Everything in the cabin that had been made from a living thing had an aura of its own—the silk long johns, the wool sweaters and blankets, the wooden furniture, even the walls and floor.
She closed her eyes again, quickly. The wonder was too much to bear on top of the pleasure.
Jack’s touch seared her skin away, seared her old life away, made her fresh and new. Not Cara Mackenzie anymore, but Cara Many-Winters in truth. The vicious voices in her head finally shut the fuck up. All she heard, other than her own moans and the small, delicious sounds Jack’s mouth made as he reshaped her body, was a throbbing hum that must be what it sounded like when incorporeal big cats purred.
She could live with this.
Literally. This might keep that black hole of despair from sucking her in.
She opened her mouth. It seemed like something Jack should hear, after all her mixed messages and self-loathing and fighting the desire.
But as she was about to speak, Jack’s mouth and fingers reached her pussy. What came out of her mouth was a scream of raw lust.
He pushed her legs wide, roughly, as if he expected her to resist—or was too turned on to be gentle. With big hands, he spread her lips, leaving her no way to hide.
Not that she wanted to hide.
The air was cold on her wetness, his breath shockingly hot. He brought his face close but did nothing immediately, just studied her.
The scrutiny made her wetter.
“You like me looking at you,” he said, a sexy, teasing chuckle in his voice. “Your juices are pouring out of your pussy like sap in the spring. I can’t wait to taste you.”
“So don’t wait.” Her face was flaming, and the flush probably reached all the way to her navel. But his words stoked her arousal, made her so sensitive that the little puffs of his breath pushed her closer to the edge. “Please.”
She tangled her fingers into the long black silk of his hair, poised her nails against his shoulder. The contact completed a circuit. Energy surged from her hands into him, from him to her hands. The colors in their auras went wilder. She arched, opened farther. As soon as her hands went limp in his hair, as soon as she let go of her will and let the magic and the lust carry her, he pressed his mouth to her clit.
His tongue lapped hard and fast, but with the utmost delicacy. His hands took no prisoners, though. Two fingers slid into her, meeting no resistance. They moved in and out in rhythm with his tongue, and it was good, so good that Cara’s body was on fire and the room glowed red but she wanted…she wanted…
She tried to make the switch from crying out to talking, but Jack figured out on his own. He pulled his fingers out, and when he thrust them in again, he’d added a third, filling and stretching her. The first time he was gentle, but she remembered enough English to call his name and beg, “Harder, please,” and after that, he wasn’t gentle. Not rough or brutal, not painful in a bad way, though she was full enough it might have verged on pain if his tongue hadn’t been doing such wonderful things at the same time. Just intense and hard, just the way she always wanted it and had so rarely gotten it in the past.
His tongue did something especially clever to her clit at the same time his fingers opened slightly inside her, stretching her even more.
She clamped down, arched, screamed. Jack didn’t slow down. He kept licking, kept fucking her with his fingers, kept her coming.
When she reached the point of madness, he stopped licking just long enough to say, “Don’t fight it,” and placed one hand on her belly.
She could have squirmed away, but the heat from his hand, the heat from his words, flowed into her and met the conflagration in her pussy, and she couldn’t bring herself to move. So what if her brain melted out her ears? What a great way to lose what sanity she had left.
When Cara’s brain was empty and her body limp and her voice ragged from crying out, when she was sure she couldn’t possibly come again no matter what wonderful thing Jack did to her, Jack finally relented.
But only long enough to lie over her and kiss her, roughly yet somehow tenderly, with lips slick with her own musk.
Only long enough to position himself so the head of his cock rested between her wet, oversensitized and suddenly hungry pussy lips.
Only long enough to sheathe himself deep inside her.
She was wrong about not being able to come again.
The bed swayed and creaked and groaned. The worn bottom sheet tore as she clutched it, so instead she dug her fingernails into Jack’s ass hard enough she checked for blood and he responded by biting her shoulder hard enough she did bleed. She snarled and slashed at him with her fingernails and came so hard she pushed him out of her.
