No Light

by Hettie Ivers

  He looked like he was about to kiss me.

  “I do,” he agreed with a hint of a smile. “We’re both fixers. It’s a shared problem.”

  “Don’t look so pleased about it. It’s a bad thing.”

  “If you say so.”

  Just when I was sure he was going to kiss me, he pushed off the back of the couch, moving out of my space as he stood upright—leaving me feeling flustered and bereft at the loss.

  My disappointment was short-lived, however, because he reached one hand behind his thick neck, grabbed his shirt collar, and pulled his T-shirt over his head and off in one sexy move.

  I saw my mark at the juncture of his neck and shoulder, and my mouth watered at the sight.

  It was still there. He hadn’t blocked the progress of my werewolf mating venom to prevent it from becoming permanent, as Kai had said that he was capable of doing.

  He reached for the button fly of his jeans next, and my stomach flip-flopped.

  My inner wolf did a happy dance.

  He could have easily vanished his clothing. But it was as if he wanted me to watch him strip naked—knowing full well what it was doing to me. And there was no hiding what it was doing to me.

  He pulled his jeans down next.

  He wasn’t wearing any briefs.

  He bent at the waist as he removed his pants at the ankles, one long, powerfully muscled leg at a time.

  With his jeans discarded, he casually straightened to his full height again, unabashedly displaying just how virile a man-slash-superbeast he was.

  Damn.

  I forced my eyes up to his face when I realized that he’d asked me a question.

  “Huh?”

  “I said, how did you get bitten by the rogue if you had the rifle and shot him?”

  What?

  Who the hell strips down to their birthday suit to ask that question?

  “Are you kidding?” My voice sounded every bit as annoyed and sexually frustrated as I felt. “It takes multiple shots.” I waved my hand around, struggling to regain my composure as the scent of his sex grew stronger in the air—calling to weaker parts of me. “He charged me and got a bite in somewhere between the fourth and sixth bullet.”

  “So he got close enough to bite you—bite you hard and long enough to release his venom—but you managed to keep the rifle in your hands and continue shooting him?”

  He’d begun casually stroking the length of his erection as he asked the question, throwing me off kilter even more with his bizarre behavior.

  What the—?

  “Are you getting off hearing about this?” I balked. “About my rogue attack? Is this some kind of freaky kinky shit you’re into? Because I am not down with—”

  “No. No—not at all.” His eyes widened at me in disbelief before rolling away, and he began to pace—while still stroking his dick. “I’m using physical sensation to try and keep my wolf—and myself—calm as we discuss things that I know I’m going to have a hard time hearing about. Because I need to understand how you were infected and how you survived.”

  He stopped pacing and planted his hands on his hips, confronting me head on—with his giant dong pointed in the air. “And so far, Avery, I have to tell you, your story doesn’t check out. If you were pumping bullets into an attacking rogue, he’d have been so crazed that he would have bitten to kill, not just infect. In the situation you’ve described, you’d have been more likely to bleed out from a wound by an angry, unstable rogue.”

  He reached down and cupped and rolled his balls in the palm of his hand briefly before resuming slow, measured strokes up and down his shaft as he awaited my response.

  I decided this was the most bizarrely staged exchange I’d ever had with someone. Even for my life it was odd—which was saying something.

  God, we probably were true mates.

  I shrugged and muttered the only snarky excuse I could think of. “Maybe he didn’t like the taste of me.”

  “Where did he bite you?”

  “In the woods, by our campsite.”

  “This isn’t a joke, Avery.”

  That werelock cock of his pointing straight up to the sky taunting me was no joke either.

  “He bit my throat,” I admitted.

  “There’s no scar on your throat.”

  “It healed after I turned.” I was grasping at straws.

  “But none of your other scars did.”

  “The others were old scars. The neck wound was still fresh when I turned werewolf.”

  He raised a sardonic brow. “Ah, that how it works then?”

  I pursed my lips. I didn’t know how it worked, and he knew it.

  He filled the silence. “The wound would’ve been a week old by the time you shifted. Old enough that it would’ve left a scar despite your new healing capacity. Unless someone with extraordinary healing capability—such as a werelock—intervened to heal your neck wound and assist your first shift.”

  “No werelock helped me,” I insisted, popping up off the couch in my anger and frustration at his striptease interrogation tactics. How was I supposed to focus with him naked and stroking his cock in front of me?

  “When you went to the police to report the attack,” he calmly relayed, “there were no abrasions on your neck or anywhere else. You were dirty and your clothing was torn and bloodied, but there were no physical injuries anywhere on your body that they could see—which is what initially landed you on rogue hunters’ hit lists when they looked into the incident and read human law enforcement’s ‘unofficial’ record of your account of the attack.”

  Hellfire.

  I walked to the bar shelf and poured myself a glass of water. With my back to him, I said, “Look, I got lucky, okay? What the hell do you want from me? I thought you saw me as your perfect, predestined mate that your ancestors had protected on your behalf all this time. Now you’re sorry that I managed to somehow survive the unsurvivable?”

  I took a long gulp to soothe the dryness in my throat. And the panic in my heart. Then I took another to delay turning around to face him.

