A shudder went through him, and he went still then, completely and utterly. She was left dazed and panting, need sawing on her nerves like the sharp edge of a blade.
She tightened her grip on his cock. “Don’t you stop. Don’t you dare stop now.”
“Is that the way of it, then?” he said, and his caress turned into a punishing pinch that made her whimper with pain-tinged desire as he kissed her again. It hurt, oh, it hurt, but in just the right way—
He let go, and she went limp in his arms for an instant, blinking against the hot haze that seemed to infest her mind. He caught her hand and pulled out of her grip as he bent down, pulling her t-shirt up and over her head. He kissed a line down her throat to where her breasts met, spilling over the cups of her bra. He dragged down the other cup, baring that nipple to the cool air of the barn.
“I’m going to screw you so hard against the hood of your car that you’ll never be able to look at it again without thinking of me,” he promised.
She laughed unsteadily, believing him. “That’s a tall order. You don’t even know that you’re the first.”
“I’ll be the only one that matters, after this.” And then he lowered his mouth to her breast, enveloping her nipple in its heat.
Harper grabbed his head with her free hand, fingers curling in his hair, making strangled noises as she arched into him. He stroked her with his tongue, softly at first, then harder, rasping across the sensitive tip as she rocked with him. He broke away abruptly, surprising a tiny cry from her as he left the damp skin suddenly exposed to the cool air of the barn, then turned his attention to the other, his free hand working at the fly of her jeans. Then he slid his hand down, into her jeans, under the elastic of her panties, sliding across the smooth skin down to her slick opening. She rocked her hips toward him, invitingly, but he refused to be hurried, pincering her clit between his fingers and rolling it to the rhythm of his mouth on her breast.
She gave a strangled sound as she pushed just over the edge into a small orgasm—and as if the sound were a signal, he suddenly slid a finger inside her and caught against the sensitive place there as he stroked her with his thumb, knocking her hard into a deeper climax that caught her utterly off guard as it slammed into her brain.
A wordless noise tore from her throat. She cursed him roundly, thoroughly, as he pushed her ever further into it until she had no breath left to do anything but gasp and arch in his arms.
She was still shaking with the aftershocks as he stepped away, leaving her leaning dazed on her arms against the hood, trying to shake the lingering haze from her brain. Levi caught her legs where they crossed over his and loosened them, tugged her ankle boots off, and dragged at the cuffs of her jeans.
She stooped down for her purse as he stepped back, digging to the bottom for a small foil packet that she pulled off a strip—she’d kept condoms there since before she’d broken up with her ex; he’d always managed to ‘forget’ them, no matter how many she bought. Then she raised her butt from the hood of the car, letting him drag her pants off. He peeled her socks off with them, and as he stepped back toward her, she shimmied out of her boy shorts so that all that she wore was her bra, the cups shoved low to expose her breasts.
“Now, this hardly seems fair,” she said as he stepped between her knees again, displaying a little more bravado than she felt. “You get all of me, and all I get of you is your pretty face and that.” She motioned toward his erection, concealed now behind the elastic and cotton of his underwear. “Take the shirt off.”
He hesitated for a second, as if he was considering her order. Then he grabbed the bottom hem of the t-shirt and dragged it off, exposing an impressive sheet of muscle—and something more, angry marks, faint but unmistakable, the tracery of old scars. He skimmed off his motorcycle pants and underwear, too, revealing even more marks across his thighs.
For a moment, Harper was shocked out of the mood. “What happened to you?”
“I told you, babycakes,” he said. “There are some very, very bad men in the world. And some of them want things out of people like me, while others hate us for what we are.”
Harper leaned forward, tracing the lines down one side of his ribs. “I’m sorry, Levi.”
“And that’s why I didn’t take off the shirt before,” he said. “I don’t need pity sex.”
She looked up into those hard eyes. “Who said that’s what you’re getting?” She held up the foil packet between them. “But first—this. I may be wild, but I’m not stupid.”
She ripped it open and slid out the condom. Then, catching his cock again, she rolled it down in a single smooth motion even as she felt his thighs tighten at her touch.
“You’re awfully practical for a crazy woman,” he remarked.
She was glad to see a ghost of his grin return.
“Or awfully crazy for a practical one,” she agreed. “Now stop talking and make good on your promise. Because if you stop right now, what I’ll think when I look at the car is how very, very disappointed I was.”
“What, the first time you came didn’t count?” he said, raking his gaze across her. “From where I was, it sure looked like you were enjoying yourself.”
“For an appetizer, it was good enough,” she granted him. “But I want the main course—and dessert, too.”
He caught her mouth in another kiss, and anticipation shot up to her lips from deep in her belly, making her nipples and clit ache with it. She held him against her with her legs, one hand around the girth of his cock, the other in his hair. The length of him was against the juncture of her legs now, pressing against it, so close to where she wanted it, riding against her clit with the rhythm of his kiss. She tried to move it, but his hand came down over her wrist, pinning it in place as she moaned against his lips.
Then he broke away, kissing her shoulder as he loosened his grip, allowing her to angle his cock down to her entrance as she wiggled her hips toward him.
