by Kat Kinney
“She’s good for him. It’s just sometimes, watching them together, it’s hard not to feel envious for what they have. They were made for each other. And life doesn’t hand out a lot of happy endings.”
Dallas leaned against the counter, crossing his arms so his biceps stretched the sleeves of his v-neck. The pack tattoo peeked out beneath the edge of one sleeve, a black crescent moon with a dagger plunging vertically through its center. And ugh, I was checking out Dallas Caldwell.
Stretching one muscled arm across the bar, he cupped my jaw, the rough pad of his thumb tracing my cheekbone. “Don’t give up on that glass slipper just yet, sweetheart. One of these days, you may still find your prince.”
I closed my eyes and curled my fingers around his wrist, inhaling the smell of black pepper and woodsmoke, soap and male. He was wrong. I was too old to believe in fairytales. Love was about as permanent as sand trickling between your outstretched fingers. The tighter you tried to hang on, the faster it slipped away.
But against my will, that warm, fluttery feeling I’d been fighting for the past two days curled like warm, gooey chocolate in my belly as the rough pad of his thumb grazed my cheek. Which was all kinds of wrong. Dallas and I weren’t two starry-eyed high school kids tiptoeing around the idea of a first kiss. It was ten years too late for that. And I knew all too well some mistakes could never be unmade.
I bit my lip. Dallas released a low growl. From a deep, primitive place within me, I felt something stir. A shiver travelled across my skin. Moonlight whispered in through the open windows over the patio, washing over me in a dizzying burst. For the first time since I’d awoken, I felt the wolf respond. Hungry. Wanting. Which made sense, in a way. There was nothing more deeply rooted in our feral sides than the base desire to hunt and be claimed. When I opened my eyes, Dallas’s irises had darkened to a deep, predatory gold.
“Lacey.” He growled, hand sliding around to clasp the back of my neck. “If you don’t want this, tell me now.”
My pulse slammed in my veins. Raw, animalistic need surged, causing my breathing to quicken. Hooking up was a bad idea on so many levels, and right now, I didn’t care.
“Ground rules,” I breathed when he knocked my barstool aside, caging me up against the cool granite counter.
“Listening.”
“One night. No promises. I want you to fuck me. Nothing more.” I held his gaze, tracing the rough-cut lines of his jaw. “You on board with that?”
“It’s the full moon.” He closed his eyes at my touch, ash-blond lashes fluttering against his cheeks. “I could—"
“Stop.” I pressed fingertips to his lips, stopping the thought before it could form. “We both know you’re not going to hurt me. You would never hurt me. We’ll go slow. If this is just for one night, I want to taste every inch of you.”
He growled, moving into my space. Licking my lips, I let my fingertips map the width of his shoulders, soaking in the heat coming off his cut chest, drinking in his scent like a drug.
I rose up on my toes, pressing my lips to the exposed edge of his collarbone. Dallas gripped the back of my neck, holding my mouth to his skin. I kissed my way up his throat, torn by the dual desires to ravish and savor, tasting hot, trembling skin until I reached the point where his pulse thrummed with every brush of my tongue. His breathing roughened. The air between us felt charged, everything about this moment heated and yet incredibly fragile. Dallas remained motionless, muscles straining from the effort to hold himself back, careful, so careful to let me make the first move.
Lifting the hem of his shirt, I drew it slowly up his torso. The scent of his skin swirled through the room, dark and dominant, and I felt the wolf rise in my blood. I let my eyes drift from his impossibly thick shoulders to the hard muscles of his chest, settling on abs that looked as if they’d been cut from stone. He let me look my fill, thumb grazing lazily back and forth along the length of my neck.
I lifted my eyes, heart thrumming so hard I thought I might burst from my skin. Our gazes locked, Dallas unzipped my hoodie, then slid his hands up the sides of my torso, taking my tank with it as he went. I bit my lip, shivering as the warm flat of his palms were replaced by the cold air in the room. Moonlight filled the kitchen, soaking into my skin, swirling through my blood like a drug until I was trembling with need, empty and aching to be filled.
