Duane followed that thought up with a nod of accord. “He’s right, Candy. You can’t go back to work in your condition. Maybe not even tomorrow.” He looked to Nate. “Don’t worry about her, man. I’ll take her home and see that she gets to bed.”
Nate glanced from Candace to Duane, his mouth edging somewhere between a smile and a frown, as if he couldn’t decide how he felt about the two of them being together. Finally, he nodded. “Fine. Just…be nice to her.”
“I won’t do anything she doesn’t want me to do,” Duane promised.
Nate opened his mouth to say something in response but then shut it and waved toward the door. “Just go and take care of her already.”
* * * * *
Duane had done exactly as he’d promised Nate, took Candace to his home and saw that she got to bed. Being the overachiever he was—at least when it came to a certain woman and certain situations that involved that particular woman—he even took it one step further and climbed into bed along with her. Sleep, well, it was a good thing he hadn’t promised Nate to see his sister got any of that, as there didn’t appear to be any on the foreseeable horizon.
Candy was gloriously naked and on her knees on the king-sized bed, her breath coming in jagged pants, her breasts heavy with arousal and filling his hands. His cells were on fire with the need to finally make her his, in body if not yet in form. Yet he stopped himself from pumping into her buttocks the way he burned to do and asked one last time, “Are you sure you want this?”
“Yes,” she breathed, rearing back against his rock-hard shaft, trying to get him between her butt cheeks by her own means. “I want it. I want you, Duane. I love you.”
The words were remarkable, ones he could hear every day of his life and never tire of. He planned on doing just that, just as he planned on speaking his own in return every day, night and numerous times in between.
After rubbing his cock along the seam of her ass one last time, he pushed the pre-cum-lubricated head inside until he reached her sphincter muscle. She tensed for an instant, the muscle tensing in turn, and then both loosened again as she demanded, “Now! I want you inside of me now.”
Candace reared back against him again and this time he met her thrust with one of his own in the opposite direction. He pumped his cock deep inside the slick valley of her ass and she squealed out with the rapid entry while her fingers dove into the sheets, clawing against the navy silk and turning her knuckles white.
“Too much? Tell me if it is, sweetie. Tell me to stop.” It very well might kill him to stop now but, if she asked, he would do it. There would always be another day, another time for them to become mates in more ways than just in hearts.
“You will not stop!” she bit out. “You will move!”
He chuckled at her demand. If those weren’t the sweetest words he’d ever heard, then he didn’t know what were. Actually, Duane realized as he gave in to her request and his own burning need, pulling his cock almost all the way out of her buttocks and then thrusting into her again to the sound of her ecstatic screams, he did. He voiced them now, “I love you, Candy. Always. Forever. You’re my family. Everything I’ve always wanted. Dreamed of. Mine.”
Her body trembled beneath his, her muscles tugging at his cock, urging him to release inside her, to spurt his seed and finally make her his. He leaned down over her, until her back was flush with his chest, and pulled at her nipples, teasing, toying, twisting until fevered cries rang from her lips. He took her neck in his teeth then. Let his fangs emerge ever so slightly and bit down.
Candy’s tremors turned to shakes and her moves to jarring slams, her buttocks grinding hard against his groin and her pussy dripping with her juices against his balls. The scent of her sweet arousal filled his nostrils, had his cock growing thicker, longer, wider within her ass, his fangs emerging to sink farther in her neck. For a moment, he feared it was too much and then she shouted a euphoric, “Ye-esss!”
She reared back one last time and her sphincter contracted around him, tugged at his cock until he was powerless to giving in. He didn’t even try to prolong it. He had no reason to. He could feel the orgasm sliding through her, hear its effects in her thoughts and feel them as the cum drained from her body and soaked his balls and the bed beneath them. As his own shot into her buttocks, filled her up in a warm, wet stream, she turned her neck against his mouth and growled, “Mine.”
