by Meg Ripley
He dropped his mouth to her cheek, closing his eyes and pausing to inhale the scent of her skin and her sleep. She was having pleasant dreams and not the nightmares he feared she would. Shifting against her, he wrapped his arm around her waist to pull her even closer, fighting the urge to shed his human appearance so he could enclose her with his wings. More and more, she brought out the dragon.
My dragon. Yes, her dragon, as this was now her castle. Even his life now belonged to her as she was the only reason he still existed. His memories of the fight were sketchy, and he didn’t know exactly how Savannah had bested him. He didn’t remember hitting the ground. He remembered only the cold—the frigid, bitter cold. A cold he thought he could still feel in the core of his bones. Just before the cold had frozen him forever, there was a single, glowing spark. And from that spark, life was allowed to return.
She moaned softly and shifted back, pushing her ass against his member. His body responded immediately, the mark throbbing to life. Within seconds, he was painfully hard and ready to take her again. With a low groan, he rolled onto his back, trying to get himself back under control, listening for the sounds of her waking. She continued sleeping, but no longer peacefully. Not quite. She moved until she found the heat of his body again, rolling over to lay across his chest, her head coming to rest on his shoulder.
“I think I’m dreaming about you,” she mumbled.
“Are you? Is it a good dream?”
“Mmmm.” She slid her hand down his body and grasped his dick. “I was dreaming about boats and suddenly—” She squeezed him, stroking from the top down. “Suddenly I see this.”
“Do you like boats?”
Her chuckle was throaty and sleepy. “Not as much as I like this.”
“Oh...oh.” Her fingers slid over the mark and the rest of the blood in his body rushed to his cock. Electricity spiraled from his balls to his throat and everything in between clenched with the anticipation of more. The contact had been so brief, but the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.
“What was that?” She lifted her head, blinking the sleep from her eyes.
“It was…” He exhaled, cleared his throat and tried again. “It was something new.”
“What?”
He reached over and turned on the bedside lamp, casting enough light to show the delineation on his skin. She gasped, reaching out to touch him but pulling away at the last second. “What is that? Is it a burn?”
“A type of burn.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No more than the one on your thigh.”
“On my thigh?” Her eyes widened. “I did that to you?”
“Yes.” His hand went to her thigh. “Which is only fair.”
“Does it feel like mine feels?” She leaned forward, the tip of her tongue emerging to slide along the mark. His fingers immediately clenched into tight fists and for a moment he forgot how to breathe, or maybe he simply lost the ability due to the constriction around his chest. The heat of her tongue disappeared and he exhaled in a long, slow sigh, already craving more.
“I think that’s a yes,” she murmured.
He pulled on her shoulder, guiding her back up his body so he could claim her mouth. She threw her leg over his, straddling his hips, his cock sliding between her slick, swollen folds. She rocked her hips, grinding against him as their tongues danced. Her nipples slid over his chest, hardening and drawing his attention.
“Honey, please,” he moaned against her mouth. Her skin was so soft, so welcoming and pliant that it only increased his need for her. He could have reached between them and angled his cock to drive into her, but that thought didn’t occur to him. He felt bound, tied in place by invisible ropes, completely at her mercy, willing to bend to her will in all things.
April broke the kiss and sat up, settling more firmly on his member. Her blonde silky hair was a tousled halo, her eyes still heavy with sleep, her lips full and bruised from the force of his kiss. She reached behind her to grip his shaft and reposition herself, rising to come down on his aching flesh. Inch by inch, she consumed him until she was fully seated, igniting the mark into a lit fuse.
She began to rock. Slowly at first, almost hesitantly, but it wasn’t a pace she could sustain. Not when he jerked his hips upward, begging her silently to move faster, harder; to ride him until they were both soaring. His eyes were half-lidded but marked every detail—the golden beauty of her face, the sway of her breasts, the rapid beating of her pulse. He’d tried to get her on top before, but this was the first time she’d been interested in the position, and he really hoped it wouldn’t be the last.
