Esme glanced over her shoulder. “I’ll be right there. Ms. Mendez was just leaving.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“You are now.”
“We aren’t finished.”
“We never even started.”
Gia pressed her infinitely kissable lips together and lowered her chin. Her somber gaze melted into Esme’s for excruciating seconds before a smile teased that dimple into making an appearance. She winked. “Tomorrow, Esme? Can I see you then?”
“No.”
“Just coffee. No pressure.”
“No.”
Gia shifted from boot to boot, then crossed her arms over her chest. “Need I remind you that you said you thought I was a nice woman?”
“I also said I wanted to hit you,” she countered, in as haughty a tone as she could muster.
“But you didn’t.”
She faltered and bit her lip, which had started to tremble. “Don’t do this to me. Please.”
“I’m going to keep trying until you give me a chance, Esme.”
Shoring up her resolve, Esme wrapped her arms around her stomach and sniffed. “You’ll be wasting your time.”
Gia brushed Esme’s trembling bottom lip with one knuckle, then stepped back. “Ah, but you see, I’d rather waste my time on you than spend it wisely on anyone else.” She nodded good night to Lilly and Pilar, who still hung behind Esme, then stepped off the porch and disappeared into the night shadows.
The standoff was only temporary. A sort of drawn-out foreplay. Though she’d never admit it, she couldn’t wait to see what would come next…
L.L. Raand has always had a fascination for the dark side—and those who dwell there.
When Hearts Run Free
Radclyffe writing as L.L. Raand
I’d only been a Werewolf for a few weeks, but I knew enough to know I shouldn’t even be looking at the Alpha of the Adirondack lupus pack, let alone lusting after her. Then again, I’d never been very good at following protocol—probably if I had been, I wouldn’t have found myself in a moonlit clearing deep in the mountains of upstate New York about to undergo my first fully conscious shift. If I’d been following the rules, I probably wouldn’t have tried to sedate the teenager in the throes of Were fever, but by the time the police had found her in an alley she was so far gone she was seizing. She was going to die without treatment, and there wasn’t time to wait for the Were medic on call to get to the ER. As it turned out, I was too late, and the girl died. But not before she bit me.
I don’t remember much of what happened after her teeth sank into my wrist like two rows of razor blades, sharp and bright. Even when the flesh tore and my instruments slipped through my fingers on a river of red, I didn’t feel the pain. The burn came later, at the same time as the fever. Then the dreams. Fragments of images flickered through my rioting brain, scattered patches of light and dark like broken bits of sunshine littered over the forest floor—chasing me while I ran, the hunter and the hunted. My muscles screamed, my bones shattered, and in the back of my mind always the low, throaty growl urging me to run. Run. Run.
When I woke, my head was clear, my stomach hollow with hunger, and everything was different. Beyond the closed door of my hospital room, I heard the staff conversing at the nurses’ station at the other end of the floor as clearly as if they were standing beside my bed. I gasped and instantly gagged on the miasma of hospital smells deluging me—cafeteria food, antiseptic, disease, the living and the dead.
“Breathe slowly through your mouth for a few minutes,” a voice as rich and lush as dark chocolate said from somewhere in the shadows of my room. “After a while you’ll learn to filter out the sounds and smells, when you want to.”
“What happened?” I asked, my memory still patchy.
A woman appeared beside my bed. She was about my age, late twenties or early thirties, and a few inches above average, putting her near my height. Blond, lithe, and on the muscular side of lean. She wore a faded green T-shirt tucked into blue jeans, and beneath the smooth skin of her exposed arms the muscles were etched and taut. “You were turned four days ago by an insurgi, a rogue werewolf.”
“Werewolf,” I said, a statement more than a question. She nodded.
“You?”
“Born and bred,” she said with a hint of a grin. “My name is Sylvan. Your sponsor, Roger, will be by later. He’ll help you through the transition.”
