by Caine
Chloe nodded before realizing he wouldn’t hear a nonverbal answer from her.
“Yes.” She nodded again, despite herself.
Luke nodded as well. And dipped his head a little. But she doubted it was for her benefit.
And left.
Chapter Four
Caine’s eyes jerked up from the computer screen and he tested the air around him by way of a deep breath. The smell was faint, but growing more acute by the second. His eyes moved to scan the yard right outside the house and his human ears perked to ready for a sound to help identify his surroundings.
Lee’s tail zipped through the very bottom of Caine’s line of sight. His own scent quickly greeting and bidding adieu to Caine’s olfactory gland.
That hadn’t been it.
He pushed himself away from the desk and stood up. The odor was invasive. Familiar, yet in a way that confused Caine’s comfort and recognition.
A pack member. His twin. Caine nodded absently when he detected Luke’s personal scent as part of the strange funk that was invading his territory.
Auditory sensation caught the sound of his brother’s jeep before Caine could see it coming down the two-mile drive to their den.
And the realization of the smell’s other creator came only shortly after that.
* * * * *
Lee’s long, black ears stood erect at the thump that vibrated a pushpin out of one corner of his Marilyn Manson poster. His black and white vision watched the screaming oddity curl partially downward upon himself just as another thump dislodged the right corner tack and sent the Mechanical Animal himself into a position most men would give up a testicle to physically be able to emulate.
Lee leaned over and lovingly licked his solitary nut.
“I can smell her on you!”
Lee’s first date for the prom was abandoned briefly at the sound of his alpha’s accusation in the next room. Still in a black and white world, Lee looked out the window and over the treetops. Toward her cabin.
So that’s what that smell was.
He had only made it a half mile or so through the woods between where he had spent the previous night and where his oldest brother was about to die via alpha wolf bite when he had come upon that smell and a most tantalizing little bitch from a neighboring pack.
He knew that Caine would lose his fucking mind if he smelled that little romp. But she’d allowed Lee to sniff her and he’d even risked a tasty lick when she hadn’t been looking and brotherly beatings had been remembered as much less painful with so much testosterone coursing through him. The bitch had flirted and played hard to get even with her delightfully primed rump in the air to tease him, but nothing in the area of starting his own pack had come of the event.
In fact, nothing and no one had come at all during the event.
Lee whined and continued with his own doggy style of self-love while he listened to his brothers fight in the next room.
“You said we were going to make sure this time…”
“I said I was going to make sure this time!”
“She’s not ovulating yet!”
“It wasn’t your place to determine that!”
“Caine, if the pack waits on you to determine the fecundity of this bitch…”
Fecundity?
Lee glanced over to the dictionary his father had given him the previous Christmas. It had made a hell of a doorstop.
“…we’re looking at extinction of a species with our generation.”
Not ready to be knocked up yet.
Lee nodded and smiled at his own brand of intelligence and then jerked to bite at something he didn’t feel and couldn’t even see crawling through his fur. Don’t ask. He’d never understood the urge to do that, either.
The thump that rattled the remaining two tacks from Mr. Manson jarred Lee’s attention away from his imaginary creepy crawlers. But the tone of his alpha’s voice caused an all-new herd of them to start at the nape of his neck.
“I don’t have to let you or Lee breed, Luke,” Caine growled. “I’m doing this because you’re my brothers and I love you.”
The next thump came with a growl that Lee recognized as his oldest brother’s. “The wolf in me has to listen to you, Caine,” Luke rumbled and Lee jumped as the thump sounded again. Luke was obviously out of control. He knew better than to push Caine this far. Despite their differences, Caine was the alpha and Luke knew and respected that. At least the wolf in Luke did. And the wolf in him knew that to put his hands on Caine in an act of anything other than self-defense was grounds for expulsion from the pack.
Or death.
Meagan had been the last thing that had triggered this irrational, human side of Luke.
“But perhaps I’m not quite as much animal as you’d like to think,” Luke continued. Lee strained to hear through the silence that now came from the other room.
The very distinct, very strong odor of fear wafted through the air.
But whose?
“Or perhaps I’m even more animal than either of us have ever imagined.”
* * * * *
The scratching at the glass door was quiet. Polite, almost.
Chloe caught herself smiling as the alpha peered through the glass at her and then pawed at the handle again. Shuffling the papers she’d been working on to the nightstand, she slipped from under the covers and walked naked and barefoot to the doors.
“Bet you wish you had thumbs, don’t you?”
The alpha whined a doggy plea and sat down to stare at her with his big blue eyes. Chloe felt her heart melt at the sight.
And her insides melt at the memory.
She pointed at the dog through the glass. “If I let you back in, you have to be nice,” she grinned and laid the tip of her finger against the pane.
He licked it from the other side.
She chuckled and shook her head. And opened the door to let him in.
Chloe watched the alpha walk in as if he had a standing invitation. The animal went straight to her bed. His weight caused the bedsprings to creak and the mattress to bounce enthusiastically as he plopped down in the middle of it.
