by Knox, Abby
She smiled up at him and inched in closer. The slight chill in the late winter air had turned the tip of her nose pink, and Ash had to fight the urge to nip at it with his teeth. The quickly fading sunlight dappled her face with the swinging of branches in the wind, making her layered hair even wilder. Something about the way the sun was shining on her face, combined with the eerie shadows, made him see something else in her. A strange, feral creature with reflecting eyes, if he was not mistaken. It was there but then gone in a nanosecond. But no, that was crazy, he told himself.
“Does that mean we’re officially a couple? Or are you one of those guys who is all I don’t want to define this thing, let’s just have fun?” Rosemary asked.
Ash put his arms around her and hugged her close against the chilly air. “Baby, if I can’t make myself exclusive to the girl who makes me come four times in one night and asks for nothing in return, then I ain’t worth the salt on the rim of my mommy’s margarita on the night she and Daddy made me.”
He felt Rosemary giggle and snuggle in closer. “You sure have a strange way with words. But I like the way you say them.”
Ash kissed the top of her head. “And I like the way you press your tits up against me. Makes me want to grab you up and kiss you all over.” He bent lower and placed small kisses on her ears and down her neck. She tugged herself closer into his embrace and snuggled her face into his chest. His lips feathered over her skin until he found the spot where her pulse pounded. He ran his tongue over the spot and kissed it, eliciting a little moan from Rosemary, deep in her throat. Once again, her intoxicating pheromones filled the air around him, and if he held her just right, he could almost smell her blood.
But what’s this? he thought. Am I mistaken or does her blood smell different from regular humans? The Static People—what Ash and his kind referred to as humans who didn’t shift—had a certain kind of scent when they bled. Ash had picked up the difference quickly as a child. The blood of non-shifters smelled like metal. Wolf shifters’ blood—his blood—smelled and tasted sweet. Rosemary’s blood didn’t smell sweet, though. What was that? Like the odd shadow that passed across her face a moment ago, the unusual scent was there and gone in half a second. He could be hallucinating, caught up in the heady throes of a new romance, and imagining his mate was larger than life. More than human, like him.
Even as he dismissed these thoughts, he still felt himself wishing for it to be true. He wished she were a shifter because this would make the truth about him that much easier to share with her.
But at that moment, all he wanted was to kiss her. “Baby, can I please taste those lips? I’ve been thinking of nothing but that sweet mouth of yours since I left you the other night.”
Rosemary sighed, and her body relaxed against him.
“Yes, you can, but I have to tell you something.”
Ash grinned mischievously. “Chlamydia?”
“Gross!” She slapped him with the edge of her fringed scarf. “No…I’ve never been kissed before.”
Ash could have been knocked over with not just a feather but with a flea on that feather.
“Let me get this straight. You’ve never even kissed a guy, but you know how to give a blowjob to send a guy through the roof?”
She looked up at him sheepishly, and he watched her blush. “Well, you know there’s this thing called the Internet. And I don’t like to kiss on the first date.”
“Wow. I’d say you’re a damn quick study,” he murmured, leaning down to kiss her nose. It was cold, and he pulled her in even tighter against him. “I was wondering why you wouldn’t let me kiss you.”
She breathed, “I’m very sheltered. And I’m…different. I just didn’t want you to think I was a freak.”
He chuckled and kissed the tip of her ear. “Oh, you are most definitely a freak. In an incredibly amazing way.”
“Oh Ash, that feels good. Kiss me.” She looked up, and Ash saw the flush of blood plumping her lips. She was past due for a kiss.
He leaned down, and their lips met with a soft, interlocking bliss. Ash felt her sigh, and it sent heated sparks all through him. Her lips tasted like a delicious secret only he was privy to. Whatever she was hiding, he wanted more of it. He pressed a little harder, and her lips opened up. He slipped in his tongue to meet hers. Like a pair of eager teenagers, the two of them stood there exploring each other’s lips and mouths. Everything stood still, as if they were the only two people in the world.
