by L. A. Banks
“Listen . . . there’s more to it than just what I want to do right now. Our clans have been at war for decades, Federations diametrically opposed . . . and . . .” Her hand under the table stopped his words for a moment. “Damn . . . who’s your mate?” he murmured against his will.
“Does it matter?”
“It could,” he said with effort.
“I saw your wolf emerge at the UCE Conference,” she said huskily. “Absolutely majestic. I’ve been waiting for you to ditch your she-Shadow and get a little space of your own. Anybody I might have been with, baby, I know you could take . . . so how about if we go get naked under the moon?”
The thought of banging this chick on all fours had his mind in a temporary chokehold. Somehow he’d managed to signal for the check, and seeing him do that had made her begin to slightly pant. It was a chain reaction that happened quickly—too quickly. The moment she’d begun to pant, all he could think about was the singular goal of mounting her.
“You’re gonna make me kill a man tonight,” Hunter said, pushing back from the table, but hesitating to stand.
“I’d be honored,” she said in a hard rasp, standing, her nipples now erect peaks beneath the sheer fabric of her blouse. He could smell the liquid heat that smoldered between her thighs.
Celebrity clearly had its privileges and perils. Hunter stood slowly, unfolding his six-foot-five frame out of the restaurant chair. There weren’t enough meds in the world to preempt this. Right versus wrong had nothing to do with it; this was purely primal.
A low warning growl from behind made him grab the female’s wrist in complete ownership—that is, until he saw who owned the growl.
“Bear?” Hunter said, letting go of the female beside him.
She folded her arms and rounded on him. “He’s a beta!”
Hunter stared at his pack enforcer. “He’s also my friend.” He watched Bear Shadow’s shoulders begin to relax. “In Shadow culture, we honor territories.”
Bear nodded at Hunter. “And mates,” he said, signifying Sasha without directly mentioning her.
“Is this your . . . friend?” Hunter asked, fighting to retract his canines.
“While in New Orleans,” Bear grumbled.
“Not anymore,” the female said angrily, folding her arms and still looking at Hunter with longing. “Can we get out of here?”
“No. I honor my pack brother’s territory—”
“But you can beat—”
A sharp growl from Hunter cut off her argument, and in his peripheral vision he noticed relief wash over Ethan. It wasn’t hard to guess why; a male wolf brawl wasn’t about to erupt in his establishment. Yet at the same time, Fae archers and bouncers from The Order of the Dragon seemed prepared for any eventuality. The only ones who seemed disappointed were the few Werewolves who had been watching the entire spectacle.
Bear Shadow’s gaze met Hunter’s with appreciation. No words were necessary as the miffed female angrily yanked away from the table to go find an alpha male from the Werewolf Clans.
“Thank you,” Hunter said after a moment, trying to soothe his pack brother’s battered ego. But it was hard not to stare of the female’s retreating form. She had a positively lovely ass.
“It was nothing,” Bear grumbled, shifting his stocky three-hundred-pound frame to stare at the lost female, too.
“Might keep me from getting shot by Sasha tonight,” Hunter said with a lopsided grin.
“Yeah, maybe,” Bear said, with no amusement in his tone, and then inclined his head toward the bar.
Sasha’s steely gray stare met Hunter’s. She didn’t say a word, just slid into a shadow and was gone.
“Oh, shit . . .” Hunter rounded the table and headed out the front door. But out on the street, everything created a shadow in the darkness.
“C’mon, Sasha,” he said, jogging as he looked five ways at once. He was glad that people walking the streets assumed he had a Bluetooth in his ear and didn’t think he was talking to himself.
Dead silence met him. The fact that he couldn’t accurately feel her disturbed him. Under normal circumstances, as a mated pair, he should have been able to feel her presence moving in and out of the shadows around them. Tonight he couldn’t. Hadn’t for the last few weeks. Couldn’t even shadow-dance with her. His shadow moved with him, not as its own living, breathing entity. His could no longer reach out and caress hers to frenzy across the room without ever touching her in the flesh—didn’t she understand what this was doing to him? Hers could still do that . . . hers blew him away. Hers wasn’t crippled by a virus he didn’t understand.
