by Viola Rivard
“I won't let anything like this happen to you again.”
There was an implication in his words that should have alarmed her, but when she tilted her head back to look up at him, all she could feel was a rush of affection for him.
“It was my fault,” she told him. “I shouldn't have... Well, there were a lot of things I shouldn't have done that day. Sometimes when I'm mad I say stupid things and I act in ways that aren't in my best interest.”
“I've noticed.”
His hands moved to her hips and he turned her so that they were facing. She wasn't sure if he kissed her or if she kissed him, but in the next instant their lips were connected.
It had been days since they'd kissed, but there was nothing tentative or uncertain in the way their mouths moved. She kissed him with a hungry ferocity and he matched her intensity, claiming her lips, her mouth, and her tongue as his own.
In the water, their height made no difference and Harper was able to push herself up on his shoulders so that he had to tilt his head back to keep kissing her. Heat blossomed in her belly, spreading across her body until even the lake wasn't enough to cool her. Her arms wrapped around him, her hands gripping his long hair as she pressed herself to him as tightly as possible.
Within moments, the ache between her legs felt like more than she could bear. She began to lower herself down his body, until she reached his erection. Stiff and rigid with an upward curve, he aligned perfectly with her entrance and she knew she could lower herself onto him with minimal assistance on his part.
She wiggled her hips, trying to work the thick head of his cock past her outer folds, and Shan's grip on her hips tightened at once. She expected him to accept the invitation and sheath himself inside of her, but instead he pulled her back and held her firmly apart from him.
“Harper.” His voice was strained as he spoke her name. “Not now.”
Lust and need hampered her brain cells, making her response whiny and inelegant. “Please? We can be quick.”
She went to kiss him again, confident that she could sway him with her mouth, but Shan pulled his head back and said one of the few things that could stall her.
“The next time I'm inside of you, I'm biting you.”
Harper blinked at him. “Like, you want to mark me?”
He didn't answer her immediately. His green eyes turned analytical as he seemed to weigh his next words.
“When we had sex, I didn't take it lightly. I don't take sex lightly, period. And when you bit me—”
“You told me to bite you!”
“Don't interrupt me,” he said sternly. “My instincts don't give a fuck about how you're rationalizing the bite. They also don't give a fuck about your human life, or the fact that you lied to me, or made me look like a fool in front of my pack mates.”
The heat drained from her body. Harper had the sudden urge to flee, but Shan's hands remained clamped on her hips.
He went on, “You have no concept of what this is like for me. While you're vacillating and weighing your options, my mind is already made up. The next time we fuck, I'm biting you and that's it. You're mine.”
Harper looked him up and down, her eyes narrowing. “If you want to bite me so badly, then fine. Do it. But I don't become yours just because you sink your teeth into me.”
Shan released her. She hadn't been expecting it and she dropped down quickly, only catching herself after she'd inhaled water. Once she'd coughed it up she started to issue a complaint, but her mouth slowly closed when she took in Shan's expression.
Harper wasn't easily intimidated, but seeing anger on Shan was unnerving in its subtlety. It was the second time she'd seen it. The first had been by the river when she'd yelled at him. Both times his spine straightened and his shoulders went rigid. His chin lifted and his face angled slightly away from her, so that he was looking down at her from the corners of his eyes. As if he wasn't already making her feel small in gesture, when he spoke his words were slow and patronizing.
“For someone raised among shifters, you really don't understand anything about our kind.”
Harper wanted no part in arguing with him. Tearing her gaze from his, she swam around him in a wide arc and headed back towards the shore.
When the water became too shallow to swim in, she was reminded of her ankle. The cold water was still dulling the pain, but she knew it would flare up again once she began walking on dry land. She resolved herself to push through it and not allow Shan to carry her back. It had less to do with her pride and more because she wanted to spite him. Even with her oh-so-limited knowledge of shifters, she knew that seeing her in pain would screw with his protective instincts.
Coming ashore, she realized that she hadn't fully thought through her bathing plan. She'd brought nothing to towel herself off with and was now faced with the dilemma of air drying or having damp clothes. While she considered her options, she noticed Shan's glossy, chocolate-brown pelt lying on the ground not far from her. She looked over her shoulder, wanting to judge how far behind Shan was, and if she could get to his pelt to towel off before he could stop her.
He was already clearing the shallows in long strides, but she wasn't entirely disappointed. She had not yet seen him fully naked in the daylight and she found it impossible to look away.
Nearly all shifters, male or female, were impeccably muscled. It was a side effect of regular shifting, which burned through fat cells with enviable efficiency. Shan's muscles were exceptionally impressive, particularly on his torso, which was longer than the average male's. Harper especially liked the sharp V where his hips curved into his pelvis.
He was still every bit as hard as he'd been when they were kissing. The sight of his erection—long, thick, and uncut—made her mouth go dry. She still couldn't believe he'd not only fit it inside of her, but had also given her a vaginal orgasm, something she'd been certain was a myth.
