by Sage Domini
Amy hung back a bit but I jumped from the truck, my eyes hungrily searching. For him. A barefoot female came forward, her lovely green eyes appraising me. She smiled and I knew she was Kate Ivanov, the family alpha, and the mother of my intended mate.
She took my hand. “Sheree,” she said. “We are pleased you are here.” She motioned to the throng of gaping Ivanovs and from their midst he appeared.
I swear I couldn’t breathe for a second as those fierce eyes took in every inch of my body. I stood tall, feeling self-consciously large in the presence of all those lithe Ivanov females, but when his eyes reached mine I saw something there. Approval. And desire.
Meanwhile, Amy had timidly emerged from the truck and in a moment her smiling mate, Anton, offered her his arm. They gazed at one another and blushed.
My father quietly unloaded our belongings. Kate Ivanov nodded at him. “Stay the night, Chevalier. We can offer you food and a pallet.”
But my father shook his head. “No, Kate. I’ve been gone several days already.” He sighed as he removed the last of the bags. Amy turned from her mate, tears already in her eyes, and embraced our father. He stroked her long hair. “Goodbye, sweet girl.” The he walked her back to where Anton waited and turned to me.
I swallowed, feeling the weight of dozens of Ivanov eyes. “Goodbye, Daddy.”
He cleared his throat, glancing around. A few curious residents of Luna Junction had come quietly onto the scene. I had known there were five extended werewolf families which populated the town but I couldn’t recall the details. My head buzzed with the fever of being within a few feet of Talon Ivanov. He still mutely watched me and had yet to say anything.
Albert Chevalier opened his arms and I ran into them. I’d been determined not to cry but as I heard my father’s sad sigh the tears came anyway. “I’ll miss you, Sheree.”
The touch on my arm was as sudden as it was electric. I turned my head and faced the intent stare of Talon Ivanov. There was meaning behind the way he gripped my shoulder. It was possession. I was his already. He looked at my father. “She will be safe here.”
My father nodded. “I know.” He tipped my chin up and stared deeply into my eyes. “Be happy too, Sheree.” And then he was gone, leaving me alone with my mate. With Talon.
Kate Ivanov clapped her hands decisively. “You girls must be hungry. My daughters have prepared a meal back at the house.” She raised a perfect eyebrow. “Do you take your meat bloody?”
Amy’s eyes were wide. Chevaliers had been in the habit of cooking their meals since they had arrived in Canada. Albert always said bloody meat was of the old country, an old time. My poor sister looked terrified by this sinewy wraith of a mother-in-law. I cleared my throat.
“We prefer a little heat on our meal. If you don’t mind.”
She laughed, not unkindly. “Of course. To each blood wolf his own.”
Silently several of the Ivanov men had stepped forth and were loading our bags onto their backs. Anton gently took Amy’s arm as the rest of the Ivanovs began moving towards the woods. Occasionally a few would glance back with curiosity.
Talon grabbed the largest bag, mine, from one of the men and flung it casually over his shoulder. He waited while I caught up but made no move to touch me. I peered over at Anton and Amy as they whispered and giggled.
Words didn’t fail me often but I was wracking my brain for something to say to this burley stranger. He walked close but looked straight ahead. I looked up at him, noting that though I was not a small girl by any means, I barely reached his thick shoulder. “Nice weather,” I finally managed.
Talon frowned. “Too dry. Fire risk.”
“Oh.” I kept pace with him easily but was getting a bit annoyed at his quick pace. You’d think a guy would want to exchange a few pleasantries with his new life partner. I decided to try small talk again. “So, ah, now that we’re mates and all-“
Talon interrupted me. “As of this hour we aren’t mated yet, Sheree. That will come later.”
I had to ignore his rudeness because all I heard was the word ‘later’. ‘Later’ was presumably when he’d peel that dingy clothing away and I’d get a close look at the hard muscles hinted at under the bulging fabric. I’d eagerly remove my white cotton dress and the lacy panties I’d acquired on a last shopping trip to Calgary. We’d face each other completely naked and then, and then…
Well, I wasn’t sure.
