He sucked greedily, forcing the ruched peak hard against the roof of his mouth, drinking from her as if she were his only source of nourishment. Missy moaned. She felt like he drew her soul out of her through her breast, but all she wanted was for him to pull harder, to take more of her into the wet furnace of his mouth.
He did. He sucked with bruising strength, then pulled back until just the nipple remained inside his mouth. His straight, sharp teeth nipped at her, hard enough to sting but not hard enough to injure, and he leaned forward again, stretching his jaw wide and sucking at her flesh until almost her entire petite breast disappeared between his lips.
His free hand reached up and closed about the other peak, kneading with rough motions, pulling at her erect nipple with strong, lean fingers. She felt them tugging at her, making her crazy, and even as they moved, the hand between her legs went to work. He hooked his forefinger in the crotch of her panties and tore, ripping the panel right out from between her legs. Then his fingers were sliding through her slick folds and spreading the abundant moisture around her swollen lips and soft, hidden valleys.
Finger and thumb closed around the nub of her clitoris as if it were another nipple, tugging and pinching in a gentle mimicry of his hand on her breast. Missy cried out, her heels digging into the small of his back, her thighs clenching as she tried to lift herself away from his tormenting fingers.
Away? Toward? God, who knew?
His growl this time held as much menace as passion. His fingers abandoned her clit to tangle in her pubic hair and pull her back down where he wanted her. She moaned and settled into place even as her thighs tried to close against further sensory overload. His waist held her knees apart, keeping her spread and available, and he took shameless advantage. He tweaked her nipple again, making her yelp, then his hand shifted and smoothed, and he penetrated her with one long, unyielding finger.
She cried. Real, honest-to-God tears rolled down her face at the feel of him inside her, even only this much of him. She wanted more, but her long-neglected passage protested at even this small invasion. Missy hadn’t had sex in six years, not since college, and then her partner had been nothing like Graham, the experience nothing like this rioting orgy of heat and pleasure and sweat. She wondered now how she would be able to take him if even his finger stretched her so uncomfortably. She felt his finger withdraw and press back a second later, followed quickly by another. Two strong digits pressed deep, tunneling through her body’s resistance and showing her why it was much too late for doubt.
If he was going to pleasure her to death, she intended to enjoy as much of the experience as she could.
Using one hand to tug at his tousled hair, she dislodged his mouth from one breast just long enough to guide it to the other. He greeted her neglected nipple with a quick nip and a soothing pass of his rough velvet tongue before sucking it deep into his mouth. Missy felt every draw like a pulse between her legs, and knew Graham could feel it, too, when he began timing the thrusts of his fingers to the clenching of her inner muscles.
God, he was trying to kill her!
Desperate to feel more of him inside her, she slid one hand down between their bodies and into the waistband of his slacks.
The soft heat of her palm met his busy fingers between her legs, wringing from him a soft growl. One that morphed into a breathless curse when her fingers closed carefully around his eager erection.
Missy echoed the sound with a murmur of satisfaction, squeezing his thick shaft and savoring the smooth texture of his skin and the heavy, solid feel of his arousal. Her fingers couldn’t quite close around him, because her hands were very small and Graham was very not. He filled her palm to overflowing, and Missy wanted to know if he would fill her body the same way.
She drew her hand away with the intent of finding out. Graham punished her desertion with a sharp nip to her breast and a deep, twisting thrust of his fingers. Missy cried out and bucked against him, but she remained determined. If he thought turning her on even more would make her change course, he could think again. She was having way too much fun to abandon her new toy just so he could catch his breath again. She quickly, if clumsily, unfastened the buttons of his trousers and tugged down the zipper, freeing his arousal from its confinement with a sigh of satisfaction. Graham’s entire body stiffened, and he pulled his mouth and hands away from her heated flesh, grasping her hips and shaking her until her eyes met his.
“Now!” he bit out, and the harsh, spare urgency in his voice made her shudder. He lifted her hips higher until his erection parted her swollen flesh and pressed firmly against her entrance.
