“Now you are announcing a conclusion that you know isn’t true.” He tugged on her hair, forcing Magda to lean her head back as he began running the brush from scalp to the end of her long, thick hair. The aroma from the shampoo and conditioner he’d brought her drifted to his nose. “You also probably have figured out that I don’t plan on killing you. It would be stupid to drag all of this to you, help clothe you and bring you my kill, if I were simply then going to drag you down the mountain to my pack.”
“I wouldn’t let you,” she said simply, as if she had the capability of stopping him.
“Since I’m sure you already know all of this based on my actions, then Magda, ask what you really want to know.”
She fought against the tug of the brush in her hair and turned her head. When she tilted it so she was looking up at him, something glowed in her dark eyes he hadn’t seen before. Maybe feeding and bathing her had brought her soul back to life. Ayden didn’t dismiss the possibility that challenging her with words was turning her on. Either way, some of the flat indifference that had been so firmly planted in her gaze the night before was gone.
“What do you think you’re going to do next?”
“Something I seldom do with a female.” He held her gaze captive. Ayden saw the question in her eyes even though she didn’t voice it. He answered it willingly. “I’m going to dress you.”
The clothes he’d brought fit her very well. It had taken running to one of the litters who didn’t often mingle with the rest of the pack. They had an unmated female about the same physical size as Magda. Their size was where their similarities ended. The litter had immediately howled for their female, a shy thing named Nola, to come entertain the single male who had asked entrance into their den. When Ayden had explained the reason for his visit, that another litter had a female not as pretty as Nola but in need of clothes, both Nola’s sire and mother smelled disappointed. They recovered quickly. Any litter would dishonor the pack by not helping another litter in need. Ayden had explained that with the sire’s physical impairment and mother’s need to care for her mate, there wasn’t anything for this particular litter to sell or trade for clothes. It hadn’t been a lie. Magda’s sire and mother obviously weren’t caring for her. Nola’s litter had graciously offered some of her clothes.
“Do I want to ask how you got these?” Magda gave him a shrewd look, but then spun around in front of him, smelling quite pleased with her snug fitting blue jeans, socks and hiking boots, and a cashmere sweater.
“I didn’t lie or steal to get them. It’s a damn shame the bra didn’t fit you.”
When she wrinkled her nose and made a face, something tightened inside him. Ayden knew what he was experiencing. He wasn’t sure he was ready for Magda to smell it on him, though.
Ayden had felt possessive of his younger littermate before. He was possessive of their den, their hunting ground, his pack. However, he’d never experienced this level of possessiveness toward a female before.
“You didn’t really think that would fit me,” she asked, nodding toward the bra still on the cave floor that wasn’t much more than a training bra.
The moment he’d seen it Ayden knew it wouldn’t fit Magda. “It would have been wrong to dishonor this litter’s generosity by refusing it.”
She made a soft humming sound and nodded once. Then tugging on her new, soft pink sweater, Magda offered one hell of a nice view of her round, perfectly shaped breasts. That lurch of emotions inside him moved lower into something more tangible in his groin. Ayden wasn’t sure how long he would be able to keep his dick from becoming hard as a rock.
Magda accepted the fruit he’d carried with him in the bag, as well as several breakfast bars. Her hair dried as they sat by the fire. There were actually several shades in her thick, long mane, highlighted from the flames dancing around the crackling wood. He noticed rich shades of auburn, brown and black strands that fell past her shoulders and down her waist. Her hair had a slight wave to it, and was incredibly beautiful. With it almost dry, he ached to run his fingers through it again. But this time when he pulled, he wanted his focus to be only on devouring those full, luscious lips of hers.
When she relaxed on the stone chair she’d brought in and placed close to the fire, Ayden took his spot alongside her, sitting on the cold ground. He relied on the chilled, cave floor to extinguish the fire growing inside him. Soon, once he was sure Magda was once again in her prime, Ayden would fuck her. The way she looked now, it would be soon.