But I’d caught enough half glimpses of passionate embraces and heard enough pleasure moans to know that what came next had to be good.
In fact, during the raucous melee which apparently passed for an Ivanov party, I was so preoccupied with thoughts of ‘later’ that I found it difficult to eat much. While Amy and Anton tenderly whispered under a tree, Talon seemed to have forgotten about me. He stood with a small clot of Ivanov men I hadn’t even been introduced to.
I sighed. Perhaps I’d misread the glint in his eyes. Maybe he was disappointed in me after all. A pair of very young red haired girls were watching me merrily.
“You’re a big lady,” one said and the other giggled. “But we think your dress is pretty.”
I stared at the girls. They were children, but still seemed old enough to know better than to be so obnoxious. Then I remembered my father telling me that Ivanovs were a little uncivilized by modern standards. They were reluctant to send their children to the human schools and kept to themselves as much as possible. I looked over at my intended mate and mused that perhaps Talon kept his distance because he was shy.
Slowly I rose from the grassy patch where I’d been sitting and made my way over to him. The other males stopped talking at my approach and Talon turned around. He seemed surprised to find me right behind him. Then he cast a quick glance at the sky. “Right,” he said. “It’s nearly twilight. We’ll mate before the moon rises.”
The other men nodded curtly. I was so shocked by his casual mention of our impending mating that I couldn’t speak. Talon took me by the elbow and began to lead me deeper into the woods along a rugged country dirt road. He snapped his fingers at Anton who looked up in surprise and then gathered Amy into his arms.
I let myself be pulled along but was beginning to feel a bit ill at ease. Was he planning to have me right there on the forest floor without so much as ‘Hey, how about it?’ or whatever it was these weird werewolves said to one another before joining bodies??
Talon must have sensed my reluctance. He turned and spoke tersely. “I’ve built a cabin. It should be comfortable, even by your standards.”
I craned my neck around. There was no one else in sight. “What about my sister?”
He stopped walking and regarded me impatiently. “Your sister belongs to my brother now. They have their own home on the other side of these trees.”
I pulled away from him, annoyed at the way he was yanking me along like a ragdoll.
Talon was exasperated. “What?”
I crossed my arms. “This is just all so, I don’t know, primitive I guess.”
His eyes narrowed. “What were you expecting?”
I sighed. “Look, I know I’m not the hottest girl this side of the moon, but I’m not nothing. I mean, you haven’t even kissed me yet.”
I had scarcely uttered the words when Talon Ivanov grabbed me around the waist and pulled me up. Our mouths met in a hot fury. He crushed my body against his as his tongue darted with urgency. And as we pressed closer together I felt another urgency, harder and lower.
Then just as abruptly he released me. “I assume,” he said archly, “that you don’t want to mate right here.”
I looked around. We were alone, but we were still outdoors by the side of a dirt road. Not exactly the stuff a girl’s dreams are made of. “No,” I admitted, although if he had insisted I knew I would have eagerly opened my legs.
His voice was gruff. “Follow me, then.”
My heart pounded as we traveled the last hundred yards to a simple yet handsome cabin. I breathed, smelling the fre
sh wood. The moon was beginning to rise as Talon’s hand went to open the door. “It’s not finished,” he said. “But near enough.”
The door creaked open and I peered in at the sparse interior. There was no furniture. My bags had already been neatly placed in the front room. I stepped cautiously over the threshold and flipped on a switch. The light was dim but working. I stared into what I assumed was the bedroom. “There’s no bed?”
Talon closed the door. “I made up a pallet on the floor.”
“Oh, well I’m rather used to sleeping in a bed.”
His voice held a note of irritation. “If you must have a bed I’ll make you a damn bed.”