Missy saw the savage need in his eyes and felt a wash of excitement instead of the fear she had half-expected. Panting, she nodded with uneven, jerky motions and pressed her forehead to his.
“Now,” she echoed, and had time for one shallow breath before her world tilted dizzily on its axis.
That breath ended on a scream as Graham’s fingers bit hard into her hips, lifted her briefly above him, and then slammed her weight down to meet his violent thrust. His thick length tunneled endlessly into her, forcing her muscles to stretch wide to accommodate his girth. Sensations overwhelmed her. She couldn’t decide if they consisted mainly of pleasure or pain. In that moment, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was inside her, thrusting hard and deep until he ground to a halt, nudging roughly at her cervix.
“Graham, wait!” she gasped, her mind whirling and her body protesting. She needed a minute, just a minute, to catch up with him, to adjust to his penetration and the unsettling feeling that something within her had changed in the instant that their bodies were joined.
Bracing her hands against his shoulders, Missy fought hard to regain her breath, her equilibrium, her identity. She felt like her entire self had boiled down to the rippling clasp of her body wrapping snugly around his. “Wait. Please.”
Though her eyelids had turned to heavy weights, she struggled to meet his gaze, to maintain that connection to reality when everything around her had gone topsy-turvy. In the dim light of the bedroom, Graham’s eyes flashed with an eerie glow.
“Too late,” he growled, pressing her hard against the door as he began to move within her to a relentless, driving rhythm.
In her position, impaled on his thrusting length, held in place by the tenuous grasp of her watery legs around his waist and the biting grip of his fingers on her hips, Missy could do nothing else but cling to Graham’s shoulders and let him conquer her like a foreign empire.
He pounded into her hard and fast, and she struggled to decide if she loved it or hated it. She’d thought she knew what sex was, but Graham Winters was showing her she had no clue. Lunging deeper inside her than she had thought possible, his corded muscles bunching and shifting against her, this man—this werewolf—seemed intent on teaching her that what she’d thought of as sex had as much in common with this urgent, primal act as a Chihuahua had in common with a Lupine.
His hands shifted to her ass and tugged. “More,” he rumbled, his lips drawing back in a snarl. “Take more.”
More? God, she could barely take what he was already giving her! How could there possibly be more? She shook her head, unable to speak, fighting for each ragged breath she managed to draw into her starving lungs.
“More!” he insisted, and his demand became an order. The hand on her ass tightened and pushed, while the other moved to her stomach and thrust between their heaving bodies. One strong finger hooked beneath the soft flesh of her mound and pulled. The movement forced her to cant her hips upward, tilting her pelvis and changing the angle of their joining until she felt him slide impossibly deeper inside her.
Missy sobbed at the feel of another inch of silk-covered steel gliding home. His penetration butted against her cervix, nudged her darkest corners, and now she could feel his pelvis grinding between her legs, feel his hips against hers in a new, heavier impact. Finally he had buried his whole length inside her, and he filled her so deeply, she tasted his thrusts in
the back of her throat.
“Graham!”
Her cry was a plea, a protest, and a demand for more. She had no idea which she meant most sincerely, but Graham answered only the last, ignoring the others completely. Pinning her against the door, now hot and slick from their sweaty bodies, he rode her hard, hilting inside her with each thrust, making her muscles ripple and contract on each entrance, collapse and yearn on each withdrawal.
She wanted desperately to thrust back against him, but her position made it impossible. He controlled her every movement, holding her still and open for his powerful thrusts. She felt the constricting band of her tight dress where it had settled around her waist, felt the rasp of his dress shirt under her hands and against her breasts. She felt the rough fabric of the trousers he still wore low around his hips while he took her. She’d never felt anything so savage or so amazingly good.
The tension built inside her until she sobbed for release. He bent his knees for leverage, thrust high and hard inside her, and Missy’s world dissolved in an endless, pulsing climax. Her body clamped tight around him, milking him with slick, wet muscles until Graham slammed her back against the door and roared.