“So, what’s next?” I said, pushing myself up in bed and taking stock. For someone whose system had just undergone a violent, rapid mutation at the genetic, subcellular level, I felt pretty damn good. In fact, I felt terrific. I was hungry. And I was horny. I took a deep breath, and smelled female. I took another look at the blonde, noting the thrust of her small breasts beneath the green cotton, the smooth, flat plane of her abdomen, the gentle flare of her hips, the tight length of her thighs. The hunger in my belly moved lower, mutated like my cells into something fierce and untamed.
“Should I breathe slowly through my mouth now, too?” I said, barely containing the urge to vault over the short metal railing on the side of my bed and take her to the floor.
“That probably won’t help.” She didn’t move back, but held my gaze steadily. “You’re not human anymore. What you’re feeling right now is perfectly normal for a wolf.”
“How many female wolves want to mate with other females?”
A growl came from the other side of the room and I realized we weren’t alone. Somehow I knew it was a bodyguard. A gravelly voice murmured, “Alpha.”
I sniffed and smelled male, and my vision hazed with red. I shuddered, my spine tingling, my vocal cords quivering with a barely audible snarl.
“Alpha, please. This is not advisable,” the male said, more urgently this time.
She waved her hand as if to silence the cautionary voice, and grinned again. The rims of her irises narrowed into a deep indigo band around flat black pupils. Her breasts rose and fell faster beneath her T-shirt. “More females than you might think.”
“That’s good to know.” I clenched my fists, fighting to hold still, to force down the flames that scorched me from the inside out. Dimly, I registered a different kind of burning sensation in my palms, and when I glanced down, saw that my fingernails had elongated into short, curved dark claws. My hands bled from a series of crescent lacerations, but I felt no pain. Only want. “I think maybe you should leave. Something’s happening to me.” I sucked in a shaky breath. “I think I might be dangerous.”
“It’s your wolf,” she whispered, leaning over me slightly. Her scent, a mix of burning autumn leaves cut through with cinnamon and sweet clover, grew heavier, darker. “She wants to be free. You can’t hurt me.”
I panted, twisting beneath the sheets. “I think I might…Jesus, I want—”
“But it’s too soon for you to control her.” She straightened and drifted back into the shadows. The pressure in my chest eased a fraction. “You’ll learn. You have two weeks until the next full moon. Welcome to the Adirondack Timberwolf pack, whelp.”
I hadn’t seen her again, but I thought of her every spare minute when I wasn’t being poked, prodded, and psychoanalyzed by the human physicians or being poked, prodded, and indoctrinated into Werewolf society by my sponsor. Her scent lingered like a haunting refrain, keeping me always on edge.
Tonight the moon was full.
“Ready?” Roger asked as the moon climbed to its zenith.
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t. I hadn’t had nearly enough time to adjust to the physical changes, let alone incorporate all the hierarchical social rules of the pack. But instinctively I knew that any show of weakness would be a mistake. I felt like I was coming out of my skin, and I guess I was.
I tried to appear casual as I followed Roger toward the pack. The whole pack, I’d been told, numbered several hundred and was spread throughout New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire. The Adirondack Pack’s territory butted up against that of the Maine Silver Ridge Pack, the l
argest Northeastern U.S. pack.
Maybe thirty or forty males and females gathered beneath the trees, moving restlessly in the slanting shafts of silvery moonlight. All of them, male and female, moved with the powerful glide of predators. Some of them were already nude, others in the process of undressing.
“Mutia,” a statuesque redhead growled as I passed.
Mutt. To the regii, the purebreds—the natural born Weres—I was less than a second-class citizen, I was a genetic blight. The U.S. Order of Were Affairs had agreed to sponsor, i.e. indoctrinate, any human turned accidently, as a condition for getting the Preternatural Rights Law passed. The Law granted non-humans protection from discrimination, among other more fatal things—like being shot on sight. Not everyone in the Were population was happy about being forced to accept “genetic inferiors,” but living in a society is all about compromise. So they cooperated, on the surface.
I was a physician. I knew I wasn’t inferior, not on any level. Once the mutation was complete, I was physiologically no different than any other lupus Were. Once trained, I would be able to shift at will, and I was already as fast, as strong, and potentially as deadly as any other lupus female my size. Maybe more so—before my turning, I’d been a trained martial artist. I could fight. I loved competitive sparring. I loved winning.