I looked at him as he leaned back against the door frame. There, in the cabin, he seemed much larger. Much closer. The full enormity of what was about to happen struck me. Talon would open my legs and take me. And we would be mated for life.
The ragged thickness of my own breathing sounded thunderous. Talon casually pulled his shirt over his head. His muscular frame was even more defined than I had guessed. He coolly threw the shirt on the floor and began to unzip his pants. I turned away. This was it. This was ‘later’. I retreated to the bedroom and knelt on the crude pile of blankets. I could already feel him moving closer.
With a gentleness which surprised me, he hooked his thumbs under the straps of my dress and pulled them down. My bra followed and instinctively my hands crossed my heavy breasts, a futile effort to shield them.
Talon reached around and pulled my arms apart. I could feel his hard extension pushing earnestly against my back as he kneaded my breasts, at first lightly and then with more insistence.
He pushed me onto my belly and raised my hips. My damp underwear was all that separated us as his monstrous organ pushed against me. He could barely speak through his panting lust. “Which way, Sheree? For our first time you can choose.”
I understood what he meant. He would mount me from the back. Or from the front. The choice was his gift to me. The sensation of my body preparing to open was a strange one. I groaned as he rubbed against me. “I want what you want, Talon.”
My panties were ripped away with one tug. Talon hesitated. “I’m taking you as my mate, Sheree” he said and hesitated no longer. I cried out as the sharp thrust of his penetration tore through my barrier. He didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. My breasts bounced against my belly as he pounded and with each thrust I felt the disappearance of Sheree Chevalier and the emergence of Sheree Ivanov.
Our bodies grew slick with sweat as we moved together. Dimly, beneath, the ache, I felt the first tendrils of pleasure as Talon’s large hands reached around and seized my breasts. Even as the enormity of his lust threatened to break me in two I heard my own moans of ecstasy.
Talon was spurred on by my pleasure, his rhythm increasingly frenetic. At the moment his hot climax spurted inside of me he opened me wider and pushed even deeper.
We collapsed together in a tangle of limbs and sweat. It was done. I was no longer a Chevalier. I nestled closer to my mate with a happy sigh and wrapped my arms around his chest.
Talon raised himself and stared at my naked body. He held my wide hips between his hands and grinned. “You were made to breed,” he said with approval.
I opened my arms to him but he rose from the pallet and walked to the front door. I was confused when he opened it. And then a moment later I heard the soft beat of his running paws. And after that the wolf’s jubilant howl at the moon.
“Damn,” I swore, staring out the uncovered window. I rolled to my side and curled up, knowing that soon he would return, hungering to take me again. And again. And despite my anger at being regarded more or less like a brood mare, I wanted him to.
***
A scream of childish rage yanked me out of my memories.
“MOMMMMM!”
I sighed. “I’ll be right out. And you better all be dressed and ready when I do. John, help Seth.”
I heard some grumbling and the word ‘unfair’ but they quieted down. I peered down at my body. During the reverie of my mating night my hand had unwittingly traveled between my legs. I had learned these past months how to satisfy myself and I didn’t feel guilt as I finished the job there in the tub. Yet as the spasms of pleasure cascaded and then receded I was sad. My hand was no substitute for my mate.
Talon.
In many ways the past ten years had been infuriating. We fought often and wildly. Rarely was there any resolution. Talon Ivanov was a stone wall, a wolf who would yield to no female and he considered his word law. I jealously watched the soulful connections between other mates, such as Anton and Amy. Their love was written on their faces. Talon had never, not once, even whispered his under cover of darkness.
But still, there were moments.
When he took our newborn first son from my breast with ecstatic wonder and leaned over, kissing me tenderly. Or those rare occasions when he accepted my company during a full moon and we ran together with delicious abandon, finally tiring and shifting back to human form so we could couple with the same urgency which had never subsided since our first mating.
A tear rolled down my cheek as I tiredly wrapped myself in a towel. I hadn’t suffered Amy’s loss. My mate, the father of my children, lived. But he had lost more than his hand. Talon had always disdained human concepts, like love. Wolf first; that was the Ivanov way.
