by Mina Carter
Veyr stood at the side of the sunken bath, naked to the waist and his feet bare. His eyes blazed as he looked down at her. Heat and desire burned in the amber depths as his gaze raked her figure. She caught her breath and sank under the water.
“Oh no, you don’t get to hide. Not after a tease like that,” he growled, stripping off his pants and underwear in one quick movement. Freed, his cock bobbed against his toned stomach in a rampant display of his masculinity.
She squeaked as he waded into the tub, the sudden movement sloshing water everywhere. “Veyr, you’ll get everything wet.”
He grinned, wickedness twinkling in his eyes. “That’s the idea.”
He was on her before she could move away, she squeaked as he pulled her into his arms. Sweat and the scent of his wolf clung to his skin, but she didn’t care. As soon as his lips crashed down over hers, she was lost. His kiss was hard and dominant, the alpha wolf claiming what was his and proving it once again. His tongue parted her lips and drove within, seeking hers. She moaned, not resisting as he lifted her to a standing position, the water sleeting from her skin. His hands moved in the opposite direction to the water, skating over her skin to cup her full breasts.
“I love your tits,” he broke the kiss to whisper against her lips. Rough-skinned fingers tweaked her nipples and she gasped as the sharp shard of pleasure-pain arrowed straight down to her clit.
“But not as much as I love your pussy,” he murmured, the words between feather-soft kisses on her lips. “I missed it this morning… and you know what?”
“What?” She pulled away to look at him, knowing she looked dazed. He always did this to her. Turned her on so much she couldn’t think straight.
He grinned, a flash of white teeth in the tanned skin of his face. “I missed breakfast, so I’m hungry. And there’s only one thing I can think of that I want to eat.”
Then his arms were around her and she was lifted clear of the water. Gasping in surprise, she clung to his shoulders for all of the second he took to reach the edge of the huge tub and lay her down.
The tile was cold, a shiver running through her, but the heat in his gaze as he looked at her spread out was enough to warm her through. When he looked at her like that, she felt irresistible. The most desirable woman in the world rather than the prettily-plump sister of an alpha, one who couldn’t shift to boot.
None of that mattered now. All that mattered was Veyr and the way he looked at her. She lifted her arms above her head and arched her back. The growl that trickled from his throat said he liked the view. Not for long though.
Water slopped over the side of the tub, making the tiles around her slick, as he dropped to his knees in front of her. Without preamble, he grasped her knees with hard hands and shoved them apart. A gasp of anticipation parted her lips. She knew what was coming next, only an idiot would miss the intent in Veyr’s eyes as he leaned forward.
Plucked from the water, goosebumps rose over her skin as the cooler air of the room bathed her. Her body quivered, her stomach muscles tensed when his warm breath washed over her pussy lips. Even though she expected it, the first brush of his tongue—hot, rough and wet—still caught her by surprise.
Her soft moan synchronized with the slap of water against the side of the tub. Veyr growled, hands gripping her hips to hold her still and licked again. From slit to clit, then back again. He explored her nether lips as though he’d never touched her before, as though committing her to memory. Big hands pushed under her ass and spread out to grip the full globes. She wasn’t skinny, so her ass was more than enough for even his big hands.
He used the hold to part her further, the movement making water slop over the edge of the tub and slap against her ass. His tongue rasped over her clit as the tip of his little finger grazed her back entrance. Heat exploded through her at the forbidden touch, but almost instantly the light touch was gone.
He circled her clit with the hard blade of his tongue, then slid downward to circle the entrance to her cunt. Shivers chased themselves over her skin. She reached down to tangle her fingers in his hair, holding him in place.
Without warning, he stabbed his tongue deep inside her. Slid it in and out, hard and fast. He fucked her with his tongue, his strong fingers gripping her ass. She whimpered, rocking her hips against his face as little shocks of pleasure rolled through her veins. She didn’t care she was spread out on the cold tile and that at least some of the shivers were from the chill. It turned her on all the more, the cold at her back, and his heat between her legs.