But genetically, I was different in one critical way. My somatic DNA might have mutated, but the chromosomes in my ova were still 100% human, and if those ova remained fertile, they would always be human. So my offspring at best would be half-breeds, assuming I mated with a Were male and not a human one. Assuming the offspring lived, and since the live birth rate for Weres was very low, that was a big if. Assuming a lot of things, such as my desire to mate with any male, human or lupine. I could have told the pack bitches who saw me as a threat that they had no worries, because I had no designs on their studs. None whatsoever. But I wasn’t going to crawl on my belly to be accepted, or to avoid a fight.
I hadn’t been at the bottom of the pack, any pack, since I was an intern a decade before, so keeping my gaze down when the redheaded bitch challenged me, as Roger had instructed I do when the situation arose, took all my self-discipline. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I couldn’t completely suppress the growl that resonated in my throat. She snarled and took a step closer, and if I hadn’t caught a flicker of gold in the moonlight and seen her just at that moment, I probably would’ve done something stupid—like answered the bitch’s challenge right then and there and gotten my ass chewed up. Literally.
Sylvan, a phalanx of Weres behind her, stalked out of the woods into the clearing. She wore skintight black jeans and nothing else. Her breasts rode high and proud, the muscles in her chest and abdomen rippling seductively beneath moon-kissed skin. I could smell her across the clearing, her scent so heady my mouth literally watered. My sex tightened and desire choked my senses.
“Sylvan.” I whispered, but a whisper among Weres might as well have been a shout.
Utter silence fell over the pack.
“No,” Roger said harshly as he gripped my arm, but it was too late.
She was all I could see, all I could smell, all I could sense, and I took a step forward, my eyes fixed on her face. I barely registered a blur of gold slashing through silver before my legs were cut out from under me and I fell hard, face first to the forest floor. The weight on my back crushed me into the rich loam, and I tasted blood where a tooth had cut my lip. A knee in the center of my back kept me pinned, and one iron-tight thigh rested alongside my hip. An arm bar on the back of my neck prevented me from raising my head, but I didn’t need to see. I could scent her, sense her, feel her heat—some part of me beyond words, beyond thought, knew her.
“You forget yourself, whelp,” Sylvan rasped in my ear.
I’d worn only a T-shirt and sweatpants in preparation for shifting, and I felt the hard points of her nipples against my shoulder blades as she leaned close. Flame surged from deep in my core and poured into my chest, driving my breath out on a moan.
“I’m sorry, Alpha. I’m sorry,” I gasped, suddenly burning up. A soul-deep ache tore my muscle from bone, shattering my mind. A thousand knives scored my skin, flaying sanity along with my flesh. “I…oh God…I can’t breathe…hurts…”
“You’ll be all right,” Sylvan whispered, her mouth soft against my ear. “Let her come.” Then she rolled away, calling, “Roger!”
And I screamed. My world disintegrated in a fury of agony and all I had to cling to was her scent, the sound of her voice, the weight of her flesh on my flesh. When I came into myself once more, I was surrounded by wolves. I shook my head, took a step, and fell. A nose nuzzled my neck, as if urging me to rise. I focused on the black muzzle and large dark eyes of the hovering wolf and recognized Roger’s scent. He lifted his lip in a wolfy smile, and I tried another step. Then another. I felt powerful in a way I never had before, my body and mind intimately attuned. I laughed and heard myself growl. Roger shouldered me forward. He was bigger than me, longer and taller, but glancing around, I realized that I was bigger than most of the females and some of the males. I stumbled again when I saw her, and this time, I kept my head down, stealing glances when no one was looking.
She was almost pure silver with only a few fingers of black in her thick ruff and along the ridge of her powerful back. Larger than almost all the wolves in the pack, she stalked the clearing, nosing some, growling at others, playfully nipping a few. I trembled as she drew near, but I did not drop my tail or my head as many others had done. I kept my head lower than hers, but I could not take my eyes away. She was too beautiful.