Fingers gripping, muscles clenching, he crushed her between the hard wood and his hard body while he emptied himself inside her in hot, heavy spurts.
She melted around him, clinging to his waist and his shoulders with the last of her strength. Her breath sawed in and out of her lungs on ragged gasps. Her muscles felt like melted pudding, and they trembled under the least little exertion. If not for the solid door behind her and Graham’s heavy weight in front of her, she would have trickled to the floor and lain there for at least a week.
Graham stirred, and Missy wondered where he got the strength. His hands cupped her bottom and held her in place while he crossed the room with three long strides. He tumbled her onto the bed with a thud. In the middle of the silk-covered mattress, Missy blinked and grunted while Graham settled his weight on top of her. He heaved a rough sigh and buried his face in the crook of her neck, his tongue lapping the salt from her skin with lazy strokes. She read more sleepy satisfaction than amorous intent in his actions and offered up a breathless prayer of thanks. She had just about enough energy left to close her eyelids and she’d be out like a light.
Her hands groped along the mattress, looking for a blanket to pull over them, but she found nothing. The only covering on the bed was the fitted silk sheet. In fact, she couldn’t remember seeing sheets or blankets or even a bedspread pooled on the floor from a restless night’s sleep. Too tired to wonder about it, she contented herself with Graham’s body heat, which seemed more effective than an electric blanket anyway.
Tangling her legs with his, she shifted her hips and felt him still nestled half-hard inside her. She mulled it over for a moment, decided she liked the sensation, and wrapped her arms around him. Her last thought before she tumbled into unconsciousness was that no woman could possibly need a fantasy fix if she got to spend one night of her life with a lusty lycanthrope.
CHAPTER THREE
Honey and vanilla.
Graham’s nose twitched, followed closely by his penis, as he slid gradually from sleep to waking. With his eyes still closed, he concentrated on the scent surrounding him, an intoxicating blend of honey and vanilla that reminded him of shortbread and sex and warm, melted ice cream. The thought made his stomach growl.
He nuzzled his face into a soft nest of hair and inhaled deeply to make sure he hadn’t just dreamed up this woman with her mind-blowing scent and her passionate responses. Always before, her scent had been obscured by the environments they had met in, ones full of humans who used soaps and lotions and perfumes with such a heavy hand that Graham had learned long ago to block off his ultra-sensitive sense of smell in self-defense. If the woman beside him had applied any artificial scents last night, time and sweat had long since erased them. All that was left was the sweet, delicious scent of a woman he’d searched for all his life. Now that he’d found her, he’d be damned if he’d let her get away.
Unless he was very much mistaken, Graham Winters had just found his mate.
Normally, a new mating—especially for a pack alpha—was a cause for celebration. When your entire culture was based on the pack mentality, anything that led to the perpetuation of the pack won praise and respect, so he ought to be feeling just terrific at the idea that he’d finally found the one woman he could be happy with for the rest of his life. He just had two problems.
The significance of the first slammed into the back of his head like an iron pipe with a grudge the minute he looked down at her. With her hair soft and rumpled on the pillow, her makeup worn away by time and exertion, she looked completely different from the way he remembered her. Instead of the brazen, blond sexpot in the too-tight dress, she looked like a little girl, all fair skin and pink cheeks and child-like innocence. Her thick brown eyelashes lay in soft arcs against her cheeks, and her rosy lips were parted and slightly pouting. She looked like a china doll. A very human china doll.
Interspecies dating wasn’t exactly verboten among Lupines, but it hardly represented the norm, either. His kind tended to view humans as amusing and occasionally useful, but hardly the sort of mates you brought home to Mother. After all, Lupine instincts still dictated that the strongest, the fastest, and the most dominant were the ones most likely to survive and most likely to reproduce. Humans, in contrast, could barely compete with newly whelped pups, let alone with mature wolves.
Graham knew all that, but it didn’t seem to be doing him any good. Every time he tried to picture getting on with his life without this woman, his inner beast raised its furry head and growled, long and low and menacing. He expected to drool at any minute, but those instincts certainly made it clear that giving her up, human or no, was not an option.