“I’m gonna make you cum,” he pulled away to whisper, his chest heaving as he panted. She could smell his need and desire in the air, the scent wrapping her in its seductive coils, feeding her own need and that of her near-dormant wolf inside.
He bent his head again, but this time with the hot lash of his tongue, his finger returned to slip between her ass cheeks again. Her moan was deeper, more liquid as he circled her ass, pressing and testing the tight opening. Each lick sent her higher, each press and circle tightened her body until she was almost at breaking point. Her nipples beaded into hard nubs that demanded attention. Groaning, she gave in, cupping her breasts and tweaking her nipples between her fingers.
“You look fucking fantastic like that,” Veyr pulled back to mutter, flicking his tongue over her clit between words. His hand disappeared for a moment, to return slick and wet. Her world narrowed to two points: his tongue over her clit and his finger against her ass.
Then he gave her a third. Closing his mouth over her clit, he sucked it into the warm cavern of his mouth as he thrust two fingers into her pussy. His little finger penetrated her ass, the slick digit pressing past the thick ring of muscle and within.
She screamed, her climax washing over her, the pleasure so intense that every muscle in her body went into spasm. He growled, pumping his fingers in both her holes and attacking her clit with his tongue until the sensations washing through her body were so much that her vision grayed out and she lost herself to pleasure.
2
The council would kill him.
Veyr sat at the head of the table and listened to the squabbling going on around him. They weren’t listening to him, instead debating pack politics and precedence in ever-increasing voices. He sighed and rubbed at his temple.
Images of Cyan spread out naked over the tiles in front of him kept replaying in his mind. Her soft skin and softer sighs, the warm, silken feeling of her body around his fingers. The shudders that racked her body as she’d come hard and fast over his hand.
He bit back his groan and readjusted his position in his chair to conceal the raging hard-on trying to punch through his pants, and ordered his body to calm down. In a room full of werewolves, all with an excellent sense of smell, his condition wouldn’t remain a secret for long. Not if his damn brain kept up presenting him with images of Cyan in various seductive poses. He couldn’t wait to get back to her and finish what they’d started earlier.
“I’m telling you, this will not fly.” Jacob McCauley almost shouted, his face flushed as he faced down Alex, alpha of the Kingwood pack. Brave move. The Kingwood’s were distant cousins of the Langdon bloodline, and some said that every so often the old stone-wolf genetics re-emerged.
Veyr’s gaze slid sideways to an empty seat at the council table, the back carved with the Langdon coat of arms. It had been empty for years, left that way as a mark of respect for the cursed alphas that couldn’t be with them. He’d never seen the Langdon’s, cursed to stone by a witch centuries before in an ironic parody of their true natures, but he had fought those with stone wolf blood in the ring. He’d won, naturally, but only just.
Legend had it that stone wolves were the product of Werewolves and Gargoyles. Which meant, like both their parent races, they were hard as nails and twice as difficult to kill. Times fucking two.
Veyr’s face split into a grin and he sat back to watch the show. Alex Kingwood was one of the younger alphas on the council, but rock-solid, confi
dent in his own skin, unlike the always pushing Jacob. But now, his eyes flashed with anger and he didn’t back down from Jacob an inch. Perhaps Veyr wouldn’t have to deal with McCauley after all. Fights between alphas weren’t unknown. Pack leaders could be replaced by rite of challenge. It would be a little odd for Alex to hold two seats on the council…
Veyr bit back his amusement. One for each asscheek?
“I don’t care what you know, or what you think you know,” Alex snarled, his voice deepening with his wolf halfway until it became a full-out rumble. “This is pseudo law. Spurious. Just the way things have always been, not what is written into law.”
“Law or not, would you want your bloodline corrupted by a filthy human?” Jacob all but screamed, spittle flying from the corners of his lips. His words dropped into silence, and Veyr’s amusement vanished. They’d been discussing borders between pack territories. He should have known Jacob would bring it right back to this.
