by Caine
“So they would have simply taken what they wanted?”
“Why wouldn’t they?” she implored. “The animal side of them would have had no reason not to.”
Chloe shifted in the seat again and looked back to the stop sign where they had been sitting for a moment. She thought about her options. About what was safe and right and the thing that she should do as a woman of her day, education, and level of responsibility. About what she should do seeing as how she had just had sex with his twin. And then she did the exact opposite.
“I think they stole the women they wanted,” she started, her hands still now. Waiting. Both for the rest of her response and for his reaction to it. “And I think they forced the women to mate with them whether they wanted to or not.” She was sure he could see her pulse, even through her skin, clothing, and even through the darkness that enveloped her.
“I don’t even think the men had a choice,” she said quietly before clearing her throat and finding her steady voice again.
“It’s simple biology, Caine. The male of any species feels an urge to pass along his genetic code. And that urge takes over in some species.” She paused and considered the sanity of her next statement. “I believe it takes over in all species to a certain extent. And I think there’s a great deal of pleasure to be found in such natural urges and drives.”
She could hear him breathing. Carefully. And deliberately, taking the time to compose his thoughts. “You mean that’s what you think would have happened if the stories were true. Don’t you, Chloe?”
Her hand flexed on the handle beside her. She kept her eyes forward. And shrugged.
“You don’t believe those stories, do you?”
She wondered how smart this was, not for her physical safety, but for her emotional safety. Chloe’s dreams and fantasies and beliefs were precious to her and having someone poke fun at them or try and make her feel dirty or wrong because of them was one of the most painful things she could think of. Her nerve wavered. But not enough to completely protect her. She shook her head unconvincingly.
He was quiet. Except for his pulse and the soft sound of his breathing right beside her. He was studying her as she refused to look at him. Most likely deciding what would make such an educated woman even consider that such nonsense might be true. Despite the fact that it was nonsense that he himself created with his mind. Or quite possibly because he wasn’t as open-minded as she wanted to believe he would be when it came to natural attraction and so he was repulsed by the fact that she was so shamelessly flirting with him even though she had been with Luke. She heard him lick his lips again before he spoke.
“Would you like to believe in them?”
She shook her head. Too quickly to look believable, most likely. But her defenses had kicked in just as she had detected the same tone of disbelief in his voice that she had heard any other time she had conveyed her dreams to anyone. Her heart had become despondent at the sound.
Chloe had been so sure that Damon Caine, if anyone, would believe as she did. But often what one believed and what was the truth, Chloe had learned, weren’t always in agreement.
She felt him move again in the seat. Most likely to take his body away from the woman who would seem so excited over such fairy tales and who would seem to want such wicked and unnatural things to be true, she suspected. He’d seen her reaction. He’d felt it. It simply wasn’t something she had ever been able to hide very well. She wasn’t even sure now if he hadn’t known that she had been touching herself the entire time he’d talked about the fairy tales. And she had the very distinct feeling that he knew every naughty detail about what had gone on in the cabin’s living room just a matter of hours earlier.
Chloe had to turn her head to the window to keep him from seeing how visibly upset she was that he was just like the very few others in whom she had confided over the years. She wouldn’t let him see the story in her eyes that told of more than one man who took her admitting this fantasy to them as a sign that she wanted abuse. Chloe knew the difference in abuse and passion. She knew a love lick from a slap. And she knew the difference between uncontrollable desire and angry rape.
But she’d never found a man who understood it as well. And she knew for damned sure she had never found one who understood and who seemed compatible with her mentally, sexually, and emotionally.
Like Luke Caine had seemed to understand. But only until he’d finished making love to her.
She knew now that she could never tell Caine that each and every time she’d read one of his books, she’d hoped, if she ever were to meet him, that he would be one person who didn’t think she was childish or perverted or insane for believing in and wanting such things. And that she’d hoped that he too understood where that very thin, very fragile line between human need and animal lust truly lived. And most of all, she knew that she could never tell him what she longed to have a man do to her. Or that she had truly believed that he might be that man, even before she’d met him.
But he was just a writer. And his stories were as make believe as her own beloved stories and the imaginary man in her mind who would know how to fulfill such fantasies. And although Chloe felt no guilt whatsoever about what she had done with his brother, she suspected that Caine found her even greater attraction to him vile under the circumstances. This was most likely the truth, no matter what she longed to believe.
Chloe let her forehead rest against the cold glass of the window to try and cool some of the heat from her embarrassment-riddled face. And she vowed never to admit her dreams to anyone or even bring the subject up ever again.
The warmth of his breath in her ear made her quickly jerk her head around to face him again.
“Do those stories excite you, Chloe?”
He hadn’t moved away. By no means, in fact. Caine’s voice was still that low rumble of affection as he spoke to her. And he didn’t have the crazed look of a man who falsely believed he’d just been given free reign over her body, sex, and soul. Nor was it the look of a man who thinks he sees an easy piece of ass in front of him.
