“Yes.”
“You didn’t sate the hungers and now your body is overloaded with them. I can help you with that.”
If she’d been in her right mind, his arrogance would have annoyed her, but she needed him so much. She needed his hand snaking between her legs, pressing the ache that throbbed there. She loved his mouth closing over her breast.
She untied the robe’s sash and slid her hand to his abdomen. His skin was as hot as hers, heat pulsing below the surface. But he’d tamed his hungers and controlled them, while she was going crazy.
Her hand moved lower until it touched the base of his cock. His wiry hair twisted around her fingers, the skin smooth and tight. She ran her hand along its long length to the tip and he made a raw noise.
“Fuck me,” she whispered. “Alain, fuck me, please.”
She’d never begged like that in her life. Come to think of it, none of the men she’d ever slept with—and they had been few and far between—had been worth begging for.
Arrogant or not, Alain Dupree was worth a little begging. His body could haunt her dreams. She tugged him toward her with her hand around his cock, his body landing hard and hot against hers. He shrugged off the robe and rolled onto her, naked.
Alain tore open the button of her shorts and yanked them down her legs. He broke the bikini strings of her panties and threw the ripped underwear on the floor.
“Open to me,” he coaxed. His hand stroked wetness, her clit already slick as it could be. She spread her legs, her fingers still around his staff. He had to pry her grip from him to position himself between her thighs and press the tip inside.
Patrice nearly screamed with it. He was hard and huge but she wanted him so much that she didn’t care. She grasped his buttocks and pulled him down on her, and he groaned as he slid all the way inside.
Alain kissed her fiercely, then he shut his eyes tight, his fists bunched on the blanket beside her, and rode her like he hadn’t had sex in a decade. This was no sweet getting-to-know-you sex, but primal urges consuming both of them. She thrust against him as hard as he thrust into her, his sweat dropping onto her skin.
She lifted her hips, pressing hard, hard to him. The bed thumped and rocked under the onslaught and she didn’t care. Let the furniture break. It would be worth it.
Alain pumped almost mindlessly, his eyes shut, but he whispered her name into her skin, his mouth finding her throat.
“Patrice, you are so beautiful. And mine, all mine.”
Her body wound her toward climax, a heavenly feel as he drove into her. She was stretched and aching, happy and needy all at the same time. Dark waves of climax took her and then receded and then built again.
Alain’s thrusts became harder, his erection inside her fuller as he began his own climax. Patrice caught a movement near the window as Alain groaned, and she glanced over to see Jackson Gray sitting in the open window. He wore nothing but a pair of jeans and he was close enough that she could see the bulge that pressed against his zipper.
She gasped, but it was lost in Alain’s cry of climax. Jackson’s dark eyes fixed on her, his half-smile warm. He put one broad finger into his mouth and licked it, his eyes gleaming.
Jackson watching her with such intensity coupled with Alain’s fierce lovemaking made her climax hard. Patrice screamed as black waves of it rolled over her, her hips shuddering against Alain’s. Her whole body climaxed, her legs tightening, her head spinning, her fists balling against Alain’s back.
She cried Alain’s name. Jackson chuckled softly, which made Alain look up.
Patrice expected Alain to leap from the bed or snarl at Jackson, but he didn’t. He moaned the last of his climax, then held Patrice as she rode out the last of hers.
Jackson hopped off the windowsill and sauntered across the room. He ran his fingers down Alain’s back and then caressed Patrice’s face. Again, Alain said nothing, only looked up at the man in quiet acceptance.
Jackson’s teeth gleamed. “Anything I can do to help?”
“I think we’ve covered it,” Alain said, his voice hoarse.
“Maybe, but now I’m turned on.” Jackson’s eyes were dark, pupils wide. He unzipped his jeans and proved he wasn’t wearing underwear of any kind. “What I’d love is both of you licking me.”
Patrice knew she shouldn’t want to. She’d been raised to believe that sex was fine, as long as it was safe sex between a man and a woman, and an engagement ring should already be shining on her finger. Times had changed, but though Patrice had fantasized about a threesome, she’d never dared.