He stopped jogging and then dipped into an alley entrance, sure that he’d felt her there. Hoped that he had. They needed to talk. Every shadow coming off the building and Dumpsters loomed long and lean. The chase and quick hunt made his wolf claw at his insides. Doubling over in pain, he stopped running for a moment, then released a mournful howl.
Echoing howls met him from the distance. The call of the wolf lit up the night air, renewing his erection, renewing the need to go feral, yet the shadows were no longer gateways to him. They were no more to him than they were to Werewolves or humans. A hard tap on his shoulder spun him around just as Sasha’s punch dropped him.
Hunter sprang up from the asphalt, spoiling for a fight, holding his jaw. She’d actually used the brick building’s shadow to level him—knowing he couldn’t shadow-hop? A snarl was his answer before something insane snapped within and he rushed her.
She spun into a shadow and out again, no weapon in her hand but pure rage burning in her eyes. “Even money says you didn’t even get that bitch’s name!”
Hunter stopped dead in his tracks and rubbed his jaw again. “It’s not what it looked like.”
Sasha’s normally gray eyes began to flicker amber as her upper and lower canines filled her lovely mouth. “Are you out of your damned mind?” she shouted. “You put alliances on the line for a piece of tail?”
“I’ve been the fucking North American Clan alpha for the last decade, Sasha! The last thing I would do is create a political—”
“Just stop!” she said, storming up to him. “This isn’t about me or you or what we want personally or whatever’s going wrong between us. It’s bigger than that and you’re out of control, Hunter!”
He yanked her to him by the front of her T-shirt and kissed her hard. “I know.”
She snatched herself away and stared at him, furious.
“I’m out of control,” he admitted, circling her.
She matched his movements, wary, her eyes glittering with rage.
“Don’t go into the shadows,” he breathed out in a rush. “I can’t follow you there and it’s eating me up.”
“You would have fucked her,” Sasha growled.
“I thought you said this wasn’t about us,” he said in a low rumble, trying to keep her from a shadowy section of alley where she could disappear.
“It’s not. It’s about détente!”
Lightning-fast he snagged her shirt again, able to propel her forward and off balance. They both knew she had enough military skills to have stopped him—if she’d wanted to. Her abdomen collided with his, almost knocking the wind out of him.
“Then in the spirit of diplomacy,” he said, thrusting his fingers into her hair and drawing in the glorious scent of it, “let’s keep our alliance strong. All right?”
Her body was rigid, but there were any number of self-defense moves she could have made to hurt him—and she hadn’t. He’d left himself wide open to let her decide this dance.
“What’s happening to us?” he said, breathing the words into her hair. Her familiar warmth coated him and soaked into his bones. “I miss this—us.”
“So you’d get that from wherever?” she said, her voice still tight like her body.
His mind was on fire; his mouth sought hers nonetheless, unable to argue with her. His hands found the dip in her spine, the high, tight rise of her backside, felt the tau
tness of her thighs . . . damn it all on the almost full moon. Her arms had finally encircled him and the tension in her body was slowly draining away.
“No,” he finally said, tearing his mouth away from hers. “I’ll admit to being flattered, but—”
Sasha wound his ponytail around her fist and yanked it hard to stare at him. “Hunter . . . you’re lying.” It was a flat statement of fact, now strangely containing no anger. “I’ve never seen you lie. Shadow Wolves can’t, not very easily. You won me that first time telling me you were no liar.” She dropped her hand away as tears filled her eyes. “That was the one thing I most admired about you.”
Seeing her this way, her body struggling to pull away from his, her soul shredding as it disconnected from him, made him panic. He let her go, the humid night air no match for her warmth, the separation knifing his groin.
“Sasha . . . I don’t know what to say to you to get you to understand any of this . . . any of what I’m going through.” He let his breath out hard. “We shouldn’t be having this conversation in a goddamned alley.”
