by Cari Z
“I agree.” He slid a hand down to my pants, opened them just enough to get at my boxers, and tore the front of them in half.
“Holy shit.” I would have complained—it’s not like I had a lot of spare boxers—except for it being ridiculously hot. I forgot about Henry’s strength, sometimes. He was so careful about using it around me, but right then I felt like I’d be just as happy if he wanted to rip all the rest of my clothes off too. Then he had his hand around me, his palm even hotter than my dick, and I bit my lips and arched my neck in an effort to keep my groans down.
“Don’t be quiet.” He stroked me once, carefully, then with a firmer grip when I pressed up into his hand. “I want to hear.”
“Well, I don’t… want everyone else… to hear,” I said around little gasps.
“No one else is in the house. There’s no one to hear you but me. Give it to me,” Henry said—demanded, commanded, I couldn’t even make sense of it, but I did what he wanted, let loose on his next stroke, and he grinned. “Just like that.” His fingers slid down to press against my balls, and the next noise I made wasn’t a groan. “Even better.”
“Fuck you, you’re too….” Dressed? Coherent? “Too much.” I remembered I had hands and ran them through his hair, down the back of his neck, and over his shoulders. Henry growled with pleasure, and the next time he looked up, his eyes were gold.
He must have heard my heart rate increase from fast to ohmyfuckinggod, because he immediately put some distance between us, moving out of my grip. “Is this too much?”
For fuck’s sake. “I would tell you if it was! Don’t try to interpret what I’m feeling without asking me what I’m feeling! I was stupidly turned on, as a matter of fact, before you moved out of reach and stopped touching me.” I made grabby-hands at him, and he came back, faster than he left, like he couldn’t bear to be out of range any more than I could.
He touched me, and I touched back, and somehow we managed to get rid of my clothes and most of his—his boots were a problem, before he just shifted his feet and kicked off the ruined leather—until there was nothing in my entire life except the bed beneath me and this man above me. Man, werewolf, idiot alpha—it didn’t matter, because he was there, and he was with me, and if he kept grinding his fucking dick against mine like that, I would be coming in under a minute. I whined and pushed at his shoulders.
“Slow down, or this’ll be over too fast.”
Henry ran one of his hands down my flank to my hip and pulled me tighter against him. I squeezed my eyes shut as I shuddered. “You can’t come twice in one night?”
“I haven’t since I was nineteen.” Youthful stamina could only combat chronic illness for so long, and for a long time, I hadn’t been as well as I was now. I wanted to say yes, wanted to go for it, but I just wasn’t sure, even with a partner who got to me as much as Henry did.
“Hmm.” Henry didn’t seem put out. He pulled back and grinned at me. “Then I’ll have to see what I can do to prolong this. Hang on, I need a condom.”
“Whoa, that’s….” He’d already pulled away and left the room, leaving me hard and a little apprehensive. A condom? Well, that was fast. Not that I didn’t like penetration but it had been years, literally, since I’d fucked or been fucked by a man, and the prospect was a little intimidating.
Henry came back, took one look at my face, and chuckled. “It’s not what you’re thinking. Don’t you remember any of Tennyson’s health lecture?” He settled on his knees at the end of the bed and opened the condom. He ran a hand up the inside of my thigh, fingers tracing a hot path right to my cock. He gripped me tight around the base, then slid the condom onto me before I could do more than groan.
“What—oh, fuck, you son of a….” My voice drifted off as he leaned in to hover over my hips. He pulled my balls into one hand, down and away from my body, holding off any chance of orgasm, just the kind of denial I loved. I hadn’t had someone cotton on to one of my major kinks so quickly in—ever, actually. And then it got better, and worse, because he licked a stripe up my cock until he got to the tip, swirled his tongue around the head, then slipped his lips over me and swallowed me down.
