by Caine
As she stood there and cried, the man in Caine longed to comfort her. He longed to tell her that this was their way and that they had accepted this as a sad but necessary part of their lives.
But Caine couldn’t tell her that. And he couldn’t tell her what he truly was. And now, it had nothing to do with whether or not she could accept him for being half wolf and half human. Because for the first time in his almost thirty years of living as the animal he had always been, the instinctual animal in Caine could not overcome the human anger he felt. Anger over the fact that a member of the family who had killed Caine’s great-grandfather now stood directly in front of him wearing the blood of Caine’s family on her hands.
Again.
* * * * *
“No, you will not!”
Caine growled his order to his father and then stared the man down.
Never. Ever. But he’d had to this time.
Caine’s insides were torn as badly as his grandfather’s poor, arthritic and grayed body had been when they’d retrieved it quietly after the lights had gone out in Chloe’s cabin. Caine’s father wanted blood. And he wanted revenge.
As most men do when they’ve lost someone they love at the hands of another.
“We do not work that way.”
Caine’s tone was one he’d never had to use before with any of his family. Even Luke. It was his alpha voice, but it had to subdue and control the anger of the men in his family, not the wolves.
He yearned to be dealing with the more gentle beasts once again.
“They are taking over our territory…”
“And we will defend that territory,” Caine reminded as he cut his father off with yet another growl and straightened stance. “But we do not attack.” Caine lowered his voice. The man in him called to him for a show of respect to his father. Something that Caine knew was never out of line for any creature.
“It is not our way,” he reminded softly.
His father brought his eyes up level with his son’s. His alpha’s. Caine met the gaze steadily and with a confidence that he had always known he had. He could see a hint of pride behind the pain of grief and the rage of injustice that fought for control of his father’s emotions.
Caine was the alpha for one simple reason.
He knew that they were not wolves. And he knew that they were not men. They were animals unlike any other, yet similar to them all. And the man who was able to control such a combination of beasts within himself was the only likely candidate for such a daunting position.
Sometimes Caine would not trade what he was for any amount of territory in the forest.
In fact, he had always loved what he was. And Caine suddenly acknowledged the fact that since Chloe wasn’t willing to consider the stories she’d heard as possible, there was no way she was going to be able to consider him for the wonderful beast he was.
He would mount the bitch in her next rut. And he would give his pack a new alpha and bring its numbers up again. Chloe Evans hadn’t killed Caine’s great-grandfather. But she had brought an intruder in who had killed that man’s son.
The bitch owed him at least one life. But she would settle her debts by giving him a life and not by way of his taking one from her. Even the man in Caine was in agreement with that bargain.
His father stood silently over the body from which his wolf blood had come. Mason Caine had never questioned what he was. He had never allowed his sons to question what they were in his presence. And the man respected Caine enough to let him run a family who could die at the hands of one human.
Caine, himself.
But Caine wasn’t just human. He was hybrid. Half man, half wolf. The thought was quiet and determined when it circled and lay down in Caine’s mind. And he was not about to let his family die for his own selfish needs and emotions.
As for anyone else who had a problem with his renewed sense of pride for himself and his kind, Caine pitied them if he ever again had to defend or protect what rightfully belonged to him.
* * * * *
“Caine?”
The voice was his brother’s. Sleepy. And not loud enough to fully rouse him.
“Caine?”
Louder this time. More authoritative. Deeper than it had been just a week before. Caine rolled to his side but didn’t open his eyes.
He could sense his brother’s presence next to his bed, but he still wasn’t fully awake. Until his youngest sibling said the words very clearly that Caine had known would change his life and the structure of his pack from that day forward.
“She’s in heat again.”
Chapter Twenty
Chloe felt the warmth of his breath on her neck and smiled at the wonderful sensation. His hands had already begun to roam her body, his fingers already wet and musty with her sex before she even opened her eyes.
The rest of him smelled like snow and the frigid midnight air he had just left behind.
But there was nothing even remotely cold about him as far as his body or his actions were concerned. Chloe felt heat coming from his frame that could have melted a mountain of snow. As she reached down in the darkness of the bedroom and gripped the hard, burning shaft of his cock, she was rewarded with the not too gentle pang of his teeth in her neck. A nipple was next, followed by the other.
He ground against her as if marking her entire body with his scent and she responded by squeezing the pulsing flesh of his cock between her fingers. Chloe felt his hard, hungry fingers come to her breast and then travel higher, ending in a twist of her hair that brought tears to her eyes.
He seemed almost angry as he pulled her head downward by her hair and moved himself up on the bed so that she was faced with either taking him into her mouth or having him put himself into her mouth for her. But it wasn’t anger that was causing the man in her bed to demand that she do what they both desperately needed to do.
And he didn’t have to force her to do anything.
She only hoped that fact was about to become clear.