He was breathing heavily as he stalked up to her and seized her by the hips. Pride made her slam her hands against his chest, but before she could protest his mouth came down hard on hers. Harper knew that she was still angry with him and that she didn't want to give into him so easily, but at the same time she wanted him so badly that it hurt.
She remained tense and unresponsive for all of two seconds and then she was kissing him back, her hands greedily taking in the contours of his chest, shoulders, and arms. There was no windup, no slow burn. In an instant, her skin became hypersensitive, her nipples stiffened, and her body was throbbing with the need to have him inside of her.
Afraid that he would stop at kissing her again, her mind turned calculating. She considered grabbing his cock and guiding him into her, but she knew that it would leave a narrow window in which he could stop her. What was more, she'd learned that he had issues with control, and she didn't think he'd let her get away with that, even if he was intent on screwing her.
She would have to make it so that he couldn't resist her. It was a tall order, considering he'd just shot her down in the lake. She hadn't known it was possible to be turned down once a man's cock was nearly inside of her. If stroking him, grinding her hips against him, and pouring her soul into kissing him wasn't enough to keep him hooked, then she had to change tactics.
As her hand ran over his shoulders on a journey to his hair, her thumb brushed against the mark at the junction of his neck. It had been several days since she'd bitten him, and in spite of his assertion that it might scar, it had almost completely healed. She might have missed the twin indentations entirely, except that when she touched them she felt a tingling sensation pass through her thumb and up her arm.
The sensation spread throughout her body, affecting her differently in each area. As it spread through her chest, her heartbeat accelerated and her breasts felt fuller and heavier. In her belly it felt like hot honey, incasing her insides with heat and pooling in her groin. In her head, it felt like she'd been shot with a heavy dose of hormones. Her mind fogged over and she briefly lost control of her body. A
n inhuman sound rose up from a foreign space inside of her, a guttural, growling sound of need.
Her reaction might have disturbed her, had Shan given her any time to contemplate it. Within seconds of her issuing the strange noise, he responded by lifting her hips and impaling her onto his cock. Harper cried out at the sudden invasion, her fingers digging into his shoulders. Shan's reply was a bestial sound that was frighteningly similar to the one she'd just issued.
Harper was only distantly aware that he was walking before Shan bent to lay her down on his fur. He was careful to remain planted inside of her, but broke their kiss so that he could maneuver her onto her knees.
She had never enjoyed being taken from behind. It was a submissive position and one that gave her little control or view of what was happening. Coupled with the threat of Shan's bite, she felt uneasy and wary of him, but neither feeling was enough to ask him to stop, or even to turn her around.
At first Shan was still, except to run his hand down the curve of her spine, his index catching a little on each ridge. Then his hands fanned out to trace the contours of her waist, her ribcage, and the slopes of her shoulders. Rather than balk at the strange and intimate gesture, Harper closed her eyes and allowed herself to simply feel him feeling her.
She became so engrossed in the intimacy of his touch that it caught her by surprise when he began moving inside of her. Slow and gentle at first, his thrusts rapidly accelerating until they were both panting from the exertion. Her climax came swiftly, hitting her with startling force. She cried out his name, her hands clutching his pelt in tight fists.
While her body spasmed with sharp peaks of pleasure, she felt Shan's mouth close around her neck. He sucked hard on her flesh, his fangs digging in, but not quite puncturing the surface layer of her skin. She remembered what he'd said in the lake and knew that he'd make good on his words if she didn't stop him.
Her brain struggled to form words. She was still shaking from her climax and Shan was still thrusting hard inside of her. Twice, she opened her mouth to issue a protest, but each time all she could manage to say was his name.
It hurt when he finally bit her, but not as much as it should have. The pain lanced her neck, but was immediately followed by a sense of exhilaration that didn't feel entirely her own. Her consciousness seemed to slip back into a distant recess of her mind.
For a time, thoughts ceased to exist and she lived on a plane of sensory information and impressions. The strongest impression of all was the feeling of connectedness with Shan. His fangs were buried in her neck and he had gone still inside of her, his body pulsing with his release.
The feeling didn't go away when he withdrew his fangs from her, nor when he pulled out of her and turned her over so that she lay on her back. Her arms moved of their own accord, going up to caress his face and stroke his hair. It felt very important that she touch him, though she didn't understand why. All she knew was that doing so filled her with intense warmth and pleasure.
Shan fell onto his side next to her and pulled her into his arms. For once, she didn't have the slightest inhibitions about cuddling close to him. She pressed herself to him in as many places as she could, entangling their legs, spreading her palms over his shoulders, and crushing the side of her face to his hard chest. When his arms tightened around her, she let out a soft, contented sound. She was safe, secure, and where she belonged.
He's my mate.
It was the first cohesive thought she was able to string together, and on its own it was not enough to jar her back into reality. That happened when Shan began speaking to her and she realized that she couldn't understand a word he was saying.
