by Amy Star
When he thrust in, it was not a slow movement. He thrust in all at once, the head of his cock breaching her and then the rest of it following in short order, until he was sheathed to the hilt. Elizabeth gasped, and the sound trailed off into a dwindling moan. She rolled her hips, pressing back against him, trying to draw him in impossibly deeper.
He hardly gave her a moment to adjust or get used to the sensation before he began to thrust, one hand pressed between her and the blanket to hold her hip, and the other curling around her leg to hold it up and out of the way for her, especially once her grip began to shake more and more with each thrust until she was forced to let go. Her hand tumbled down to the blanket, fingers clenching in the fabric and pulling at it, and her other hand tangled in her hair, thoroughly mussing it as she began to toss her head.
She could feel herself getting closer and closer to the edge, and she began grinding back against him even more quickly, making it rather apparent that she was close. Using that information, Ambrose abruptly slowed down. He didn’t stop, of course. But the rapid pace he had been maintaining slowed to a crawl, and Elizabeth whined. She could feel each inch of his cock as he withdrew with painstaking slowness, and each inch as he pressed back in just as slowly. She whimpered with each thrust, trying to urge him onwards. She knew that he was aware of what she was getting at, but he kept going at his slowed pace all the same.
Even going so slowly, though, the inevitable could only be delayed for so long. Gradually, Elizabeth’s whimpers rose back to moans and breathy gasps, and she had to hold her leg out of the way herself again as Ambrose had to hold her hips in place to keep her from grinding herself back to reach completion in a timelier fashion. But even so, she steadily approached the edge, until eventually she tumbled over it, and she breathed out a moan and every muscle went taut and shivering as she came. Her fingers clenched and unclenched, digging little crescent moons into the skin of her leg.
Ambrose’s slow rhythm stuttered briefly as she tightened around him, and it was only once she began to go limp that he picked up the pace, thrusting with renewed vigor towards his own completion as Elizabeth breathed encouragement for him. It didn’t take long before he came as well, managing only a few more faltering thrusts as he milked himself dry.
Slowly, he came to a halt, resting his forehead against the back of her neck. He let his cock slip free and smoothed a hand up her side as she finally let her leg come to a rest. She was pretty sure her hip was going to be sore in the morning, but it would be worth it.
They stayed right where they were for a few moments, chests heaving as they caught their breath and sweat drying on their skin. A gentle breeze blew, and a shiver chased itself down Elizabeth’s back until Ambrose pulled her closer to his chest. Warmth radiated from him like a furnace, and Elizabeth’s eyes drifted halfway shut as she took advantage of his heat, even if she was in no danger of falling asleep there.
Eventually, though, they had to disentangle themselves from each other. With something like reluctance, Ambrose pulled away and sat up, heaving a contented sigh as he leaned back against the railing along the side of the ramp. Elizabeth flopped over onto her back, her hands draped loosely over her stomach.
For a moment, neither of them moved or spoke, and the stillness was broken only by the skittering sounds of the breeze chasing leaves across the floor, by birds in the trees, and by crickets in the underbrush.
It was nice. Soothing, in a way.
“I can call the deal off,” Ambrose offered eventually, still leaning against the railing and watching the sky. “I can toss him out permanently; I won’t mind.”
Elizabeth was touched, for a moment. After all, she had to imagine that doing something like that wouldn’t exactly be convenient for Ambrose, and to say that she was unaccustomed to being allowed to inconvenience the people around her was a bit of an understatement. So, for Ambrose to just offer the choice, just like that… Well, it meant more than he probably knew.
But Elizabeth already knew she couldn’t accept the offer. Besides, his willingness to let her be an inconvenience every so often just made it so she wanted to inconvenience him even less than ever before.
“You don’t need to do that,” she assured him, her voice low. “I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t go over very well.”
Who was to say Maxwell would react well to being denied? After all, he seemed nearly feral half the time. Besides, what would it do to Ambrose’s side business if he picked up a reputation for turning people away when they became inconvenient? After all, considering what his side business was, no one was really convenient.
On the whole, she could imagine it doing far more harm than good to turn Maxwell away. It would likely be less trouble to simply deal with him and send him on his way, and it would leave him with no valid reasons to linger afterwards.
“You’re sure?” Ambrose wondered, sounding slightly skeptical. She couldn’t blame him.
With a slow sigh, she sat up and reached over to cup his chin with one hand. “Perfectly sure,” she replied, nodding once. She tapped his lower lip playfully with her thumb before letting his chin go once again, and she began getting to her feet. “If he’s gone, then we may as well head back,” she sighed. “There’s no real reason to loiter around out here with the bugs.”
Ambrose simply watched her for a moment as she started pulling her panties and her pants back on, before he slowly got to his feet to head back down to the ground and transform. Even if she was pretty sure he still didn’t quite believe her, he didn’t argue, and Elizabeth appreciated that.