  “No,” he responded from behind me. “I’m sorry that you still feel the need to lie to me. That you can’t trust me yet—can’t sense how much I adore you. How loyal and devoted to you my wolf and I are already.”

  I closed my eyes at his words.

  I felt his tempting warmth stealing up behind me. Before he could get too close, I turned and sidestepped, holding my water in front of me—as if the cool glass could shield my heart and keep distance between us.

  His brow wrinkled. “Don’t you know I’m on your side, Avery? That I’ll do anything to protect you—no matter who your enemy is?” His hazel eyes on me were searching. Intent.

  And his words … they felt pure—in my heart.

  But when he went in for his face-cupping move, I took a step back, challenging, “Why would I know that, Chaos? Trust is something that takes time.”

  “I agree, honey. But you were smart and courageous enough to make it this far—to survive for this long keeping your daughter’s identity a secret from our world.”

  My heart punch-started and fluttered violently in my chest at his revelation.

  He knew.

  “And I know you’re smart enough to understand that we won’t have the luxury of time much longer where your daughter’s life is concerned. So I hope you can find the courage to take a leap of faith and trust me.”

  With every word, he confirmed it: He knew about Sloane. How much he knew, I wasn’t sure. It sounded like he knew enough.

  My heart pounded. The crazy part was it didn’t feel so much like terror and panic gripping the organ beating like a wild drum in my chest anymore. It felt like excitement. Maybe even relief.

  “Trust that I’ll protect your daughter with my life just as I’ll protect you.”

  I didn’t stop him or step out of the way when he went in for his face-cupping move a second time.

  He knew my daughter was the Rogue that he’d b
een hunting so many years for. And he wanted to protect her.

  I swallowed. “I don’t understand.”

  His smiling eyes beamed back at me. “I’m all in, Avery. Forever.”

  His palms were warm on my cheeks as his long fingers slipped into the hair behind my ears to rub in soothing circles against my scalp. He sighed gently and pressed his forehead to mine, and that strange sense of familiarity washed over me again—like we’d done this a million times before.

  Or maybe it was the sense that we were going to do this a million times again. The intuition that we were meant to.

  And I knew in that moment that I wanted us to. More than I’d ever dared hope for such a thing before.

  I wanted him—the big hot werelock with the weird name who for serious was totally into me despite all the obvious obstacles to our union.

  My glass flew out of my hand and shattered somewhere as I reached for him—for the massive erection between us that curved the right way.

  My clothing evaporated as he groaned and lifted me off the floor, our mouths fusing in a messy convergence of hope and fear, cemented by primal lust as we invaded one another, body and soul.

  My hands were frantic to touch him everywhere; my legs locked around his waist. He fisted my hair and his tongue overpowered mine in a kiss that was as exquisite as it was rough. Consuming.

  All in.

  My back hit the wall. Something crashed to the ground nearby as he shoved inside of me, filling me to perfection.

  My claws extended and scored down his back as he thrust hard. Deep. Withdrawing and slamming into me with a grunting force that was all animal, his hips rolling and pumping into my slick center that was swollen with need and gripping onto his invading organ as if fearing it might not return each time he pulled it away.

  But it did. Returning again and again with a blinding passion that said it’d always be back for more.

  He fucked me like his cock was claiming me—because it was.

  He was.

  Alcaeus

  I held my wolf in check for as long as I could. But when the first orgasm hit her—her pussy squeezing, fluttering, and clenching around me as her body tightened and then melted in ecstasy against mine—I lost control and sank my canines into her throat.

  Mine.

  She cried out in surprise and her nails dug into my shoulders.

  I paused just long enough to inhale deeply as I pulled my hips from the cradle of her spread thighs, withdrawing a few inches from the heaven of her gripping wet heat. When I scented no fear or pain from her, I growled and thrust my hips forward, biting down until my canines were lodged deep within the muscle tissue of her neck.

  Mine forever.

  She cried out again.

  I didn’t pause this time. Because her cry was accompanied by a rush of hot liquid at the base of my cock as her pussy flooded me with heat, her arousal coating my balls as I drew back and rammed deep, again and again, circling my hips and grinding against her to ensure a direct hit to her little button every single time.

  Mating venom dripped from my fangs. I released so much of it that the taste flooded my mouth.

  Still, I bit down harder—anger and primal protective instincts fueling me as my hands stroked and squeezed her ass and thighs and my fingers found the scar on the back of her left hamstring—wanting to make sure that my mark would take. So that there could never be any doubt to anyone that she was mine.

  We were a mated pair. I wanted the world to know that if anyone dared to harm her, they were asking for hell on earth, for fire and brimstone, from me.

  When she came a second time, I joined her, filling her with my cum as I released even more venom into her neck.

  I bent her over the couch and took her from behind next. The view was everything I’d known it would be, and more.

  While the scars on her back that were directly in my line of sight from this angle still enraged me, it was hard to stay angry at the ghosts from Avery’s past who had caused those scars amid the sight and sensation of my dick gliding in and out of her wet pink folds. And equally difficult to find room for emotions like regret or sorrow when my mate was moaning and undulating in front of me, arching her back and raising her fucktastic ass in the air, her hips pushing back to meet my strokes as her pussy swallowed my cock, over and over again.

