by Hettie Ivers
To see what his fingers would do next if I said yes.
“Yes,” I mouthed.
As I watched his throat muscles work and his eyes roll back, the lids falling to half-mast, I knew in an instant I’d just opened a door within myself that I could never again seal shut.
3
Lauren
Seconds ticked by and nothing happened. He remained motionless in place above me—his features taut with tension, his furrowed brow projecting an internal struggle I couldn’t hope to comprehend.
Then his eyes squeezed shut. He started shaking as he hovered above me, mumbling unintelligibly. Finally, he said, “Can’t. Isn’t right—”
I tilted my hips up into his unmoving fingers before I could think it through, and his eyes snapped open—glowing an iridescent blue shade reminiscent of the eyes of the white wolf that had attacked me.
His fingers entered me.
One. Then two.
His thumb found my clit.
I bit my lip too late to stifle the panted moan that escaped me.
This was so wrong.
I knew I should want him to stop. But all I wanted was for him to start—to move his fingers in and out.
He growled above me, his face contorting in anger, making him look more menacing than he had a moment before.
“I’m scared,” I confessed.
He growled louder when I said it, and finally, his fingers began to move.
“Terrified,” I added after a beat, and was rewarded when his touch became faster, a little more aggressive, his fingers moving easily in and out.
Because I was soaked.
And not from the snow.
Despite the pain in my throbbing, wrecked ankle, suddenly all I wanted was to figure out how far I could push this frightening stranger into doing inappropriate things to me on the snow-covered forest floor.
Because the throbbing need blossoming to life in my core was somehow greater than the agony in my ankle, greater still than the fear and panic tripping my heart rate.
And his fingers—they moved with such certainty. His touch was exact, exploring me from the inside with knowing strokes. Finding undiscovered places within me that caused my eyes to roll back, my breath to catch, and my brain to melt.
But beneath the calculated finesse of his touch, there was urgency—thinly suppressed ferocity. I sensed it. And something in me wanted to chase it. To pull the tightly wound string and see where it led. Watch it unravel.
My hips started rising to meet his fingers—rolling up and down. He snarled at me then, his teeth pulling back to reveal sharp canines.
Holy mother of …
Roots came up out of the frozen soil to wrap around my thighs, spreading them wider while restricting my hips to the ground—halting their movement. At the same time, more roots wound about my arms, pulling them to either side above my head and shackling them against the earth.
It was like something out of a horror movie! But like a really hot, kinky horror movie I’d never seen before.
My eyes widened and a scream climbed up my throat. Only part of it managed to emerge, though, because finer roots came up from the ground on either side of my head to imprison my throat in a hold that was restrictive enough to be threatening, but not enough to suffocate me.
The warning in my captor’s glowing, feral eyes was clear, though—even before he pulled his fingers from my center and pushed them into my mouth.
An involuntary whimper escaped me as my tongue swirled over his fingers. The most insane part of all was I knew it had more to do with the loss of his fingers inside my sex than it did the fact I was shackled horror movie-style to the ground by tree roots, at the mercy of a man with glowing feral eyes and fangs—who possibly wasn’t a man at all, but a creature.
I sucked his fingers, tasting myself before he told me to. I knew that’s what he wanted when I saw the hardness in his feral gaze soften a fraction. But then the hardness returned abruptly as I continued to suck and swirl my tongue.
I’d been hoping to incite him to put his fingers—or preferably the erection bobbing in my peripheral vision—inside my spread center. Because the cold air was nipping my engorged, exposed clit now—heightening my arousal while adding to my discomfort and fear.
Was it possible for a clitoris to freeze off?
His head dipped; his lips brushed my ear. “I’m in charge, Lauren.”
His fingers slipped from my mouth, down my imprisoned throat, to the neckline of my flimsy tank top. “I did not hunt you down, bite you, and terrify you to the point of hysterical bawling so that you could play games and give me orders.”
He shredded my top down the center with one violent tug, and not even the tree roots tightening around my neck were enough to suppress the strangled scream that emerged from me then.
“I did it so that I could taste your fear.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. He was a creature—he was the monstrous wolf who had attacked me!
Terror swept through my veins as his warm lips traveled up and over my cold cheekbone. The tip of his tongue licked up a tear as it fell.
He groaned. “That’s it.” His breath warmed my face. He licked up the next tear as it pooled at the corner of my eye. “More … so good …”
He kept going, lapping up my tears as I proceeded to cry in earnest.
I no longer wanted to feed his sinister desire; I just wanted to survive.
“Your scent … so divine … could drink you in for eternity …” His breaths began to fall faster against my damp face, and his soft groans of pleasure turned to grunts.
Even with my eyes shut, I knew that he was jerking himself off as he feasted on my terror. The thought made me cry harder as I felt the heat emanating from his naked body as he hovered above my freezing, restrained one.
Because I was scared.
Because my nipples were so tight and frigid it was painful; and my exposed clit was in agony—in danger of freezing.
And this wolfman creature was jerking off to the sight of me restrained—injured and terrified—against the frozen forest floor. What kind of a sick psycho got off on that?