He slammed back in, impaling her against the bed with a wordless cry of triumph.
He twisted her until her muscles ached. She pushed back against his relentlessly moving cock, taking it all, trying to take even more, trying to get his whole body and spirit inside her.
At some point, he flipped her over, or maybe she flipped him, and she found herself on top, riding him hard, Jack grasping her hips and driving her down onto him even more fiercely than she was doing on her own.
She pinched his nipples, rolled her hips and squeezed.
Jack roared as he came.
As he did, something snapped in Cara. She came again and fell into light.
She landed in a heap of warm fur that smelled of pine and snow and big cat.
A cougar.
She froze.
The cougar shook itself, so she rolled off, wheeled around to face her, staring at her with dark, human eyes.
It was wearing Jack’s beaded necklace.
“Hello, gorgeous,” the cougar said, its voice deep and rumbling, yet recognizably Jack’s. “I thought I’d have to use the wordside and Lynx all the time to talk to you. But I guess it makes sense, seeing that I’m your other spirit guide. Now listen up.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jack touched Cara’s cheek gently. “Wake up, sleepy.”
She stirred and opened her eyes. “I wasn’t sleeping. You know, your cougarside talks to me,” she said. “He says he can help us convince Gramps to live and figured it was easier to talk to me directly than go through you. That way we can be on the same page.”
“My cougar doesn’t talk in human words.” He took her hand. “And he doesn’t talk to anyone but me and other duals.”
She pulled her hand away. “Some other cougar is talking to me, then. Some cougar with human eyes and a necklace like the one you wear.”
“You were dreaming.”
“Having a vision, maybe. Not dreaming.”
The cougarside could laugh, in his own way, not a noise but a feeling. The cougar was laughing at him now, and the images in his head all added up to I told you so.
Told him Cara was his mate.
Maybe more than that.
“The cougar,” she said slowly and carefully, as if the words were volatile explosives, “says he’s my other spirit guide. Which would make you my spirit guide. Which makes no sense, except all my intuition tells me it’s true.” Cara pulled away as if the freakiness had finally sunk in through the post-fuck haze. She rolled from the bed to her feet. “No offense, but how the fuck are you my spirit guide?”
She sounded annoyed.
He wasn’t sure he blamed her.
“I don’t know. “ His heart and his magic told him that it was the truth. No one ever said, though, that truth had to make sense, especially for shamans.
“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” he said, realizing his voice sounded flat and lame. “Rafe and I are our own spirit guides, in a sense, but it’s more that the cougarside channels back to the ancestors and Trickster for us. I don’t understand how I can be a human’s spirit guide. I can’t reach back to your ancestors.”
“No kidding it makes no sense. You’re not a spirit. You’re real.” She hesitated, then added in a voice that was a little less angry, though just as tense, “No offense,
Lynx. I know you’re real too.” He caught a glimpse of the smaller cat out of the corner of his eye. “I mean real in the normy sense.” Cara reached out and touched his chest. “Real as in solid.”
He caught her hand, trapped it against his skin. Her touch burned. “Do you know what this means, Cara?” He wanted to pull her close, smell the way his scent clung to her skin. Wanted to take her again, even harder than before.
He flung her hand aside, harder than he meant to, so she was thrown off balance and stumbled back, sitting on the bed bonelessly and abruptly.
Guilt panged through him, but she jabbed him in the chest, this time aggressively. “I don’t. You’re supposed to be my teacher. So teach me.”
“It means we have no fucking choice about being together. The magic’s taken away our choice just when we thought we had one. The magic wants what the magic wants, and it doesn’t care who it has to run over to get it. Trickster’s given us a gift with one hand and smacked us upside the head with the other. I like you, Cara, and I don’t think it’s just the insanely hot sex. But we’re looking at a lifetime commitment whether we’re ready for it or not.”