Of course, she’d never had crazed sex like she’d just had with Alain. It felt right, lying in Alain’s arms with Jackson standing next to them, his cock tight and long and large. Inside her, she felt Alain harden again. Her fantasy threesomes had always been two rather vague men pleasuring her—she’d never thought of the two men pleasuring each other. The vision of Jackson and Alain together and then including her made her giddy and almost come again.
She turned her head and licked the length of Jackson’s cock. He groaned and lost hold of his waistband, letting his jeans slither to the floor. Alain watched her, his silver eyes intent on her tongue. Slowly, as though uncertain, he leaned forward and licked Jackson with her.
Her tongue and Alain’s tangled around each other and Jackson let out a moan of ecstasy. Patrice caught Alain’s tongue deliberately and they kissed around the tip of Jackson’s cock.
Alain laughed and Patrice echoed him. Then they both went to work on Jackson, licking their way up and down him, lingering at his balls, taking turns sucking his tip into their mouths. Jackson tasted spicy and dark and the way he thrust his hips at them told her he enjoyed it as much as they did.
“Nice,” he murmured. He laced his hands in both Alain’s and Patrice’s hair, making noises of approval.
They licked and stroked him, Alain still large and hard inside Patrice, until Jackson gasped. “I’m coming,” he said, then his seed wet their tongues and lips. Patrice kissed Alain’s mouth, licking every drop off him.
Jackson backed away, but his pants were still around his ankles and he sat down hard on the chair behind him. He laughed, his face relaxed with the afterglow, and Patrice smiled at him.
Alain groaned, dragging Patrice’s attention to him. He was inside her, his cock opening her wide, and he began to fuck her again. He braced himself on his fists, driving faster and faster until Patrice was screaming and he came a second time.
Jackson sent them a smile of delight.
“This is fun,” he said as she and Alain fell back, panting, to the bed. “What do you want to do next?”
* * * * *
Patrice wanted to run. The moon had risen by the time they left the house for the porch and Patrice felt her body shimmer and start the change.
“No,” Alain said sharply.
Startled, Patrice shifted back to human. “What? Why not? I want to.”
“You must learn to control it. You must give in to the wolf but you must also command it. Or else one day you will surrender and become the beast completely.”
Patrice’s heart began to pound. It did not seem odd to her that she stood on a porch overlooking Oak Creek with two naked men, she naked herself. She’d just had great sex with one of the men and enjoyed helping him pleasure another man. None of that seemed odd, which meant her worldview had severely changed since yesterday.
“You mean I wouldn’t be able to turn back from being the wolf?”
Alain gave her a grim look. “Oh, you’d turn back. But you’d still be the wolf. The human Patrice would be gone and the beast would take over.”
She stared at him. “Seriously? Hell.”
Jackson nodded. “In other words, you wouldn’t be able to drive your truck and wear your uniform, or even think like a human anymore. Of course, you’d be able to smell criminals long before anyone else saw them. The police department could devise some sort of leash, I suppose…”
“Very funny,” Patri
ce snapped. “Shit, what if that had happened last night?”
“That’s why you need me.”
Her skin warmed as Alain ran his hands up her arms and cupped her chin. “I told you that you needed initiating. I didn’t mean just having sex. You need to learn about being the wolf and about being Patrice.” He touched her lips and then pressed a brief kiss to them. “Now. Think of the wolf—become it. But don’t change until you are ready. Decide to change at the count of twenty and don’t change until then.”
Patrice drew in her breath and nodded. “I think I can do that.”
Jackson smoothed back a lock of her hair, his touch gentle. “We’ll be right here. Don’t be afraid.”
His words gave her strength. Patrice closed her eyes, reached out with her senses to the night and started to count silently to twenty. She felt the wolf rise up in her, the beast wanting, needing, to come to the fore. She clenched her hands and held it back.