“You don’t know what you do to me.” He dragged the backs of his knuckles across my shoulders, down the length of my arms. I shuddered as his eyes drank in the swollen pink tips of my breasts. Like he needed his hands on me everywhere but didn’t dare grant himself permission. “What you’ve done to me since the day we met.”
I rose up on my toes, capturing his lips. A second later he was forcing me back against the counter, our mouths colliding in a kiss I felt low in my hips, where a hot, desperate heat was building. Dallas growled against my throat, pulling down the straps of my bra. While his tongue flicked one nipple, he tugged roughly at the other. Shivering, I twisted fingers into his hair, needing him to never stop. Needing more.
Suddenly he was kneeling before me, ten years of unanswered questions crashing down around us as he held my gaze and slowly removed the rest of our clothes. Without breaking eye contact, he pressed a kiss to my navel. I was standing before him, completely and utterly bare, the lazy circle of his thumbs at my hipbones causing me to see stars. His erection rose to just beneath his navel, thick and ready.
“You’re beautiful, Lacey.” Eyes hooded, he kissed the crease of my hip. “I’m going to bite you and then I’m going to fuck you. Last chance to say no.”
His eyes blazed gold. Capturing my knee, he hooked it over his shoulder. My pulse jackknifed, the sight of Dallas’s huge muscled body kneeling before me in a position that was undeniably submissive causing a low pulse to start between my legs. Dallas worked out, lifted and trained with his brothers at the gym, took care of his body, and had a physique to show for it. And seeing him like this, so naked, so raw, I wanted to feel that strength as he pushed me to the floor, feel his chest hard and solid over me while he showed me with his lips and hands and body every desire he’d held back the past ten years. In this one stolen moment we might never be able to keep, I wanted all of Dallas Caldwell’s secrets, the words we’d left unsaid, the version of us we could have been if things hadn’t gone so, so wrong. For one, impossible moment, I wanted him to make me believe.
Mine.
“Yes,” I breathed.
With a possessive growl, Dallas bit the crease of my hip.
I gasped, arching over him like a freshly strung bow. The bond roared open between us, consuming me in a rush of flame. My body came alive, every air current whispering through the room tickling over my skin like the caress of a thousand feathers. The night air scattered gooseflesh across my naked skin. Dallas’s body was an inferno, searing mine in every place we touched. Raw moonlust burned through his blood to mine, every sensation he felt assaulting me through the bond. His naked hunger for me. Raw loneliness so stark that tears sprang to my eyes, the hurt he’d been suppressing for decades cresting over me in a tidal wave. There was no hiding. No holding back. And, god, I needed to run, to hunt, to come, to scream—
Gasping, I let my head fall back. Dallas’s tongue stroked my sex, driving quick and rough where I needed it most while his thumb laved the fresh scar at my hip that claimed me as his.
His.
I shattered. Stars burst on the back of my eyelids. Keening, I raked my nails down the thick muscles of his bare shoulders, the wolf close to the surface, base instinct shivering across my skin.
Mine.
I swayed under the addictive link of the bond, feeling Dallas’s body responding in time with mine. The scent of his release filled the room. He growled, eyes blazing a heated gold. My breathing instantly slaved to his, our hearts thrumming as one through the link of the bond. I threw my head back, shivering as another wave of dark pleasure rolled through my hips.
This wasn’t happening, couldn
’t be happening. After nine years of dancing around us, Dallas Caldwell was stripping away my last defenses. And I wasn’t certain, but I was pretty sure something about that terrified me.
He lowered his eyelids fractionally, the wolf coming out as he stared up at me in the dark room, all power, raw lust, and dominant command.
Tearing open a condom, he sheathed himself and turned me away from him, pressing my hands against the countertop. Like this, locked in the hard cage of his arms and chest, there was no denying the call of our darker, feral sides.
Shuddering, I nuzzled the hot skin of his throat, giving permission. Bracing himself, he entered me from behind. Time slowed. I lost myself in the musk of our swirling scents, in the hypnotic twist of pleasure and pain as he trailed soft kisses and bites up my throat.