His cock suddenly filled her mouth, almost choking her as he impatiently pushed it between her lips much harder than she was ready to take it. She imagined the impatience she would feel when he finally did push himself into her cunt as she reached to grip the soft, furred sacs at the base of his cock and then began to work her tongue around the head and her mouth moved up and down its hard, smooth length.
He pumped himself in and out of her mouth. Chloe savored the feeling of the action and continued to fondle his dick and balls with one hand while she reached down and found her own slit with the other.
She was drenched with the proof of her own excitement and Chloe felt her fingers glide into the silky wetness of her own body more easily than ever before. Tonight, the anticipation of what she would finally have was more than Chloe could bear alone. Not even on the nights when she’d been left so badly in need that she thought she might explode if he didn’t finish her, she hadn’t been this aroused and wet.
Or as hungry for the feeling of having him inside her.
He hadn’t been the least bit polite when he’d let himself into her house this time, nor was he genteel or discreet about his desires when he’d joined her in her bed. From all indications, it would also seem that he wasn’t going to be gentlemanly when he allowed himself access to her body, either. But none of those facts made Chloe uncomfortable with this man. Nothing, save for the fact that his body felt so much like his brother’s felt, even tried to plague Chloe’s mind.
But this was not the man who had made love to her the first time. There were differences. Tiny differences. Only those that a wife or lover would detect. Things she wanted to know, if only because he was hers and there was nothing about him she didn’t want to know and adore. Chloe tried to memorize them all as she soothed and loved his cock and ass with her mouth and hands.
Her fingers also tried to fill her empty and lonely pussy and she worked her lips and tongue around his cock as furiously as she could, but Chloe knew that neither of them were
getting what they really wanted.
Slowly, she pulled his stiff and wet prick from her mouth and looked up to try and see if the magnitude of what they were about to do reflected in his own eyes. The darkness prevented her from being able to see the twinkle of blue that she knew he would be sporting as he looked down to her and confirmed that it was all right for them to do this. It was necessary. Chloe understood that. It was an action that served as a sign that they were bonded to one another.
A bonding that would be so strong, Chloe suspected, that even others would know what they had shared. And a bond that would somehow overcome any past wrongs or indiscretions either of them had inflicted upon each other or themselves.
He would forgive her for what she had done with his brother. But more importantly, Chloe would forgive herself for being human. And she would allow Caine to know the woman she wanted to be with him.
Chloe smiled and ran her hands up his chest, dragging her scent and juices up his body in the motion. Rising up on her knees, Chloe knelt in front of him and wrapped her arms around his neck, and brought her mouth to his ear. She bit. Hard. Hard enough to cause his own hands to flex painfully on her butt. Bruisingly hard, in fact.
Chloe gasped and grinned at the feeling and at the knowledge that she felt sure she was mere seconds away from having the brutal man inside her she had always wanted when he finally made love to her.
Or perhaps a whisper away, were the right words used to entice him.
Her breath purred from deep inside her chest before she gripped both hands into that thick black hair and pulled his ear closer to her.
The words had barely even escaped her lips when Chloe realized that her entire life had somehow taken an abrupt and irreversible turn for the terrible.
She suspected that the scar her lips found in the dark as she grazed his cheek on the way from her whispering to him was nothing like the damage that she had just unwittingly inflicted upon herself with the plea she had chosen to murmur. Words spoken before her mind could register who had actually made love to her the first time. And a plea spoken to the man about to give her exactly what she had never wanted.
“Hurt me.”
* * * * *
Caine could hear her screaming even before he turned off the motor. Luke’s silence since the death of their grandfather had been a warning to Caine that the man was a bomb waiting to explode. And whether it had been because he was also angry with Chloe for having brought new packs into their territory or because Luke felt the urge to help re-populate their own pack by way of his own young, Caine wasn’t sure. But he could be sure of one thing.
He wasn’t about to let Luke rape Chloe. The man would brutalize the woman in order to impregnate her and Caine knew he would never rid himself of the guilt he would feel if he were to let that happen.
His need to protect her had nothing to do with territory or mating rights or the way of his kind. It had to do with his heart. The one that had cracked when he and his brother had fought over a woman the first time and the heart that had broken completely in two when that woman had died.
Chloe had healed his heart. She had made him feel love and compassion and hope again. She had made his heart human again and caused it to pump wolf blood through it with an intensity that still frightened Caine.
But not nearly as badly as the sounds of her screams did.
Caine shoved into the front door without breaking it the first time. His anger over Luke’s thinking to lock him out of his own bitch’s house caused him to almost take the door off of its hinges when he slammed against it again. He shoved the door to the side before bolting to the bedroom from where the screams were coming and then turned on the light.
She was bleeding. In Luke’s haste to mount her, Chloe’s mouth had already been hit either by the headboard or the nightstand and her lip was busted from the impact. Caine smelled the blood and felt a renewed sense of anger well up in himself at the sight of his twin about to fuck a woman who didn’t belong to him.