“Oh no,” Chloe shook her head. “We’re not going through this again tonight.” She patted the wolf’s butt with her open palm to try and shoo him off of her bed. He moved slightly and looked at her before turning away from her again and laying his head down on his front paws.
“Boy, I said not on the bed,” Chloe argued and patted his rump a little harder. The alpha blew out an irritated sound and stood up in the middle of the bed before hopping to the floor. Chloe raised her leg to climb into bed but found her wrist grasped between razor sharp teeth that were set in jaws strong enough to urge her into going exactly where he wanted her to go.
The alpha pulled her completely down to the braided rug on the floor before stepping over her. He lay down beside her and then laid his head on her shoulder before sighing a long breath of contentment and closing his eyes.
“Smart ass.”
She had known that one would get a grin.
Chloe reached up and snatched a pillow and tucked it behind her head. The alpha glanced up at the bed and then back at her. Chloe laughed and reached to scratch the animal’s head after he rose up and caught the corner of her quilt between his teeth and dragged it over them. He wiggled and situated himself closer to her. Facing her. Staring into her eyes with that look he possessed.
The one that made her want to forget that he was just a wolf.
“You’re gorgeous, did you know that?”
The wolf blinked slowly and Chloe snorted at his seeming agreement with her admiration of his beauty.
“A little modesty wouldn’t hurt you, though.”
The alpha yawned and stretched his legs.
A large, warm paw landed on her belly.
Chloe picked it up and shifted it off of her. “We are not doing this again tonight,” she stated as she blocked his attempt to paw at her breast this time. Chloe laughed at his method of
bait and switch that allowed him to act as if he was going for her stomach or neck and then move quickly and let his paw press against a nipple or slide down between her legs.
“Stop it!” she laughed, as the alpha’s play grew more intense. Chloe’s two hands were having trouble keeping up with his four paws as he reached with a front leg and then shifted and reached somewhere three feet away on her body with a back paw. Finally, Chloe got his two front legs together in her hands and clamped her legs around his back legs. Trapping all four limbs at once.
“A-ha!” She laughed and teased the wolf as he studied his hogtied-like position. “Now what are you gonna do, smart ass?”
Chloe quickly realized that she really shouldn’t have pushed her luck with this beast.
His teeth caught a ticklish spot just between her ribs. Chloe screamed in laughter as the alpha nipped and licked at her side, torturing her to the point of wetting herself and then moving down an inch or so and finding another spot to torment. She tried twisting to get away from him, but unless she let go of at least two of his legs, she was trapped.
The captor had become the slave.
“Stop!” She laughed and screamed and cried all at once. That damned grin and look was secured on his face as he looked up occasionally to make sure she was still enjoying what he was doing to her.
“Stop it!” She cackled and released his front legs in order to block his mouth from causing her to pee on herself. The giggles came in waves for several seconds as she lay beside him and watched him gloat over his accomplishment. Finally, she felt the wolf shift and settle down beside her again. Away from her this time. Spooning with her. Chloe reached out and stroked the smooth, dark hair on his neck and side.
“Met a man today, boy.”
Chloe watched the alpha’s eyes stay open and stare across the room as she spoke to him. Almost as if he was listening. Chloe reached to turn off the lamp and then rolled to her back and stared up at the ceiling.
“He was almost perfect,” she murmured.
The alpha’s breathing was steady. Soothing. Chloe closed her eyes and let her own breathing mirror the animal’s beside her.
“He was also gorgeous,” she murmured. “And he made me want to do things I have never imagined doing before. Things I’ve never imagined having done to me,” she whispered quietly into the alpha’s ear.
“Don’t ever tell anyone I said this,” she smiled at her own foolishness and stroked the alpha’s side, “but with a little bit of work, I think he could possibly be what I’m looking for,” she stated. And then she giggled. “At least he could be in the bedroom.”
“That’s terrible for me to admit, isn’t it?”
The alpha was still. And quiet. Chloe wanted to imagine the alpha was thinking about what she had just said. She wanted to feel the wolf next to her and allow her fantasies to play through her mind. For just a moment, Chloe wanted to pretend that he was a man. A man like she had dreamed of finding. A man very, very similar to Luke Caine.
But not quite.
Chapter Five
If there was one trait that Chloe simply could not stomach in a human being, it was dishonesty. A student cheating on an exam or a colleague withholding a research finding that could benefit the wolves for the sake of his own glory caused Chloe’s blood to boil. To think that a lover had been deceptive with her enraged her to the point of violence.
If she lived through the brutality of Luke Caine’s fucking her, she was going to kill the bastard. If she didn’t fall forty feet deep in love with him before she could commit homicide.
Chloe glanced up to the logs that made up the outer wall of her bedroom. The backs of his hands were barely visible in the darkened bedroom. Hers were not visible at all. Her palms were pressed against the wood and his hands were hiding hers as he held them there, over her head.
The feeling of his hard, warm dick and his pubic hair against her ass caused her to tighten.
“Relax.”
