by Christa Wick
The only submission he would accept was hers -- her heat, her body positioned chest down and ass up, her pussy dripping with enough arousal to ease his passage into her.
Iris stepped around the patrol officer, her body blocking Cade from harming the man as she repeated her command.
Damn it, Cade. Stand down!
Before Cade could respond, the crack of a high-powered rifle whipped through the air. The plain-clothes detective, his body so close to Iris he almost pushed into her, dropped to the ground, half his face exploding across the patrol cop and Iris before he collapsed.
Hunters on the roof, boss!
Mathis threw the van in reverse, the words in his high-frequency warning like a bucket of ice on Cade's arousal. Cade shot his arm out, his hard grip seizing Iris around the waist as she reached for her gun. Spinning, he threw his body backwards as the van slammed to a stop next to him, its side door open. Twisting as he fell, Cade pinned Iris to the floor of the van as Mathis threw the vehicle into drive and hit the accelerator.
A quick jerk on her wrist disarmed Iris. He tossed the gun from the van before shutting the door as another rifle shot ricocheted off the bumper. Hearing the shot, Cade threw himself across her body.
She fought, twisting and jerking, her nails swiping at him to draw thin streams of blood across his cheek as her knee searched for a clear shot at his groin. He wrapped a hand around her throat, his breath steaming against her face as he forced her to stop kicking by slowly denying her air. When she finally quieted, he shook his head at her, drew a deep breath and laughed.
"Baby, you're not supposed to smell like this."
Iris blinked once, surprise pulling at the sides of her face, and then her mouth went slack. A second later, the plump lips hardened into a scowl and she pushed at his thick chest.
"Get off me!" She screamed. When he didn't budge, she pushed harder. "I said get off!"
"Not happening." Growling, he buried his face against her neck and inhaled. "Or don't you realize those were Hunters shooting at you?"
The van shuddered as the driver took a hard right. Tanner’s voice squawked over the radio that more shots were being fired outside the club, with Hunters holding positions on two rooftops as the police scrambled for cover.
"We’re clear!" Tanner squawked again. "Going down the hole!"
Cade lifted his head and barked at Mathis. "Follow them!"
With the Hunters and the cops keeping each other busy, Cade settled his weight against Iris’s body. He tried to keep his expression stern. She had run out on him, after all! But his wolf -- hungry and horny -- smiled at her.
Struggling against him, she snapped, "That was my partner on the ground!"
Partner...
He growled at her use of a word too close to "mate" in his mind.
"Going back won't make him any less dead." Cade leaned in, sniffing again with the need to know just how deep her "partner's" scent went on her clothing. Cold metal touched his lips and he quickly pulled away. "Silver? You're shielding yourself with silver?
Reaching beneath the collar of the blouse Iris wore, Cade yanked a thick chain from her neck. The van jerked right, the frame almost buckling as a low whine of need sounded from the driver's seat.
"Boss, whatever you just did...fucking fix it."
"It" was Iris unmasked. With the chain broken, her heat permeated every inch of the van. Energy poured from her body, the waves turning to a carnal scream only a wolf could hear. Unmated, she was a ticking bomb ready to go off on his mission, jeopardizing her life and those of his team.
Unmated...
The word stuck in his head for a second before he crushed it like a tin can. Snarling, Cade reached between them.
"No." Iris shook her head, her deep purple gaze pleading with him to stop.
He tugged at the front of her pants, the fabric shredding beneath his claws. She wasn't unmated, just unfucked. She was his and if he needed Mathis to calm down in the front of the van and finish the rescue mission, then Cade needed to claim her.
"No," she whispered. Terror mixed with tears in the purple gaze, so that there was no she-wolf beneath him, just a frightened woman.
"Then control your heat," Cade snapped, the fear in his mate's eyes warring with his need to protect and claim her. "Or I will."