Especially since it freed his hands to explore every inch of her while she commanded the rhythm. He massaged her full breasts, weighing them against his palms, squeezing and stroking and god did he love the way they felt in his hands. He loved the solid feel of her against him, loved the shape and curves of her body as she rose above him, loved her rapid gasps and shouts that seemed to take her by surprise. Loved the way she tensed and her eyes widened when he found her clit, pressing his thumb over the sensitive tip and massaging with slow, careful intent.
“Oh...oh god...oh...oh my god…” Her body trembled around him, like the earth before a great quake. He could feel it building within her--he could hear it in her voice and sense it in the way she jerked, the way her rhythm altered, punctuated with short, rapid strokes. His balls pulled tight, the base of his spine tingling with warning that soon he would not be able to hold himself back. “Oh Mads.”
April slammed down one final time, her channel clenching and quivering around him as the pleasure swept through her. He rose to meet her, muscles pulling taut as he spent himself. She collapsed forward, falling into the safety of his arms, and they slowly came back to the earth together.
“I love you, mein Schatz.”
“I love you, my dragon.”
Sleep was already pulling her back, and this time he felt himself following her into the darkness. He closed his eyes and unconsciously tightened his hold on her, slipping away into dreams infused by his love’s scent, her warmth, and the peace she brought him.
THE END
Part V
Rogue Wolf
Wild Forbidden Mates
Rogue Wolf: Wild Forbidden Mates
Two rival shifter clans.
One relentless and forbidden love that breaks all of the rules.
In the small town of Spring Lake, the long-standing rivalry between a pack of werewolves and a clan of were-panthers erupts into full-scale battle. Raul, an ex-Navy enforcer of the Wolf pack, is forced to take sides in the conflict when a group of panthers—who have been raiding werewolf businesses for weeks—is finally captured, and the order given by the Pack's Alpha male is to execute them without trial.
He can only save one: Keira, a voluptuous panther female who only consents to let him rescue her after she nearly beats him in personal combat.
But the war between the two groups is more complicated than either of them know. As they begin to unravel the two Alphas' motivations in attacking each other, Raul and Keira's rivalry develops into a hot, heavy, and forbidden romance, sparking further reprisals and deeper battles between their people.
With threats of death—or discovery—hanging over their heads, Raul and Keira must find a way to bring their communities together, or risk losing each other in the chaotic war.
51
“Raul, we’ve got another one,” the voice on the other end of the line began as soon as the call connected. Raul groaned, scrubbing at his face. It was still dark outside—but it was nearly four in the morning, and he had been looking forward to finally going to sleep.
“Bastards keep slinking off before one of our guys can catch them in the act,” Raul said bitterly. He could feel the frustration of his pack-mate on the other end of the line, sense it as an extension of his own irritation.
For weeks, he, Gary, Cameron, and Adeline had been tracking a group of vandals; their scent marks at the scenes of the
crimes were easy enough to read, but all traces of the assholes responsible for the graffiti and broken windows—not to mention a few petty thefts—disappeared within a half mile of the site. It was just like a bunch of sneaky panthers, Raul thought bitterly. The town of Spring Lake had fewer than five thousand residents; and yet, Raul and the other enforcers for the Pack hadn’t been able to track down what they’d counted as five panthers. The other members of the Pack had started looking at him doubtfully, and the Alpha—Reginald—had put more and more pressure on Raul as the Pack’s number one enforcer to get the job done.
“Someone was asleep at the wheel,” Cameron said, his voice full of brittle irritation. Raul growled low in his throat; he had asked for the Pack’s participation in staking out the various businesses that might come under attack. He, Cam, Gary, and Adeline simply couldn’t watch over all of the businesses that the members of the Pack owned in the town. They needed people to be vigilant, and they had needed to have a way to track the shifty, good-for-nothing panthers to their den, wherever it was.