And that led him neatly to dilemma number two.
The woman lying unconscious in the middle of his bed wasn’t an anonymous and interchangeable human. She was Melissa Jane Roper, Regina McNeill Vidâme’s best friend and pseudo little sister.
Already, the consequences of last night loomed large in his mind.
First of all, Regina would try to kill him. He’d only known his friend Dmitri’s new wife for a few weeks, but that was plenty of time for Graham to learn how protective she felt toward her quiet, wallflower friend. Missy had been Regina’s maid of honor, and though she’d faded into the background for him until last night, he clearly remembered the things Regina had told him about her.
“Missy is a sweetheart. Probably too sweet,” Regina had explained at the rehearsal dinner while he’d sat, politely bored, beside her. “Don’t be offended if she doesn’t talk to you much, even if you are the best man. She’s always been kind of quiet, especially around men. That doesn’t mean she’s some sort of Pollyanna or a nun or anything. It just means she’s more likely to listen than to talk. And she almost never says anything bad about anyone, but I just don’t want you to think she’s ignoring you or anything.”
Graham hadn’t noticed the woman enough to know whether she was ignoring him or not. With her hair in a neat, subdued braid and her body-camouflaging clothes, he’d paid her about as much attention as the flower arrangements on the tables at the restaurant. Even when he’d practiced escorting her away from the altar, he’d barely realized she was with him. Her grip on his sleeve had been so light, and she’d held herself so far away from him, that he might as well have been alone.
“Ava is trying to corrupt her, though,” Regina had continued. “Now that I’m settled down, Missy is Ava’s next project. If she has her way, Ava will turn the poor thing into a man-eater.”
Something in him rebelled at the idea of Missy being shaped into some sort of femme fatale and then set loose on unsuspecting males. It had to be the fact that she was his mate, because pack leader or no, he’d never exhibited much of a possessive streak before, especially not when it came to women. To him, they made an interesting diversion but c
ould be easily exchanged for the flavor of the week. Missy was the first woman he’d ever wanted to possess so completely that no other man would even dare to look at her. That, as much as his obsession with her sugar cookie fragrance, convinced him she really was his mate, no matter how inconvenient that might be.
He sighed, and Missy reacted to the small sound, frowning and shifting in her sleep. She rolled over to face him and burrowed into his furry chest. The tip of her cold nose brushed his nipple, and she nuzzled it sleepily, pressing a small kiss to the tight surface before snuggling back into sleep.
He fought hard against the urge to hook her leg over his hip and slide gently into her sleepy-soft warmth. After last night, he knew how quickly she could be aroused and readied for him. If only the knowledge didn’t make his mouth water, he wouldn’t be in this predicament.
That wasn’t precisely true, he admitted grudgingly as he tried to keep his hands from straying down the silky-smooth skin of her back to caress her amazing ass. Graham had the distinct feeling that he’d been doomed from the moment he’d first noticed that particular feature of hers. Her scent this morning had only clinched the deal, but he couldn’t pretend to understand why. Why should the smell of warm cookies stir him to previously unknown possessiveness when hideously expensive French perfumes only made him want to sneeze? He’d heard about the sort of instant knowledge other Lupines had when they met their mates, but he’d never expected it to hit him on an air current that smelled like tea biscuits and warm woman. Just like he’d never expected to see the ass of his dreams on the back of a woman whose front he hadn’t even given a second look.
If he could draw her fragrance permanently inside himself and smell her every time he breathed, he would be a very happy man. As it was, he was a hungry man with a hard-on.
Frowning, he eased his arms from around Missy’s sleeping form and slid off the bed. The loss of his body heat made her shiver. His bed had no blankets on it, because he never used them. He generated enough body heat to keep warm in anything short of a blizzard, but his human guest didn’t. He dug through his closet and found a spare blanket he kept around for moving furniture. Lucky for him, he’d washed it after the last trip, so it was clean and would serve to keep her warm.
Big Bad Wolf Page 4