When they finally pulled apart, Ash could not stop his mouth from spilling it all. Most of it, anyway. “All right. There’s something you need to know about me. Not only am I not a one-night stand kind of guy. But also I just got cheated on and I’m not looking for a rebound. I’m looking for a mate. Er, I should say, someone to settle down with.”
Rosemary’s mouth formed an O as he talked and she processed the information.
“I know it’s crazy fast, and traditionally we would date first. But I don’t want to date you. I just want to spend every minute with you. The thought of us going through the motions of courtship when I already know you’re it for me…it’s enraging, to be honest. It’s just … just the way it is with my kind of people. We make quick decisions.” What he didn’t say was his kind of people become completely, obsessively fixated once they meet their mates.
Her eyes wide, Rosemary nodded as if she understood even if she looked a little shocked.
“So here it is. Take me and my whole mess or leave me. I’m not talking about dating, I’m talking marriage. Now’s your chance. I’m done finding out who’s right for me. I have an instinct about you, Rosemary. Marry me or cut and run. It’s your choice. It won’t hurt me if you run.” Yes, it would, but she didn’t need to know that.
Rosemary looked surprised, pleased, and a little scared all at once. He waited for her to say something. He desperately wanted to know what she was thinking.
“All right, Ash, let’s do this. And I mean now. I want a short engagement.”
Even better. “Anything you want.”
“One other thing. I hope this isn’t a dealbreaker, but I’m a virgin. I know we did a lot of messing around, but I’d like to save that one thing for the wedding night. Can you handle that?” She stared into his eyes and rained that velvet voice all over him, giving him eyes that were so bedroom he felt like he was already there.
“I can handle it. What I can’t handle is not having your lips on me for another second longer.”
* * *
Ash’s shirt was off, and he was leaning up against the cold marble inside a crumbling old mausoleum. Interesting how that can happen on a simple stroll around the grounds of a cemetery. Rosemary was saying, “I think we ought to get to know each other better if we’re going to be married.” Then she inched down and pressed her soft lips against his pectorals. “What’s your favorite color?”
“That part of the sky at sunrise where you can’t tell if it’s pink or if it’s orange. It’s like, rose gold or something, but better. It’s what I imagine your skin will look like on our wedding night after I’m finished with you. What about yours?”
“Icy grayish blue, like your eyes,” she said, kissing his other pectoral.
“Where did you go to school?”
He answered, running his fingers through her hair, “Jefferson High School, then Tulane for a year. Couldn’t make it. Left and went to Europe for a while. Came back and went to work for Daddy at JB’s. Now I’m writing copy for an ad firm. I’m kind of a savant in the business. The JB Chicken jingle? I did that.”
She suddenly stopped kissing and licking his abs and met his eyes. “Are you kidding me? JB Stands for Just the Best? That was you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I love that jingle!”
Ash looked up at the sky in the open-air mausoleum as if he needed rescuing from above. “That’s it, I’m leaving.” He pretended to try to get out of her embrace, but she shoved him back with an impressively strong hand.
“I
’m not kidding. I’ve driven my parents crazy with that ear-worm ever since those commercials started a couple of years back! I thank you for that, sir! I’m in the presence of a genius! Don’t you get it? We were meant to be together!”
Ash did believe in fate. He was happy to see that Rosemary did too. But was he any closer to telling her the whole story about who he was? Maybe later.
“And what about you, sweetheart? Where did ol' Lionel send his princess to school?”
Rosemary’s mouth had been traveling lower and lower, planting kisses down his stomach to the pleasure trail, rubbing her hands through his chest hair. She gave a quick tug that sent a blast of pain through his chest. “Ow!”
She stood upright and smirked. “That was for the princess comment. Parochial prep school, then finishing school,” she said, tracing kisses along his shoulders from one side to the other as she spoke. “Then I went to an Ivy League school up north for a while, got bored stiff. Nobody likes to have any fun up there, and also it was too cold. So against my parents’ wishes, I finished up at state school. I got my degree in elementary education and now I teach kindergarten.”
