Howl at the Moon

by Christine Warren

  "Then I'll ride with you."

  "Don't be a jerk. I'm a grown woman. I can take care of myself. In fact, I'm Lupine; I could take care of you, too."

  He shot her a sideways glance full of heat. "As I recall, the last time we tussled, it ended in a draw. It will be interesting to see who wins the rematch."

  Sam froze for a second, then shrugged into her backpack with what looked to him to be very deliberate nonchalance. "As I recall, the last time we 'tussled' ended in a demon attack."

  "I can guarantee that we won't start the rematch unless we're very much alone."

  He'd pitched his voice deliberately low, letting the huskiness of his desire creep into it and rumble between them. He saw no point in concealing from her the fact that he wanted her. Hell, he didn't think he could do it if he tried. What he hadn't counted on was her reaction. He watched the ripple race up her spine with fascination and found himself wondering what it would feel like if she gave one of those full-body shivers while he was inside her.

  Sam drew herself up, deliberately drawing on a mask of cool challenge. But when she met his eyes, hers had gone just the slightest bit hazy. She wanted him, too.

  "I haven't agreed to a rematch," she said, stepping out from behind the protection of her desk and walking deliberately around him, far enough away to maintain some distance but not so far as to give him the impression he scared her.

  He knew he didn't scare her, just like he knew he threw her off-balance. Both truths pleased him.

  She headed for the door, her chin up, her expression a study in confident unconcern. Noah couldn't resist. As she walked past, he caught her arm and turned her, bringing her close enough that he could feel the heat radiating off her body. He wondered how much of it was because of her Lupine metabolism that kept her body temperature hovering just over a hundred degrees and how much of it was a reaction to his nearness.

  Maybe it was time to find out.

  Deliberately he straightened from his half-seated position on the desk and aligned their bodies so he could feel her heat along every inch of him. He had to grit his teeth against the sensation in order to maintain his control.

  "If you won't let me take you home," he rumbled, releasing her arm to stroke his hand up over her shoulder until he cupped the back of her neck, "then I'll have to say good night right here."

  Squeezing gently, he shifted closer and slowly, intently, lowered his mouth to hers.

  He gave her plenty of time to pull away, but she didn't. Instead, she stood very, very still, not resisting but not melting against him in the way he craved. He kept the kiss light, brushing her mouth with soft, teasing little contacts, enjoying the plush, velvety giving of her lips beneath his. She was the softest thing he'd ever touched, and he wanted to touch a lot more of her.

  He let the hand cupping her neck firm by degrees until the pressure brought her closer to him and he felt the hot shudder of her breath against his lips. The tip of her tongue followed, tracing the seam of his slightly parted lips, gathering his flavor like nectar to a hummingbird. She teased for a long, tense moment, then retreated, and he followed as helplessly as a sailor steering for the Sirens' rocks.

  Her lips parted, luring him deeper, urging him on, and he battled the urge to rush, instead progressing with almost excruciating slowness, savoring every minuscule change in texture and flavor. The surface of her lips felt like velvet and tasted like spun sugar, but beneath, the tender inside of her mouth felt like hot, damp silk and clung just as enticingly to his probing tongue. She tasted of honey and almonds, like an exotic Middle Eastern treat, and the soft skin beneath his hand felt as hot as a sandy desert. He could have devoured her then and there and felt nothing but the satisfaction of a craving fulfilled.

  But this wasn't the place.

  Slowly, reluctantly, he drew back, easing from the kiss by the same mind-numbing degrees that he'd entered it. With a fierce sense of satisfaction, he felt her lips cling sweetly to his for a moment before he raised his head.

  He looked down at her, taking in the fog in her golden eyes, the heavy lids, the slick sheen of her mouth, and wanted to give a primitive grunt of satisfaction. He settled for a lazy smile.

  "Take care of yourself, Samantha," he purred, letting his hand caress her nape as it withdrew and feeling her tremble with another of those full-body shivers. "I'll see you in the morning."

