by Elsa Jade
His biceps, planted like trees on either side of her head, bunched and strained with each thrust, and he stared down at her with such intensity she wanted to look away, to bring it down a notch.
But she couldn’t, not when he felt so good, as if he’d found some secret spot—not just her clit—to unleash something she hadn’t known was inside her.
Wait, no, she wasn’t a shapeshifter—she didn’t need to change. She just needed to—
“Gin,” he groaned. “I have to come. I need you too…”
With a roar, he plunged into her, his earlier smooth, powerful strokes transforming to a wild, uncontrolled rhythm. She could only cling to him, her breath a keening jumble of gasped curses and commands that he just keep going a little longer…
His jaw was clenched so hard, his dimple was a jagged lightning bolt in his cheek, and when she grabbed his hips and yanked him close for an endless grind, he threw back his head with another roar.
Inside her, he swelled and gushed, finding that secret spot—okay, that was the G spot—so that she tumbled with him headlong into orgasm.
The long, shuddering glide from the peak was never-ending, as if she’d shifted into something with wings. She closed her eyes, seeing stars, or the afterglow of lightning, or something.
With a grunt, he collapsed on top of her, flattening her imaginary wings. She oofed a complaint at his lax weight and managed to wedge an elbow between their bodies, just enough to breathe.
“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered. “I lost it there at the end.”
She smirked. “I know where it is.”
He levered himself on one forearm to peer down at her. “Yeah, I feel it,” he whispered. “I feel you.”
His words made her conscious of the delicious shocks of her inner muscles still clenching around him—grasping, greedy little exclamations of delight. She frowned to herself. Sheesh, it was just an orgasm.
Reaching up to feather his thumb between her eyes, he smoothed out the crease she realized he must’ve seen. “Here, right now.”
He was reassuring her that she hadn’t become something forever different just because she’d opened herself to a sexy shifter with an enticing smile.
So why didn’t that ease the clenching inside her even as her post-orgasmic lassitude faded?
Slowly—now that she knew he was a wild animal after all—she scooched out from underneath him. He made a disgruntled sound and with obvious reluctance untangled his legs from hers.
Even as she was sitting up, she started fastening the row of silver buttons as fast as her still fumbly fingers would allow, but Ben just sprawled next to her, innocuously naked, his cock only half hard but pointing toward her, like it was a magic wand or something. Her body tingled at the thought of that magic.
Oh geez, she’d told him everything had magical power, but she was not going to let one good fuck upend her plans. She’d seen what had happened to her sister—and her mother, for that matter—and she wasn’t going down that path. She’d chosen the way of the shadow circle, and that was all she’d ever wanted.
Twisting to one side, she swept the tiny diablo rose into her palm. The peppery scent seemed a bit faded. Although maybe that was just because her senses were overwhelmed at the moment. By other things. She kept her gaze fixed on the petals where the dark scarlet seemed to bleed into the shadows. “It’s dark out now.”
“It is night,” he agreed.
“I meant there’s no more lightning, so it’s safe to leave.”
“Yup. The clouds broke up awhile ago.”
At his amiable tone, she darted an irritated glance at him, studiously ignoring his nudity. “So I’m going to leave.”
“Okay. This was really nice.” He patted her bare knee.
She stared at her knee then into his face incredulously. “Nice.”
He chuckled. “Well, it was no frog orgy. But yeah, that felt nice.” He stretched, the v-shaped muscles in his groin popping as if she needed a reminder.
She slid off the mats, groping around with her toes for her flipflops. “I need to get home.”
“If you want to keep the bloom fresh, set it in a shallow dish of water, but don’t get the petals wet. If you want to dry it, set it someplace cool and dark. But you probably already know all this since you’re a witch.”
She didn’t need that reminder either. Still, she scowled at him. “You’re not going to walk with me?”