“A teacher,” he said. “That’s hot.”
“Is it?”
He winked. “Sure is. I can see some serious role playing with a ‘Hot for Teacher’ scenario in our future.”
She smiled and licked his earlobe. “Glasses, bun, miniskirt?”
“Nah, pencil skirt.”
“Ooh, a man who knows what a pencil skirt is, now that is hot,” Rosemary said, raking her teeth over his nipple.
He sucked in his breath and then laughed. “Shut up. I got five sisters plus a best friend who’s a girl. Gimme a break.”
“Ash, you didn’t tell me your family was also Catholic.”
He grinned. “Nah. We’re just…rambunctious folk. Real…uhm…frisky.”
That was the closest he got to telling her about the beast, but he soon got distracted with some seriously hot petting. He opened her coat and squeezed her delightful little breasts through her top. His hands explored her ass, her legs, and her core through her jeans. He was drawn so hard to her pussy. Her scent told him she was soaking her panties the more he squeezed her with her clothes on. Ash massaged her between her thighs until she moaned.
“Oh Ash, unzip my pants, please.”
“Here? Baby, we’re nearly bumping uglies in public.”
“Oblige me, darlin’.”
Well, he would be ungentlemanly if he did not. Ash unfastened her jeans and slipped his hands down over her ass. Working his lips down her front until his face was level with her tummy, he lifted her shirt and saw a delicious-looking navel. He kissed it, then trailed sloppy kisses across her stomach, inhaling her deeply. There it was. Her spicy, mysterious scent. She was hiding something, and he was going to draw it out. Maybe not today, but soon.
At the moment, he had more urgent activities on his mind. He needed her flesh. Needed to taste her juice. All Ash had to do was tug her jeans down, push aside her lacy panties, and start pleasing her clit with his tongue. Public or not, there would be no way she could push him away. She would not say no. He knew this to be the truth. It would be a surge of pleasure like nothing she’d ever had before. Surely she knew that. If she had been looking up oral sex on the Internet, then she knew how he might want to please her in return. But with her somewhat limited experience, he let her take the wheel. “What do you want me to do for you, baby doll?”
“Make me come with your hands.”
Without a word, he moved his hand inside her panties and felt her bare pussy. Slipping his fingers between her velvety folds, he found her aroused little clit. Rosemary sucked in her breath. She was already soaked for him.
Ash worked her hard little nub as he watched her face. She was enjoying it, but she also looked tense.
“Relax your face, baby, and enjoy it. It’s just you and me.”
She unclenched her jaw and released a smile, circling her arms around his neck.
Ash reached further into her depth and sank a finger in slightly. Her bare pussy and her wetness, combined with the look on her face, her lips parted, was giving him the biggest, hardest sense of urgency of his life. The fact that she was a virgin who wanted him to be the first added an extra layer of need. Both the human and the wolf blood inside him pulsed with fervor.
“Don’t break me, not yet, Ash. I want to save that part for our wedding night.”
He leaned in and kissed the place where her swan-like neck met her shoulder and then said, “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do.”
Ash thought he might’ve heard a quiet purr coming from somewhere deep in her throat. It was an odd, inhuman noise, but it doubled his desire for her.
Rosemary let go of the tension in her hips and rocked her pelvis closer to him, begging him to go harder, faster, deeper. Ash explored every inch of her body that his hands could reach while not removing her clothes. His hand was thoroughly soaked from her. Lord, he was going to enjoy fucking his future wife, very soon.
She must have been thinking the same thing because she moaned, “You have magical hands, darlin’. Keep going.”
Ash ramped up the intensity of his strokes and sank his middle finger a little deeper. “We ain’t stopping until you say uncle.”