She was the pack Alpha, the leader of hundreds of Weres, not just when they were in wolf form, but in every aspect of their lives. She led not simply by might, but also by intelligence. She commanded loyalty and was given it, because she was trusted, and because she had earned it. She was my Alpha, just as I was her wolf, and even though I was there not by divinity, but by accident, I felt like I was hers.
Then with a flurry of snapping teeth and rumbling growls, she struck. And though I had never yielded in a battle, never run from a challenge, I did not fight back. Within seconds, I was on my back, her legs straddling my exposed underbelly, her teeth buried in the thick fur of my neck. I tilted my head back and gave her my throat, a soft whine escaping me. Her scent was overpowering now, enveloping me, drowning me, and still the fire inside me burned. Snarling with my throat in her jaws, she shook her head from side to side, reminding me, reminding every wolf within sight or hearing, who ruled the Adirondack pack. Then she released her vise-like grip on me, and I instinctively licked her face. Her blue eyes gleamed in the moonlight, and for just an instant, her chest and belly settled onto mine. Then she vaulted off, loped into the center of the clearing, raised her head to the moon, and howled.
Dozens of voices answered, and my heart stirred, my soul singing with them. I jumped up, shook myself, and answered her call. Then we were running, legs pounding, muscles stretching, hearts pumping. The pack broke into the forest and although I couldn’t see her, I knew where she was, just as I knew how to decipher the sounds and scents of the forest. I followed her trail along with a few others, joyfully, freely, with no sense of time, no beginning, no end. Only the thrill of the hunt and the feel of her ahead, calling me. I don’t how long I ran or how far, but I gradually became aware of the silence descending upon me. I caught a glimpse of silver slipping between the trees ahead, and realized that she and I had outrun the pack. We were alone in the forest. I slowed and cautiously padded forward into a small clearing. She appeared like a whisper of smoke and I halted, waiting.
She circled me, sniffed me, bumped her shoulder against mine. I waited still, shivering not from exhaustion, but excitement. She rose and set her chest on my shoulders, telling me my place—beneath her. I trembled under her weight, my heart pounding. Her hot breath teased my ear and I rumbled in pleasure. With a powerful thrust of her haunches, she dismounted and, gently set
ting her muzzle on top of mine, rubbed it back and forth. Then she dipped her head, but not her gaze. She would never lower her gaze to anyone—Were or human. Tentatively, I stroked the underside of my jaw over her nose. She allowed the contact only for a few seconds before backing away. Then she turned and raced toward the forest, glancing once over her shoulder, one ear flickering. An invitation. This time when I rushed to follow, she slowed until I ran by her side, and together we hunted.
When the moon slipped down and the night edged toward dawn, she led me to a shelter of fallen pines. She rested her head on her forelegs, studying me solemnly as I curled up by her side. Carefully, cautiously, I edged closer. When she didn’t move away, I settled my head on her shoulder. She arched her neck over my back, and together we slept.
*
“I need to leave,” Sylvan murmured, “before the pack sees us.”
I’d awakened with nude women I barely knew before, but never on a soft bed of pine needles beneath a crystal clear sky. And never had I fit so perfectly with anyone. I lay on my back with her head on my shoulder. Her hand rested in the center of my chest, her thigh over mine. I stroked her shoulder.
“How many rules are we breaking?”
“Too many for me to count.” Sylvan pushed away and sat up, running her hands through her hair. “Can you find your way back?”
“I’ll follow you.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I can smell you.” I ran my hand over my chest, down the center of my abdomen, and watched her eyes follow the motion. They were blue, rimmed in silver, and I remembered her wolf shimmering in the moonlight, a great shining beast. “Everywhere I go, I carry you on my skin.”
Her face was completely expressionless. “Don’t let anyone hear you say that.”
I sat up, my skin still warm where she’d lain against me. “Is there an alpha male in the wings? Is that the problem?”
Radclyffe & Stacia Seaman - Romantic Interludes 2 - Secrets Page 27