The Shifter's Shadow_Shifters Of The Seventh Moon

by Selena Scott

  Bringing a woman pleasure, he’d learned, wasn’t about learning moves and then re-using them. It was about learning a woman herself. So Jack was delighted and perplexed when he realized that what was doing it for Thea wasn’t roughness or hardness or intensity, tough as she was. No, what was making her jerk and tremble, gasp and whisper his name, was the featherlight teasing he was doing. He was certain that his whiskers were giving her thighs road rash and that his fingers, clamped on her thighs, were in danger of leaving marks, but his mouth was tender and patient, not slow, but he was flirtatious with his pressure, making her buck her hips into him.

  It was a matter of seconds before she was imitating him. Her mouth over the head of his cock wasn’t performing the vacuum-like exorcism of moments before. It was light and almost sweet, if it weren’t for the fact that she was licking pre-cum off of him like it was a Popsicle on a hot day.

  They were wet with each other and melting again, rising and falling all in one endless, rolling breath. His hips jutted forward as she licked all the way down the side of him and sucked his base. He followed suit, pressing inside her with his tongue to lift back up and almost tickle her clit. She began to tighten against him and he knew she was close.

  “Jack,” she gasped, then stopped speaking to swallow him down for a second. “I want—”

  “Me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah.” He shook his head and pulled away from her to fumble with the condom box. He suddenly felt like a teenager again and he couldn’t have been happier about it. Because in some ways, he hadn’t ever done anything like this before. Sex had always been a wildly enjoyable pastime in which both partners did their best to make the other see stars. But this new thing that was happening? Well, he was new at it, but determined to be good at it. He slid the condom on with two hands, one after the other, and looked back at her sprawled across the bed. He couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was something he was supposed to say, something he’d forgotten to say.

  Later.

  Now, he fell to his knees beside the bed and spread her legs again. He wanted her at the edge, balancing, when he pushed inside. So he found her with his mouth again and this time, let his eyes take her in. Every trembling, gasping, silvery-freckled inch of her. Her thighs were opening even wider and her knuckles were white where she gripped the sheet when he finally kneeled up, one foot on the floor and one knee on the bed, and spread her open with his hands.

  He made half circles over the top of her clit with his thumb when he leaned forward and pressed the head of his cock between her legs.

  “Ah fuck. Holy—Thea. Fuck.” He knew he was growling and couldn’t help it as he sank, so slowly, into the hottest, wettest unknown of his life.

  Thea’s orgasm had no real beginning and no real end. It was just suddenly happening to her as he inexorably pushed his way inside her. The slow, constant pushing pressure of his cock inside her with the rub of his hand made her eyes go blind, her mouth fall open, everything inside her tighten down and pulse against itself.

  When he was fully in her, he pushed a bit more and then a bit more, tiny pulsing motions that prolonged her orgasm even further. It had been a deep, aching pleasure, starting from deep inside her. She’d never come like that before. When she blinked her eyes open, he was staring down at her, halfway on the bed and halfway off, a ghost of a smile on his face. God, they’d barely started, how was she going to survive this?

  She reared up to sitting, clamping her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist at the same time. The edge of the bed took some of her weight, but Jack was basically standing as he absorbed the impact of this new position. He gripped onto her, his palm over one cheek of her ass, his fingers slipping into her cleft. And that’s when she started climbing him, only to slip back down and climb again. And again and again. They were sliding against each other, the rub of their hands against one another creating a layering, echoing friction that never seemed to stop.

  Jack’s thrusts into her weren’t sharp or sudden, it was more of an unstoppable roll that had her gasping into his neck.

  He used his weight to tip them back onto the bed, her hair spilling everywhere, his hands braced on either side of her and one of his feet still on the ground. He didn’t stop that rollingrollingrolling grind of his hips. Even when she tipped forward, rolled them to their sides.

  She realized her mistake immediately. She’d wanted to roll them to a position where Jack wasn’t dismantling her heart, stroke by stroke. But she’d ended up wrapped tightly in his arms, not enough space to really fuck, just holding each other while he whispered impossible words in her ear, pumping forward just enough to keep her on the absolute edge.

  She rolled them again and ended up on top. There. Now, she could control things a little better. This was what she wanted. To be in charge. To make sure he couldn’t keep—

  “Oh, fuck it,” she muttered and rolled them again, so that he was back on top. “Just go ahead and wreck me, then,” she told him.

  He smiled and gritted his teeth, pleasure and pain all at once as he kept rolling those hips. “Believe me, sweetheart, you’re the one wrecking me.”

  He lowered himself to give her a little of his weight, his chest hair scraping across her nipples.

  “I ain’t never—” he tried, the pleasure too acute and cutting himself off. “This is the first time I—” He cleared his throat, tried to see through the spots in front of his eyes. “I’m never gonna—”

  He looked down at her, saw those clear blue eyes dilated to almost all black.

  “Oh, fuck it,” he repeated her words and buried his face in her neck. Her wetness was spreading between them, both of them shaking and straining. They were sliding against one another more than thrusting, choosing ultimate, never-ending friction over the banging search for pleasure they both usually partook in. Jack felt like he might have been having sex the wrong way his entire life. He’d always dug down deep for an orgasm, when what he really should have been doing was swimming down deep for it.