There were just enough people in the town for it to be impossible for any of the members of even the large wolf pack to know everyone, to know all of the addresses. Spring Lake was home to a thriving supernatural community—and even Raul, in his position of relative authority within the Pack, didn’t know all of the shifters in the area. There were even some, he was fairly certain, who lived outside of the town proper—in the woods that surrounded the town, closing it off superficially at least from the rest of the country. He had done what he could, asked who he could, about the whereabouts of a group of panthers and had come up empty.
“Which business was it?” Raul put his phone on speaker and set it down, standing up from his seated position on the couch to get ready to leave the house. If another one of the Pack-owned businesses had been vandalized, the Pack would expect him to be there before daybreak, working the scene, trying to find a clue that might not have been at the other raids. Eventually those fucking panthers are going to get sloppy, he thought. And when they do, we’ll track them down and put the bastards on trial.
Even with scent marks at the scene, there wasn’t a whole lot of information to be gleaned about the vandals. Raul knew that one of the panthers involved in the crimes was a fertile female—he could smell it in the rich honey-moss smell of her scent mark, buried in the deeper, sharper musk of big cat that the males left behind. He knew that there were five of them. He knew what they were. But until I know who they are, I am going to have this goddamned albatross around my neck, pulling me down.
He had been a natural successor to the Pack’s previous lead enforcer; Reginald had groomed Raul for the position for years, even mentoring him through the Navy when Raul had enlisted. Reginald had told Raul more than once that the best thing he could cultivate beyond ruthlessness was the ability to lead, and Raul had taken that seriously. If Reginald retired—or if he fell in a challenge, or met with an accident that cut short his time as Alpha of the Pack—then Raul would be the first in contention for the Alpha position within the Pack. He would need to have the skills that it required, whether or not he ever took on the job.
“Alicia’s bakery,” Cameron confirmed on the other end of the line. “And get this: they’re escalating, the fucking cats.” Raul felt Cameron’s barely-controlled rage and reveled in it, breathing in and out slowly. The low-level telepathy that members of the same Pack shared was sometimes a joy—but more often a pain. He didn’t want to feel heartbroken just because one of the younger members of the Pack had been rebuffed in his romantic advances to some girl or guy. But when it came to hunting down prey—or even fellow predators—it came in handy.
“Escalating how?” Raul pulled a shirt over his head and glanced at himself in the mirror, smoothing his hair down against his skull. As soon as he had left the military, he’d let it grow out into a full, dark-brown mane, in defiance of the strict military grooming standards he’d subjected himself to for years. No one in the Pack thought that a man with long hair was anything to be laughed at, and members of the town who weren’t of the supernatural persuasion learned quickly that to laugh at his long hair was to court almost certain disaster.
“There was a fire,” Cam said. “We managed to put it out with minimal damage, but someone still called 9-1-1, so there’s going to be an official investigation if we don’t sort this out quickly.”
Raul groaned, throwing his head back and cursing long and fluently. “The last fucking thing we need is the cops on this,” he said. He took a quick breath. “Who’s coming to the scene?”
“We’re trying to get ahold of Tanya and Jeremy, see if we can’t get them to take the case, keep it quiet.” Tanya and Jeremy weren’t Pack, but they were shifters—were-foxes. They could be trusted to a certain extent to slow up the investigation if they could get themselves on it, give the Pack a chance to handle it.
Everyone in Spring Lake knew and didn’t know that there were supernatural humans living in the area; there was plenty of local lore about not going into the woods and scrublands surrounding the town during the week of the full moon, with vague implications of what happened to people who did. But nobody directly said that there were shifters, even elementals living amongst perfectly normal humans.
Whenever possible, the two-natured community tried to police themselves, along with the other supernatural elements of the town. The elementals intervened only when they had to; otherwise they kept to themselves, and Raul preferred it that way. “Text me the address, and I’ll be there in fifteen,” he told Cam after a moment’s thought. “Maybe they’re getting sloppy. Maybe we’ll luck out this time.” Raul checked his pockets to make sure he had his wallet, and when Cam said goodbye, he slipped his phone into another pocket, checked for his keys. He could feel the animal nature—the part of his brain that was always the wolf—shifting, fidgeting inside of him. He wanted to be on the hunt. He wanted to track down the assholes who thought it was a good idea to harass the wolves. He growled low in his throat and headed for the door, picturing the panthers in their animal forms, slinking away from a burning building. Raul stepped out of his house and strode towards his car, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. I am going to catch them this time, even if it kills me.