I released a great shuddering sob at the thought.
“Shh—almost over, Lauren,” he said, his voice strained. “Just a bit more … and I promise it’ll all be over for you.”
All over? What did that mean? Oh, God, he was going to kill me as soon as he shot his load! My sobs became louder. Frantic.
“No … that’s too much. Don’t,” he ordered. “Shh-shh … it’s okay.” He pressed an awkward, conciliatory kiss to my forehead. Then another. “Please,” he entreated with an aggravated sigh. “Please just be good for a few more moments? I’m so close. I have to find a way to stop this. Please, I don’t want to hurt you.”
He was definitely going to kill me. I began noisily, full-blown ugly crying.
With a curse, he abandoned his halfhearted attempts to reassure me and went back to lapping up my tears, ignoring my increasingly hysterical weeping.
I knew I had to try and connect with him—to appeal to whatever shred of sympathy and sense of empathy he possessed—to get him to see me as a human being. Wasn’t the common characteristic of most killers a failure to see their victims as anything more than objects?
I tried to reassure myself with the fact that he knew and had addressed me by name already. Surely, that had to mean something? There had to be some humanity in him that I could work with.
I summoned my courage and opened my eyes. When I did, he jerked his head back, away from me.
The feral glow in his pale blue eyes was startling as I took him in.
He was braced up on one hand, leaning over me. His naked body was huge—more than a little intimidating; his form was long and lithe, packed with compact, defined muscle. His shoulders were tensed, his bicep muscle bulging and twitching as he pumped an alarmingly large erection in his free hand. A vein pulsed down the midline of his frowning forehead as he growled disapprovingly down at m
e.
“Close your eyes, Lauren.”
“No.”
Another growl. “Don’t make this worse than it needs to be.”
I shook my head.
“Stop testing me. I’m trying to—fuck, you think I want this? Don’t look at me like that!” He let go of his cock in order to slam his fist into the snow next to my head.
I yelped and squeezed my eyes shut out of reflex, before forcing myself to open them again. I stared defiantly up at him, even as my tears blurred the sight of his irate features.
“Damnit, I’m not even touching you. I’ve restrained you for your safety—so I don’t risk putting my hands on you to hold you down. All you have to do is lie there a little longer. Can’t you see this is the safest way for me to—”
“I don’t wanna die!” I wailed. “I’m not ready to die!”
“Ah, bloody Christ.” He groaned in disgust and leapt to his feet.
He began turning in place above me—cursing and muttering, his hands on his hips, his erection at full-mast. He pointed an accusing finger down at me. “We have to stop doing this, do you hear? I—I have to stop this. I am not a monster. I won’t become a monster. I won’t do it. You don’t deserve this. It’s wrong.”
When he stopped crazy-mumbling to himself and turning in place, he scrubbed a hand over his jaw and glanced down at me. The first thing that struck me as his eyes widened on me was that they were no longer blue, but a warm shade of brown.
And I realized that this man wasn’t a complete stranger to me. I had seen him around campus before and in the coffee shop where I worked—many times. In fact, I’d secretly been crushing on him for a couple months now, even though we’d barely spoken and I didn’t know his name. It occurred to me I should’ve recognized him sooner, but it was as if this wolfman double of him was a phony evil twin—a sadistic Mr. Hyde version of the civilized stranger I’d been mooning over.
“God, what have I done?” He dropped to his knees on the snow-covered earth next to me, taking in my state with remorse-stricken brown eyes.
I had reached him—his humanity.
Slowly, he shook his head, laughing softly and without humor as his palms framed my face and his thumbs wiped at my tears. “I wish,” he whispered, as if replying to my unspoken thought. “I wish it were that simple.”
His tormented brown eyes moved over my face, and then his lips followed suit as slowly he bent his head, pressing kisses to my eyes and cheeks and forehead while he murmured again and again that he was sorry.
“You have the face of an angel.” He crouched over me on all fours as his mouth moved along my jawline to my neck. “So sweet. Innocent.”
The finer roots encircling the column of my throat fell away as his mouth traveled downward, pressing kisses along the way to my chest.
“Only a monster would want to harm you. To see you cry and beg for your life.” His hand found my right breast as his mouth closed over my left nipple.
Wow, this was confusing.
“Only a twisted animal would get hard at the sight of you injured and in distress. You have to stay away from me. Do you understand?”
Not one bit, actually.
“I’m bound to hurt you—to do terrible, unnatural things to you.” He paused, his mouth poised over my nipple. “But … maybe … I can also make you feel good …”
I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or to himself.
“No. I shouldn’t. I have to stop.”
Definitely talking to himself, I decided.
But my brain shorted out and my eyes fluttered shut a moment later at the increased pulling sensation of his tongue and lips upon my nipple. Fuck—what was he doing to me? Suddenly, I felt good all over. Better than good. My ankle didn’t hurt at all anymore, and I felt warm and tingly everywhere. Even the snow beneath me felt like it had morphed into some kind of molten heat that was now sliding along my thong-covered ass and—oh, my Lord, that was a tongue moving beneath me, not snow.