I didn’t know what kind of sound I was making. Loud. Loud was the only thing I could come up with, but even my noises couldn’t distract me from Henry’s slick, overheated mouth. His tongue was ridiculous, amazing, longer than it seemed like it should be but perfect against my cock. He took me in and sucked so hard I thought I might black out before I could come, but I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t. Not when I loved this so much, and not when he loved doing this for me. It was clear in every movement, every little sigh and moan he made, the way his hand held me fast but not so hard that it ever hurt.
I was writhing now, caught on the edge of pleasure and ready to jump right over into pain if I didn’t come soon. “Henry, please… I need to… I need….”
He pulled off and nuzzled my hip. “I know.” He let go of my balls and stroked me hard, once, twice—and I came. I came harder than I could ever remember before, the kind of orgasm that made it feel like your organs were bruising, you were clenching them so hard. I came, and I barely had a chance to settle down from that when Henry was on me again, pulling off the condom and rubbing his dick against mine. I gasped, too sensitive for this but too desperate to care. He thrust against me, and I wrapped my arms under his and pulled him in as tight as I could.
“Yes,” I said. I barely knew what I was saying yes to, but I wanted it. “Yes, do it, come on, Henry….”
“Ward.” It was a murmur, not a shout, but I felt it like a shock to the heart. He came, grinding against me brutally, and I took it and took him and held on until my arms were numb and he was spent.
I didn’t want him to move, but letting him stay on top of me was going to end with shortness of breath and a coughing fit if I wasn’t careful. That was the last thing I needed after my ridiculous panic attack. Henry moved right before I was going to suggest it, though, sliding off to the side and pulling me in close again. We were sticky messes, and I didn’t see the discarded condom but it had to be around here somewhere. Getting up and taking a shower would be smart. You couldn’t have moved me with a crowbar, though. The silence was easy, but I was never much for keeping my mouth shut.
“Well,” I said at last. “That fucking rocked.”
“Mmm.” I felt his lips curve into a smile against my temple. “I like to think so.”
“It was kind of one-sided, though.”
“Yeah, I agree.” He went on before I could get annoyed, or worse, shamed. “You didn’t make me work for it nearly enough. Next time needs to take twice as long. If my jaw isn’t aching, I feel like I haven’t done enough.”
I pulled back a little to look at him. “Are you a closet masochist?”
He shrugged. “Not really. I don’t care for pain in bed. I get plenty of that at work. But I want to feel like I’ve taken good care of you.”
“You have,” I assured him. “A-plus, would ride again.”
A smile spread across Henry’s face. “Do you like that?”
“Like what?”
“Riding,” he hissed in my ear, and oh, shit. If I could have gotten hard again, I would have just from the sound of his voice.
“I, ah—I guess so? I barely remember. It’s been….” It was a little embarrassing that I had to calculate the last time I had sex with someone. “A year since I’ve been on a date, and I haven’t gone to bed with anyone since before Ava was born. My last guy before that was… God, in my midtwenties? And he didn’t like penetrative sex, so I didn’t get any riding in.”
“When’s the last time you did?”
This was the sort of conversational topic that could have easily segued into a hypermasculine, competitive bullshit fest, as far from pillow talk as possible. It wouldn’t have been the first time. But with Henry it felt more like an honest question, not a bid to outdo me or outshine the last person I’d taken to bed. Not that he hadn’t wildly succeeded.
“Probably back in grad school. I had a boyfriend then that was pretty adventurous. In, out, up, down, on a swing in the park… if we could possibly fit on it or wedge ourselves into the right position or hold on for long enough, he wanted to fuck there.”
“Sounds a little hazardous.”
“Yeah, it was. We were almost caught a few times. I had to run naked through a park in the middle of January to get away from some cops, which—yes, it’s California, but it still gets cold there at night, you know?”
“Mmhmm.” He settled in a little deeper. “What else did you get up to?”
“Oh, well… I took yoga with him for five months so we could get around to the second half of the Kama Sutra, but after grad school he headed for New York and I stayed where I was.” At the time I’d felt massively hurt that he hadn’t wanted to stay with me, but now I knew it had been for the best. “What about you? When was your last….” What do I want to call this? A liaison? A tryst? “Encounter?” Ugh, that sounded sterile.