“Mark me,” he growled, voice husky.
Our tongues met in a hot, needy kiss over my shoulder.
He gripped my wrists, teeth scraping the unbruised side of my neck. “Do it.”
It was the wolf talking, raw, wild animal need. His wolf had always wanted to claim me. That savage unleashed power, that need to possess what had drawn us together from the start. He was no longer being gentle, our pace wild, frantic. I arched back against him, wrists locked in his grip, the cage he had me in one I had no desire to escape. Twisting just before I fell, I sank my teeth into his bicep.
Dallas threw his head back, teeth gritted, the roar he released one of ecstasy and savage pain. I felt it all, unable to hide from him. Not any more. And then we were falling, falling—
Sometime after midnight, I got up for a glass of water. I stared out at the backyard, watching gauzy moonlight playing out across the lawn through the trees and trying to ignore the way my heart had started to race. What had just happened had felt like anything but one and done. I should have known better. I had known better.
Dallas and I had gone down this road once before, and left countless lives scattered in our wake. My mother couldn’t see us together, couldn’t know we were in contact at all without terrible consequences. And even if the Caldwells had once supported me out of a sense of obligation or guilt, it was pretty clear if they’d wanted a future for me and their son, they wouldn’t have shipped him off to the Canadian wilderness.
Much as I might have once wanted things to be different, Dallas Caldwell and I couldn’t be together. And the sooner I got used to that idea, the better.
5
Dallas
A POST-IT. I GOT UP at 4 a.m. to make Lacey Blair her favorite banana macadamia nut pancakes only to find out via the office supply breakup method used by douchey guys everywhere that she’d snuck out on me like I was a cheap one-night stand.
Never mind that I couldn’t stop replaying the memory of marking every last inch of her skin with my hands, mouth and tongue. Never mind that my dick ached like it had that entire summer before high school when I’d first figured out being a shifter meant you could go half a dozen rounds before you started getting sloppy. We definitely wouldn’t be talking about the fact that there were probably still grooves in my back left by her nails. Or that for a male shifter, waking up in a bed that smelled like the female who’d just marked you only to find her gone pretty much dialed the possessive Alpha-wolf freak out mode thing up to an eleven. As in eleven thousand. And, wow. Cold shower.
An hour later, I was up at The Spoke, sorting through the previous day’s paperwork. I grazed a finger across the faint crescent moon arc of the scar Lacey had left on the top of my biceps, feeling it pulse in time with her heartbeat. Her note stared up at me.
GOTTA GO. TALK LATER.
Growling, I pulled out my phone.
Me: Okay, so the part where Brody said someone could be after you, so don’t go off anywhere alone?
Three blinking dots appeared.
BabyGotBake: Which is the sort of order, btw, that never gets handed down to Ethan or Cal.
She wasn’t entirely wrong, but I wasn’t about to ride my oldest brother’s ass on that one. A year and a half ago, our dad had been abducted on a rural county road in broad daylight. We’d all heard the scream through the pack bond. Brody had been the one to find his abandoned police cruiser. From what we were able to piece together, Dad had been secretly meeting with contacts from a pack up in north Texas. Two weeks after his disappearance, that same pack was obliterated by vampires.
Maybe he thought he’d been protecting us. Maybe in the end, my dad knew exactly what he was doing. Maybe if we’d known the full extent of what was going on, we’d be as dead as the North Texas pack. But after all that went down, it was hard to call Brody paranoid whenever he made us upgrade security, call in periodically while out patrolling pack territory, or assign a guard when things got tense.
Me: Like we both don’t know you’re a badass…
BabyGotBake: Wait for it.
Me: …who asks me to get her special-blend alpaca socks for Christmas every year for her freakishly cold toes.
BabyGotBake: Which you’re totally getting me again, btw.
Me: Well, duh.
BabyGotBake: Besides, I took Snickerdoodle.
Me: You mean Major? You’re so going to be the cause of that dude’s doggie identity crisis.
