Scout: Reckless Desires (Norseton Wolves #7)

by Holley Trent

  “Faster, woman.”

  She couldn’t go any faster. He’d done the right thing by taking over the job from her.

  “Going to buy you clothes,” he thought at her as he tossed her flannel shirt onto the floor. “Clothes that aren’t hand-me-downs and that are designed for a woman’s shape.”

  He tugged at her sagging waistband, as if she wouldn’t have been able to discern what he wanted on her own.

  The jeans had once been Arnold’s. He’d last worn them when he was fourteen. They were pretty threadbare, but she never gave up on an article of clothing until it’d disintegrated to the point of no return. She and the Viking likely disagreed about whether or not they’d reached that point.

  “These.” He slipped his fingers down the inside front of her jeans and into her panties, and she wondered if he were going to trigger another one of those seizure things.

  She couldn’t breathe with his fingers being there, idling over her clit when she was already so close to combustion.

  “Off,” he commanded.

  Gulping, she clawed at the fastener of the jeans and managed to get the fly down. He helped her kneel up, and then watched her wriggle the pants down her thighs.

  He laid her on her back and took over before she could do much more.

  Impatient.

  But so was she. She needed him and couldn’t have him until her clothes were off.

  He tossed her jeans in the general direction of her shirt and then wriggled her panties past her hips, his intense gaze fixed on her. Daring her.

  She wouldn’t take the dare. She was going to lie very still and let the scenario play out. Her limited experience with sexual things would only be an obstacle if she were allowed to take point.

  For once, she’d keep her mouth shut and wait.

  She lay there on the new bed that somehow belonged to her in the new house that had been given to her and her brother and, for the first time in ten years, felt like something was actually going to go right.

  Even if slowly.

  Paul settled between her parted legs, pressing his palms up the insides of her knees. He pushed her legs farther apart and finally looked away from her face to fix his attention much lower.

  Gods.

  She closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see him look—didn’t want to guess what he was thinking when he looked at her like that.

  Warm breath tickled her inner thighs and higher. The mattress shifted beneath her and some firm thing pushed against her leg. She didn’t open her eyes to see her slide her hands down to feel. She curled her fingertips into the sheets so she didn’t touch anything—ruin anything.

  Her legs were lifted, propped up.

  More warm breath, but closer to her sex, and then away.

  His tongue seared in the crease between her abdomen and thigh, and her toes curled as he licked ever closer to her juncture.

  But he ignored that completely and licked the opposite crease. Differently, though. He added kisses and teasing bites to his improvisation, and she changed the pitch of the wanton hum building up in her throat.

  Still, she wouldn’t open her eyes.

  She could feel his breath tickling her thighs and his hands pressing against her crotch.

  She didn’t want to see—didn’t want to give away how anxious she was about getting things wrong.

  He parted her, and her eyes opened then. A reflex, just in time to see his tongue circle around her nub and his lips stretched into a grin with his amusement.

  She must have looked terrified. Her eyes certainly felt round enough, and she had her mouth wide open, like she was trying to catch flies.

  She reached down and snatched his glasses off his face.

  “I can still see what I’m doing, Petra.”

  “But I…” Can he even hear me? “I feel better.”

  “Would you feel better if I turned the lights off?”

  He could hear her. His ability frightened and exhilarated her at the same time.

  “Yes,” she thought at him.

  “Too bad. Not gonna fumble clumsily in the dark when I can service you so much better in the light.”

  “Service me?”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m doing my best to satisfy you, but you have to let me.”

  “Are you telling me again to stop talking?”

  He didn’t answer, except to delve his tongue back between her legs and to brazenly service every crevice of her.

  All she could do was try not to clench and give away how novel the sensation was for her—his tongue flicking rapidly against her clit and sparking quakes in her body. Not warnings of an impending seizure, just her nerve endings being too damned happy and her muscles not knowing what to do except to contract and relax, over and over.

  He slipped a finger into her, and she held her breath as he added another, then a third, and her breathlessness made what he was doing that much worse.

  Or perhaps better.

  The fullness ebbed and flowed as he slid his fingers in and out of her, but she had to breathe when his mouth closed around her clit because she damn near launched off the bed.

  He pressed his free hand to her belly, obviously thinking she was going to float away or something. “Not done with you.”

  His tongue tapped out a rapid beat against her clit, matching the tempo of whatever he was doing with his middle finger inside her pussy, and her body didn’t know how to respond except for her to giggle.

  She giggled and wheezed while she gripped his hair and tried not to squirm away from him. If she moved away, she wouldn’t come, and that’d be a new experience for her—brought about by her mate’s hands.

  And tongue.

  “That fucking tongue,” she muttered as she threw her head back and tried not to yank all those luscious locks out of his scalp.

  “I think you’ll like other parts of me just as much.”

  “Sure. Uh-huh.”

  She certainly couldn’t imagine what those were, not with his tongue turning her brain to mush via her private parts.

  “So soft.”