“Yours, huh?” Duane asked teasingly moments later as he pulled her into his arms and kissed the bite marks on her neck.
Candace smiled back, her eyes dark gold and filled with love. Her voice was anything but, biting out, “Yes, you’re mine. To control. To have whenever I want. To demand you give me endless pleasure.”
He chuckled, aware just how much truth there was to the venomous tone—not very damned much. Moving to her lips, he kissed her soundly. “Don’t forget about taking you hunting at night for road kill and field mice, every werewolf’s entrée of choice.”
She laughed, then sobered. “I seriously think you need an education if you think that’s what us werewolves like to eat.”
All humor drained away with her seriousness. “’Us werewolves’?”
She licked her lips and nodded. “I’m ready.”
Ready. As in, ready to change. Ready to become his in more than just heart and body. In form. “You’re sure?”
“You said it wouldn’t hurt, right?”
Duane recalled the way she’d responded to his tonguing her that afternoon after he’d met up with Andy in his wolf form. She’d more than enjoyed the scrape of his fangs against her clit, just as she’d enjoyed them on her neck now. “Did you like becoming my mate?”
Her eyes widened slightly, her pupils dilating just enough to tell him she’d liked it and then some. “If you really have to ask that, then you truly are an idiot.”
“I don’t, but I love it when you get bitchy with me.” To the sound of her gasp, he moved down her body and settled his hands on her thighs, pushed her legs up. “Open up, sweetie. Your inner wolf’s down here, just waiting to come out and play.”
Parting her thighs, she raised an eyebrow. “Down there?”
“Oh, yeah.” He planted a kiss on the ticklish pear-shaped birthmark that lined her upper thigh. To the squeal of her laughter, he moved lower still and sniffed at her arousing scent. He brushed his goatee over the sodden curls that covered her mound, then parted those curls and sank his tongue deep inside her warm, waiting wetness. Slowly, he allowed the wolf in him to take over, to emerge. To become whole.
The grating sound of bones shifting and changing filled the air for several seconds and then faded away to nothing but the excited sound of Candace’s panting breaths.
Duane looked up at her through his wolf’s eyes and brushed his cold, wet nose over her clit, followed it with the gentle rasp of a fang. Her pussy pulsed in response, let loose a flood of juices. Her eyes darkened and her fingers dove into his long fur. He moved his fangs to either side of her clit and sank them into the delicate flesh that surrounded it as he plunged his tongue deep inside her core. Her hips bucked up off the bed and her fingers clenched in his hair.
“Oh, God, Duane,” she breathed as he increased the pressure of his sucks, his thrusts. “I want to become a wolf at least once a day. On second thought,” she bit out a on a harsh pant as his tongue lengthened and widened to its fullest, “make that twice.”
Epilogue
Candace pulled into the parking deck of Vaughn Technologies, fighting off anxiety. Joe was going to be ecstatic, just as the rest of the family would be about her news. Still, Candy hadn’t expected this day to ever come, let alone so soon, and the idea of telling her oldest brother she was engaged had her belly coiling with tension. Deep down, she knew the truth. She wasn’t anxious about sharing the news she and Duane were getting married, but that the outcome of that marriage would be children they both wanted badly and soon, yet also ones she had no idea of what to expect. Would they be human? Wolves? Mixed breed
s like their parents?
According to Duane and what he’d learned in speaking with others of their kind, they would be the latter, but more than likely come out in their wolf form. And that was the real cause of her nerves. Before that day came, they would have to tell her family the truth about them, not to mention find an obstetrician who wasn’t afraid of delivering werepups, potentially a whole litter of them.
First things first, though. Sharing her happy news with Joe.
Mentally calming herself, Candace made her way from the closed-in ground-level deck to the third floor of the technological building that housed Joe’s office along with numerous others. It was after five already but she knew her brother well. He was working an extra hour or two a day now to compensate for next month, when his son was due and he’d want to take off several days in a row, if not more.