“We should hunt so you have more food to keep you well fed until I come again.”
“Maybe in a bit,” she said with a wave of indifference as she reached for her hair and began twisting it into a knot at the back of her head.
“Don’t,” he said. Ayden put his hand on her leg without thought.
Magda stilled. “Don’t what? Put my hair up? Sorry, Cariboo, I don’t have the luxury of wearing it down.”
“You do around me.”
Magda still didn’t move. She didn’t lower her hands and focused on his fingers wrapped around her knee. Her scent was rich, intoxicating, stronger than it had been before. Then, with her fingers crawling down her scalp, she released the hair that she’d just twisted behind her head. It fell, uncoiling, in thick waves past her shoulders and over her breasts.
“That is what this is all about,” she whispered.
Something noticeably changed in her scent. Magdaline leaned toward him. She moved to all fours and crawled over Ayden. He fell to his back and breathed in her scent as her hair tickled his face.
“If you want to fuck then let’s do it now,” she breathed, and lowered her mouth to his.
Chapter Five
Magda didn’t want to feel. All she needed to do was act. When she stared into Ayden’s blue eyes, which darkened the instant she crawled over him, something shifted inside her that was hard to identify.
He was a male. He was bringing her gifts because he wanted to fuck her. It stung. He was so incredibly sexy. This was the kind of male that a female dreamed of catching. But if he just wanted sex, it would make him less scrupulous than he smelled. And Ayden wasn’t easy to sniff out. Maybe it was for the best. The last thing she needed was to lose her heart to this male. She needed her head clear so she smelled the truth in all matters. One wrong move and she’d be dead.
There were other reasons she didn’t need involvement with a male. There was no ignoring them. No male ever wanted to run with her. She certainly would never be the female they would bring to their den and introduce to their litter. For Magda, in her twenty-five years, all males who sniffed her out did so out of sheer, limited time only, fascination. Her breed had been sentenced to death. No male cared to smell that truth for too long.
No one would ever accuse her of smelling of self-pity. It wasn’t as if she’d ever been different than how she was now. Magda might have a beautiful black coat, but she also had a gift that no one else had. The way she saw it, she was blessed, which made up for being different. If that meant she would run alone her entire life—so be it.
Of course, if she ever made it to the Malta werewolf pack in Colorado, there might be a male waiting for her there. It was hard to believe he’d be anywhere as perfect as Ayden, though.
There was no denying she wanted Ayden. Her craving for him grew every time he entered the cave. It was more than physical beauty with him. His inner strength. His ability to smell past what other werewolves told him to smell. His willingness to do so much to help her, although she wouldn’t become reliant on it, made Ayden damn near perfect. Magda thought it only fair that she sample perfection at least once in her life. As long as she didn’t let him break her heart, all would be fine.
“This is what you want, isn’t it Cariboo?”
She wasn’t ready when Ayden flipped her off of him. The cave floor was hard, and cold. He crushed her back against it. Before she knew what had happened, he’d taken control.
Ayden pinned her to the ground. His muscular arms
locked, straight, pressing her shoulders into hard stone underneath her. His legs moved between hers, preventing her from bringing hers together, or raising them in an effort to fight back.
“More than anything,” he snarled, his expression suddenly hard and almost terrifying.
His scent changed, and it wasn’t what she’d expected him to smell like.
“There’s no reason to be angry.” Magda forced herself to relax when all she wanted was to throw him off of her.
She fought not to sneeze from the spicy smell of outrage that suddenly filled the cave. Magda wasn’t sure what just happened but his getting pissed wasn’t how she’d thought he’d react.
“I think the normal reaction is to be aroused,” she whispered, hoping she sounded seductive, although she wasn’t able to keep a hint of sarcasm from surfacing.
No way would he sniff out how nervous he’d just made her.
“Is this how it is for you, ma beaute noire?” he grumbled. Silver laced through his blue eyes like lightning. The closeness of the change burned underneath his flesh and added to his strength.