Every inch of his skin burning with his desire for Iris, Cade reluctantly eased his weight from her. She rolled to the side of the van and sat up. Her hands closed around the silver necklace he had torn from her. Finding the heavy clasp broken, she placed the chain around her neck then pinched the ends together. She started murmuring. Blue light erupted along her fingertips.
Surprise coiled around Cade's growl and squeezed to keep the sound inside him, the silence beyond the she-wolf’s murmuring broken only by Mathis in the front seat.
"Boss, why does she sound like Esme?"
Chapter Three
Esme...
Her flesh starting to burn from the silver and the blue light that erupted with her chanting, Iris shoved aside the vague memory of a teenaged witch-in-training. She knew the driver was talking about the words and not her voice.
Casting words were slippery to a shifter's ears. Wolves couldn't catch them, couldn't hold them in their minds long enough to roll them off their tongues. Wolves might be magic, but they couldn't learn or cast magic. Beyond her too round shape, her ability to not only remember the words the witches used but repeat them with effect had been the first clear sign that she was not a shifter.
Already an outcast among the wolves, she had told no one. The secret had saved her life the day she was forced off clan lands and had shielded her for over a decade from shifters and Hunters alike -- until today, when Cade Mercer stormed back into her life, his words and behavior claiming the impossible.
She was in heat.
Absolutely, totally out of the question -- she couldn't be. The blue light dancing around her fingertips and the foreign syllables rolling off her tongue proved as much. She wasn't a wolf, wasn't one of the clan's women even though she'd been born to a mated pair.
Iris looked at Cade to find him staring at her, his eyes wide and his jaw tight with suspicion. She pushed the distraction away and continued the chant. Beneath her fingertips, the silver melded to one unbroken length of chain around her neck. She knew the moment the chain was restored by the fresh growl that rumbled through Cade's chest and the way the van steered straighter beneath the driver's steadied hands.
She released the necklace then dropped her gaze to the shredded fabric around her pants' button. No fixing that -- fabric and plastic wouldn't respond to casting, even most metals wouldn't, just iron and silver.
Untucking her shirt to cover the front panel of her pants, she scowled at Cade. "Better?"
The answer was "no," even if he didn't utter a single word. She heard it in the hot exhalation of breath as his nostrils flared, saw it in the angry shudder that rolled over his body as his gaze narrowed.
With a nervous lick to her top lip, she patted around the right side of her waistband. Her hand closed over her badge. Unclipping it, she rolled the shield at the tip of her fingers, her gaze kept on the curved gold edges of metal instead of the angry shifter in front of her.
Cade had every right to be angry and no right at all. He had no idea what she had done for him, just like she had no idea what lies his father had filled his head with after she vanished from clan lands a dozen years ago.
The air in her lungs froze at the thought of the elder Mercer. Her brain became fuzzy as it always did when she tried to remember the details of that day. Vague images and sounds danced at the corners of her eyes and ears. Hank hurting her, threatening to kill Cade and her grandmother, a piercing pain and then the magic she had kept hidden exploding, suddenly free from his grip, her legs pumping, running hard, her body an alien thing that only barely followed her commands.
She sharpened her focus on the shield, her grip on it so tight the edges threatened to slice her skin. She
didn't care about the pain, knew the magic running through her body would heal her the same as if she were a shifter. It was more important to stop the panic attack that threatened while she still had a chance to convince Cade to turn the van around or at least stop the vehicle and let her out.
She looked up, her cop façade in place. "You really think you can kidnap a homicide detective with another one dead on the ground?"
He shrugged and for a second she saw the twenty-year-old boy she had been crazy in love with instead of the hardened shifter that had thrown her into the van and clawed at her pants.
She blinked, dismissing both memories as she jabbed her finger at the back door. "That's my partner--"
Cade's growl rumbled through her body, gripping her and holding her paralyzed as he closed the small distance between them.
"I tolerated that word the first time you used it." His breath played hot over her throat as he spoke. "Don't say it again."