She smiled. “Well, see, Uncle Trev is in the other crypt just a stone’s throw away. We can do it in there next time if you want.”
He didn’t know if she was kidding, and he could not have cared less. How could a human be so close to coming and still make jokes? He leaned down and bit her hard little nipple through her shirt.
Rosemary let out a startled yelp of pleasure. “Ash!”
“That was for being a wise-ass while I’m about to make you come.”
She gasped and pulled his hair; the exquisite pain made his entire body flush with heat. “Well, if that’s the case, I got a whole bucket full of one-liners about my family.”
He smiled. “Oh, you like the biting?”
She whispered hoarsely, “So much.”
Ash glowered at her, unable to control the expression of the frustrated beast beneath the surface. His teeth raked across her collarbone, down to her nipple, and bit down gently, repeating until he felt her breath catch. He worked his teeth in sync with his strokes at her soaking wet core until he felt her body start to buck.
He didn’t want to miss this moment, so he gave her hard bud one last little bite through her shirt and then straightened up so they were face to face again. He didn’t let up his strokes even as her hands clawed his back and she struggled for words.
“What is it, sweets?”
“Bite my neck. Bite it hard,” she breathed.
Ash smiled. “You got a vampire thing, baby? I’ll be your vampire.” Gladly, he thought. The perfect excuse to explore her throat once more, searching for the elusive whiff of her blood, the mysterious, inhuman scent he thought he had detected the night before. The clit was not a mystery to him. He had that well in hand at the moment, pun intended. But the goddamn notes in her scent? Maddeningly undefined.
While he kept up his attentions to her arousal, he let the tip of his tongue paint a stroke up the side of Rosemary’s delicate throat, up and back down again until he came to the spot where her pulse pounded. There, he inhaled her into his lungs. The elusive scent was much more prominent as her blood roared under the surface. He licked and sucked the spot, nearly able to taste it. It was clear. Something in her was not human. But what was it? She was not a wolf—and he would have known her if she was; wolf packs communities all knew each other, even if they didn’t all get along. Whatever it was, he liked it. And whenever she was ready to tell him, he would be ready. He had a whopper of a secret himself.
His mouth widened and covered as wide an expanse of her neck as he could, bathing her with his tongue, biting and raking her skin gently until she demanded he bite harder.
As much as the beast in him answered to whatever beast this was in her
that called out to him, he had to rein it in. If he let loose, he could bite as hard as she wanted, but he could easily draw blood. Not the best idea for a second date. With everything inside him, he bit down hard but not too hard. The resulting orgasm rocked Rosemary’s body as she mewled out his name. More like roared, like some kind of damn ferocious feline. Lordy, what a pleasure it was to know he was the cause of all her commotion.
He felt the tightening of her sex, but he kept going until the spasms of pleasure finally calmed down and her heart rate began to return to normal.
She fell against him and sighed. “I always wondered what an orgasm would feel like. I’m so glad it was you who gave it to me.”
He felt less surprised and more honored by the distinction.
“I feel like we should seal this moment with a kiss.” Ash gently removed his hand from her panties and showed it to her.
She hesitated. “I don't know.”
“Do you trust your daddy?”
“Implicitly,” she said, her eyelids heavy with pleasure.
“You shouldn’t, you know. I might be the big bad wolf.”
“I like it when you boss me a little bit,” she said lazily, her finger tracing over his stubbled jawline.
“Then kiss my fingers.”
Rosemary looked at his eyes and then his hand. She closed her eyes and kissed first his pinky finger, slowly worked her way across, tasting each of his fingers with reverence. “I love this hand. Make sure you bring this hand to our wedding night.”
But Ash was in no mood for jokes. He was about to explode into his drawers. When she’d kissed each of his fingers on that hand, he then rubbed her scent all over his chest and down his abs.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He was dead serious. “Painting. Putting your mark on me. I’m going to wear you on me until you’re in my skin, in my blood. You’re already in my head and my heart.”
Chapter Five