  The man was supremely coordinated. He meandered his hand up her chest and palmed one of her breasts without missing a beat. He kneaded it, strummed the nipple with a thumb, and she couldn’t take any more.

  The way she saw things, she had two choices. She could suffocate him between her thighs, or she could let the pleasure engulf her and allow the orgasm to play out however it needed to.

  She didn’t want to suffocate him. Her mate was far too handsome to kill, so she picked Option B—the shame.

  Oh well.

  She needn’t have been worried, because apparently she wasn’t a shrieker or a moaner. She was a panter, and a pull-his-hair-until-he-stops-lickinger.

  But he wouldn’t stop licking. Not until he’d lapped up all her honey, apparently, and not until he was satisfied that her nipple couldn’t possibly get any more turgid.

  “Fuckin’ hell, dude.” She lay boneless, staring at the ceiling, and giggling as he slipped his fingers out of her.

  He didn’t say anything. She worried that he didn’t say anything, and wondered if she had been talking too much again.

  She risked a look down her body and found him up on his knees with the hand that had been stimulating her wrapped around his big cock, pumping up and down.

  And he was looking right at her. No timidity in her Viking’s gaze, only a dare for her to look away.

  But she couldn’t.

  She was mesmerized by his strong grip pushing her lubrication up and down his shaft and how the dark head leaked his own arousal.

  Had he been any other man, she might have looked away, but his body was hers to enjoy as much as hers was for him. He didn’t look like the wolves she’d grown up around, and perhaps that was a good thing. No bad memories.

  New. Fresh.

  Hers.

  “Be still,” he whispered in his deep rasp.

  She hadn’t thought she’d moved, but she co
ncentrated on keeping her body very straight and stiff all the same.

  His seed arced onto her belly in long, ropy spurts, and she lay stunned with her mouth open.

  Half scandalized. Half turned on.

  He kept stroking, teeth clenched and belly muscles twitching as he finished himself off.

  And she kept still longer as he slowly eased off the bed and walked to the attached bathroom.

  He returned a moment later with a warm cloth that he swished tenderly over her belly, and then disappeared into the bathroom again.

  She tried to be still because she hadn’t been told to do otherwise, but he was gone for so long.

  Minutes, maybe. She couldn’t tell. She could often count time by the beats of her heart, but hers was contracting too quickly, trying to slow down. But every time she thought about what they’d just done, it sped up again.

  He must have been gone a very long time because by the time he returned, she was halfway asleep and so used to him being gone that the sound of the light switch being hit made her jerk.

  He climbed into bed behind her and pulled her against his body, pressing his softened cock against her ass, and tugging the covers up over the two of them.

  His breathing filled her ears.

  No words. No psychic whispers bombarding her, but she had to say something. She wouldn’t be able to sleep otherwise.

  “Took you so long.”

  He draped his arm over her hip and tucked his chin atop her head. “I’m back now.”

  “You would tell me if you weren’t going to come back, wouldn’t you?”

  No answer.

  She didn’t want to poke or nudge him, but she had to know. Something felt off about them, and she was too ignorant to even begin to know where to start troubleshooting. She didn’t even know who she could ask about what was supposed to happen next.

  “Paul?”

  He pulled in some air, and his arm tightened around her. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

  She was going to anyway. He could tell her to be still, and she’d do her best for him, but being told not to worry?

  She didn’t think he had the right kind of magic to make that possible.

  CHAPTER NINE

  With each little movement Paul made to try to separate his body from Petra’s, leaving became somewhat harder.

  Her clock read six. He needed to be up and at home showering for work, but she was so warm, and she felt so nice. She was a perfectly organic mood regulator. The longer he touched her, the mellower he felt. She was like some decadent cream being soothed over burned flesh. She seemed to make everything feel better—seemed to make his grasp on the Afótama web a little stronger.

  That wasn’t unusual for his kind. Generally, when people in the clan became intimately close with others, their psychic networks merged. But, Petra wasn’t from the clan. She was a werewolf with no psychic abilities at all, beyond with him. She shouldn’t have affected his magic at all, but he was her mate, and she was his match, and the mingling of their gifts was unavoidable.

  He didn’t know what that meant. Doctors didn’t generally like not knowing things, so he needed to get up and ask someone. He needed to clear his head before they got any further entangled. Already, he was certain he’d never be able to deny her anything, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t hurt each other. He couldn’t bear to hurt her. She’d already endured too much.

  “Petra.” He gave her bottom a little pinch, and she swatted him in her sleep.

  He sighed into her hair and gave her ass another grope. “Come on. I’ve gotta get up and go to work and as it is, your alpha’s gonna be pissed that I didn’t follow up with him last night.”

  “If he thought something was wrong,” she said sleepily, “he would have barged in. Right?”

  She slung a leg over his thigh and wriggled closer to him, insinuating her warm sex against his crotch.

  “Petra…”

  “Mmm, why not?”

  He could think of a lot of reasons to keep his cock to himself. The risk of pregnancy was one, and given her questionable medical status, if they didn’t have protection, they needed to abstain. Another was that if they went there, she would never be able to completely extricate herself from him.

