by Zoë Archer
His tongue delved into the warm wetness of her mouth and she stroked it with her own. He rolled, coming to rest on top of her, her legs twining around him as he braced himself over her. She rose to meet his hips with her own. He growled into her mouth at the contact, that welcoming place, even separated by too much fabric. When he pressed his length against her, she surged up, moaning. He’d never been harder in his life. His cock was a branding iron that wanted her flesh. As she wanted his burn.
Faintly, he realized he shouldn’t be doing this, that he was getting her clothes wet with his damp skin and she would be cold. He couldn’t make himself stop, not when she laced her fingers into his hair and pulled him fierce and close to her.
It wasn’t gentle or sweet or tender. It was rough and urgent, primal. The beast in him snarled its demands. When he dragged his mouth from hers to bite at her neck, she arched. The effort it took to keep from actually piercing her skin with his teeth made him shake. Instead, he shoved off her coat and almost tore her shirt right down the middle, but that small rational part of his brain reminded him that she needed clothing and might not have anything to replace it. So he clawed at the buttons with hands that felt more like paws. Her own trembling hands came up to help, their fingers tangling.
Then her shirt was gone, and all she wore beneath was a camisole. Beneath the thin fabric, her breasts were perfect, high and full, her nipples tight, stretching the cotton. When he took them in his hands, they both moaned, and he stroked her, drinking in the feel of her skin with a visceral savagery.
Through lust-hazed eyes he gazed down and what he saw made him growl. The dampness of his skin soaked through her chemise, turning it transparent. Her nipples were the color of rosy dawn against the cream of her skin, hardened into beads. His beast broke free of its leash. She gasped when he tore the chemise, and gasped again when he took the tip of her breast into his mouth. She pulled him even closer as she ground her hips into his.
With each of his licks and each of her moans, arousal grew, his beast becoming wild, until he became mindless, wanting only her, needing to be inside her. He fumbled with the buttons of her trousers.
Then she shoved him away. The beast bayed in frustration and loss, the sound echoing inside him. God, no. He was too close. He wanted her too badly.
It took him a moment to understand what she was doing before fierce exultation hit him. She tugged off her boots and threw them carelessly aside, unbuckled and set aside her gun belt, then began to wriggle out of her trousers.
The sight was too much, her hips undulating, the skin of her belly and lower being exposed. As soon as he saw the faintest trace of golden down between her legs, he leapt upon her. Nathan yanked off her trousers in one motion, then cupped her sex with his hand. His fingers were drenched immediately. The scent of her, damp and musky with passion, urged his beast to frenzy.
His fingertips brushed against the bud of her clit. She stiffened with a cry. Holy hell, had she climaxed already? Even as shudders racked her body, she growled into his mouth, “More.”
“More,” he rumbled in response. He caressed the liquid core of her, his fingers dipping into her, while the demand and weight of his cock grew monstrous. She tumbled through another and then another orgasm, her eyes squeezed shut, the expression on her face bordering on torment if not for the pleasured sounds she made.
“Inside me,” she panted. “Now.”
Nathan lifted himself up enough to undo the fastening of his breeches. His cock sprang free, the relief from pressure enough to make him groan. When her fingers stroked along his shaft, over the aching head and across the weight of his balls, he drew upon wellsprings of control he barely knew he had not to explode in a second. And when she guided him toward her slick opening, as impatient as he, Nathan went to the brink of madness. He thrust into her with one hard, sure stroke.
She was hot and sleek and gripped him like the beginnings of time. They moved together, possessed, and there was no way to know who was more wild because they were both fierce, racing toward pleasure, throwing themselves into it mindlessly. She clawed at him, and when he bit her again, harder, at the juncture of her neck and shoulder, she came with a cry.
He let himself go then. A few more deep, thick thrusts and his own climax tore through him. It was fire, liquid fire, and he realized only later that the feral, animal rumblings of satisfaction and release came from him, from somewhere deep inside.
There was a word for what happened to living matter when it returned to the earth, breaking down to its elemental, liquid state and soaking into the ground to feed another generation of trees and plants. Deliquescence. Nathan, draped over Astrid as they both lay panting and shaking, felt he would deliquesce, dissolve into the soil and leaves, nothing remaining. Spent. He was spent in every sense of the word and could hardly move, weighted down with exhaustion and contentment. Even his beast could barely stir. It curled up inside of him, rumbling as it slept. Now there was nothing for him to do but melt.
She shoved at him.
“I’m crushing you.” He immediately rolled aside.
When she sat up and began picking at the leaves in her hair, he also sat up—though his body protested at any angle other than horizontal—and brushed at the twigs and leaves clinging to her back. She waved him off.
“I can do it,” she said.
“You can’t reach your back.”
Instead of letting him assist her, she stood and shook out her shirt. She did not seem to care that all she wore at the moment was a shredded chemise. He took a moment to admire her, especially her legs: They were, as he had suspected, long and slim, and sculpted from years of mountain living. He’d felt their strength wrapped around him, pulling him deeper. Gorgeous legs that he wanted to lick.