  He was holding his breath and so was she, bursting out for breath every twenty seconds or so and then holding it again. They were rising, falling, slipping. Their eyes held and her hands found his shoulders, clamped down like a lifeboat.

  “You and me,” he told her, sweat dripping from his forehead, their bodies hot enough in the cool room to create condensation on the window. “You and me.”

  She was going up and over the edge again. On impulse, Jack dropped his face to hers and sucked the breath from her lungs. He pulled back and clamped one hand over her mouth and nose, just for a few seconds, as he rode her through the height of it. Her pussy clamped down on him so hard he yelled, realized he’d just stepped through a one-way door. There was no going back.

  He dropped his hand and barreled toward his own paradise. “Jack,” she gasped, sounding undone and utterly his. “Jack.”

  He dropped his face to her neck, held his breath, and went over the edge. The bed trembled on its legs as he shook and shook himself out. The longest and most intense orgasm of his life threatened to kill him. When he finally collapsed, he gulped down air and let his cock jump inside her for a while.

  They lay there, pressed together, panting. Jack could have stayed that way for a year had he not had to deal with the condom.

  When he pulled away from her, a bright burst of embarrassment hit Thea, something she was not accustomed to in the least. But she’d had to work to dislodge her hands from him and even in the dim, blue light of dusk, she could see that there were bruises already forming over him.

  The sweat on her skin began to cool as she listened to the faucet run in the adjoining bathroom. A crack of light speared out from under the door. It was too bright and an intrusion on the warm, blue bubble of the bedroom.

  She was just sitting up, shaking her hair back when Jack stepped back into the bedroom.

  He was on her in a second, nuzzling into her neck, tracing his hands over her legs, melting h
er again. The strange, immediate loneliness that had crept in in his absence was gone. The embarrassment didn’t go naturally, though; Thea had to kick that out the door.

  “I hurt you,” she said.

  Jack was too busy laying her down on the bed, pressing his full weight against her, burying his face in her hair to hear her correctly the first time. “What’s that?”

  “I hurt you. On your back and shoulders.”

  He lifted his head and one arm, inspecting it first and then the other. That smile of his started to crinkle up his face. “Looks like you had yourself a hell of a time.”

  Thea rolled her eyes. She didn’t deign to respond to that. Especially not when he was grinning and dragging her under the covers.

  The woman was halfway caught between being stiff and melting again and it was a perplexing little mystery to Jack. She was sexually confident, he knew that, so he didn’t think she was in the throes of humiliation that they’d just fucked each other straight off the map. He was wrapped around her, tangled in every which way, but for just one moment, Jack allowed himself to retreat fully into his own head. He took a quick inventory, seeing if how he was feeling could lend any credence to how she was feeling.

  There was exhaustion, sure. He wasn’t in his twenties anymore and he’d just had about an hour of the most passionate sex of his life. There was also exhilaration. Because, come on, he’d just had about an hour of the most passionate sex of his life. And there was a rising, admittedly terrifying, euphoria. For the exact same reason.

  Huh. He turned back to her and wondered what his reaction might have been if he’d had that exact same sexual encounter at age 29.

  He chuckled to himself. He didn’t have to wonder for long at all.

  He would have been out the door just about as fast as he could have gotten his boots back on. At 29, he’d been looking for willing bodies and good times. Somebody to scratch the itch. He hadn’t been looking for what they’d just done to one another. Which was to abruptly, rudely, and completely change one another’s lives. He was sure of it.

  Whether or not she was willing to admit that remained to be seen.

  “Never quite felt like that before,” he said, figuring that admitting how it felt for him might help thaw this strange stiffness she seemed to be battling with.

  “Like what?”

  “Like I was a bowl of melted chocolate and you were a bowl of melted chocolate and we just kind of mixed all up together.”

  That was the exact right way of putting it, Thea decided. It scared the shit out of her. Because there was no way to get all her chocolate back from him, so to speak. They’d gone and done it now. They were mixed! And no amount of complaining about it could change that. It was that that calmed her again. There was nothing she could do about it. She’d fallen into bed with Jack Warren and now she was all tangled up in him and when she left to go home, it would hurt. Painful. She’d leave a part of herself behind. Something she’d never done with a man before.

  She dreaded it, but she didn’t fear it anymore. Not the way she had just moments ago. Because she knew what it was that had happened. They’d mixed. Maybe even irrevocably. But to Thea Redgrave, practical as she was, it didn’t have to mean any more than that.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jack woke up the following morning about fifteen degrees hotter than anyone in their right mind would care to be. But he didn’t find that he minded all that much, considering the reason was that Thea was completely laid out over him, her breath hot on his neck and her palm over his heart.

  He was surprised. They’d been sleeping in the same bed, sure, and had often woken up touching. But she mostly kept to her side. This morning, though, she was plastered to him, head to toe. He hated to do it, but had to get up for the bathroom. He splashed water on his face and rinsed his mouth out, lingering in the doorway to watch her for a moment on his way back.