Caine’s woman.
Caine’s wife.
Again.
And this time, Luke was using his more powerful and dangerous form in which to subdue her.
Caine watched Luke’s canine incisors dig deeply into the flesh of Chloe’s neck. Unnecessarily retraining her with his jaws since he’d had the forethought to tie her to the four-poster bed before he’d transformed. Chloe’s vision was partially obscured because of her face down and forward stance, but she knew that something inhuman was behind and on top of her and about to do unnatural things to her. Her screams told Caine this as clearly as any words ever could.
She was terrified. And rightly so. Caine considered his dilemma for only a second before he reached to drag his twin from Chloe’s frightened and trembling body.
Two-inch fangs identical to the ones Caine would possess in this form sank into the flesh of Caine’s forearm for his efforts. Luke quickly shook his alpha off of him and then lapped his twin’s blood from his muzzle and turned to begin to mount the bitch again.
“Caine!”
The tone she’d used to say his name, her frightened plea made to the man she knew would stop this from happening caused Caine to wince at old, unanswered questions.
He’d often wondered if Meagan would have called for him to help her had she known the truth.
Not that it mattered now, though. What did matter was that Chloe had caught a glimpse of him as he’d come into the bedroom and she had called out to him. To help her. To stop Luke from hurting her. From fucking her.
From raping her.
Caine’s kind had always been forced to debate a fine line between the man and the animal in them. They had always had the internal dialogue go on as to whether what they did in the name of keeping their species alive was more animal or human.
As Caine watched the wolf in his brother about to mount a human woman he didn’t love, and a woman who didn’t love him, merely for the sake of the pack and regardless of what the man in Caine wanted for any of them, that debate once again plagued Caine’s mind.
But that line grew very, very clear in his heart.
Luke knew that he would be banished from the pack because of these actions. And Caine’s twin had come to Chloe’s cabin knowing that Caine could rightfully kill him for mating without the alpha’s permission.
But Luke understood Caine, it would seem, even better than Caine knew himself.
And Luke knew that every human had a fatal flaw when it came to such matter as the drive to survive. But as in every species, their pack could possibly die out if Caine didn’t learn to control the human part of him that wanted to deny its own animal ancestry. The counterproductive way of thinking that discouraged man from listening to the urges that would ensure that his species survive. An urge that religion and society had long ago deemed ugly and wrong. But that his animal forefathers and present day cousins respected because of the power of creation such an urge held when it was obeyed. But more importantly, they respected it for the power of destruction the urge held when it was denied.
Luke’s actions had nothing to do with his desire to hurt Chloe or Caine. It had nothing to do with retribution or anger.
The man simply didn’t think that way. Caine’s brother thought about survival. About the survival of his species. Of the pack, first and foremost. And only then did he think about his own needs.
As an alpha should.
He suspected that had Luke been more like himself, he too could have gotten pleasure from making love to a woman. But Luke’s mind didn’t think about his benefit. The animal in him did his duty. And rarely had the man in Luke ever found the time or opportunity to take anything for himself. In fact, Caine could remember only once that his twin had actually seemed happy to be a man.
And this was not that day.
As Caine neared the bed again, he came to understand a fact he should have accepted long ago. The part of him that his twin had already accepted as the more pure and natural of their souls.
/>
Compassion will never fill the belly of a predator.
But now Caine understood that neither the animals nor the men inside them had ever derived any pleasure simply from the act of predation. The pleasure came from another source altogether.
He and his twin were a precarious balance of nature within themselves. They were human, as their mother and grandmothers and great-grandmothers had been. But they were also animals. As their father and grandfathers were.
The purity of their animal fathers. The males of their species. The predators. It would seem, the inflictors of pain for the sake of survival.
And the brutality of their mothers.
The females. Of every species. The prey.
The inflictors of a pleasure that no man has ever been able to resist for long. And in that, truly the creatures who sustain life.
Chloe twisted and called out to him again. A low threatening growl came from Luke’s throat as Caine neared the bed. Caine raised his hand to his brother. A silent signal that he would not kill his twin.
But Luke would have to defend himself against Caine. Because he had defied his alpha. And because Luke had once again attempted to take what wasn’t his.
“Luke.”
His brother shifted his head to the side and glanced at Caine. The tone Caine had used was calm. Knowing. The tone an alpha uses when he knows his pack is soon to be safe.
“She’s mine, Luke.”
The wolf raised his head and turned without looking at his brother this time. Caine reached out and stroked his twin’s back. Soothing him. Thanking him for what he had been willing to do for the pack. And then removing his clothes in order to protect what was his.
Luke moved from his position and jumped from the bed. Caine watched Chloe’s eyes as she twisted to see what was happening behind her. Caine tugged his shirt over his head and let his jeans and belt drop to the floor underneath him.