Which seemed to be the furthest thing from her mind. With quick, methodical movements, she pulled off the remains of her chemise and stuffed it into one of their packs. She dressed herself just as mechanically, as one might dress before setting off to conduct important business elsewhere. There was nothing in her manner suggesting she had just survived dangerous rapids and then made fevered love on the forest floor.
Nathan, sluggish, could only watch her as she bustled about and set herself to rights. Shirt, drawers and trousers, boots, belt. And not once did she look at him.
“I got your clothes wet,” he said. More complex sentences and thoughts eluded him.
She glanced at her damp shirtfront, and the wetness on the front of her trousers, concentrated especially at her hips and between her legs. Where he had lain, and moved.
“It’s fine,” she said through stiff lips, looking away. “It will dry.”
His mind slowly began collecting itself. Something was very wrong. Maybe he had been too rough. He’d never taken a woman with such force. But then he felt the lingering heat of her nails on his back, sharp lines scraped into his skin. If he had been rough, she had been equally so.
“You should cover yourself,” she said.
Nathan got to his feet, tucking himself back into his trousers. The action was all the more difficult because his trousers were still wet from his trip in the river.
She went to the packs and rifled through them.
He followed, reaching out to stroke her hair, but she ducked from his hand and sidled away.
“We should go,” she said. “I don’t know how far it might be to reach the Earth Spirits, and we need to cover more—”
He’d had enough. “What the hell are you doing?”
She stared at him, unblinking, removed. “I’m putting us back on track for our objective.”
Anger flared at her retreat. “Astrid. We just—”
“I know what we just did,” she said, her voice glacial. “I was there.”
“Me, too,” he growled. Her determined indifference dug at him. He wanted some kind of reaction from her, anything. Even anger. So he goaded. “Or maybe you were too busy throwing yourself onto my cock to notice.”
She winced slight
ly, his crudeness shaming him, but it was some kind of reaction rather than icy impassivity. “Don’t confuse yourself,” she said. “What happened was only an expression of lust.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “More than that.”
“It wasn’t.” She hardened her chin, almost surly. “I’ve not had sex in five years. It’s only natural that, after being in such close contact with a man as we have been, and then surviving the rapids, I needed some release. You were convenient.”
The word was like a slap. He glowered as he stalked to her. “I’ve spent my life being dismissed, pushed aside because I’m an Indian, but I pushed back. And I’m damned well not going to allow it now.”
She looked offended. “This isn’t because you are Native.”
“No,” he answered. “You’re afraid.”
“Afraid?” she shot back, disbelieving. “I’ve faced fire demons while trapped inside a collapsed pyramid. Crossed the icy wastes of Siberia with nothing but a knife. I’m not afraid.”
“But you are frightened.”
She stiffened. “Getting bloody presumptuous just because I let you roger me.”
“It was better than a rogering.”
“Now you’re being arrogant.” She tried to brush past him, but he gripped her arm. She glared up at him. “Lesperance—”
“No going back,” he said. “It’s Nathan now.”
“What sodding difference does it make?” she snapped.
“It makes a hell of a difference,” he fired back. “It means we’re more than strangers fucking each other.”
Hurt stained her cheeks. “We have just crossed the boundary of the Earth Spirits’ territory. A tribe that is feared by all the Natives in these mountains, and likely with good cause. The Heirs of Albion are close behind us, ready to use the darkest magic they possess to capture you and kill me. Now is not a good time to have this discussion.” She tried to pull away, but he held tighter.
“No running,” he growled.
She turned mulish. “You can’t browbeat me into submission.”
He scrubbed one hand over his face, frustrated with her and himself. “Astrid. You loved your husband. I can’t pretend to understand what it must be like to love someone and lose them, to have them die in my arms—”
She tried again to wrench away. He still would not release her.
“But I know I would be afraid, too,” he continued. “Afraid to feel anything again. And I’d fight like the devil to keep everyone away. It was like that after I lost my family. But I didn’t live the rest of my life that way. I didn’t bury myself in the wilderness, hiding.”
“I’m not hiding, damn you!” Her eyes shimmered. “I built a new life for myself. A life apart.”
“Never answering letters? Abandoning friends, family? Living in an isolated cabin with only books for company? That’s not a life apart. That’s hiding.”
Anguish and anger suffused her face, and he hated causing her any pain, but feeling something, anything, was better than numb detachment. She was too bright, too alive, to waste herself as she did.
“What do you want from me?” she demanded.
“I won’t let you run like a deer. Everyone else let you scamper into the bushes and stay there. It’s not going to work with me. I’ll hunt you out.”
For some moments, she was silent, staring at him with silver smoke eyes filled with guarded trepidation and the smallest, barely perceptible beginnings of hope, before glancing away. “You are a stubborn son of a bitch.”
“Always have been.”
“An arrogant, stubborn son of a bitch,” she amended.
“And you’re a recluse, a mountain cat who’s just as stubborn.” He unclasped his fingers from around her arm. A softer woman would bruise, but she wouldn’t. “We need to get back on the trail,” he said, yet added when she let out a small sigh of relief, “but don’t think this is over between us. I never back down from a challenge.”