She couldn’t even manage a nod, let alone a word to confirm his suspicion. But he needed neither from her, apparently. Her eyes and her breath and something primitive that man detects from woman were her messengers.
The sting she felt was sharp and quick. And not what she considered painful in the least. But had it not been preceded by their conversation and some unspoken understanding that they had somehow come to just seconds earlier, the action and the sting would have been quite inappropriate.
He had her by the hair. His fingers woven into and around her curls, flexing, pulsing, it would seem. Mirroring the pulse sounding between her legs.
“Would you have resisted them, Chloe?”
His mouth grazed hers as he spoke. Chloe could taste the breath that came from his lips as he spoke. It intoxicated her, causing her head to spin and drop, giving his hand reason to flex once again within her hair. The renewed sting was more pronounced and even more exhilarating.
“Would you have tried to fight them off, Chloe? Creatures who were more animal than any man? Creatures who couldn’t be taken down by full grown human men?” She felt the tip of his nose drag down her cheek and then around her ear. His breath followed it, tickling her. Warming her even more. Teasing her skin with its signal of life and with the natural implications of what they could create together.
The soft, tender pang of her earlobe caught between his teeth was quick. Fleeting. And all the more potent in its rush. “You wouldn’t have a chance against such a creature, sweetheart.” She felt the words more than heard them and then noticed that he had paused to consider the very sensitive skin just below her ear. The place that she knew still bore Luke’s passion mark. But he didn’t take it. Not just yet. He simply studied it. “At least not if he wanted you badly enough.”
His tongue, just the very tip, warm and moist and very talented from all indications, traveled up the skin he had just admired. Exactly where his
brother’s had. And then it disappeared. Just in time for his lips to brush hers.
“Has the animal in you ever wanted anything so badly that the human woman in you would do something wrong to have it?”
His eyes were level with hers, his mouth still teasingly close to her lips. His hand still embedded in her hair. Holding her where he wanted her, just as his twin had. Chloe couldn’t hide her expressions from him with him restraining her like this. All of her fear and excitement and desire were right there in front of him. It showed back at him through her eyes and through the coloring of her cheeks and the red, splotchy patch of nervous natural rouge that had begun on her neck and chest.
He was staring more deeply into her than he had in her fantasy. And like the warm, wet excitement that she would be unable to keep secret from him were he to force her to spread herself open for him, Chloe knew that Caine was watching her become more aroused and intrigued right before his eyes.
Chloe shook her head to answer his question. And licked her lips to try and speak. His eyes immediately went to the tip of tongue that she had inadvertently shown him with her motion.
“Have you, Caine?”
His eyes were still on her mouth. But not the mouth in her fantasy, this time. These lips, it was almost acceptable for him to taste just moments into their human courtship. She could feel the movement of his chest as he breathed in and out, wanting him to break the smallest of societal rules and allow their mouths to explore one another. His excitement forced him to breathe in a motion that resembled panting, or at least she would have thought were it one of her wolves this close to her.
Exactly like Luke panted against me…
That thought danced through her mind and Chloe felt a tiny gasp take hold of her at its conception. Identical physical attributes between the men, she was ready to accept. But to have them both possess such similar signs of sexual arousal and expression with her was more kink and decadence than Chloe had considered.
More quickly than that thought had formed, one of Caine’s hands had released her hair and had come around to slip two of its fingers between her momentarily parted lips.
They probed just inside her mouth. Gently at first, and then more savagely as he didn’t find what he wanted within the first few seconds of his search. Chloe’s first instinct was to clamp down and try and prevent the digits from entering her, but she waited the urge out and it soon turned into something very different.
His desire infected her somehow. It made her want him to have what he needed. And so she let him find what he was looking for with his curious and demanding hand.
Chloe barely touched the tips of his fingers with her tongue. But she did it deliberately and with enough conviction that it caused him to bring his eyes up from her mouth to her eyes.
She tongued his fingers as he studied her eyes. Relaxed her jaws and took them fully into her mouth. Began to taste them when they first hit her tongue. As soon as she detected his flavor, she rounded them again with her tongue and began a slow, pulsing suction on the long, masculine phallic symbols he had forced between her lips.
It could have been considered obscene had it been any other man who had just done this to her. But just as she had told him, Chloe had read everything the man had ever written. And she wanted to think that the word obscene didn’t even exist in his vocabulary when it came to sex and physical love.
Caine didn’t mean anything vulgar or degrading with this action. If what he had written had any basis in fact as far as the way the man felt about sex and animal attraction and its relationship to human passion, Chloe knew exactly what he was doing.
He was exploring her. Letting her taste and explore him. And arousing them both indirectly, simply with his attempts to let them familiarize themselves with one another. Flirtation.
Foreplay.
Animal style.
At least Chloe hoped that was what the man was doing. She tried very hard to keep the possibility to a bare minimum that he was the victim of a serious finger-sucking fetish.
