needed when she got back to the office was the first thing she got. “Vanessa,” he said, standing over her from just behind her right shoulder as she slumped at her desk.
“What can I do for you, Dr. Koller?” she asked with forced composure.
“Please come into my office.”
Shit. Vanessa mentally reviewed Koller’s schedule for the day and realized he didn’t have another patient for an hour and a half. That was a lot of time for poking around in her business and in her head. True to Vanessa’s concerns, once inside his office and behind closed doors, Koller motioned for her to sit on that damned squeaky leather couch. The freaking thing was like a lie detector, reacting to tells in body language and tattling on every patients’ smallest exaggeration, omission, or resistance.
Jeremy didn’t take his usual seat at his desk but leaned against it with arms folded instead, staring down at Vanessa with paternal imperiousness. Uh-oh. “I feel I have a responsibility to ask you what’s going on between you and the man you’ve been meeting every day at the café, Vanessa.”
Her silence filled her chest like cement, heavy with shock that Koller had seen her with Eric. Had Jeremy been following her? Or had he only stumbled upon the pair by accident? He’d apparently seen them together more than once—enough times to think something was going on. Being scrutinized in this office or as she sat on that couch was bad enough. The thought that Jeremy was watching her out there in her real life summoned up a cold, creeping nausea that was now crawling around loose in the pit of her stomach.
Why did it always seem like someone was watching her? And not just Aunt Fay and Uncle Oren being overprotective guardians. Not just Gloria and Norman Yancy, whose main concerned seemed to lay in providing Vanessa with hot coffee and a ride home whenever she woke up in their back garden. Not just big brother Aubrey with his adamantly held ideas on how he thought his little sister ought to act in the world he’d have had her believe was too scary and dangerous to live—really live—in. And not even just Jeremy Koller now with his highly unethical, vaguely sexual, entirely too personal interest in her.
Vanessa hadn’t ever told Dr. Koller about those dreams. Everything about them smacked of actual mem
ories: the feeling of summer sun on her four-year-old arms as she sat on her blanket in the grass in front of her parents’ house, the distorted reflection of herself with her pink sundress and her baby-fat limbs in the mirror black shades worn by the two men in black pants and black t-shirts, the distinctive black clothing with the straps and pockets—the tactical gear—the men wore later when they came back with the others in the middle of the night, after they’d asked the little girl all their questions about her mom and dad. She had answered too many of those questions, revealed too much. The suspicion had nagged Vanessa for twenty years, along with Aubrey’s insistence that none of that had really happened, that her four-year-old brain hadn’t been able to comprehend the trauma of the car crash that had killed their parents but spared the children. Over and over, Aubrey asserted, to this day, that Vanessa had mixed memory and nightmare up in a jumble in her head. And she believed him, or at least part of her wanted to, even if that made her crazy. It was moments like this, feelings like the one wriggling in her stomach and coiling cold at the base of her spine, that made her wonder.
“If you’ll excuse me, Dr. Koller, I’m not feeling up to this right now.” Vanessa stood from the couch, and one of the doctor’s dark brows rose with her in dismayed surprise. Her deflection was usually considerably more deft than flat out avoidance.
“Vanessa, I’m not going to let this go,” he said, straightening to his full height. For a second, she could have sworn he said he wasn’t going to let her go. “You’re my….” And this statement, after that, started out far too forcefully for Vanessa’s liking or her worsening mood. She stopped mid-step on her way toward the door to regard her boss with obvious dubiousness in her crinkled brow, in the hard little frown she felt drawing down the corners of her pinched lips. “You’re a valued member of this office, and I don’t want to see you traumatized.”