“Also in college, but undergraduate. He was an artist, a metalworker. We shared studio space.” Henry smiled again. “He had the strongest hands I’ve ever felt on a human. I bruised when he held me tight enough, and the marks stayed with me for a while. I liked it.”
“Definitely a hint of masochism in you,” I murmured.
“Maybe back then.”
Not now, was the overwhelming subtext. Don’t ask me, don’t ask for it, because I would. Somehow I knew he would, even if he didn’t want to, for me. Just for me. It was in the way he held me, the way he turned to me. Henry was the alpha of La Garita pack, but he would bend for the people he cared about. For Sam. For me.
It was a hell of a responsibility. At least this part of my response could be easy.
“Don’t worry,” I told him, aiming for cheeky. “I doubt I’ve got enough strength to bruise you even if I wanted to.”
“Right.” Henry relaxed, and I felt a tiny swell of victory. “With you I’ve got to be on the lookout for chairs to the head, I know.”
“Tennyson deserved it.”
“Not saying he didn’t.”
“He scared the ever-living shit out of me.”
“I’m sure he’d agree.”
“Are you placating me?” I gave Henry my fiercest glare. “Because I don’t need to be placated, not when I’m right. And I’m so right, I’m righteous.”
“Mm, yeah. Of course.” He kissed me again, then reluctantly pulled away from me. I shivered, and not just because I’d lost my living space heater. “Let’s shower so Sam and Liam can stop hiding in their bedroom.”
I stopped in the middle of reaching for my sock, horrified. “You’re kidding me.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“They were listening to us?”
“Not for more than a few seconds,” Henry said. Like that was supposed to soothe. “I thought you had an exhibitionist streak.”
“Not with your sister, I don’t. Or my kid, holy shit, what are we going to do when Ava comes to live here?”
Henry smiled wider than I thought the question merited. “Soundproof her room and hope for the best, I guess. Now come on.” He took my hand and pulled me to my feet. “Shower, clothes, dinner.”
Shower, clothes, dinner. I could do that.
Chapter Eighteen
Henry
I CALLED John up for a meeting exactly three days before I was going to leave. The timing was tight for setting up a hunt, but I hadn’t wanted to leave without being sure that Ava was mastering her shift. Even without me around, if she had Tennyson to work with and her father to strive for, she’d make it, and the two of them would be safe. It put me in a pretty Zen place, to be honest. I wasn’t going anywhere good, but at least I was leaving behind a better, more whole pack than I’d come back to.
At least I thought that until I met with John.
“Come in, Alpha,” he said when I got up onto his porch. I couldn’t hear any other heartbeats in the house, which meant he’d sent the kids out together. That was rare enough to raise my eyebrows while I took off my snow-covered boots.
“Where’s everyone else?”
“Out.” John sounded grim. “I thought this was a conversation better kept between the two of us.”
“I thought we were talking about setting up a hunt.”
“We’ll do that too, but this needs to be said.” He sat down at his dining room table, a big, heavy oak oval that I knew for a fact had been a gift from the pack when he first took on the role of guardian. It was scarred and scuffed in places by now, a lot like its owner. I sat down across from him and looked him in the eyes.
“What’s going on, John?”
“I found an application for the University of Colorado in Genna’s room.”
The observation seemed completely random to me. “What about it?”
“Well, it was out of place, especially considering that she’s been accepted to half a dozen schools already. All of them are out of state, though.”
“So she wants to be closer to home.” I shrugged. “I wouldn’t think that would bother you.”
“It wouldn’t,” John replied, “if she hadn’t already told me, plenty of times, that she couldn’t wait to get out of here. She blames me for her mother leaving, for putting so many of the family responsibilities on her. Which I understand. I encouraged her to shoot for the stars, to use every advantage my work gives us to get into some of the best universities in the country. Stanford. Yale. Berkeley. She was accepted to them all. Harvard only turned her down because she got a B in Calculus. It’s the only class that wasn’t an easy A for her.”