The walk back to the house was quiet, as Elizabeth’s thoughts roamed far and wide, far too busy to entertain a one-sided conversation. But it was comfortable nonetheless.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Elizabeth liked having friends. It seemed like a bit of an obvious statement to make—who didn’t enjoy having friends, after all?—but it still seemed like a novelty to her, considering what had been her standard of friendship before she was thrown into Ambrose’s life.
It helped her stay away from Maxwell, and it helped keep him farther away from her than just arm’s length, true enough, but more importantly than that, she had a social life, at long last. She could hardly believe it. It seemed too good to be true, in a way, as if she hadn’t really thought she had deserved friends. She knew that was ridiculous, but it was a pervasive thought all the same.
After all, she had tried to make friends in the past. Really, truly, honestly, she had tried. She had given it her all. Sometimes, she even managed to come close, but then it would get out that her home life wasn’t ideal or that she lived on her own despite her young age, and as if by magic, whomever she was putting her all into befriending would find a reason to keep her at arm’s length, as if her home life would infect them if they let her get too close.
Well, sometimes they would find a reason. Sometimes, they would just step back and leave her guessing as to why they had backed away when they had seemed so willing to spend time with her before. When she was left to fill in the blanks herself, she tended to fill those blanks in…creatively, in ways that almost always made her into the bad guy, because if it happened so often, it had to be her, right? If they wouldn’t just tell her what the problem was, or if the reasons they did give were pathetic or made no sense, it seemed natural to assume that it was because of her, and not because of the hand that life had dealt her.
So, yes, she liked having friends; in fact, she loved having friends. Or more than friends, in the case of Ambrose, even if they hadn’t actually used real words to discuss what they were. And she looked forward to spending as much time with them as she could, as much as they would let her.
*
Ambrose was shaped like a bear. It was a lot less shocking after the first few times. (Elizabeth was pretty sure she got all of her shock out all at once when she stumbled upon a pack of wolves and a bunch of bears dueling for the rights to piss on her yard.) Even so, she couldn’t quite help but stare at him for
a while. It didn’t seem like he minded, though. He was just so…large.
She wasn’t sure what he was doing, as he wandered lazily through the woods, pausing here and there as he went to rub up against a few especially large trees. She followed him just a few paces behind, watching with gradually increasing curiosity. He knew she was there; she was well aware of that. He looked back at her every so often, and he seemed to enjoy the company even if he couldn’t really say so just then, and Elizabeth was still not exactly fluent on how to speak bear body language. But up to that point, she hadn’t met a shifter that balked at nudity, so she was pretty sure that if he really minded, he would just turn back into a human and tell her to go back to the house.
That never happened, so she carried on following him on his circuit of the property. It was a relaxing evening, all in all, and Elizabeth never minded being one with nature. She was pretty sure her job would have driven her off of the deep end ages ago if that was a problem.
It wasn’t until Ambrose made it back to the house that Elizabeth was privy to any actual information related to what he was doing. He turned back into a human at the porch stairs and stretched, his arms reaching over his head with his fingers linked as his back arched, and Elizabeth took a moment to appreciate the way his shoulders shifted. She tried very hard to look innocent once he looked over his shoulder at her, though he didn’t look like he completely bought the act.
He cleared his throat, letting the moment pass. “I have to mark my territory every so often,” he informed her, lifting a hand and waving vaguely into the woods. “If it’s very, very obvious that a shifter already lives in the area, then I won’t need to deal with finding others fighting over my yard.”
“Lucky,” Elizabeth sighed. “Maybe you should just do that around my house whenever I go back.”
She meant it as a joke, more or less, but Ambrose looked thoughtful afterwards. “I suppose I could,” he decided after a moment. “Yusuke and Mara probably wouldn’t mind either. Even if someone might risk taking on one other shifter, three seems unlikely.”
She had meant it as a joke, but in that moment, it seemed like the best idea she had ever had. She wouldn’t need to worry about any shifters kicking her out of her house ever again, probably, and the only ones that would show up would be the ones that she actively welcomed. It seemed like such a basic level of decency, and yet the idea thrilled her just then.
Grinning, she linked her hands together behind her back. “Sounds like a great idea to me.”
*
When Mara said she wanted to get Elizabeth out of the house, Elizabeth hadn’t been particularly surprised when she was led into the woods. It seemed like all three of them considered the woods to be the best place to be.
She hadn’t expected, however, to be led to a clearing with targets nailed to a few of the trees surrounding it. The clearing wasn’t particularly huge, but it was a decent enough size. It would have been pretty, except for the targets and what were clearly a few gun cases sitting between the roots of a large oak. Their manmade qualities rather detracted from the natural beauty and serenity of the scene.
“Welcome to my shooting range!” Mara declared, throwing her hands up and out to her sides. “It’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s served me pretty well.” Her hands settled on her hips as she nodded her head once in satisfaction. “I figure I can pass on some of my skills to you. It’s better than just sitting around in the house all day.”