She tilted up her chin. “Is that what I am to you, a challenge?”
“Oh, no, love,” he said softly. He stroked the skin just beneath her bottom lip with the pad of his thumb and was rewarded with a blaze of returning desire in her eyes. “You’re much more than that.”
Even to an experienced mountain woman such as Astrid, these lands were unknown. She took in the landscape—snow-crowned peaks, open and shaded valleys, evergreen woods—with a careful, assessing eye, but underneath that caution, a gleam of excitement. The same as when she and Nathan had conquered the river rapids.
Yet none of this resonated as deeply as what had just happened.
She’d never been so wild. She had wanted him—still wanted—with a hunger and need that alarmed her. Not only his body within hers, but that greater, subtler connection she had not felt in so very long. And this frightened her as much, if not more so, than the Heirs. They could only hurt her body. But her desire for Nathan could tear her completely apart and leave her in ruins. She knew it the moment they touched. She’d had to protect herself after the searing intimacy of their sex—but Nathan was too strong to back down, to let her retreat. He would not accept her flight.
Infuriating, but liberating, as well. His extraordinary strength shattered her defenses, freeing her, and that freedom was a joy and a terror.
Face this moment, she told herself. The land and people within it were treacherous. She would face those threats and wonders rather than the ones within herself.
He, too, felt the excitement of discovering a new land, she saw, but there was more than that simple emotion.
“Hear that?” he asked as they wended through a sloping pine forest.
She stilled. “An animal? People?”
“A heartbeat.”
Her brows went up. “Perhaps your own.”
“No.” He gazed around, upward, trying to isolate the noise. “Not my own. It’s coming from”—he gestured, taking in the land surrounding them—“everything.”
She felt her gaze softening. “Even if I had your sharp hearing, I think that sound is yours alone.”
He nodded slowly, half dazed, as though suspended in a dream. Not a sleepy, languorous dream, but the kind that revealed hidden truths previously unknown to the dreamer. “This place wants something from me. I can feel it….”
She stepped closer to him, compassionate, cautious. After their sex had shattered the walls between them, something had shifted, a tentative intimacy growing in their now exposed and tender core. “These lands, they are in you, just as the wolf is in you. Buried for years. Until now. A homecoming.”
The word was so foreign to him he started. “Homecoming,” he murmured. “Home. Never had one, not truly. Are these ancient mountains and primeval woods my home?”
“Nathan,” she said softly, drawing his attention, “I think you should change into the wolf.”
He looked at her with surprise but said nothing.
“Whatever it is in this territory,” she explained, but gently, “it’s calling to you. It wants you to find the other Earth Spirits.”
“And the best way to do that is to take on my other form,” he concluded.
“At the least, you could scent the Earth Spirits out. Your senses are better when you become the wolf, aren’t they?”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t recognize their scent.”
“I think you will.” Quiet confidence in her words, both in herself and him.
Woven into his flesh and soul were the means by which he could transform himself. The world he had known no longer existed. The man he’d been seemed to fade into something else, but what that “else” might be remained to be discovered.
“You would have to carry both packs,” he cautioned.
“I’m strong.”
“That I know,” he said, admiration plain in his voice. He glanced around. They stood amid bracken and pine. It would not be difficult to step behind a tree, take off his clothes, and there, unseen, shift into the wolf. She could sense that it was easier for him to su
mmon the animal now. He didn’t have to wait for a threat. He could do it. Privately, as he’d done before.
Astrid saw the hesitation on his face. “I can look away or,” she pointed several yards distant, “wait for you there.” She understood the exposure he felt to have anyone, even someone who knew his secret, watch the transformation. She understood vulnerability, going to great lengths to hide her own.
He seemed to come to a decision.
“Stay,” he said. He slipped the pack from his back. “Will you put my clothes in the pack?”
She nodded, mute, eyes wide. “I’ll—” She swallowed and tried to turn away but seemed unable to move at all. “I will look away.”
“Don’t. We shared something before,” he nodded toward the direction from which they’d come, the riverbank on which they’d made love. “We’ll share this now.” He pulled off his boots with hands that shook slightly with the intimacy of what he was about to do. A greater intimacy than the joining of their bodies in sex. They both knew that no one had ever seen him so unguarded, so truly exposed as he would be in a moment.
Nathan tried to calm his thundering heart. She knew he could shift into a wolf and wasn’t afraid or disgusted. But that might change to see him actually transform in front of her.
He had to take that risk. Had to show her what it meant. To him and to her.
He unfastened his breeches and slid them down his legs. A momentary gratification to see the purely female appreciation in her face. He couldn’t think of that now. The breeches were folded and put beside his boots, then he rose to his full height. Naked. Poised on the edge.
Hard to tell who was more apprehensive. Her breathing, like his, came in short, shallow gasps, measuring life in tiny increments.
Then, holding her silver gaze with his own, he let it happen. He reached into himself, where the animal dwelt, pacing inside of him, alert and keen. The part of himself he’d always fought against. Indians were animals. That was all they could ever be. That’s what he was taught. He’d pushed it away, fighting himself, but that time was past. Now he summoned it.