  He had ex-girlfriends from the time he’d been living away from a Norseton who still called him out of the blue and said things like, “I have no idea why I was thinking about you. I hate you, but I had to call anyway.” He’d left his psychic thumbprint on them, and he’d always niggle at their consciousnesses, even if them being together wasn’t meant to be.

  But he was meant to be with Petra, however that didn’t make him any less wary of what might happen.

  She was so worried he’d give up on her and abandon her for being a wolf. He was afraid he’d become too dependent on her—as his kind tended to do with their partners—that she’d be the one who ran. He’d be stuck. Gutted. Pining after a woman who didn’t want him anymore, and he’d never be able to move on. The people of the Afótama only got one chance at a fated match. There were no replacements. No do-overs.

  She was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity he hadn’t been ready for, and she needed to get ready for him, too.

  “Paul,” Petra crooned against his chest. “Why not?”

  Her lips were soft as silk—tantalizing and punishing at the same time.

  His cock had gone from soft to iron-hard in about thirty seconds. Spearing her between her legs would be so easy—just a grab of her thigh to make some room and a tilt of his hips to get sheathed inside her.

  “Fuck,” he muttered.

  “Why not?” she repeated.

  “Listen.” He kissed the top of her head and gently peeled her away from his body.

  Just that quickly, he felt the chill of isolation race through him as if she were a mile away, and not just being held above him at arm’s length.

  Afótama bullshit.

  “As much as I’d like to lie in bed with you all day, I’ve got to go to work.”

  “Can’t you take the day off?”

  “That’s not easy to do with a staff as small as ours. The only person who could feasibly fill in for me is Chris, and he’s working nights right now. He can’t do back-to-back shifts like that.”

  “What time do you get off?”

  He laid her gently beside him and then sat up. He hated leaving her, but he didn’t see where he had a choice. She may not have thought she needed space from him, but she’d appreciate having it later.

  He hoped.

  “I get off at around six, assuming there isn’t a six-car pileup on Main Street that sends twenty people to the emergency room.”

  “That’s a long time from now.”

  “Yeah. Things’ll get better at the hospital in the next couple of years. We’re in recovery mode right now. A few doctors all decided to retire at the same time, and we have to be very careful how we recruit replacements.”

  “No more young Afótama doctors out in the wild finishing their residencies or whatever right now, huh?”

  “Nah.” He kissed her forehead and eased off the bed before he could convince himself that he didn’t really need to go to work, and that probably no one would need an emergency medicine doctor that day. “Far as I know, there’s one out there who just started first year medical studies. She still has plenty of chances to pick another field. Not holding my breath.”

  “Can’t you recruit from other groups?”

  He put on his glasses to find his socks, and regretted it. Leaving her for the day would have been easier if she’d been blurry. She was wild and stunning, and she was his.

  Gods.

  “We have a lady at the executive mansion—Lora—who’s looking into finding us a designated recruiter,” he said. “She used to do a little bit of recruitment work, but since Queen Tess came back, she’s been too swamped to start any new projects.”

  “Maybe I should go help her. I’ve got skills.”

  “Oh?” He glan
ced over his shoulder to look at Petra. He bet that in time, he wouldn’t need to see her face to know which expression she was wearing. He’d be able to make a good guess just based on what her psychic energy was putting off.

  Her wicked smile was probably meant to emphasize the fact that she probably could root out candidates for whatever job openings happened to be sitting on Lora’s desk, but that wasn’t how he immediately read it. His Viking brain immediately motored to that jealous curiosity about who his partner had honed her skills with.

  Probably assholes who don’t deserve to keep breathing.

  He ground his teeth and pulled on his boxer shorts.

  She’s poking at me.

  He hoped he’d get better at discerning that in time, too. Already, she knew exactly which buttons of his to press.

  “Get close enough to Lora, and you’ll get trapped in her gravitational pull for sure. She’ll find some work for you to do,” he said. “I suggest you check in with Adam first, though.”

  “So he can make sure I’m alive?”

  “That, and other things.” Paul found his shirt and pulled it on quickly, as well as his shoes.

  He was a pretty enduring long-distance runner. Sprinting back into town through the desert rather than via the paved path could possibly prevent his mother from finding out about her only son doing the walk of shame at six in the morning.

  “You’ll call me when you get off?” Petra asked. “Or—actually, I don’t have your number, so—” She clucked her tongue and wriggled her eyebrows playfully at him.

  He couldn’t help but to laugh.

  Gods, we’re a fucking mess. Not even the slightest bit normal.

  “You don’t need my number,” he said. “I’ll find you.”

  “Or more likely, I’ll find you. Not like it’d be hard.”

  “Why not?” he asked with one hand already on the doorknob.

  “’Cause you’re my mate, I guess. I don’t know. You’re easy to find. I’m not sure if that’s normal for wolves, though.”

  He suspected it wasn’t. Sounded like Afótama shit to him. Chris could find his wife without even trying, and so could his neighbor Will with his girlfriend.

  He gave Petra a wave and let himself out without another word.