  She nodded, blinked, then stepped back, putting a buffer of space between them. He saw that her fingers had clenched around the thin straps of her backpack until the knuckles looked white against the dark leather. His smile widened.

  Stepping forward, he put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her to face the door. It required a tiny nudge to start her moving. She didn't say a word, just stumbled out into the hallway, pulling the door closed behind her, more out of habit, Noah guessed, than intent.

  For the next five minutes, he stood staring at the blank wooden door panels and grinning like a prize fool. Saturday couldn't come fast enough.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Samantha felt Saturday looming before her like a bottomless pit and cursed the day Noah Baker had been born. Or at least the day he'd hit puberty and condemned a generation of helpless women to lust and confusion. It was Wednesday night, she still hadn't made any appreciable headway on the situation with Annie, and every bloody time Sam sat still long enough for her mind to wander, it wandered right back to Monday's mind-altering kiss.

  She swore to the moon, Noah Baker's lips were like LSD. She'd almost been able to feel the circuitry in her brain rewiring itself. How else could she explain the fact that one kiss from him had done more to upset her equilibrium than the sum total of all her past romantic relationships combined? It was ridiculous.

  Scowling, Sam dropped her dinner dishes in her kitchen sink and poured herself another half glass of wine. Her thinking had been cloudy for the past three days, so she didn't need to add a haze of alcohol to the equation; but at the same time, tension had her wound so tight that if she didn't find a way to release it, she'd wind up snapping under the sheer pressure.

  Her libido whispered that it knew of a fabulous way to release her tension…

  "Like I haven't thought of that," Sam growled to herself, taking her wineglass and settling herself at the pine desk in the corner of the living room.

  She'd thought of little else since Monday. All she had to do was pause for breath and she could feel the warm weight of Noah's hand cupping the nape of her neck, taste the rich spice of his mouth, feel the hard length of him pressed up against her body. Goddess, another two and a half days of this and he'd be taking her for dinner in the cafeteria at Bellevue.

  Powering up her laptop, Sam tried for the millionth time to figure out what it was about Noah that put every one of her nerve endings on high alert. Sure, he was a raging babe, but she'd seen plenty of gorgeous men before. She'd even dated a few of them, and she was related to a hell of a lot more, but no one had ever affected her the way Noah did. Even the first time they'd met, when she'd attacked him because she'd thought he was kidnapping Abby, Sam had felt the flare of heat between them. At the time, she'd written it off as a side effect of the adrenaline caused by the fight, but it hadn't gone away. In fact, it had gotten stronger every time they'd met for the entire last six months. Ruefully she acknowledged they were both lucky nothing had taken to bursting into flames anytime they got within ten feet of each other.

  Nothing, that is, other than her sex drive.

  Sam would have loved to blame that on the moon, on hormones, on her heat cycle, but none of them seemed to have much effect on it. She wanted Noah all the time, not just when she was in season and not just when the moon was full. It was like an addiction she couldn't shake. Seeing him every day at the office this week had only added fuel to the flames. By the time he picked her up on Saturday, he'd be lucky she didn't throw him down on the stoop and rape him.

  The thought of the expressions on her aunt's and uncle's
faces if she did that gave her pause. She'd realized yesterday that if Noah wanted to go out at seven, he'd have to pick her up at Aunt Ruby and Uncle Henry's place in Brooklyn. There was no way Sam would have time to finish up with the kids, get home, and get ready in time. Which meant that when Noah came to get her, he'd have to meet her family.

  When she'd told that to Noah yesterday before leaving work, he'd taken it in stride, shrugging his broad shoulders and asking her to write down the address for him. She didn't think it had dawned on him just what meeting her family would entail. This wasn't just a polite nod to a couple of aging parents as he escorted her out the door. She was Lupine, for heaven's sake, and Saturday was little Evie's sixth birthday. The entire family would be at the house to celebrate. Noah would be looking at a solid wall of adult Lupines, probably fifteen to twenty of them, all of whom felt they had a right to know Sam's business, especially if Sam's business involved dating a human.