The head slipped just inside her, and she clenched hard around him, panting. His forehead was against her shoulder, his entire body rigid.
She was so wet he just slid into her body, so deep and hard that she almost came apart right then. He drove in again and again, pulling back almost to her entrance each time. One of her hands tightened in his hair, the other sliding between them, stroking herself in time to his thrusts. He moved faster, his hand reaching down, pushing hers away, driving her on with merciless skill and insistence. She felt herself slipping—away from herself, into the heat and the need and the sharp edge of an orgasm, approaching quickly.
It took her suddenly, jangling all her nerves and muddling her brain until she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but get lost in the intensity of it, hammering straight into her nervous system. She closed her eyes and let it take her, rocking against him, squeezing him with each wave after hot wave.
She came back to herself again just as Levi shuddered his own release. She slumped forward against his chest when he finished and took one shaking, gasping breath after another as he held her to his body, hard.
And just then, the barn doors exploded.
Chapter Eight
Shrapnel flew across the barn, thick pieces of wood slicing through the air. Levi opened his eyes just in time to duck, throwing Harper to the ground underneath him. He felt his body changing, and he did nothing to stop it. Her reaction to his nature was far less important than surviving the next few minutes, and with his gun out of arm’s reach, his best chance of doing that was as a wolf.
The girl made a squeal and rolled for the cover of the car as he bound away, the shift finishing midair. As the remains of the doors fell to the ground, it revealed Mortensen’s men—four of them only, and human from the smell of them.
Fools. They’d thought that with their weapons, they’d be able to take him alone. They were wrong.
He covered the distance between them in seconds, even as the idiot with the M79—a grenade launcher? seriously?—let off a shotg
un round that whizzed by his head. Levi barreled into the man, his jaws closing around the thug’s throat with a satisfying crunch and ripping it open as Levi continued past and the man’s body did not. The tang of hot blood filled his mouth, and the wolf tried to take over.
The other three whirled, letting loose with a hail of bullets. Levi kept going into the open air. The sudden afternoon light blinded him for an instant until his pupils constricted. He was already falling into the thought-patterns of his wolf form, the men becoming no longer human in his mind but merely targets, enemies, things that had to be eliminated because they wanted him dead.
He whirled and bounded back, yelping as one wild shot slammed into his shoulder, the same one that Harper had shot. But he kept charging, taking another of his opponents down under his weight. The wolf in him wanted to stand over the body to make sure that he was disabled, but the man knew that to do that would be to invite death from the two still standing. So he streaked past, back into the darkness to dive into the vast tangle of furniture that filled a third of the barn.
Cursing, one of the survivors scrabbled for the dropped single-shot grenade launcher. Levi’s muscles twitched. The man was too close to the barn to shoot another grenade—the M79 needed thirty meters in the air to arm, a precaution that kept morons from blowing themselves up with their own weapons. At a closer range, the grenade was no more than deadly than a rock.
But if Levi tried to rush him, the M79’s shotgun round was perfectly capable of disabling him, instead. Surprise had been on his side the first time. This time, the goons were ready for him.
Damned if you do, blown up if you don’t.
The other survivor backed up, away from the barn doors, reaching for the gun in his holster as he tapped frantically at his phone.
“It’s Kowalski. We found him, sir, in a barn just north of mile forty-one.”
Levi’s ears, sharper than any human’s or ordinary wolf’s, picked up the reply.
“Good. Don’t move in until backup arrives.”
“We already did. Reynolds’ call.”
The first goon had the grenade launcher now and was retreating slowly, step after step, into the open dirt space in front of the barn as he reloaded the grenade round. There was nowhere to hide there, not even shadows.
“What? The idiot. Put him on,” said the voice on the phone.
“Can’t, sir. He’s dead.”
The other voice snarled a curse. “Of course he is. Have you got the target pinned?”
“I can’t say for sure, sir,” Kowalski said cautiously.
There was another sound, one from inside the barn, a soft metallic noise. Levi jerked his gaze over, but from his vantage point, all he could see was the driver’s side of the gold car. What the hell was the girl doing over there?
The man on the phone spoke again. “Just—hold on. Backup’s coming.”
“ETA?”
“Half hour. Keep him there.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.” Kowalski hung up.
This was bad. It was very bad. Even in his wolf-form, he understood that. He was fast, but fast enough to close distance on the one with grenade launcher before he could shoot? He didn’t think so. At least it wasn’t an RPG—that would have blown clear through them to the other side of the barn—but what the hell was Mortensen thinking, arming his men with that?
He was thinking he was facing a werewolf. Levi answered his own question. And really, as far as that was concerned, the M79 was a pretty damned good choice. It was small enough to shove in a car, and it wouldn’t take down a house, but its stopping power was something that not even Levi wanted to test.
If they hadn’t wasted their first shot on the door, this might have already been all over. Lucky for him that good help was hard to find.
Levi couldn’t even see the patch of barn floor where he’d set his gun from his vantage point behind the bulk of the Skylark. Not that it mattered. With the man with the grenade launcher peering through the doorway, he wouldn’t want to take bets on whether he could make it to the gun and shift back to his human shape before he got blown away. Hell, the man could get tired of waiting and just start letting loose. Grenades weren’t exactly precision weapons.