I was starting to get a bad feeling. John kept going. “I decided to do a little digging into the pack’s internet log. I thought maybe Sam had met with Genna, talked her into applying somewhere different.”
“Pretty invasive of you.”
“It’s my right and my responsibility, as your guardian, to be aware of the actions of your pack and to use any means at my disposal to do so,” John retorted. “You want me to cite chapter and verse here? Because I can. As it is, I’m on the hook for deliberate destruction of government property. The only reason I’m not assigning any blame for this to you is because you’ve been gone for so long.”
I was getting lost. “What was destroyed? What does that have to do with Genna?”
“Well, it turns out that someone in the pack has been looking into CU, but it isn’t Sam.” The thin, unhappy blade of his mouth answered my unspoken question.
“Roman.”
“Yep. I put a camera with a motion detector outside my house two days ago—a small one, it broadcasts directly to my computer. I caught a couple of deer with it, one big ol’ moose. And one wolf, carrying a backpack in its mouth.”
Oh shit. “Roman came here?”
John nodded. “Last night, around eleven. He shifted back under her window, got clothes out of the pack and got dressed. He vanishes at that point. I assume he climbed the house and she let him into her room.”
“How does he get out of our—” The camera issue John had mentioned when I first got back popped up in my mind, taunting me with its obviousness now. “He disables a camera and uses the blind spot to get out.”
“So I assume.”
Well, that wasn’t good. On the other hand, there were far worse things that could be happening to the pack than Roman sneaking out every now and then to visit his secret girlfriend. Jesus, I hoped they were using protection.
“Have you talked to her about this?”
“Not yet, but I will be when she and the boys get back. I’ll do my best to keep them apart, but you—”
Wait wait wait. “Why do you want to keep them apart? Getting them to come clean, I understand that. But keeping them separate? That seems excessive.”
John shook his head. “Genna’s future won’t include having to deal with werewolves. She’s smart. She could do anything with her life. The last thing I want is for her to be shackled to a tiny stretch
of isolated land in the middle of the goddamn mountains.”
“It’s not like they’re getting married,” I reminded him. “They’re teenagers, they’re… dating would be too strong a word for it. Feeling things out, maybe.”
“Maybe literally,” John snapped. “Five months ago Genna couldn’t wait to leave, and now she’s thinking of staying close, just for a boy? And a werewolf boy? No. She’s got a crush—it’s as simple as that—and I’m not going to let her waste her life on someone who might not even live to see twenty.”
What. The. Fuck? “You want to explain what you mean by that?” I growled.
“I monitor your communications, remember? I know you’re leaving, Henry, and I know the odds aren’t good that you’re coming back.” John’s eyes were pained, but his voice was firm. “I know that boy is next in line to be alpha at this point, and I also know that he’s not ready for it. This pack is heading for a rough time, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let my daughter get tangled up in something that’s just going to break her heart.”
I was dumbfounded. Literally so taken aback I couldn’t respond to John for a moment. As soon as he dropped his eyes, I found my voice. “You’re… counting on my death? You’ve got Roman set up as the next alpha already?”
“I’m just reading between the lines. And I know I’m not the only one doing it, so don’t look so betrayed, son. I’m sorry for it—I am, but—”
“You’re sorry? Are you really?” I leaned forward and placed my palms flat on the table. “Think about this, guardian. The oversight of our pack is your responsibility, and it has been for almost two decades. You used to care. You used to go to bat for us, to fight to get us more supplies, better equipment, more liberty. But you stopped giving a damn about what happened to any of us when Clara left, and I think maybe now you’re just counting down the days until we’re disbanded and you can move on with your life. That’s not going to happen, though.” He looked up at me, and I let my eyes shift gold. There was the faintest hint in the air, barely detectible, of fear. Whether it was fear of me or fear of his fate, though, I didn’t know.