There was that word again. And this time, his voice had told on him. It had insinuated to Chloe that he hadn’t been completely honest with her when they had first met. His tone was different. Tonight, his hands and mouth and touch had told of his deceiving her as well. They were still brutish and strong, but there was a caring touch underneath it all that she was almost certain she could feel. Rather than the cold, callous heart of a man who rubbed her the wrong way, Chloe now imagined if she cracked this stone of a man open, the underbelly of his soul would have been covered in soft, downy fur.
Something inside her heart had caught wind of his secret as well.
She hadn’t felt the alpha leave her side. And she had no idea of how long it had been between the time the wolf evidently nudged the glass door open and took his leave and when Luke undoubtedly used the same passageway to steal into her bedroom.
What she did know was that it had taken little to no effort for the man to hoist her healthy female frame off of the floor and up onto the bed. And she knew that it had taken even less than that for him to move her into a position almost identical to the one she had observed her wolves using when they mated. But most importantly, Chloe suspected very strongly that she had severely misjudged the man about to make love to her.
“You want this, don’t you, Chloe?”
His cock was bruisingly hard as he pressed himself against her. His breath was hot, moist and seductive sounding down the side of her neck and into her ear. His hands had already proven themselves rude when he’d taken hold of her. And even as they flexed against the backs of her wrists, they seemed greedy and unapologetic for the hunger controlling them. But now, they spoke very clearly to her despite their actions when they released her with a firm press against her hands that told her she was not to move from that position if he was to stop restraining her. But that he wouldn’t punish her too harshly, even if she did.
“Tell me you want this,” he breathed.
Chloe loved to follow orders such as these.
Chloe loved to follow the orders of men like Luke Caine and she loved to feel the rush she now found coursing through her mind and heart and soul as he explored her and tasted her and even hurt her flesh occasionally in his attempts to find everything he could about what made her Chloe and no one else but Chloe.
She nodded and then felt his hands slide down her arms.
“I said tell me,” he ordered firmly. But she had heard the unspoken tenderness in his voice.
The man behind her was not only capable of feeling love, but he was so incredibly capable of feeling it that it sometimes consumed him. It controlled him. Made him seem vulgar and cruel when he tried to express it.
“I do want this,” she whispered as she listened to the other things his touch was silently telling her. “I want you.”
At that moment, Chloe thought she heard his soul tell her that the man whose passion made him bite down hard into the soft, tender flesh of her shoulder didn’t do so in order to inflict pain on her. Nor did he do it to draw the blood that Chloe felt him clean away from her skin with his tongue. He did it because he needed to express something so overwhelmingly precious and right inside himself that it sometimes took the contrast of pain and destruction to allow it to be seen and appreciated for what it truly was.
She was certain she heard this from him. And she understood this. She had always understood this. Chloe saw this in nature and in her wolves every day. She knew that death was simply a sad but beautiful part of life and that there was pain both in the creation of life and in the bringing of that life into the world. She knew damned good and well that sex had more to do with what life truly meant than religion or morality ever could.
“What do you think about when a man’s inside you, Chloe?”
His question startled her. The intimacy of it. The thought of a man being inside her mind had always seemed more intimate to her than a man being inside her body.
“Or do you just think about how he feels inside you?” he pressed when she hadn’t answered.
She shook her head. Chloe knew that it had never been mere sex that she wanted from a man. What she truly wanted was that rare connection to another human being where pleasure and pain, life and death, man and woman were all the exact same thing in nature and the only way that such a unity could possibly be expressed was through actions that would seem to a passer-by to be a war between two people. But it wasn’t a war or a fight against one another. It wasn’t a battle between the man and woman entangled within one another’s flesh. Rather, it was a battle they fought together. While they worked toward the same goal.
To become one.
But she couldn’t tell him this yet.
She had always imagined that the men she had dreamed of, the ones Maw had spoken of, would most likely have understood this better than anyone. A man who was the embodiment of two beings that never should have joined. A man who had no choice but to accept that man is an animal if only because half of his being could be classified in no other way. And a man who was the result of nature’s tenacity. Its will to live and its ability to evolve in order to sustain life.
“Do you like it gentle when a man makes love to you?” he breathed to her. Chloe felt his mouth on her neck and his fingers trace her ribs and then a nipple. “Or a little rough?”
She could feel his forehead pressed against the back of her head, his hands kneading the flesh of her ass. This man wanted inside her. Badly. And he wanted her to want him there, although his hands and body would seem to be quite determined even if she told him she didn’t want him to fuck her. His breath moved her hair as he panted, holding back as much as possible so as if to not seem too obscene in his desires or his actions toward her. She understood what he wanted to do to her. And Chloe knew that he wanted to enjoy free reign while he did it. She wanted the exact same thing for them both.
She took her hands away from the wall and reached back for him. Her fingers found his neck, the stubbled line of his jaw. And then his lips. Chloe pushed against them, causing them to part slightly. Her fingers pressed into his mouth, finding his tongue, and then working themselves into him. Roughly probing inside him as she wanted him to probe inside her. She felt him grip the flesh of her thighs in a bruising response to her invitation.