"Joshua--" A second growl, more menacing than the first, froze her tongue for a few more seconds. She closed her eyes, tried to control the trembling she knew he could see, if not feel. She swallowed, shook her head. "Detective Harper was--"
"He's not anything but a stain on the sidewalk now," Cade reminded her. "That bullet was meant for you. You're not going back."
"I can take care of myself." She wanted to argue further, but his head had started to move in a familiar pattern, his nose and mouth lifting to the top of her head as she heard him inhale. His face made a slow descent to pass against her ear, and then her throat.
Iris threw her hands up to block him. "Don't!"
He was scenting her for another male, one whose odors went deeper than the surface to hide in intimate places. Any such trace of a man was long gone from her body.
"Stop and let me out," she ordered, squirming to gain a little separation of their bodies.
"If I do, you’ll have to give up the clan. The only way to stop the cops' questions is to give them us." His hand closed over the badge she still played with. Taking it from her, he tucked it in his jeans pocket. "You want to turn everyone over? Me? Your grandmother?"
"My grandmother's dead," she bit out, turning her head but not before she saw shock flicker in his dark eyes.
"And how the hell do you know that?" he barked. "You visited her after you left?"
Wiggling away from him, she shook her head then pressed her face against her knees and wrapped her arms around her shins. "I saw it," she answered, her words muffled. "Felt it when she passed."
"Don't believe you," he growled, his hands continuing to move over her with all the efficiency of a street cop until he found her cell phone. "Andra said she kissed you good-bye."
Iris had felt that, too, her heart breaking at the distant press of her beloved grandmother's lips. But she hadn't been there -- not physically.
Moving into the front passenger seat, Cade rolled down the window and threw it out. Hearing the right rear tire smash the phone's case, Iris hugged her legs a little tighter.
Chapter Four
Sliding open the van's side door, Cade braced against the look on Iris's face. He expected anger, a blazing white fury instead of the trembling fear that turned her purple gaze almost black. Slamming the door shut without removing her, he turned on his heels and barked an order at Mathis.
"Bring her inside!" Reaching in his pocket for his house key, he slowed his steps and lowered his voice to a register he hoped Iris could only feel and not hear through the van's steel frame. "Respectfully or I'll rip your guts out."
Opening the door, Cade stepped into the house's dark interior. His hand hovered over the light switch. He didn't want the light on, didn't want to look in her eyes and see that she was afraid of him.
She had no reason to be.
He blinked, his chest tightening as he remembered holding her down in the van, his claws shredding the front panel of her pants as he fought his wolf to keep from slicing deeper. She had to realize he had contained himself -- strangled the need triggered by the ball burning, cock gripping, full on rutting odor of a she-wolf who was not only a female alpha but his mate, a woman he had loved as long as he could remember.
With the house remaining unlit, he watched Mathis guide Iris out of the van. Her lips quivered as she said something, her face turning toward the driver so that she spoke straight into his ear.
Cade heard only one word, the only one he needed to hear.
Hank.
"Dead," Cade barked, his voice as cold and buried as his father. "A few months after you skipped out."
He watched as her face hardened. He flipped the lights on, pushed the door open a little more and moved deeper into the living room. As soon as Iris entered, Cade held up his hand to stop Mathis. "Go to the latents' dorm and round up some clothes and supplies."
Iris turned toward the door, her hands and lips moving as if searching for a way to make Mathis stay. Reaching past the she-wolf, Cade slammed the door shut. His hands found her shoulders, his fingers itching with the need to remove the necklace again.
She stiffened beneath his touch.
"Time to talk." The order rumbled through him with mixed motives. He wanted to talk her right into his bedroom, to remove the clothes that held the scent of other men, to bury himself between her soft thighs as he nuzzled her pale neck, to part her lower lips and lick her into submission.
Tightening his grip, he turned and directed her toward the couch. "Sit."