Blinking at her, he pushed himself upright. “Oh. If you want—”
“Never mind.” To her horror, the words sounded squeaky, as if her throat was too tight when the rest of her felt too jangly loose. “I know the way.”
Ben rose and in one long step was between her and the doorway, not seeming to care that he was mooning all of Angels Rest behind him. “Hey, no, I’ll go with you. I just thought… Well, like you said, never mind. I can shift later.”
When he reached around her for his jeans, she leaned aside to avoid brushing against him, but all the little hairs on her body—when had she become so sensitized to her own sparse fur?—seemed to angle toward him. “You’re going to shift?”
“It’s a beautiful night.” He gave her a crooked smile that didn’t quite bring out his dimple. “More importantly, it’s really late and there won’t be anyone around to freak out. And my bear is hungry.”
Gin opened her mouth, but then closed it again. What, was she going to offer to make him breakfast or something? He was a baker, a bear, and a bro. There was literally nothing she had in common with any of that.
The broken stem of the rose poked into her palm, and she loosened her grasp on the flower. “I guess I could wait for you. And I won’t freak out.”
He didn’t move. “It’s not really something we do where just anyone can see.”
All her life she’d been one of the weird Wick sisters and now she was still not good enough for an even weirder shapeshifter. She lifted her chin. “Shifting is more personal than having sex with someone?”
“Do you do magic where people are watching?”
She smirked. “I thought we made some magic together.”
“Gin—”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, I was just curious. Go do your thang.”
“If you still want me—”
“Nah, I got things to do too.” She got the flower she wanted, and as she’d told him before, it wasn’t like she couldn’t find her way through Angels Rest. “See you around.” Unfortunately.
She sidled past him and stepped out of the shed into the cooler air. After the stultifying closeness, the night sky was almost dizzying, like she could fall upward and never stop.
“Gin.” With his jeans on but still undone, Ben halted in front of her.
She flattened one hand at the apex of that eight-pack and stood on tiptoe to kiss the corner of his mouth. “Goodnight, Ben. It really was nice.”
No dimple, just a faint frown on those masculine lips, as she dropped back to her flat soles.
And maybe she was just a bit wicked, because as he watched her walk away, she hoped he stayed hungry.
Chapter 7
After stuffing himself into his clothes and following her back to the old Victorian—staying to the darkness the whole time—Ben gave up the idea of shifting and headed home himself.
He also gave up the idea of understanding females.
She’d been annoyed when he picked her up at her house, then she’d been mad that he didn’t walk her back. What was he supposed to have done?
He should’ve bitten her, claimed her as his mate, and never let her go. That would’ve solved everything.
The thought—or not so much the thought as the primitive satisfaction that flooded him at the thought—made him stumble over his own two feet. It was the bear, of course, roused from the coupling, ravenous, waiting to be unleashed. Well, not tonight. Not when he was still too close to the Victorian.
Gin had been very clear about her feelings. Whether she was clawing his shoulders or brushi
ng him off. Even the sometimes oblivious bear couldn’t pretend not to have heard that she wasn’t interested in forever.
Good thing he still had the other ladies of the gardening club because right now, he was feeling a little deflowered.
In the darkness, he trudged back to the cottage he rented with his cousins while they worked to reestablish the clan’s relationship with the rest of the town’s shifter population. He walked around the back corner of the house to let himself in through the kitchen door. Maybe he’d ask for the weekend off to go camp on the mesa and let the bear eat all the juniper berries and ground squirrels it wanted. That’d take the edge off—
His boot stepped into nothingness, and he yelped in surprise.
He started to fall…but something hard caught under his heel and catapulted him out of the hole. Windmilling his arms, he kept himself upright more by instinct than intent as a huge, dark mass emerged from the hole. “What the…”
“King.”
At the fractured basso rumble—neither human voice nor growl—Ben felt like he was falling again. “Hey, cuz,” he said cautiously, wanting to remind the feral creature of their shared blood before any of it was shed. “What are you doing…uh, out here?”