“That’s it.” Jackson’s voice came to her, now smooth and calm. She felt a wave of caring from him.
“Wait until twenty,” Alain’s more grating voice said. “Wait for it.”
She relaxed, suddenly unafraid. Jackson was there on her left, his coyote cockiness hiding an aura of incredible strength. Alain on her right, his body tall and warm, his need for her palpable.
“Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.”
Now.
Change.
She felt herself shimmer, her senses sharpen, and she became wolf.
“What a cutie,” Jackson chuckled, and then he was next to her, nuzzling her with his pointed coyote nose.
Alain growled something in irritation, then the black wolf joined them and they were off into the night.
Chapter Four
The three loped up the hill, Alain exhilarated from the hunt and what had started to happen in his house. The scents of juniper and wildflowers filled his nose and so did Patrice’s scent as she ran beside him, moonlight dancing on her silver fur. She was beautiful no matter what form she was in.
Jackson ran just behind them, his tread nearly silent. A demigod, he’d said. Alain believed it, thinking of the man’s sleek, well-muscled body. The light in his eye said he found both humans and werewolves amusing, and he had an uncanny ability of knowing everything about Alain and Patrice.
They ran west of town, the roads giving way to wilderness, protected for now from human encroachment. They skirted the ranch where a man called Dunstan raised cattle, hearing the uneasy calls of steers out on the range. The cattle sensed the wolves, but Patrice and Alain left them alone.
The three of them roamed for miles, following dry washes and then ones filled with water from winter rains. They ran up the slopes of a mountain, stopping to rest on a rocky outcropping that gave them a view of the entire valley and the beautiful red bluffs of Sedona.
“Why did you come here?” Patrice asked Alain after they’d sat silently a while. She was slowly learning to communicate in the way of the wolf, though a few whines escaped her mouth.
“I inherited the house.” Alain sat down, letting the wind ruffle his fur. “When my father died.”
“When your father was killed,” Jackson corrected him.
Alain acknowledged him with a grave nod. “When he was killed.”
Patrice gazed at him with beautiful golden eyes. “Killed? I never heard that. That’s terrible.” Her distressed yips died away and her eyes narrowed. “Wait, why didn’t I hear about it? The police should have been all over that.”
“Because everyone thought he died of natural causes,” Alain said. “In his bed, of a heart attack. But he didn’t.”
“Werewolf hunter,” Jackson said shortly.
“Oh, Alain, I’m so sorry.” Patrice paused, her fur standing up on her back. “A werewolf hunter? Here?”
“Yes,” Alain said gravely. “I was going to ask you, as a police officer, to help me look into his death.”
“A werewolf hunter,” Patrice repeated. “Why would he kill your father when he was human? Why not hunt him when he was a wolf?”
“I think he poisoned my father. I’m not sure how. It was a coward’s way. He didn’t even have the guts to hunt my father down and shoot him.”
Patrice moved closer to Alain, rubbing her body against his. “How terrible. You should have reported a suspected poisoning, you know.”
She tried to sound severe, but she didn’t quite have the wolf growl down yet.
“And say what? ‘My dad’s a werewolf and a werewolf hunter poisoned him?’”
“I see your point. How do you know it was the hunter who did it? That it wasn’t a rancher trying to get rid of coyotes or something?”
“Because of the poison used,” Alain said. “My father did actually die of a heart attack but it was because he’d been given silver when he was a wolf. The symptoms all point to it.”
“Silver is lethal to werewolves,” Jackson put in.
Patrice looked around nervously. “I’ve heard that. I always thought those were just stories.”
Jackson snickered. “Welcome to the real world.”
“I can look into it at work,” Patrice said. “Find out who was in the area around the time of your father’s death, any strangers who were stranger than usual, that kind of thing—”
Alain broke in. “It could easily be someone who lived here already, someone who wanted my father dead. I’ve been sniffing around.”
He meant that literally. He’d smelled silver faintly in the bed on which his father had died, even after the woman who’d cleaned the house had washed the sheets. Alain had put those sheets aside and bought all new ones, unable to bear even the lingering traces.