  It wasn't so much that they would object to her date with Noah on principle, just that they would have a good deal of concern about the possibility of her getting hurt. If Sam chose to date someone in the pack, there were rules everyone expected would be followed, and certain repercussions would be meted out if anyone broke them. Humans didn't know the rules and couldn't be expected to follow them; therefore, they presented a special kind of concern for certain members of her family. Including Aunt Ruby and Uncle Henry.

  They had been the ones to raise Sam. Her father had never been in the picture, a rogue with a chip on his shoulder who had claimed her mother and just as quickly discarded her again, only to end up on the losing end of a dominance challenge before he was even aware he'd sired a pup. And Sam's mother, young, selfish, and unable to cope with the responsibility of raising a child, had dropped her off on Ruby and Henry's doorstep before taking off for parts unknown. Sam had always figured she'd gotten the better bargain. Her aunt and uncle had loved Sam as much as their own children and had raised her as one of them. No one had ever spoken of her mother, Ruby's wild younger sister, and that had suited Sam just fine. Cindy Meadows hadn't wanted her daughter, and Sam hadn't needed her mother. Sam had grown up fine and healthy and well-adjusted, thanks to Ruby and Henry, and as an adult she rarely spared a thought to the woman who had whelped her. The Howells were all the family she needed.

  Unfortunately, they'd always been a little overprotective of Sam, maybe to make up for the abandonment she'd experienced in infancy, and that protective instinct would carry over into their meeting with Noah this weekend.

  Guiltily Sam wondered if maybe she should warn him.

  She pondered the issue while she brought up her Web browser and pulled out the notebook she'd been using to keep track of the information she'd been able to dig up on Annie's experiments, molecular biology, and cross-species DNA manipulation. At the moment, the pages remained distressingly empty. Sam had found very little, and most of what she had dug up she didn't really understand. Sam considered herself an intelligent woman, but the vocabulary these Web sites used made her feel like a four-year-old at an astrophysics convention.

  For all intents and purposes, she reflected ruefully, she supposed that's exactly what she was.

  Typing a new search term into the browser window, she hit the go button just as the phone rang. She reached absently for the receiver and murmured a distracted hello.

  "Hey, gorgeous," a familiar voice greeted her. "What are you wearing?"

  Sam laughed and leaned back in her chair. "That depends. Is this going to be a dirty phone call?"

  "Would you let me get away with that?" Noah asked.

  "Mm, probably not. I've never been a big fan of remote-control sex."

  "Me either. I'm a hands-on kind of guy."

  She snorted through a chuckle. "I never would have guessed."

  "So, what are you doing right now?"

  "Just some research," Sam dismissed. "I'm trying to answer some questions for a friend of mine. You?"

  "Paperwork." A note of disgust crept into Noah's voice, making Sam grin. She could easily guess how he felt about that aspect of his job.

  "Ah. So, what did you need me for?"

  There was a short pause on the other line, then a husky laugh. "Now that's a loaded question if I ever heard one, sweetheart. How much time have you got?"

  "Like I said, I'm not into dirty phone calls. I meant, why did you call?"

  "Because I wanted to talk to you."

  "About what? It couldn't wait until morning?"

  It must have been Noah's turn to snort. He did it with authority. "Samantha, this is what people do when they have a personal interest in each other. They talk to each other. Since you refused—again—to go out with me before Saturday, I figured a phone conversation was the next best thing. Sooooo… how are you doing?"

  "Noah, you just saw me three hours ago. I'm doing the same now as I was then."

  "Samantha," he growled, amusement and frustration warring in his voice, "either we can have a nice, casual, getting-to-know-you conversation or I can go back to asking you what you're wearing and what color panties you have on. What do you want it to be?"

  "I'm good, thanks," she said, pursing her lips and staring at the list of Web sites her search engine had pulled up. "And you?"

  "Impatient. Saturday is too far away."

  "I'm pretty sure it's arriving at the usual time." That didn't mean her stomach didn't do an excited little flip at the thought of his eagerness to see her. It made her feel less vulnerable to know she wasn't alone in that. "Don't you have enough to keep you occupied in the meantime?"