  After round six in my sitting room, Avery’s tiny stomach began growling.

  I brought her to the kitchen to feed her, and wound up feeding myself—spreading her delectable body across the island countertop and eating her to orgasm three times. She returned the favor, dropping to her knees on the floor in the kitchen and devouring my cock with such enthusiasm and skill, I broke down and told her that I loved her.

  Seven times.

  I’d been trying to hold back, not wanting to freak her out by saying it too soon, but I figured a blowjob love confession was as safe a way to go as any for the first time.

  After briefly breaking our sex marathon to eat real food, we found ourselves engaging in shower sex—some of which proved rather acrobatic—for two hours next, followed by a relaxing soak in the whirlpool tub. Avery actually fell asleep curled against my chest for a full thirty minutes inside the tub before my wandering hands made their way between her thighs, rousing her.

  Ultimately, we christened every room in the penthouse but the one that Kai was holed up sulking in, before finally doing it classic missionary-style in my bed. We collapsed shortly thereafter from exhaustion.

  I was awakened by the sensation of Avery’s mouth sucking my cock.

  “I love you.”

  Damn. I’d said it again.

  She giggled and hummed around me in response, and my dick jerked, leaking precum into her warm mouth.

  I opened my eyes to watch her.

  Jesus. She’d twisted her long black hair into a knot at the top of her head to keep it from getting in the way of her sucking my cock. I could see my mark on her neck. I was in heaven. Her lips were swollen and puffy as they worked me into a state of total idiocy.

  I decided she’d never looked so beautiful before as she did with her mouth full of my dick. When she released me with a pop to lick my balls, I decided we’d get married in the morning at whatever church opened earliest.

  I think I also said it out loud, because she giggled again as she sucked the head of my cock inside her mouth once more, twirling her tongue all around it before pressing the pointed tip of her tongue into the slit in my glans, prompting me to swear in Portuguese and reach for the knot of hair she’d secured at the top of her head as my hips jerked up into her mouth, filling it to the back of her throat.

  Her fingers wrapped around the base of my dick, stroking and pumping the lower half as I rolled and jerked my hips up like a desperate, horny teenager, coming embarrassingly fast inside her mouth.

  I was still muttering to myself in Portuguese as she finished me off, licking me clean once she’d sucked me dry, and then pressing a sweet kiss to my dick before hopping off the bed.

  “I need a computer,” she announced gaily. “And Internet access.”

  “Take anything you want,” I told her with a groan of satisfaction. “Anything in here is yours. I’ll put your name on the deed to the whole place right after we get married this morning.”

  “Right.” She laughed and began to explore the room.

  Naked.

  God, she was a sight.

  “Am I getting warmer?” she asked as she searched the teak bureau next to my antique writing desk.

  “Hot as sin, sweetheart.”

  She pulled out a razor-thin laptop and held it up in the air. “This one?”

  “Any of ’em,” I said, stifling a yawn. “I mean it. You’re welcome to whatever you want.” I rolled over and looked at the clock by the bed. It was a little after three in the morning. We’d barely slept at all.

  Before she’d nodded off in the whirlpool earlier, I’d gotten her to confide quite a bit to me about her daughter, Sloane. Sh
e’d said that she needed to get a message to Sloane and her caretaker, Azda, and I’d assured her that I’d get her a computer and Internet access right after we got out of the tub.

  Of course, that promise had been forgotten the moment I’d been balls deep inside of her again.

  “Password?” she asked. She’d set up the laptop at my writing desk and was logging on.

  “Bento1482,” I answered quickly as I felt Lessa tapping my mind. I hesitated for a second before blocking her.

  I really did need to talk to Lessa. But now wasn’t the best time.

  Right now I just wanted to enjoy being in Avery’s presence for a while longer—to bask in this beautiful state of normalcy that we were experiencing. It was so rare in our world. Plus, I was ass-tired, and I needed to have all my wits about me before I started trying to explain to family members about my new Rogue daughter, Sloane.

  A phone started ringing somewhere—everywhere—throughout the house. I had a house phone here? Oh, yeah, I guess I did.

  I didn’t have to look at the caller ID to know that it was Lessa. My sister was a damn bloodhound.

  “Sorry. I gotta take this real quick,” I told Avery before snatching up the receiver on the nightstand and walking into the adjoining master bathroom for privacy.

  “Hey, Lessa,” I greeted, then went straight into ditching her. “Now’s not a great time. I meant to call you after the meeting in Denver, but I’ve been kind of busy with—”

  “Never mind about that,” she cut me off. “I already heard the whole thing was a bust. That’s not why I’m calling.”

  “What? Wait—what whole thing was a bust?”

  “When I didn’t hear from you, I contacted Clifton, the Highlands Ranch pack Alpha you were supposed to have the meeting with,” she relayed at breakneck speed. “He told me they weren’t able to make it to the meeting with you because there was some terrible attack on his pack that night.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked nonchalantly, fighting to keep the smile on my face out of my voice.

  “Yeah, someone burned their whole gated community down. They don’t know who or why.”