“You want me to shoot something,” Elizabeth stated, her tone caught somewhere between bewildered and skeptical. “For no reason other than to shoot it.”
Mara rolled her eyes. “You say that like I’m asking you to shoot an actual living thing,” she groused. “I’m asking you to shoot a paper target. It’s not even shaped like a living thing. It’s just a circle. Or I guess multiple concentric circles.”
It was Elizabeth’s turn to roll her eyes that time. “Yes, thank you, I could put that together myself.”
Mara held her hands up in a pacifying gesture. “It never hurts to be specific.”
Slowly, Elizabeth returned her attention to the rifle in her hands. It wasn’t particularly large. It was reasonably lightweight, at least compared to what she had been expecting. (Mara had told her what it actually was multiple times already, but each time the knowledge fled a moment later, so Elizabeth silently dubbed it the cowboy rifle in her head, mostly because it was the same shades of brown and black as her boots.)
Slowly, she sighed. “Alright,” she relented. “I don’t know why this is a big deal to you, but I guess I can play along. What do I do with this?”
Mara offered her a beaming smile and picked up her own rifle (well, they were both Mara’s rifles, but only one of them was actively in her use at that moment). It was larger than the one Elizabeth was holding, but presumably the basic concept remained the same, as Mara lifted it into a proper shooting stance and said simply, “Do what I do.”
Carefully, Elizabeth mimicked Mara’s stance, though Mara still had to offer a few corrections. She followed Mara’s lead as she settled a finger over the trigger and as she pulled it.
She was wearing earplugs, but she couldn’t quite decide if she had expected it to be louder or quieter. The kickback as it recoiled into her shoulder felt a bit like someone had kicked her in the torso. The shot went wide, missing the target entirely and hitting a tree a few feet to the side, sending splinters of bark in every direction. By contrast, Mara’s bullet sank into the target almost dead center.
Elizabeth had never fired a gun before, but she was pretty sure the idea was typically to hit the target, so she was pretty sure that counted as a failure. Despite that, Mara still threw her hands up in excitement and proclaimed, “Just like that!”
“So, missing is secretly the goal?” Elizabeth wondered wryly, her eyebrows rising as she lowered the rifle.
Mara rolled her eyes. “No, of course not, but you didn’t drop the gun or freak out, so you did better than you could have. You just need to adjust for the recoil, and you’ll be hitting the bullseye in no time.”
What followed was a slightly roundabout conversation on what, exactly, adjusting for the recoil entailed because it turned out to be the sort of thing that Mara couldn’t just say and then instantly expect Elizabeth to know what she meant. Still, it went fairly well, all things considered. True, Elizabeth wasn’t exactly hitting the bullseye, but she was at least hitting the target. Considering she had never fired a gun before, she was willing to consider it a victory.
And she even had a good time, to her own surprise.
*
Ambrose was a tidier. He tidied when he was thinking about something and didn’t otherwise have something to keep his hands busy readily available. It had the rather entertaining side effect of a billionaire with a dishwasher that could have probably kept several restaurants in clean dishes instead hand washing all of his dishes in the sink.
(Not that washing dishes was the only way he tidied. He dusted, he vacuumed, he swept, and he rearranged things that had been bumped out of place. Washing dishes just seemed to be something of a standby because…well, there were always more dirty dishes. Shifters ate a lot, to put it charitably, and Yusuke and Mara had no compunctions about raiding his fridge.)
It was strangely mesmerizing to watch. He had it down to something of a science, like a machine, almost. Not that Elizabeth was ever actually going to say that out loud. She had learned after the first two days that the quickest way to figure out what was on Ambrose’s mind was to just wait until he exhausted his supply of dishes and then let him bring it up on his own. But he wasn’t going to bring it up if he thought Elizabeth was otherwise occupied, so she just…watched him do the dishes, steady as a robot.
Eventually, after the last semi-dry dish was set aside to finish drying, Ambrose set his hands on the edge of the counter near the sink and leaned on them, staring down at the draining water.
“I’m pretty sure Maxwell is hiding some
thing,” he stated eventually, as the water drained away and the sink burbled loudly. “He’s never in his wolf form around any of us. Not when he’s close to us, at any rate. It’s getting a bit bizarre.”
“I’m not going to defend him, but why does that specifically mean he’s hiding something?” Elizabeth wondered, leaning back against the kitchen counter as she asked.
“A shifter’s human form and animal form smell different,” Ambrose explained, drying his hands off on a dishtowel as he did. “So, for some reason, he doesn’t want us getting a whiff of his animal form. I’m not sure why.”
“And just demanding an answer probably won’t go well,” Elizabeth finished, making an educated guess.
“Precisely,” Ambrose sighed. With a wry laugh, he added, “Much like animals in the wild, we prefer not to provoke a fight until we really think it’s necessary. Even if there’s a winner, the damage will be bad enough to make it so it wasn’t worthwhile. So, I’d rather not chase him into a corner.”