And trapped halfway between man and beast.
The mahogany-furred silhouette rose up and up, taller even than Thor in his upright form which was tall enough. Shaggy, humped shoulders flared in challenge, and the warning-amber glint of a hard stare fixed Ben before he was able to glance away.
“You stink.” Thor flexed his hands. Claws, actually—the great, curved saber spears of a rex ursi griz.
Ben withheld an answering growl. “Had gardening club today,” he said, as if earth and roses alone could explain the rich musk he knew still clung to his skin. “It went pretty well.”
And if he thought a discreet redirection of his king’s rudeness would work… “That’s no sow you fucked.”
Ben restrained a wince—and maybe a snap of his own. Lady bears had been fighting that word for awhile now. If their rex ursi didn’t know that, maybe he needed to get out of the basement more. Or maybe not, cuz Gin would undoubtedly frog him in solidarity with the lady bears if she heard such talk. “And that’s no business of yours,” he said instead, struggling to keep his tone calm and even.
“I watch all.”
“Is that why you’ve tunneled from the kitchen pantry to the backyard? To keep an eye on things? Looks more like escaping to me.”
Oops, so much for calm and even.
To his surprise, Thor didn’t rip his head off his shoulders, even though those claws could do exactly that with one ripple of the hulking muscles under his partly furred skin. The boar-man swiveled his heavy head to stare out over the fence that ringed the cottage backyard. They didn’t have a view of the mesa, but beyond the white pickets, the high desert plateau streaked away, the undulating mounds of silvery sagebrush looking like a frozen ocean under the starlight.
After a long, tense moment, Thor said, “Sometimes I can’t open the door.”
Ben glanced at those claws again. The churning in his gut paused then started swirling in the other direction as the angry bear’s defense of a possible mate was surpassed by the man’s worry for his struggling cousin.
He took a wary step forward to join Thor in contemplating the wildland. “You could just ask.” For help, he almost finished, but swallowed the humiliating words.
Thor shook his head, ragged dark hair falling over his too-pale eyes. “I am supposed to be king.”
The supposed to be set off alarm bells in Ben’s gut worse than falling into a pit. “You are king,” he clarified. “The only rex ursi in the Four Corners.”
“That could change.”
Okay, that was even more ominous than supposed to be.
“Thor,” he said, probing his way like he was testing for more neck-breaking holes in the ground. “What happened with your father was bad. And I know we never really talk about it—us bears like to act as if howling and yowling is only for the wolves and cats—but no one in the clan blames you…for any of it. You did what you had to do, the only thing that could be done. We know it was hard, brutally so, for you, and if anything, we’re ashamed we didn’t do more to help.” Dang it, he’d meant to not say help and there he went. So he continued resolutely, “We want to help now.”
“We…” Thor rumbled under his breath.
The bear clan had always been scattered across the Four Corners, and more so since the old king’s reprehensible alliance with the Kingdom Guard. “Mac and me,” Ben said. “We’re right here.”
“Mac has a mate now and a cub.”
A painful spark of longing silenced Ben for a moment before he rallied to say, “I’m still here.”
Thor jerked his head around to fasten that amber stare on him. “So you’d take my place?”
The eerie glint in his cousin’s eyes made Ben stiffen. “I’m not trying—”
“I’m giving.”
It had been a really long day and whatever pleasant relief he might’ve felt after his encounter with Gin felt even further away. “You can’t give away being king of the clan,” he protested. “Not to me, not to anyone. It’s not a…a bag of chips and an extra beer. It’s what you are.”
“What I am is…” Thor paced a few steps to the edge of the yard and rested his hand on the fence. One of the white pickets snapped under his claws like an old bone. “Broken.”
“Not broken,” Ben said stubbornly. Well, the fence was, not to mention the kitchen pantry, which was going to cost them their rental deposit. “Hurt.”