It was obvious the fact Veyr hadn’t picked his sister at Midwinter ate at Jacob, niggling away under his skin. At every opportunity, he steered the council’s discussion toward how unlawful it would be for the Master of the City to take anything but a pure-blooded lycan woman to his bed.
“Corrupted?”
“Filthy human?”
Alex Kingswood and Nick Trevais spoke at once, their voices so cold they were almost arctic. Both had reason to be. Alex because he always took comments about pureblood lines to heart, and Nick because the woman Jacob had taken such a dislike to and had just described as a filthy human was his sister.
“I suggest, Jacob,” Veyr said, his words dropping into the silence in the room with precision. “That you retire from the current discussion to consider your words, and the thinking behind them.”
Jacob had apparently not learned his lesson because he whipped around to face Veyr, fury on his face. “I will do no such thing. I have a right to be here. You cannot dismiss me like an errant schoolboy!”
Veyr pinned him with a hard gaze. “Then I suggest you stop acting like one. Before you face down a challenge.” He glanced toward Nick and Alex, both still bristling with rage. Why was he trying to smooth this over, rather than just throwing the little shit literally to the wolves?
He sighed inwardly. Because he was the Master of the City. The one who everyone looked up to, was scared of, but who had to do the most compromising to keep everything running smoothly so everyone else wouldn’t have to.
All. The. Time.
Fuck. It would be easier to run a damn kindergarten. For ferrets. Or plait jam. He liked jam. Juggle soot in a white suit… Any number of frigging things.
Somehow, Jacobs’s obviously underdeveloped survival instincts kicked in and he blinked at the two bristling wolves. He bent his head, backing off.
“Perhaps it is time for the council to call a recess.”
Veyr’s teeth ground as Jacob spoke, somehow making it seem as though he was the one to decide what the council did or did not do. Perhaps his ambition didn’t just extend to ensuring his sister mated the Master of the City, perhaps he cast greedy eyes to the main seat himself…
“Indeed, it is.” Veyr stood, not bothering to hide the lethal grace in his movements. He hadn’t been brought up with a silver spoon in his mouth like most of the council. He was a fighter, a scrapper from the streets. “And Jacob?”
Jacob, already on his way to the door, turned to look over his shoulder. Veyr extended a single claw, running it over the table in front of him as he walked around it. An impressive feat, since only full and powerful alphas could part shift with such precision.
“Don’t try my patience any more. It will not go well for you.”
“Do you plan to take Cyan to mate? Or are you just going to use her as some kind of fuck-buddy?”
Veyr had managed less than five steps from the door to the council chamber before he was accosted. Holding in the sigh that wanted to escape his chest with effort, he turned to face Nick Trevais, Cyan’s brother.
One of the calmest members of the council, Nick was usually the voice of reason, the one who could be counted upon to inject a measure of reason into even the most heated of battle plans. Just last month when the city’s territory had been breached by scouting parties from a city to the west, Nick had advised caution. His suggestion had been to return the errant wolves with a diplomatic envoy rather than sending them back in pieces, as was custom.
His instinct had paid off. Turned out that the wolves were young, and had been out without permission. The Mistress of their City had torn them off a strip right in front of the envoy, whom she had asked to convey her deepest gratitude to Veyr. Turned out that one of them had been her nephew, so killing them would have caused an all-out war, something that Veyr wished to avoid.
Now though, Nick was anything but calm. Anger shone in his eyes, the amber color warning Veyr that Nick’s wolf was close to the surface. So close in fact, that fur poked through the skin under his collar as he glared at Veyr. Although his sister couldn’t shift—unusual for an alpha’s sister—that Nick could shift was very obvious.
Veyr knew he had to tread lightly or this could end up in a challenge fight. Which he would win. There was no way on Earth Nick could match him for fighting ability. But trying to explain to the woman he loved that he’d killed her brother? That would not end well…
He paused. Blinked.
He loved Cyan.