The cougar whined in protest. He was ready to make that commitment. Things tended to be simpler cougarside. “We’re trapped. Trapped together. Right where we might otherwise want to be. Somewhere, Trickster is laughing his-her ass off.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s not supposed to be. For once in my life, I can’t think of a joke.” He sighed, flopped down on the bed next to her, then sprang to his feet as if the bed was on fire. It wasn’t, though. She was on fire, her body calling to him even though he should still be sated, not to mention distracted by the mess they were in. “I shouldn’t be here. We need to put space between us long enough to think.”
“But if you really are my spirit guide, don’t we need to stick together, so I don’t…?” She spun her finger by her left ear in the universal gesture for crazy.
“If I’m your spirit guide, I can still reach you. That’s how it works. We don’t have to be together every second.”
“Good. Having you around every second would make me nuts. For one thing, I don’t think we’d both fit in the damn outhouse, especially not with our zoo of spirit animal friends.” She giggled, though it sounded desperate.
“Spoken like a true shaman.” He clapped her on the back.
At least that was what he intended.
As soon as he touched her, his brain short-circuited and apparently the same circuit blew in hers, because when they ended up lying on the bed, his length sprawled on top of hers, she didn’t resist. Instead, she melted into the kind of kiss that was probably illegal in conservative areas.
They were already naked. Her skin gave off the scent of sex and magic, and her crazy-quilt aura now had a streak of cougar-tawny running through it, just like his. His cock sprang to attention, rooted at the juncture of her thighs, which parted slightly.
No. Not right. Bad idea.
He rolled off just as she shoved him away.
“I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.” He grabbed his pants off the floor but didn’t actually put them on. That was admitting he wouldn’t be skin-to-skin with Cara again in the immediate future, and he couldn’t quite do that. Not with her so close. Not with their mingled scents making him drunk with need, not with her aura color-keyed to his.
The half of him that was cougar and saw things in straightforward terms figured he needed to stay.
That conviction made it even clearer he needed to leave. “I shouldn’t bail when there’s so much to sort out. But I just can’t be in the same place with you right now. I… The magic… I want to…” He flailed, at a loss for words or even gestures.
“I know.” She snatched a sweater off the floor, threw it on over bare skin and pulled a blanket over the lower half of her body. “Just when I thought we knew where we were going, things are getting confusing again.” She didn’t meet his eyes. That was probably good, because Cara half-dressed was just as enticing as Cara naked. Maybe more so, because now he was enjoying mental images of getting her naked again.
“Just when I thought my life couldn’t possibly get more fucked up,” Cara continued, “Trickster decides that giving me magic I never wanted, ruining my career and killing Phil in some kind of stupid magical drive-by weren’t enough. I thought maybe meeting you was the only good thing to come out of this disaster, but that’s fucked up too. No, now I have a spirit guide I can’t keep my hands off of, only I don’t know if it’s you or the magic I want.”
He shrugged, trying to be nonchalant while feeling anything but. “No reason it can’t be both—that would be very Trickster. But damn, it hurts my brain.”
“Can we break the bond, so you’re not my guide anymore?”
The thought felt like claws tearing out Jack’s vital organs.
Trickster’s tits, he wanted to believe he and Cara belonged together—at least that they had as good a chance as any two people. But there had to be choice involved.
“If anyone would know how, it would be Sam. But I, for one, don’t relish trying to explain this mess to your grandfather. Especially not the wild-sex part.”
Cara laughed, a laugh that almost turned into a sob. “When I told you to go away before, you were smart enough to know I didn’t mean it. Now I mean it. We can’t think when we’re this close together. You said it yourself. And we both need to think.”
Every nerve in his body yearned to touch her, but her words galvanized him to action where his own will failed.
He threw on his coat and boots, grabbed the rest of his clothes and sprinted back to his house, embracing the biting cold as a way to distract him from Cara in his arms.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Run this by me again?”