It angered him that someone in this beautiful place had been so evil that he or she had dosed his father with silver and then watched him die. Alain would find this person and tell him—or her—exactly what he thought. Exact retribution. That was the way of the wolf.
He’d distressed Patrice. She leaned into him, rubbing her muzzle along his. He liked her long-legged strength, which she possessed whether wolf or human. He wanted to teach her so much, and he had so much to teach her.
He sensed Jackson watching them, his dark eyes filled with knowledge. Jackson was teaching Alain things he never knew existed. Since Alain had moved in he’d had the feeling of being watched, but he’d assumed it was the hunter. Now he realized it had been Jackson, the coyote’s eyes on his every move.
He still wasn’t sure what to make of his reaction to Jackson. It had seemed natural to join Patrice in licking the man’s tight cock, enjoying the unfamiliar feel of Jackson’s satiny tip under his tongue, the taste of his seed. Alain wondered if the fact that Jackson was part god kept him from worrying why he liked stroking and kissing another male.
Alain broke his thoughts. “Want to run?” he asked Patrice.
Patrice darted away from him so fast it was comical. “Oh yes.” She zoomed off into the underbrush with the eagerness of a pup, never mind watching for danger.
“Patrice,” he growled, and plunged after her.
Jackson began to follow, then he dropped back to the edge of the trees and silently sank to his haunches. Something smelled wrong, even sinister. He sat quietly, letting the breeze drift past his nose, analyzing each scent. He sensed anger, bright and hot, overlaying the excited scents of Patrice and Alain.
The coyote shimmered and became Jackson the man. He looked around with grave, dark eyes, not liking what he felt. The mind he sensed burned with anger on colossal levels.
Jackson put his hands on his hips and looked around with human eyes, but human eyes were limited. Did he sense another Were? No, that wasn’t right. The auras of Patrice and Alain as they chased one another were shot through with rainbow lights while this aura was muddy gray.
Jackson himself wasn’t Were—he was divine, or at least half-divine, as the gods liked to remind him. Half-divine with a strange interest in humans, they teased him. To which Jackson replied that humans a
nd their foibles were tons more interesting than gods with nothing to do but sit around and admire themselves.
They laughed at him but they respected him. Humans feared Coyote sometimes, but he really had their best interests at heart. And demons—they would learn to fear him.
Jackson gently sent his senses to the woods around him, to the snakes curled tightly in holes against the winter cold, to rabbits huddled together for warmth, to a lone hawk roosting high on the side of the cliff. Jackson touched his mind, earning an irritated hawk equivalent of What?
“Let me borrow you a moment, my friend,” Jackson sent to him.
The hawk snarled a few things about being awakened in the middle of a good dream, then he spread his wings and glided out into the night.
* * * * *
Patrice and Alain ended up at his house before dawn. Alain made Patrice wait to change back, teaching her to control the movement between wolf and human. With practice, he said in his rumbling voice, she’d be able to shift at will, without the crazed burning she felt at the full moon.
Patrice completed the change and stood once more with him on his back porch, the wooden boards cool beneath her feet. She put her arms around his naked body. “I won’t feel all the need?”
He smiled, silver eyes filled with mirth. “Well, you can hang on to some of it.” His hands were warm on her back. “The part that involves me, anyway.” He covered her lips with his, sliding his tongue inside to taste every corner of her mouth.
They made love again in his bed, this time slowly and gently without the frenzy of earlier that evening. Patrice fell asleep with his body warm and heavy on hers and woke to him lying full length beside her, his arm across her abdomen.
He opened his eyes as she slid out of bed. “Time for work,” she said with reluctance.
His silver gaze held hers in triumph. “You do what you have to. My mate.”
She opened her mouth to retort but the warmth in his eyes, the wickedness of his smile sent shivers down her spine. He’d well and truly caught her, but whether she could stay caught remained to be seen.
Howlin' Page 3