I gasped as the tongue licked over my anus and up between my spread folds to circle my little bean. Wha—how?
I still felt his mouth on my nipple. How could it be in two places?
My eyes flew open just as my thong was ripped off and fingers penetrated me. To my shock, I found my captor’s face hovering directly above mine—his beautiful, swollen lips touching neither my breast nor my sex, despite the fact that I still felt them in both places.
Those lips smiled faintly down at me as more unseen hands started touching me. Stroking me. Entering me. A set of phantom hands began massaging my ankle that no longer felt damaged. Another tongue licked the arch of my foot.
I was on sensory overload. I tried to speak, but only a garbled sound emerged from my throat. I could barely keep my eyes open as phantom lips sucked hard on my clit and unseen fingers curled inside me, pressing against my G-spot.
The wolfman was jerking himself off once again as he observed phantom hands and mouths violating me—in the best possible way. I decided he had to be some sort of demon. An incubus, perhaps.
“You’re going to come for me.”
An order.
“Before I lose control and hurt you.”
A threat.
I was primed for detonation already, and his autocratic tone got me even hotter. But it also prompted the recklessly deviant, thrill-seeking side of me to defy him and taunt the devil. He wasn’t the first to describe my face as angelic. I’d spent my life trying to dispel that myth.
“Make me.”
As I threw those two breathy syllables at him, I could scarcely believe I’d done it. From the look on his face, he couldn’t either. But if I was to die as soon as the psycho shot his load, then by God, I was going to get the best damn orgasm I’d ever had out of this sick, sexy fucking demon bastard first.
He growled. “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”
Yeah … he definitely didn’t appreciate my dare. His eyes were back to being bright blue and he was shaking with fury—or restraint—above me now. Even the muscles and veins in his face appeared to be flexing and rolling beneath his skin—as if preparing to burst through and reveal his true demon form at any moment.
“I can’t be gentle, Lauren.” His eyes were pleading. Desperate. “I can’t touch you the way the phantom hands and mouths are touching you now.”
As he said it, the unseen hands and mouths on me multiplied. And grew markedly less gentle. A phantom hand wrapped around my throat, and it felt like it had claws. Sharp teeth bit into my nipple, causing me to hiss in pain.
“I want nothing more than to tear into your flesh. Do you understand me?”
His eyes glowed brighter as he said it; his hand moved faster over his angry-looking erection—revealing how turned on he was at the prospect of tearing into my flesh.
And that really shouldn’t have brought me closer to orgasm.
But it did.
“I want to feel your skin break apart beneath my teeth,” he snarled down at me. “To taste your blood as it fills my mouth. I want to mark you, to fuck you raw, to ruin you for any other man—”
“Then do it!”
Oh, snap. Before I could grasp what in the world had possessed me to actually say that last bit aloud, he pounced.
I saw the briefest flash of his sharp white canines as they caught the moonlight before I felt them sink into my jugular.
Ouch!
I fell out of bed with a crash, my arm whacking the nightstand and toppling my stainless steel water bottle, which bounced and clanked noisily as it hit the tile floor.
With my legs tangled up in the sheets, my right hipbone had broken my fall. I’d be feeling that bruise in the morning for sure, along with the spot where I’d whacked my arm.
“You okay?” Kendall, my suitemate, called through the paper-thin bedroom wall that we shared, her voice groggy from sleep.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I called back. “Sorry I woke you.”
I was covered in a layer of sweat an
d shaking all over as I detangled myself, retrieved my water bottle that had rolled halfway across the room, and climbed back into bed.
As I was drifting back to sleep, I combed my memory, trying to recall if I’d been dreaming about anything before I’d tumbled so violently out of bed. But no memory of any dreams surfaced to account for why I might’ve been startled to the point of tossing myself from the bed—much less explain why I’d awakened with the crotch of my pajama shorts soaked through with my arousal.
4
Lauren
“You know, customers tend to assume our coffee is weak when the barista keeps yawning,” Jeff, my coworker and sort-of manager, said in a low voice over my shoulder.
I nodded in agreement, while yawning, and mumbled back, “It is weak. Obviously.”
He chuckled. “Crazy late night partying?”
“Yeah. Wild rager at the library.”
“Can’t believe you didn’t text me,” he joked.
Except he wasn’t entirely kidding. He was fishing. Jeff was always curious to know what I was doing and whom I was spending my time with. He wished that I would text him when I was out partying—because he wanted to be more than my work-buddy-slash-quasi-manager.
“Figured you’d have more exciting plans,” I returned.
It was the truth. I had been studying last night. But I hadn’t stayed up late doing so. I’d actually crashed pretty early. I just hadn’t been sleeping well recently. Not restfully at least. While it seemed as if I’d been sleeping heavily—because I didn’t recall waking up even once during the night—I also hadn’t remembered much, if anything, about my dreams for the past couple months. So I figured I must not have been entering REM sleep lately.
“Now you’re just flattering me,” Jeff said.
“Mm … flattered enough to take inventory for me?” I asked with a smile and shameless puppy dog eyes.
“Flattered enough to assist,” he acceded.