“Oh, what would be better—a bar?”
“Right now, yeah. Buy you a round.”
She stared at him and lifted her chin. “A six-pack in the room and you’re on.”
He nodded but didn’t move for a moment. “When I shoot up with the meds . . . it’s like my wolf is on fire . . . needs to come out, but can’t. Everything is intense, almost like what I guess a Were’s full-moon transition would be—but because I’m not one of them, I don’t change. It hurts like hell, is all I can say.”
Sasha stared at him, assessing his statement. This time he was telling the truth. She sniffed the air and walked in closer. “You’re also trailing male Werewolf pheromone,” she admitted. “You’d better stay out of the bars or you might piss them off and get jumped.”
As diesel as Hunter was, with the rep he owned in the clans, oh, yeah . . . she could see why the alpha Werewolf female had made a move to work her way up his pack ranks to try to get to him. Made sense. Yet another part of her was suspicious. It was too contrived, too happenstance for her liking . . . Not that even the average human female wouldn’t want to jump his bones—still, it was the timing. Timing that seemed designed to create irreparable damage between them. Split the leadership, you could advance an agenda. The question was: Who?
“On this subject,” Hunter said quietly, misreading her long silence. “I swear I am no liar.” He looked away. “And . . . if I’m trailing pheromone like you say, then trust me when I tell you that the hormone flux that goes with it is a true bitch.”
Again she stared at him, watching his stone-cut chest expand and contract with deep breaths that he took in through his mouth. His damp T-shirt was practically welded to him, and the eight-pack in his abs trembled ever so slightly with each inhalation. The erection he owned was ridiculous and—given the shift in conversation—shouldn’t have been.
“Hunter, listen . . . maybe I’m not fully understanding everything about this. The meds, before we realized we didn’t need them, were like downers for me and the squad when we used to take them . . .”
“It starts out like that,” Hunter said, stretching out his arms to flat-palm the brick wall before him. He dropped his head, closing his eyes as he spoke. “First hit chills me out, brings me down, keeps the wolf at bay . . . then it can’t get out—I can’t transition,” he said through his teeth. “I’m half afraid of what will . . . but it hurts like hell. Second shot eases the pain, but drives me fucking nuts when the moon is waxing.” He looked at her, eyes now amber-rimmed in the dark.
“But before . . . you took one shot and then would nod off.”
“The moon was waning,” he said. “After the full moon of the conference, I was myself. Didn’t have to take the meds daily—and when I began to have to, that first time when you found me . . .”
“The convulsions—”
“Yeah, the convulsions!” he shouted, punching the wall and making a section of the brick crumble. “Remember how I was when I got up off the floor?”
Sasha looked away into the dark, dark night. How could she forget?
“That was a double shot on the night, midpoint, when the moon went from waning to waxing.” He pushed away from the wall and circled her. “So I tried to make it all week with one shot, nodding off in your arms, trying not to take a double hit until I thought I’d puke up my guts—and every night it’s gotten worse while you’ve treated me like an invalid! Shit! Tonight I need you to be my lover, not my fucking nurse!”
He pointed at her hard, breathing hard. “On that I am no liar, Sasha! But what I’ve just said probably isn’t politically correct enough for you, or hasn’t been analyzed enough for you. If you wanna bed a Werewolf, then goddamn it, bed me! You don’t think I can smell Shogun on you? He must have been standing close enough to you at Finnegan’s to leech his scent into your clothes. Tell me I’m a liar.”
She turned on her heel. “Let’s go.”
“So that’s it? Just like that, you’re pissed off and don’t want to hear any more, right?”
“Wrong,” she said quietly. “I just understand the condition.”
He jogged to catch up with her. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
She grabbed the front of his shirt and kissed him hard. “Shut up. Go back to the room. I promise not to be your nurse, unless that’s a pending fantasy, all right?”
A pair of shrewd, gleaming eyes opened within the depth of the alley. A low, satisfied chuckle whispered on the night and then, just as quickly, was gone.