  “What’re you looking at, you old perv?” she grumbled from her cave underneath the covers. One eye and a river of dark hair poked out.

  “Tell me about this homestead,” he said, thoughtfully running a finger over his bottom lip as he watched her.

  He could have sworn the temperature in the room changed.

  “What do you want to know about it?”

  She guarded her privacy and her lifestyle like a pitbull. It didn’t surprise him that she wasn’t exactly forthcoming with details. Especially not at 6 a.m. Pre-coffee. “Tell me about it. What’s it look like? What’re your days like?”

  “It’s forty acres. My neighbor mostly manages the fields of soy and wheat that we grow and process together. I care for the animals. It’s completely paid off. I live simple.”

  It was like she was reading the words off a cue card. He might have thought that she didn’t have passion for the lifestyle. But he knew her well enough to know that her flat voice was really a way of hiding from him. From his questions. She didn’t understand why he was asking them. But she would. Soon enough.

  “You live alone?”

  She nodded.

  “Got family?”

  She nodded again.

  “Jesus, this is like pulling teeth.”

  She chinned down the blankets and let her eyes travel over him for a second. He was naked as a jay bird, and though her appraisal of him was mostly clinical, he felt himself stiffen and grow under her eyes.

  “I’ve got three brothers. Had a grandfather. He passed away. Left me the map.”

  Ah. Must have been the ‘Chet’ he’d heard her mumbling about all those days ago. Some things fell into place. He could tell, without having to ask, how much she must have loved this grandfather of hers. Only a true devotion of the heart would have a practical woman like Thea Redgrave on such a wild goose chase. “How long ago did he pass away?”

  “About a year.” She cleared her throat. “He raised us. My parents weren’t around.”

  “Your brothers don’t run the homestead with you?”

  “Nah. One’s a lawyer in New York. One’s a teacher about sixty miles down the road and the other’s in L.A. trying to hack it as a musician. The land didn’t call to any of them the way it called to me. Besides, after Chet died, we scaled back the operation so the work that has to be done isn’t much more than one person can handle.”

  She sat up and the covers pooled around her waist. She searched the blankets for her hair tie, found it and slapped her hair up into a messy bun. Thea lifted her hands high in the air and stretched. When she opened her eyes again, Jack was next to her, leaning across the mattress and taking one of her nipples into his mouth. She couldn’t fight back the moan. She’d tried wrestling this great, rising wave of feeling last night and that hadn’t worked for shit. She figured the only thing left to really do was ride the wave and try to swim back to shore when it was time to leave.

  But he didn’t sweep her away. He pulled his mouth off her breast with a wet pop and looked up at her. Green eyes, she reminded herself. They sometimes looked brown from a distance, but those babies were green alright. “It sounds lonely. Life at the homestead.”

  “I don’t really get lonely,” she answered honestly. “I’m not built that way.”

  “Huh.”

  “Are you? Built that way, I mean?” He sensed that her question was completely genuine.

  He considered his answer for a moment, nibbling his way to her other breast and sucking the tip into his mouth. “Now that you mention it, not really. I prefer being on my own. And never have trouble finding company when I want it.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him and they both laughed.

  “Didn’t mean that kind of company,” he said, just the lightest shade of pink on his cheeks.

  “Yeah, but you didn’t not mean that kind of company either.”

  He couldn’t think of a reply. He honestly couldn’t remember the last time someone had him so firmly pegged. She understood him, that was for sure.

  “It’s okay, Jack. I wasn’t under the impression that you were a blushing
virgin last night. I’ve been with other people, too.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t seem like a blushing virgin,” he said, kissing his way up her neck, neither of them caring that he may or may not have been leaving marks as he went. “Cuz I kind of felt like one.”

  “What?” she pulled back and looked him close in the eye. “What do you mean?”

  He leaned his back against the headboard and pulled her into his lap, all the better to play with her. They were both completely naked and her wetness trailed across the base of his cock and made both of them gasp. Thea reached for a condom.

  “I guess I mean that that was uncharted waters for me. Parts of it felt brand new. I’m not an expert, by any means, but I usually know where the ship is headed. Last night—ah, damn—” he hissed when she rolled the condom onto his length. “Last night was… different.”

  She climbed tighter onto his lap and let herself slip across him. They both gasped. “Why?”

  “Well,” he tried to talk through the spots clouding his vision. She took his hands and traced them up the sides of her body, gave him a handful of breast and ass before she sucked on his earlobe. “I never tried to make somebody’s whole body come before.”

  She tilted her hips back and caught him inside just an inch. “Is that what you were doing to me?” she asked, and then pushed her hips down and took him to the hilt.

  Jack knocked his head back onto the headboard and just breathed for a minute. A man had to have enough oxygen to live. And enough blood in his heart. He thought he might be running dangerously low on both. “I wasn’t trying, I was just doing.” He experimentally thrusted his hips up, even though he was seated all the way inside her. It made her breasts bounce and his heart trip over itself. “I couldn’t stop touching all of you, with all of me. I wanted to thrust,” he bounced his hips again. “But I couldn’t bring myself to pull out of you. Even an inch.”