Magda wouldn’t dwell on how much stronger he was, or how he had her pinned so well she was completely his captive. “I told you. I am not your—“
“Do you believe I am here simply to fuck you then run to the next female?”
His question smelled genuine. Magda studied his broad cheekbones, the intense way he stared at her. There was anger under the surface of his harsh expression. But another emotion, not as easily detected, simmered there, too. She wasn’t able to label it.
“I know why you’re here,” she snapped, frustrated that he was so hard to sniff out. “I’m not like the females in your pack. I am forbidden and that’s a turn on to many males. You aren’t the first to come sniffing around because you smell something you shouldn’t have and that excites you.”
“As thin as you are, the others must not have offered you much to eat.” With the same speed and agility he’d used to slam her to the cave floor, Ayden leapt to his feet and yanked her up with him. “So this is how it’s been since you’ve been on the run.”
“What does that mean?” Magda wasn’t able to free herself from the iron grip he had on her arm. “I said others have come sniffing around. But I never howled anything about raising my tail to each and every one of them.”
“I don’t need to be paid with sex for taking care of you.”
“What?” she gasped. Her shock at how close to the truth he had just howled pissed her off. Not that she looked at it that way. Hell, at the moment she wasn’t sure how to smell the truth. “How dare you!” she yelled.
Magda felt her shoulder pop when she tried tearing free of his hold on her. Instead of letting her go, he started dragging her toward the entrance of the cave.
“My beautiful black bitch, I dare,” he ground out through clenched teeth.
“Where are we going?”
“Hunting.” Ayden turned. “Unless you’d rather remained caged in this cave and fight,” he suggested, his voice too smooth to mistake the cold, underlying rage he barely contained.
When he quit dragging her and turned to face her, Magda almost walked into him. Ayden was tall—really tall. His short blond hair looked thicker than when he’d arrived, and his blue eyes were radiant against his sharply chiseled face. He had broad shoulders and an incredible, perfectly sculptured chest. She almost pressed her free hand against all that ripped muscle but pulled back just as her fingertips brushed his shirt.
Ayden grabbed her wrist and pressed her palm to his heart. He towered over her, pulling her so close she had to tilt her head back to see his face.
“When I fuck you it won’t be because you think it’s what is supposed to happen next,” he growled. “It will happen when neither of us can restrain from having the other any longer.”
Her first thought was that would happen very soon. Magda was caught off guard by the fire burning in those intense, dark sapphire eyes. His scent wrapped around her, drawing her to him.
“You smell a bit too sure of yourself.” She almost choked on her words when he lowered his head and nipped at her lower lip just as she got the words out. “Oh,” she gasped.
Ayden’s confidence was off the charts. Magda had known a few males when she’d run freely on her mountain before the humans burnt them out. Most litters surrounding their den lived there because, for whatever reason, they preferred not to be part of a pack. With her litter, the reasons had been obvious. She’d never bothered asking other litters why they preferred living in isolation; mainly because none of the males who’d sniffed after her had ever really impressed her. If she’d run across a werewolf like Ayden it might very well have been a different story.
Magda breathed in the scent of him. She leaned back, needing space. It seemed her feet were pinned where they were. That or she didn’t want to move. Standing this close she swore the sex appeal radiating off him caused every inch of her to start tingling. Ayden was probably everything she’d ever dreamed of finding in a male. However, it was the way he’d been raised, the world he lived in, and the only one he’d ever known that had so much to do with carving out the male who stood before her now.
Ayden lived in a pack. He’d never known suppression, hatred, or the smell of disgust simply over the blood flowing in his veins. Magda imagined he not only ran with honor, but believed no other werewolf would challenge his beliefs. Possibly no one ever had. Magda didn’t know a life like that but pictured it in her head as one hell of a way to live.