BabyGotBake: Um, toxic masculinity much? (And I’ve totally taught him to bark on command when I call him that.)
Me: Yeah. Brody’s going to love that. And not to knock the little man’s mad protective Goldenskillz, but I’m pretty sure I saw him run from a cat last week.
Me: Which, spoiler alert, was in a Meow Mix commercial.
BabyGotBake: Okay. Now you’re just being mean.
Me: You hear back from the Council?
BabyGotBake: Preliminary test results in. Not sure what’s going on, but they’ve ruled out anything contagious.
Me: Well. That’s something.
BabyGotBake: Right? Got to go. Dinner tonight? *cupcake emoji*
Tapping out a quick response, I hit send and dialed West.
He picked up on the first ring. “This had better be important.”
Computer keys clacked peevishly in the background. Crap. I’d interrupted him in the middle of a good chapter. Or a really shitty one.
“Out of curiosity, do you go all Voldemort on your first period class every morning? Because someone should seriously stage an intervention.”
“As you’re perfectly aware, my first block advisory is possessed. Last week I tried to take them outside for ten minutes of fresh air and someone broke a car window throwing rocks they got from the meditation pond. The meditation pond. Let’s just sit with that one for a minute. Second, I credit their survival and mine to my morning caffeine fix. Six shots of espresso. Extra whip. Caramel, chocolate and a dash of hazelnut. Something else in there Ethan refuses to identify. House secret. Fuck, I hope it’s nothing illegal—"
“Well, knowing E—” I snorted. “How’s Topher?”
Dead. Silence. I pulled the phone away from my ear to make sure the connection hadn’t dropped.
“Wow. That good, huh?”
“Yeah. Kind of on his shit list at the moment.”
“Something you want to share with the class?”
There was a pause. “You ever do something you’re convinced is right, but as soon as you take a step back from it, you figure out you’re actually the villain of the story?”
“Not following, bro.”
“Whatever. It’s nothing. I’m just worn down. Cal thinks Topher’s recovered physically from the Tracers trying to force their way into his mind. As in, there’s nothing preventing him from accessing those memories as far as we know. It’s the PTSD in cases like these that does the most damage. He’s angry. Constantly on edge. Doesn’t trust any of us. I’m trying to do what I can to support him, but since I’m his sire, we’re pretty much always together when I’m not teaching class. Which makes me not exactly his favorite person right now.”
“Which is why you’re taking out all your aggression on the Chosen One and his
Dark blond Prince?”
“Like we both don’t know I’m at my best when I rage-fic.” The typing stopped. “So are you going to tell me what Lacey was doing out at the ranch this morning with your scent all over her?”
I closed my eyes, allowing myself to be dragged back into the memory of Lacey’s lips at my throat, her claiming mark tingling beneath my shirt where she’d bitten me just before I’d all but blown the end off my dick.
“Nope.”
“Uh-huh,” West said smugly. “You can thank me later, by the way. Preferably in beef ribs—”
“Whatever. I gotta go.”
The following day was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. The Spoke was slammed with last minute smoked turkey orders and prep for enough cornbread stuffing to feed an army of werewolves, including buckets of celery, baskets of onions, and so much cornbread I was pretty sure we were going to need a new oven. Then there were the mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, giblet gravy, and fresh-baked rolls. Plus the recipe I only made once a year, okra fried in funnel cake batter and served up with Ranch dipping sauce.
If you’ve never been, the Texas State Fair was the ultimate mecca for food and adrenaline junkies. In other words, werewolves. Held every fall right as the weather was starting to turn, the fair boasted live music, a youth livestock auction, enough rides and games on the midway to tame River and Brody’s hardcore competitive streaks, and a 212-foot Ferris wheel.
But the best part was the cooking competitions. In Texas, frying things your average person wouldn’t think to fry ranked somewhere between an art form and a religion, and every year for the fair, well, let’s just say people left it all out on the field. Fried Coke? Hell, yeah. Fried Jell-O? Frito Pie? Why not fry up some ice cream? Better yet, drizzle that bad boy with chocolate sauce and put it on a stick.