She tried focusing on his words. It sounded like he was speaking English, but it was as if he was far away and talking through a pipe or speaking to her while she was underwater. She tried to look up at him, but found that her head wouldn't budge. She quickly found that her entire body was refusing to obey her. This revelation was made all the more startling by the fact that she hadn't had a seizure or a stroke. She was still rubbing her foot against Shan's leg and still nuzzling his chest with the side of her face, except it wasn't her doing any of it.
Harper started to panic, but was able to calm herself almost immediately. Without a brain flooding her body with norepinephrine, stress was easy to reign in.
After collecting herself, she paused to analyze the divide between herself and her body. She recognized that it was eerily similar to the way Shan had described shifting. Only, she hadn't shifted. She reasoned that it was some sort of perverse side effect of repressing her wolf, but in order to accept that, she had to accept that she had a wolf. Given that the only alternative was that she was finally having her psychotic break, she decided to go with the first theory.
Shan had told her before that he could influence his wolf form by sending it impressions. She tried doing this to the best of her ability, but getting anything across felt like trying to throw a stone over an ocean.
With each second that passed, her awareness of her body grew dimmer, as if she were slowly sinking into dark water. When she tried seeing through her eyes, she perceived only a murky image of Shan's face looking at hers. He was still speaking and she wondered if he'd realized that there was something wrong. Would he even care? Why would he want complicated and messy Harper when he could have the doting and affectionate entity that was inhabiting her body?
Suddenly, she was able to perceive pain shooting up her injured arm. She still had no control over her body, but she could see Shan more clearly than before. He looked angry, and his words moved over her in harsh vibrations.
Fear and desperation crashed over her like sheets of glass falling on her head. The feelings were debilitating in their intensity. Just when she thought she could no longer handle it, she was all at once back in her body.
Harper inhaled a massive breath and then sobbed her exhalation. Her body shaking uncontrollably, she wrapped her arms and cried without inhibition.
“Harper. Talk to me.”
It took her a moment to sputter out a response. “Wasn't me. It wasn't me.”
She felt his hand on her back. “I know. But you're all right now. You're safe.”
“Am I? How could I possibly be safe? She just... I just lost control of my body. I could see everything and feel things, but I wasn't in control.”
As she spoke, Shan pulled her into his arms. He put a hand on her head and pressed it to his chest, cradling her until she calmed down. Between his scent and the metronome that was his beating heart, her breathing quickly slowed and she grew lax in his embrace.
“What happened to me?”
“I'm not sure,” he said. “I know that before the first shift, the space between the two forms can become muddled. Once you complete your first shift, I don't think anything like that will happen again.”
A fresh wave of tears rolled down her cheeks. “This is really happening. I was sure you were wrong.”
The story of Shan's mother, so similar to her own, had planted a seed of doubt in her, but she hadn't really believed she'd be able to shift. The closest she had come was to believe that she might have been able to shift, had she properly cultivated the ability when she was younger, but doing so now had seemed so beyond her as to be impossible.
Shan started to stand, bringing Harper up with him. “Let's go get your clothes.”
“Can I wash up again first?”
Adjusting to the temperature of the lake was easier when she was being held against Shan's warm body. Perversely, she wondered if her body temperature would rise after she completed her first shift, and that thought branched out into a dozen more. Would she become even taller than she already was? Would she get weird lady muscles? Would her voice change? Would she become hairier? Would she have a pelt like Shan did, and which color would it be? Black, like her natural hair color, or flaxen gold like her father's pelt?
While her mind explored question after question, Shan took up the task of cleaning her. His hands weren't
enough to shake her concentration, except when he cleaned between her thighs, his fingers taking a bit too much liberty for her to ignore.
They remained in the water for a while after she'd been cleaned. He held her with his arms wrapped around her midsection, while she rested her own arms over his and her head against his chest.
“How did you bring me back?”
He seemed to think about his answer, and then said, “When I realized that something was wrong, I told her that she had to release you.”
“That's it? She listened to you just like that?”
His lips slanted. “Your wolf is vastly less combative than you.”
In spite of the grim situation, Harper managed to laugh.
Shan went on, “She listened to me because as far as she's concerned, I'm her mate.”
Harper wondered how he was able to glean all that from the mere minutes he'd spent with her wolf. Then, she contemplated how surreal it was to actually refer to her as 'her wolf'.
While her finger traced a vein in Shan's arm, she stared up at the darkening sky and wondered if her wolf could see it as well. She was almost certain that it could. When it had first taken over, she had felt so many emotions that she'd initially believed to be her own. Her wolf was a very complex creature, and that level of complexity didn't happen in a vacuum. She had seen things, felt things, maybe everything. And the whole time, she'd been trapped in the void, watching her host move from one self-destructive habit to the next.
Imagining how awful it must have been for her was enough to make Harper want to cry all over again, but she was too exhausted.
It's not fair.
She'd had that thought a lot lately, but it was no longer a self-pitying mantra. She knew now that the real injustice was that she had been manning their ship for all these years.
“She adores you,” Harper whispered. “I could feel it so strongly. My chest still aches when I think of how much she cares about you.”