His cousin sidelonged a glance at him. “A cholla cactus crossed with poison oak crossed with a boulder.”
Ben winced. “We do landscaping in a desert. We can deal with those.”
“It’s not enough for the clan. I am not enough.”
A surge of alarm rippled the hair at Ben’s nape. One of the many good things about Mac and Brandy finding each other again and bringing Aster—already cub cute—to Angels Rest was the new beginning they modeled for the bear clan and the rest of the shifter community. Their happy little trio showed that the clan had left its dark days behind. If Thor tromped over that fresh start by abdicating…
“The clan needs its king,” he said through gritted teeth.
“The clan needs a king,” Thor countered. “If I am wandering the plains, that could be you.”
Ben laughed. Out loud. In his king’s face. “Me? Nah. You’re thinking of some other bear.”
“None other. You’ve been a loyal friend to me. The clan loves you, and the alpha of the Mesa Diablo wolf pack personally requested you for replanting around the mesa’s gathering stone.”
Shrugging awkwardly, Ben muttered, “They needed someone who could lift.”
“They needed someone they trusted in their sacred space.” Thor’s nostrils flared. “And obviously the non-shifters of Angels Rest like you well enough too.”
A flush of hot and cold made Ben rock from one boot to the other. “Can’t swear to that.”
“Couldn’t be allowed to continue anyway. If you’re going to become the next rex ursi—”
“But I’m not.”
Thor roared.
The burst of sound rattled the deep quiet of the night, shaking out even the tiny scuttlings of mice and bugs in the bushes. All fell silent in dismay except for the softest whisper of wind that threaded through the fence slats.
Ben tightened his jaw. “Hopefully the neighbors think that was the last of the thunder.”
“It won’t matter. Nothing matters if the clan falls apart because its king does.”
Angels Rest was a small town, no doubt, but their world was bigger than just the clan now. If nothing else, the Kingdom Guard tragedy should’ve proved that.
For a moment, Ben wondered what Gin would think about a stick-in-the-mud king trying to force a happy-go-lucky bro bear into the royal hot seat. Not that he’d ever subject her to a half-rogue rex ur
si’s delusions.
After the awkward way they’d parted, if not for his cousin and her sister, he’d wonder if he’d ever see her again.
“So you’d better not fall apart,” he told his cousin in a low, unwavering voice. “Because this bear will not be king.”
Whirling on his heel—ignoring the twinge of pain in his ankle where he must’ve turned it falling half down that hole—he stalked back to the cottage.
He and his bear were done with being teased with things he could never have.
Chapter 8
After Gin finished settling the diablo rose in a spelled crystal phial embedded with wires of precious metals bent into arcane symbology—and drowned in a purified bath of Gypsy’s finest paint thinner—she emerged from the basement workroom in the Victorian to find the darkened horizon paling to a perfect blue.
Like a certain pair of eyes…
Ugh.
To clear her head, she stepped out onto the front porch and breathed deep, reaching her arms overhead until her spine crackled in protest. The air under the oak tree was still nighttime-cool, but already the light was catching the edges of the leaves, promising another hot day.
A flash of bright yellow caught her eye as she stretched from side to side, and she leaned farther over the porch rail to see a stack of bulging burlap sacks. Those hadn’t been there yesterday. She tilted her head the other direction to read the label that said Sunday Landscaping with mulch in smaller letters underneath.
Geez, landscapers kept worse hours than shadow circle witches.
With a long-suffering sigh, she trudged down the steps. She hauled the bags to the oak, yanked loose the heavy cord that cinched the burlap tight, and upended the coarse chopped mulch in a thick circle around the tree, keeping the trunk itself clear so it could breathe.
By the time she finished spreading the five bags, the tree looked great and she looked awful, her sweaty skin itching with flecks of mulch. Dang it, hadn’t she told Marcia she wasn’t a fan of compost? Well, hopefully it’d keep the old tree standing long enough for Aster to inherit the Victorian.