She obeyed, but instantly seized one of the oversized couch pillows and protectively drew it to her body. The fleeting anger that lit her gaze a few seconds before reverted to fear. Scowling, Cade yanked the pillow from her and nodded down his hall.
"Perhaps you should shower first," he suggested dryly. "You're getting bits of Detective Harper all over my furniture."
Violet fire erupted in her eyes and her face turned to stone once more.
He nodded, satisfied. An angry mate he could handle. A fearful one clawed at his gut with a burn worse than any fire, bullet or silver could conjure. He watched Iris rise silently from the couch, his posture stern but all of his senses targeted on her until she slammed the bathroom door shut and locked it.
Alone, he sank onto the couch and pulled the pillow to his nose. There were no actual bits of the dead man on the pillow or furniture. The fabric, however, had soaked up Iris's scent like a sponge dipped in perfume. The mingling of cloves and oranges with the deeper musk of her heat stirred his cock to full hardness.
Sighing, he lowered the pillow from his face, pushed it down his chest and stomach to rest firmly against his cock. The sigh turned to a growl, the sound vibrating so low he knew it would penetrate the walls and the fall of water over her soft body.
Another low, rumbling, quiver of noise moved through him to pass over his shaft like a lover's fingers. Eyes closed, he imagined Iris in his shower. Even as a child and teen, she had never quite looked like a shifter, her sweet body too soft, her face too round. But he could smell the wolf in her when others -- not even the grandmother raising her -- couldn't. He could see the shift that never fully materialized as it shimmered beneath her skin, fighting to break out.
Now there was no doubt that Iris was all wolf, in heat, just down his hall...in his shower.
Tossing the pillow aside, Cade stood and took his first step toward the bathroom. His right foot dragged forward, his once iron will fighting the desire to shift. Body shaking, he took a third step, right hip dipping, ankle rolling outward as the other foot started to move forward.
A tentative knock landed on his front door.
He sprang backward, landing expertly behind the couch in a tactical position before laughing at himself. Tears flooded his eyes and he rubbed roughly at his cheek, laughing some more and shaking his head. Maybe Mathis was right and he was turning into a pussycat. He sure as hell had just jumped like one. And how the hell did someone make it to his front door without him knowing it at the first crunch of tires on his drive?
Oh, yeah -- because his entire focus had been on Iris, on the lingering scent filled with her heat and the memories of her half-yielding flesh the last time the two of them had been alone in their youth.
The knock landed again, producing another startled jerk.
"Coming!" He prowled toward the door, his wolf seeking out the energy of the person beyond it. Not Mathis, whom he expected to return with the clothes. Not male at all. Female, shifter, unmated and trembling...
He yanked the door open to find Joelle Frost holding a small duffel bag of clothes in front of her like it was a silver shield that could protect against Cade's ire.
"Mathis said to bring this!" she blurted.
Hearing Joelle's voice shake worse than her hands, Cade closed his eyes and cursed Mathis. He understood why his second had sent someone else, but he'd made a bad choice. He could have chosen any other female wolf, or a mated male, even one of the latents. Instead, Mathis had sent a nineteen-year-old wolfling who had been sniffing around Cade since her first heat -- a move that reeked not of stupidity but sabotage.
Grabbing the duffel, Cade jerked it toward him. She held tight to the bag, the momentum pulling her into his house.
"Leave, Joelle."
She dropped her gaze, refusing to challenge a pack alpha directly, even if Cade wasn't her alpha. "I thought all new latents were supposed to go to the Fielding house."
He could hear the question lurking beneath little she-wolf's statement, could see it in the way her body twitched with a poorly concealed need. She wanted to know if the woman she had brought the clothes for was a latent whose scent marked her as Cade's mate.
"My guest isn't a latent and you need to go now." He fought the urge to growl at the wolfling, knowing the energy running through his body was too confused by Iris's proximity for the sound to come out right. The way his day was going, his mate would exit the bathroom to find Joelle on her knees, ass bobbing in the air in supplication for Cade to take her if he risked another growl.