CHAPTER 4
The breath literally was knocked out of Sasha on her way through the double French doors of the B&B. Her back took the brunt of the impact and almost shattered priceless stained glass. There wasn’t enough time to be thoroughly humiliated by the very wide smiles of the establishment staff and a few wandering guests that greeted them. All of that would have to be sorted out later.
Hand-to-hand combat was a must to get Hunter to bypass body-slamming her against the parlor furnishings once they’d cleared the doors, and she’d had to make a break for the stairs to salvage any dignity or privacy she once owned. That had required flip-rolling him hard on the floor and a mad dash, then bolting up three steps at a time to the third floor and down the long hallway. The evasive tactic didn’t dissuade him in the least; instead, it thoroughly turned him on.
A few seconds of distance was her friend as she fumbled to get the key in the door to avoid having to explain to Dugan why his best B&B suite door was off its hinges.
Hunter hit the third-floor landing only moments behind her as though his wolf had finally broken free. Skidding into the wall, he stopped partially stunned, shook his head for a moment to study his quarry, eyes glowing amber, canines in full. Oh, shit, this was gonna be bad . . .
The only speed advantage she had was that her wolf was just under her surface and still accessible to her human form. But what Hunter currently lacked in speed he made up for in mass. His six five versus her five seven: It didn’t take a rocket scientist to do the math.
Once in the room, Sasha stood to the side of the door hidden in a shadow as he barreled through. Then she slammed it behind him. Hunter’s sheer momentum took out the coffee table and a lamp. She quickly removed her weapon and tossed it across the room, lest she be tempted to use it. In his condition, if he tried to yank off her leather holster, he’d probably dislocate her shoulder.
Gone was her patient, careful Shadow Wolf lover. Gone was the man who would drive her insane with lengthy foreplay and shadow caresses. Max Hunter had gone straight animal.
Disarming in front of him clearly had the same effect as a pole dance. She saw that as Hunter got up from the floor slowly, his gaze following her every move. But there was also something extremely exciting, in a twisted sort of way, about seeing him like that. It pulled at the primal side of her being, calling her wolf, hers taunting his to make it more ferocious.
He inst
antly stripped his T-shirt over his head. Her gaze raked the dark mahogany surface of the skin he’d exposed, appreciating every single chiseled brick. Immediately she took off her sneakers and shimmied out of her jeans. For a few seconds he closed his eyes as though she’d punched him. He quickly bent to unlace his boots but winced and had to back off for a moment to stop, panting from the pain. She came forward to help, stripping off her shirt as she walked toward him. By the time she got to him naked his hands were shaking.
She said nothing, just laid her cheek and palms again his hot chest for a moment then kissed his stomach as she slid down his body. The man was burning up; the contact practically seared her cheek and lips. Hunter’s breath audibly hitched the moment she’d grazed him. His skin was on fire, at that transition heat where his wolf should have leapt through his human form.
Pain from his repressed wolf coated her insides as she hugged him, laying her cheek against his stomach for a moment, trying to calm that tormented creature within him. To no avail.
Even as a shadow healer, her hands only seemed to add to his agony. An intricate network of thick abdominal muscles contracted against her face as a deep moan erupted from his throat. The sound of his suffering made her hands work more quickly to get him out of his boots and jeans. She tried to remove the cumbersome denim fabric, tried to slide it down and over his slim hips without inadvertently hurting him, but apparently she wasn’t moving fast enough.
Tearing at the fabric blindly once his boots were off, he shed his jeans like a second skin. She looked up at him for a moment; he looked down at her, his hands slowly balling into fists. When she quickly sheathed him with her mouth, his voice rent the air and his knees buckled. Another quick glance up explained everything. His head was tipped back, mouth open, eyes tightly shut, tears streaming from their corners as he slowly shook his head. She understood; he was too far gone to play at this thing. He needed her pronto. Required total body heat and friction . . . in the way of the wolf.