But now, unable to run, he was something less. And since he would never accept living as a mere human, Talon was trapped somewhere in between. These days when I tried to reach his haunted eyes, he barely saw me.
I missed him.
Chapter Three
The crispness of the air was invigorating. Since we were going to Flagstaff, I flung a light coat over my shoulders and buttoned up the boys. The air had warmed enough for it to be comfortable on hardy blood wolf skin but people wouldn’t understand that. To them it was still the season to bundle their tender bodies in warm layers. If we showed up at the Flagstaff Mall in February wearing only t-shirts they would stare. And it was always better to avoid attracting attention.
John frowned when we bypassed the road which led to town and beyond. “Where are we going?”
“Kate’s.”
One of the boys issued a soft groan and then yelped when his older brother poked him in the ribs.
“We won’t be at your grandmother’s house long,” I promised. “I thought I’d see if Aunt Amelia wanted to come with us.”
The boys brightened at that. They loved their pretty young aunts. Tess had been rather preoccupied ever since finding her mate and getting quickly with child. But Amelia was yet unmated and was pleased to fuss over her small nephews.
When I pulled up to the Ivanov cabin, I felt a peculiar prickle at my neck. Although I knew already what caused it, it didn’t stop the instinctual mother wolf’s growl from rising in my throat.
Javier Ramirez watched us from about twenty yards away. He carried a large coil of rope but carefully placed it on the ground and smiled. I waved. Although I had become used to the idea of a bitten wolf in the family, others were not as forgiving. Though Javier was mated to his sister and had been instrumental in saving his life during the Luna Junction pack battle, Talon still regarded him warily.
Bitten wolves were once human. It was forbidden for a blood wolf, a natural wolf, to bite a human under a full moon, yet reports first came sifting in a year ago that bitten wolves were rising in the east. Our lore had always told us they were abnormal creatures; volatile and ferocious. And unable to control their shifting.
My father, however, had always dismissed such notions as a load of bunk. Bitten wolves, he always said, were as wolves what they had been as men. If they were cruel humans they would make violent werewolves. Still, he never supported their creation and I’d known from his letters that that Chevaliers were as alarmed as any other blood wolves when the attacks had begun.
Bitten wolves, created by unknown blood wolves for an unknown reason, had been scouting werewolf commun
ities, violently attacking at will. The hunters, that peculiar race which had watched werewolves since history began, suggested an alliance to combat the threat to wolves, to hunters, and to humanity.
It had been a grim summer, culminating in the deaths of the Bellini alpha, Carmine, as well as the Luna Junction sheriff. And also Anton Ivanov. As winter descended all had been quiet. Ominously so.
But my heart knew Javier was no threat, even as my blood wolf instincts were raised by his presence. I smiled at him as he approached, brushing the snow from his dark hair.
“Where’s Tess?”
He jerked his head. “Inside with Kate.”
Tess Ivanov was as headstrong as any Ivanov, perhaps more so. When she had decided to mate with the rogue bitten wolf there had been no stopping her.
I turned the ignition off just as the door to the cabin opened. Tess was radiant as she bounded out the door and landed lightly at her mate’s side. I had worried for the youngest Ivanov girls; they were strange and naïve as a result of being kept so closely to Kate’s side. But Tess had adjusted nicely to her new role as mate. Her usually taut belly was beginning to show the effects of impending motherhood.
The boys poured out of the truck and mobbed her. While they fought for her attention Javier watched me soberly.
“How is he?”
I bit my lip. “The same.”
He sighed. “Is there anything we can do?”
I shook my head. “This battle belongs to Talon alone.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Does it?”
“What do you mean?”
Javier glanced over to where Tess was being shepherded back to the cabin by my raucous sons. His face softened. “She wouldn’t let me fight alone.” His gaze returned to me and he spoke quickly. “You know of the, ah, challenges we faced.”