Reaching his closed office door, she heard the echo of his deep voice from inside. Just like she’d guessed, working late. Candy took one long, nerve-fortifying breath, then turned the doorknob, pushed in and…came to a mind-jarring halt.
The deep voice she’d heard seconds ago was louder now, far more understandable, and didn’t belong to her brother for a second. It also wasn’t her brother who stood on the opposite end of Joe’s spacious office. That man was clad in nothing more than black suit pants, his dark hair shot with gray at the temples, and in his hand was a whip. A whip he brought down soundly on the bared and reddened backside of a blonde.
Candace’s speeding thoughts came to a grating halt at that last observation. Forcing herself to look past the actions of the man, she concentrated on the woman. On the blonde. The one who was bent over and manacled to the arms of Joe’s desk chair and shouting out her pleas for mercy. Pleas that sounded more like ecstatic requests for the man never to stop. Pleas that rang out in a voice Candy recognized to a heart-stopping certainty, just as she recognized the woman’s fair blonde hair. It wasn’t in a ponytail now, the way she always wore it, but that didn’t change the facts.
Good God, Carrie?
But, no, it couldn’t be. Her sister never wore her hair down. Didn’t even seem the least bit interested in men. She sure as hell wasn’t subservient—that trait wasn’t built into the Anderson gene pool. Then there was the little matter of Carrie being at the university library this evening, cramming for a coming exam. That’s what she’d told Candy this morning. Had told her almost the same damned thing the morning before that and the one before… Oh my… No. No way. She couldn’t have been lying that whole time. This couldn’t be her sexually reserved little sister—
The blonde’s head fell back suddenly, her facial features coming into clear view, and Candace all but swallowed her tongue. She blinked back her stupefaction, her shock, the sensation she was going to pass out, to gasp, “Holy shit! Carrie?”
“Oh. My. God.” The words tumbled from Carrie’s lips on a squeak. Candy repeated them silently, only with far more strength. Their overprotective older brothers were going to freak.
Well, Candace did still owe Nate for making her stand up with Duane in his and Kelsey’s wedding. Not that she was actually upset about that anymore. Or that she planned to get retribution by telling him their baby sister was not only seeing a much older man, if the gently graying hair was any sign, but one that was into whips and handcuffs. Judging by the elated look on Carrie’s face just before she’d spotted Candy and horror overtook her expression, Carrie was in to it every bit as much herself.
Oh, dear Lord. And she’d thought her secret was big.
About the author:
Jodi Lynn Copeland resides on 30 acres of recreational woodland and farmland, minutes from Michigan's state capital. She has been writing since her junior year in college when she began a romantic suspense novel. Since then she has written numerous books, which range from single title mystery to erotic romance, and has won various writing awards. When not writing, she enjoys time in the outdoors—hunting, fishing, playing ball, or just spending time with her family and pets. Weekdays are spent on her day job as a technical writer, graphic designer, and web programmer for a national engineering firm, and evenings and weekends bringing tales of passion, romance, and adventure to life.
Jodi is a member of Romance Writers of America (RWA), Greater Detroit Romance Writers of America (GDRWA), Mid-Michigan Romance Writers of America (MMRWA), Cata-Romance, and a dedicated critique group.
Jodi Lynn Copeland welcomes mail from readers. You can write to her c/o Ellora’s Cave Publishing at 1337 Commerce Drive, #13, Stow, Ohio 44224.
Also by Jodi Lynn Copeland:
Gold, Frankincense and Myrhh
Naughty Mistress Nita
Sons of Solaris: Aries
Sons of Solaris: Taurus
Uncharted Waters
Wild Hearts: One Wild Weekend
Discover for yourself why readers can’t get enough of the multiple award-winning publisher Ellora’s Cave. Whether you prefer e-books or paperbacks, be sure to visit EC on the web at www.ellorascave.com for an erotic reading experience that will leave you breathless.
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Wild Hearts 2: Wild by Night Page 15