Or sucking fetishes in general, although Chloe had no aversion to any form, position, or action with regards to the sexual act.
She just hadn’t tried them all yet. And Damon Caine could just be the man she could lose a few more virginities to if he was what he appeared to be.
He pushed that little hope closer to conclusion as he eased his fingers out of her mouth and took them into his own. Tasting hers with his.
Exactly what she’d hoped he’d do.
And exactly what his brother had done.
She wasn’t sure if the grip in her hair tightened before or after his mouth smothered hers, but somewhere along the way, she lost the coveted ability she’d once held to get herself out of any situation life threw at her.
The man was most definitely a curious beast. Or at least he was in the oral sense of the word. Chloe was kissed. Chloe was tasted. Chloe was savored in a way that she had never been savored before. Even by his brother’s tongue on her sex. Most importantly, the man now making her his meal found her mouth watering.
Caine didn’t say as much. But he didn’t have to.
His hands told her he didn’t want her to get away from him until he was finished with her. His lips silently started creating the story she had teased him about. They told her of desire and lust and passion so out of control that even the most educated of women and the most successful of men and the most domesticated of animals were helpless to its demands if ever caught in its grasp.
His tongue mated with hers while neither of them was looking. And as if neither of them cared.
Chloe couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move away from him or get his hands out of her hair or his mouth away from hers. Her heart beat out a message that told her she had made love to the wrong brother, even if it had felt so damned close to right that it had scared her. Chloe felt he was the man she had been born to be with as his hands and mouth prevented her from denying that fact. Had Luke stayed with her, had he shown her the affection she had needed after he’d been inside her, Chloe felt certain she could have found it with him. But he hadn’t. It hadn’t been in his nature. At least not in his nature when he was with her.
It constituted the bulk of Caine’s nature. He, like she for him, had been created for one purpose. To make love to her. To give her pleasure and pain and everything in between. Damon Caine was just as strong as Chloe, if not stronger. Physically. Emotionally. Mentally. Chloe had never found a man like this before. Certainly not one who had held her in his arms. And she wondered how she had ever lived without knowing how it truly felt.
An intelligent woman. A PhD. Summa Cum Laude. Strong as an ox if she needed to tote her equipment or a wounded animal somewhere.
Suddenly, rendered helpless.
Chloe had long ago decided that being a strong and intelligent female had come with its own downfalls. Her fantasy had always been to find the man who put her to shame with his strength. A man who could hold his own against her in every aspect of life. A worthy ally in that war they would fight together.
An animal like the one her great-grandmother had created in her mind.
Caine had created very similar animals in his own mind. And Chloe was learning first hand just how powerful such a mind could be when it lived in the body of a man.
Once again his actions, the combination of hold and release, restrain and withdrawal, were a blur as she found her mouth free to draw breath and his fingers massaging tender scalp where he himself had just inflicted pain. Caine’s eyes reinstated their grip as soon as they found hers again. His lips brushed against her mouth once more, without any decided movement toward another kiss. And he smiled.
“They are only stories, Chloe.”
Only stories. And Caine was only a man.
Reality had never tasted this good before.
“And my books are fiction as well,” he nodded and slid back across the seat to put the truck back into drive. Chloe wondered how he was managing to remain so calm. How
he was so together after what he’d just done to her. The man had reached into her psyche and ripped a hole into everything she knew as rational and sane.
And then somehow been able to let go.
For a moment, Chloe had to wonder which of the brothers she had just tasted.
She wrapped her arms around her body and stared forward. Her pulse pounded from her ears down to her clit and then reverberated into her toes. She was alive. Awake. Aroused more than she had ever been in her life. Ever.
He’d simply kissed her.
Chloe hadn’t had time to think about the rush of courtly anticipation that comes with a first kiss. Neither her body nor her mind had bothered to examine the societal meanings behind what the man was doing with his hands and mouth when he’d taken possession of her. Caine hadn’t touched her breasts. Never once reached for her sex. He’d used no tried and true area of her body to cause her to react as she was. Save for her mouth. Her ability to feel the sharp and pleasant pain of desire.
And her mind.
Every reaction she’d had was automatic. And natural.
And the result of a kiss.
Chloe could not even begin to imagine what this twin could do with his body.
Chapter Nine
The lights from a massive three-story farmhouse took Chloe by surprise as Caine rounded a sharp curve and then guided the truck up a driveway that meandered through what appeared to be an equally impressive yard. As far as she could tell in the moonlight the structure was immaculate and flanked by temporarily hibernating vegetable and flower gardens and several other outbuildings and smaller houses. Squinting in the darkness, Chloe turned and surveyed the property without trying to hide her curiosity or her surprise.
“It looks like you have your own town.”
She hadn’t meant to say the words out loud, but the low chuckle that came from him as a result made her glad that she had. The main house itself looked large enough to house several families. She wondered what the property would look like in the daylight as she watched Caine open his door as she reached for her own door handle.