52
Keira’s heart pounded as she, Lachlan, William, Blake, and Floyd sped away from the scene of their most recent raid in the scent-blocked car that Noelle had contrived. She smiled to herself, worried and exhilarated, terrified and proud of what she and her clan-mates had done. “The fire was a stupid fucking idea,” Blake told Will as they put distance between themselves and the scene of their crime.
“It wasn’t exactly an idea,” Will said defensively, shifting in his seat. “It just kind of happened.”
“We can’t have things ‘just kind of happen,’” Lachlan told the others, glancing at them each in turn. His gaze lingered on Keira’s face and she looked back blandly, keeping her expression neutral until he looked away. There was an uneasy power dynamic going on between the members of their clan, and while Keira was not by any stretch interested in going for the Alpha, she wasn’t about to let Lachlan—or any of her clan-mates—push her to submit when she had no reason to. “We have to be more careful,” Lachlan added, turning his attention back onto the others.
“How can something like that be an accident, anyway?” Keira looked at Will. “I mean, you don’t accidentally light a match. You don’t accidentally drop it on the ground.” She crossed her arms over her chest as Floyd navigated the darkness. Keira could feel the tendrils of almost-thoughts from the rest of the members of her clan in the car with her; she could feel their excitement, the adrenaline pumping in their veins.
“It wasn’t a match or anything,” Will said sullenly. “I tried to do something with the breakers and the fire started that way.” Keira watched her clan-mate intently for a few moments in silence, trying her best to take in as much information from him as she could from the slightly telepathic bond
they shared. From what she could tell, Will was being honest; at the very least, he believed what he was saying. It had been an accident.
“Then yeah, we need to be more careful,” Keira said, glancing at Lachlan. “It’s one thing to raid these assholes’ businesses, it’s another to get sloppy about it.” Keira hadn’t been entirely in favor of the raids herself—but once the clan had voted on it, she and the other four were the natural candidates for the job. All five of them were fast, difficult to trace—especially with the car that Noelle had worked over, masking the usual scent marks—and skilled.
“The wolves will keep the police out of it if they can,” Lachlan said thoughtfully. “But we can’t have any more fuckups like this. The goal is for them to know who’s raiding their businesses and that we’re serious about keeping them in check.” Keira pressed her lips together, looking around the car. She wasn’t actually sure what the true goal of the raids was; in the clan debate where it had been decided, it seemed to her that for the most part people just wanted to get back at the wolves, to get some kind of revenge.
The wolf pack and the panthers had been rivals since long before Keira had been born; she had grown up knowing that the wolves were untrustworthy, and that they looked out for their own—proud, overambitious and exclusionary. She had known by the time she had made her first transformation that if she encountered a wolf in the woods, she was likely going to be in for a fight—and that she should never be alone in the woods during the full moon, lest she find herself surrounded by the vicious jackals.
But why they had chosen to begin raiding the wolves’ businesses in the past few months, Keira had no idea; she had heard vague reports that one of the panthers’ homes had been raided by some of the wolves—but nobody in the clan seemed to know who it was who had been affected, or who hadn’t been affected. As soon as it starts to be about wolves, everyone has a grievance, Keira thought wryly as the car made its way back to the clan’s headquarters on the outskirts of town. She had to wonder: did the wolves feel the same way about the panthers? Keira knew that the wolves thought that the panthers were little more than scavengers, that they were not good enough to ally with—unlike the foxes or the bears that lived in Spring Lake, the wolves didn’t think anyone was truly good to ally with. But did the wolves have the same tendency to jump at shadows when it came to the topic of the panthers? Or were they so confident that they couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to crowd them out?