Time dilated as a warm, fuzzy feeling spread out from the center of his chest. He’d never thought about love. Lust and the need to possess, emotions driven by his wolf, took precedence, but under all that was a deep, a soul-deep, connection. A need to have her in his life. Always. To wake up with her next to him every morning.
“Well?” Nick’s voice had dropped to a snarl and Veyr snapped his head up, met the other wolf’s gaze.
“I don’t plan to take her to mate, no.” He put his hand up as Nick surged forward, fury radiating from every line of his body. “There’s no planning involved. I will mate her. No matter what the council and that fucktard Jacob says about it.”
Nick relaxed, the amber vanishing from his eyes and the fur disappearing from his collar. “Thank fuck for that.” He chuckled, as though a little embarrassed. “Because, dude, I really was not looking forward to you handing my ass on a plate. But she’s my sister, you know… it’s all about family honor.”
Veyr chuckled and looped his arm over Nick’s shoulders as they walked away from the council chambers. “My friend, I would do nothing that puts a pack’s honor at risk. Don’t worry.”
As they walked away, neither of them noticed the figure lurking in the shadows at the end of the hall or the brief, satisfied flare of amber in its eyes.
3
“Yeah… You’ll need to order from Giovanni’s. And tell Nick to check the utility bill. They always fuck it up so you need to be onto customer service to get them to sort it out. At least until we can get a different provider. Which honestly, can’t come quick enough for me.”
Cyan sighed and tucked a loose lock of her hair behind her ear as she spoke into her cell. She sat waiting for Veyr in his office, speaking to Melanie, one of the Trevais wolves back at the pack-house. None of them had foreseen her abrupt departure to live in the Master’s household, and with Cyan running the place, it had left them in disarray.
“Okay, yeah. Get Nick to check it, and whatever you do… don’t let my mother anywhere near the ordering system, okay? Yeah, you too. Take care, hon.”
She pulled the cell away from her ear and clicked it off, only to have it plucked from her grasp by a large male hand. This time she didn’t squeak, just turned around and found herself enveloped in Veyr’s arms. His mouth covered hers in a quick, hard kiss that left her breathless.
“What was that about coming quickly?” he asked when he lifted his head.
Unbidden her hands smoothed over his chest, bare beneath his jacket. He rarely wore a shirt, one of his quirks, but she didn’t care. It allo
wed her easy access to his deliciously hard body. Her fingertips brushed over his nipples, which caused a flare of amber in his eyes.
Still on edge after this morning, when he’d brought her to an earth-shattering orgasm but still hadn’t fucked her, she grinned slyly. Two could play at the temptation game.
“Coming quickly? Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Keeping the innocent look on her face, she pulled away and dropped her hands to his belt. His nostrils flared, darkness seeping into the amber of his eyes as she undid the buckle. Already he was hard, the thick ridge of his cock pressing against the fabric of his pants at the same time the scent of his arousal wrapped around her.
Parting the fabric, she reached in and slipped her hand around the rigid shaft. Like shirts, he also seemed to have a thing against underwear. Not that she was complaining about that. His cock pulsed in welcome, as though pleased to see her. She hummed in pleasure, reaching up to plant a quick kiss on his lips before she slid to her knees.
“Fuck me,” he muttered, one hand reaching for the edge of the desk he leaned against and one driving into her hair.
“Maybe… if you’re a good boy,” She threw back and liberated his cock from his pants. The thick, flushed head bobbed just in front of her lips and his hand tightened in her hair. A smile on her lips, she flicked a glance up at him to find him watching her, his attention rapt… fixated even… on her lips.
Just to be evil, she licked them, her tongue almost whispering against the sensitive head in front of her lips, but not quite. His groan seemed to roll up from his toes, but his grip in her hair remained constant. She almost expected him to use it to force her head forward and her lips over his cock, but he didn’t. That wasn’t Veyr. Not at all.
Uber-masculine, alpha male he was, he did not need to force to coerce her into anything.