  "Sure, but that doesn't mean I can concentrate on it. For some reason, my mind would much rather concentrate on you."

  "Your mind?"

  "No phone sex, remember? My mind. Among other things."

  His voice had deepened on that last bit, but Sam decided to leave it there. Before she forgot that she should. "Okay, so am I supposed to tell you about my day? Oh, wait. You were there watching the whole thing."

  He sighed. "Has anyone ever told you that you're a hard woman to get to know?"

  "Absolutely not. I'm an open book."

  "Written in invisible ink."

  His grumping sounded more good-natured than irritated, so Sam just sipped her wine and waited, her gaze idly scrolling down the list of search results on her monitor.

  "All right," he said. "Why don't you tell me about this birthday party you're having on Saturday?"

  She felt her eyes widen with surprise. "You want to hear the details of me spending an entire day riding herd on a couple dozen six-year-olds? I'm not sure your stomach is strong enough for that."

  "Sweetheart, I've been in combat. After an hour or two in a war zone, I don't think a birthday party is going to faze me."

  Sam laughed out loud. "You haven't spent much time around six-year-olds, have you?"

  "No, but that's Abby's fault. She's been slacking on providing me with nieces and nephews."

  "Somehow, I don't think that will be a problem for much longer." She thought about the electricity that sparked between Abby and Rule and grinned. "So after Junior's sixth birthday party, give me a call and we can have this conversation all over again."

  There was a short pause before Noah rumbled, "I'll put it in my calendar."

  His voice sounded close to a purr, and Sam felt her stomach do something acrobatic. To distract herself, she focused briefly on her computer and hit the button for the next page of search results. "Six-year-olds can be surprisingly… creative."

  "I know I was. My parents still haven't forgotten about the time my best friend and I devised a creative and clever plan to keep in touch through the summer while he went on vacation with his parents fifty miles away."

  "What was the plan?"

  "Smoke signals."

  Sam choked on a mouthful of wine. "What did you set on fire?"

  "My schoolbooks. But when that didn't make a big enough blaze, I threw on my parents' toboggan."

  "A
nd they let you live? What did your friend use?"

  "Oh, Joey had ambition," Noah informed her, and she could hear his grin. "He went for the boat shed at his parents' cabin on the lake. That one took two fire trucks. My mom just used the kitchen fire extinguisher."

  "And where is Joey now?" she laughed. "Prison, perhaps?"

  "Not Joey Jenssen. Like I said, he had ambition. He's a high-ranking employee of the USDA, as a matter of fact. In the Forest Service. Fire and Aviation Management."

  "Good goddess, there goes Montana."

  "So far, so good."

  "What happened to the two of you? Did your parents decide Joey was a bad influence?"

  "Nope. They were too busy worrying I'd be a bad influence on him. When Mom got pregnant with Abby, I think she went to church every day for the whole nine months, just to pray for a civilized child. It worked, too. Abby saved all her troublemaking for after she was all grown-up."

  Sam laughed. "She was that good all along, huh? Even as a kid?"

  "Oh, she was worse as a kid. I don't think she managed to get grounded once in her life. 'Goody Two-shoes' doesn't even begin to describe my sister's childhood."

  "While you, I'm guessing, only got more creative as you got older."

  "I tried," he said modestly. "Do you want to hear about the time I made a citizen's arrest of my fourth-grade teacher?"

  Sam grinned, enjoying their banter. And the butterflies in her stomach that seemed to appear every time she spoke to him. She'd been attracted to other men, obviously; she was almost thirty and a healthy young Lupine in her fertile years. She'd even had crushes before, but this was different. It felt better, stronger, more intense. This felt like the kind of thing that she'd seen develop all around her—between Graham and Missy, Tess and Rafe, Abby and Rule—and never thought she'd have herself. This felt like… home.

  Before Sam knew it, she looked down at the time in the lower corner of her computer screen and saw that more than an hour had passed in flirtation and conversation. She blinked and realized she'd been staring at the same search results for almost forty minutes, which made for a less than effective bit of legwork.