It didn’t matter how great that life was. It would never be her life. She managed to start a step backward when Ayden laced his fingers through her hair and yanked her head back further. Her neck stretched. His face was so close to hers that it blurred. The way his scent changed, growing stronger, richer, and smelling so damn good, Magda didn’t care if she saw him clearly, or not. The imprint of this sexy male holding her had fixed itself in her brain. She could look at it anytime. Right now she allowed her other senses their stimulation.
“Magdaline,” he snarled, his voice thick with lust.
Seldom did anyone use her full first name. The way Ayden said it caused trickles of desire to tease and torture her insides.
It was all he said before taking her mouth. If there were reasons not to do this they got lost in the overwhelming waves of passion that exploded between them. He didn’t just kiss her. His lips seared hers. Heat unlike anything she’d ever known robbed her ability to think.
Magda felt his shirt against her palms. She’d grabbed him, fisting his clothes in her hands and held on as she spiraled toward a center too intense for it to come at her this fast. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t come before. But with a kiss!
His mouth had more ability, more skill, than most males possessed with their entire bodies. He’d created an impenetrable fog in her brain. She gave up on her sense of sight. She smelled him. And damn, a male had never been so overwhelmingly enticing from his scent.
Magda hadn’t paid attention to where his hands had been. His kiss was too demanding to focus on any other activity around her. She most definitely felt his hard-packed muscles and incredibly solid body pressing against her breasts, her hips, her thighs. But until that second, she’d accepted his hands tangled in her hair.
She suddenly grew acutely aware of him touching her when those large hands, with his long fingers and calloused fingertips, stroked her shoulders. Then he was touching her back. His hands glided down her body and gripped her ass. When he abruptly lifted her off the ground, Magda wrapped her arms around his shoulders and willingly held on.
He impaled her mouth with his tongue, creating an ancient dance their kind had been performing together for over a millennium. It was one she thought she knew. But as she clung to him, his strong hands cradling her ass, she was certain she’d never experienced what she was right now.
“Magdaline,” he whispered again, and scraped his teeth over her lip before biting.
“Mmm,” she h
ummed.
“I’m going to lay my kill at your feet.”
Magda blinked. He didn’t really mean that he wanted a relationship. “You already laid it outside the cave,” she murmured, and tried kissing him again. She didn’t want to think about how impossible it would be for a male like Ayden to seriously chase down a female like her.
He didn’t hesitate. “I mean it.”
A male brought his kill to a female if she was his mate, or if he wanted to make her his. It was another tradition, and one still honored today.
He lowered her to the ground and stepped away. “If you change in here your clothes will be warm when we return.”
Magda didn’t follow his meaning until he let go of her and left the cave. She started toward the exit but then froze. Her view was slightly impaired but not so much that she couldn’t see Ayden strip off his shirt. His back was to her and muscles bulged and rippled under white flesh. He was a perfect specimen, a deadly male who would outrun and outfight any other male if they made the mistake of sniffing too close to pure danger.
What the hell was he doing with her?
Someone like Ayden would end up being alpha male. He would lead his pack. The best female would run by his side. If any other Cariboo saw him running with her they would attack first and possibly not even bother to take the time to sniff out the situation. Malta werewolves were a condemned species. There was too much of that blood in her veins to deceive anyone into thinking she was another breed.
“Are you hunting with me, or not?” Already his voice had a gravelly edge to it.
Magda stared a moment longer. He bent over and pulled off his boots then unzipped his jeans. Fire ignited inside her as the change began. It made her senses more acute even before her body physically altered. She breathed in his rich, dominating scent. Ayden dropped his jeans and boxers. His muscular ass would be a sight imprinted in her brain always.
God damn he was perfect!
Magda almost stumbled out of her clothes. She was barely naked when Ayden had dropped to all fours. His coat was thick, and as shiny white as hers was dark. The fire inside her, igniting the change, burned with fierceness stronger than usual. If she had dared dream of a perfect male on her mountain he would look and behave just like Ayden. She might actually have dreamed of him if she’d known such a male existed.
With Her Capture Page 5