Cara sighed. It was only the second time she’d be telling Gramps the story, but it felt more like the fifteenth from all the times she’d rehearsed it in her head. “Jack Long-Claw’s cougarside says he’s my spirit guide. But as far as he knows, that’s impossible.”
“Strictly speaking, Jack’s impossible, which is what makes him such a good shaman. He’s one of Trickster’s special children.”
“Short-school-bus special,” she said without any malice.
She wasn’t sure her grandfather would get the reference, but he nodded and roared with laughter. “That he is, Cara. I tried teaching him, you know, my last student before…” He paused, his expression dark and somber for a few seconds that felt much longer to Cara. “He probably cured me of teaching. That boy was a handful, even by the standards of a young shaman. Suppose it was the cat hormones as well as the boy hormones. He seems to have more than his share of both.” Gramps cackled, then stopped abruptly and glared at her.
She hadn’t said anything about being attracted to Jack, let alone that they’d had sex. But her grandfather was clearly waiting for her to fess up.
As if she was going into that with her grandfather.
Gramps clapped her on the back. “Joking aside—which is hard to do when two shamans talks about another—Jack’s a good guy. Smarter than he lets on. A bit too fond of the prankish side of being a shaman, but he’s young yet. I can think of far worse mentors for you. But the business of him being your spirit guide is troubling.”
“No kidding. But it seems to be true, unless one half of Jack’s lying to the other, or both sides are lying to me.”
“I don’t think the sides of a dual can lie to each other.” Her grandfather’s wizened face closed in on itself. Without his usual smile, he couldn’t hide how old he was, how frail.
And he might be dying because he’d chosen to cut himself off from his magic.
“Why not? We humans lie to ourselves all the time.” Like her telling herself she didn’t want Jack. She’d actually believed it for a while.
Which, in hindsight, was hilarious.
She smiled despite herself. Her grandfather shook his head slightly, something resembling a grin flitting ov
er his face before it settled back to looking like an old walnut. “Duals can literally smell lies, so they tend to be honest folk. No point in lying if you’ll just get caught anyway. But that doesn’t mean they always know what the truth is.” He squinted at her. “That’s one important thing to remember as a shaman. We know a little more than other people, but we’re still as likely to fuck up as anyone else.”
“We?” Anger flared hot and tight inside her, although she couldn’t explain why she was angry. “I thought you weren’t a shaman anymore, Gramps. I thought you couldn’t find the magic.”
He shook his head. “The magic’s still there, but I can’t tap it any more than you could reach yours when you first came to us. Coyote won’t talk to me, and I can’t find the way back on my own. Your grandmother and I always worked together, from the time we were boy and girl. Coyote wasn’t her guide, but he always swore he hung around to be close to her since she was so much prettier than me. And maybe he wasn’t kidding. I haven’t felt my guide in years. It’s killing me. Literally. I’ve prayed and burned sacred tobacco and drummed and done everything you’re supposed to do when you’re blocked from the spirit world, and I’m still alone in my damn head.”
She tried to make a joke out of it. “I’m jealous. My skull’s crowded these days.”
“Downside of being a shaman, and also the upside. You’re never lonely, but you never have privacy.” He sighed and took her hand between his large, age-spotted, bony ones. “I try to take comfort in the quiet. When I start hearing voices and they’re not Coyote, it’ll be time to join your grandmother and mother.”
“Maybe we could share guides. Take Jack. Please.” She was only half kidding, although seeing Gramps smile again helped. “Or borrow Lynx. She’s a snot, but she’s useful, if only so she can say ‘I told you so’ later.”
He chuckled, but it was a rueful one. “Lynx and I go way back. She was your gram’s guide, and your mother’s, but she talked to me—especially when she thought I’d been stupid, and that was a lot. She came to me after your gram died, to say good-bye and that it had been a pleasure teasing me all those years.”
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