There was a click in the darkness, loud enough that the men jumped from outside the door.
“There’s nowhere to go, Levi!” Kowalski called out as the jumpy one with the grenade launcher swept the weapon back and forth across the interior of the barn. Levi’s hackles rose as it crossed where he was hidden, deep in the pile of furniture.
How the hell had they learned his name? Someone, somewhere had blabbed. Or someone had recognized him. He’d been found somehow, so there was a good chance that the steps he’d taken to disable Mortensen’s surveillance had fallen through. If his face had been recorded, it would have taken someone with the vampire’s resources a matter of hours to identify him.
If the stakes hadn’t been high enough before....
“Why don’t you come out now, nice and easy?” Kowalski continued. “We don’t want to hurt you. We just want the knife back.”
Levi swallowed the growl that rose in his throat. Mortensen wanted him dead. It was the only kind of response the bloodsucker could have, if he wanted to save face among his kind.
A small movement at the corner of Levi’s eye attracted his attention. There, over the trunk of the car, the black snub end of his nine mil slid slowly upward.
If Harper was going to have any chance of hitting the guy, she was going to have to aim. And to aim, she’d have to stick her head into view. Then the thug with the grenade launcher would see her and fire, and it would all be over.
Unless the man was looking somewhere else....
Levi crouched, muscles bunching hard under hide and fur, and then he leaped, propelling himself up the tottering pile of furniture. A chair, balanced precariously, wobbled under his weight as he landed, and he slammed it down the pile as he jumped again, starting a slow avalanche of wood and upholstery behind him.
The man with the grenade launcher shouted, whirling. Levi could see his finger on the trigger even across the distance, tightening....
But the nine mil barked first, and the man fell to the ground, the launcher falling from his hands. Kowalski shouted, firing a burst of rounds wildly into the barn.
“Get in the car!” Harper’s voice pierced the reverberating aftershocks of the gunfire.
He crested the top of the collapsing mountain and half-ran, half-tumbled down the other side, paws dancing on the shifting furniture. He could see her through the front windshield now, scooting over the bench seat in nothing but her bra with her keys clutched in one hand. He hit the ground with all four paws, claws biting into the dirt as he took the corner around the front of the car. He shifted as he lunged for the door handle, dragging it open and flinging himself inside.
“My pants,” he managed. The SD card was still in the pocket.
She didn’t even look at him as she slapped the gear stick into reverse. “In the back.”
Never before had a nearly naked woman seemed as beautiful as Harper did just then. He slammed the door. The car was already moving, jumping backward even as Kowalski fired at them again. The Skylark hit the hole in the barn doors and burst through, wood splintering in every direction.
Kowalski jumped back, hitting the ground as the rear bumper narrowly missed him. Next to Levi, Harper yanked the car through neutral into first and floored it.
“Told you I’d find out your secrets,” Harper said as she moved up through the gears, the car accelerating down the dirt road. “But I didn’t expect one of them to be that you’re a goddamned werewolf.”
Pursuit
The Alpha’s Captive – Book 2
By
V. M. Black
Chapter One
The man on the ground scrambled for his gun as Harper hit the gas, leaving him behind in a spray of dirt and gravel.
“Told you I’d find out your secrets,” Harper said
to Levi, yanking the stick through the gears. The Buick Skylark roared toward the highway, passing the black sedan that had carried their attackers to the barn. “But I didn’t expect one of them to be that you’re a goddamned werewolf.”
“Yeah, about that,” Levi said. “You seem to be taking it pretty well.”
Harper blasted through the intersection onto the empty asphalt road before sparing him a glance. Werewolf or not, he made a fine hunk of male flesh in his human form, from his amber eyes to his hard backside, which was planted, as naked as a jaybird, in her passenger seat. He had another smear of blood on his shoulder, but he didn’t seem injured.
“What am I supposed to do? Start screaming, ’cause I’m a girl?” Her hands were shaking on the steering wheel. She tightened her grip until they stopped.
She’d shot somebody. Probably killed somebody. A stranger, someone who meant nothing to her. And she’d pulled out Levi’s gun and shot him in the head....
It wasn’t like when the gun had gone off when Levi jumped her. She’d had time to make a plan, to aim the gun, to pull the trigger and watch the man fall.
The man would have killed her, given the chance. People didn’t use grenade launchers for warning shots. Even so, the bare fact that she had shot a man in the head ran through her brain in a never-ending loop.
“Were they werewolves, too? The men out there?” Harper asked, keeping her voice level.
“No. Not werewolves or anything else. Just human,” Levi said.
Then the man wasn’t going to heal instantly, the way Levi could. And the other two, the ones that Levi had attacked—they were dead, too.
She and Levi had just killed three people. Three really, really bad people, sure. But they were still dead.
Harper took a deep breath. “You’d better put your pants on.”
Levi gave a bark of a laugh. “That’s what you have to say to me? No kidding? After all that?”
She treated him to a glare. “It seems kind of important. Whether or not the police are already looking for us, there are three bodies back there, and we’re going to get stopped if we’re still naked.”
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