Jackie’s tongue lolled from her mouth, over her fangs, and she swished her tail. Her human had nothing to fear. Tracking the female—
Delanie
—was fun. Easy. Her scent grew stronger with every tree passed. Soon she would find the female human—
Delanie, damn you! Delanie.
—and then she would run and play and—
No. I will not be lost again.
Cold rage flooded Jackie’s veins. An image of two women filled her mind—one tall, one short. Both laughing.
The human memory scraped at Jackie’s psyche. She snarled, her human’s unease twisting into her natural impulses.
Human. She was human too. She had human friends, human connections. She had human dreams, human desires. Human fears.
Delanie. Delanie was in trouble. She needed to find her. Save her.
The blackness around her became a blur. She moved through the night. Rourke followed her, a massive dark wolf of immeasurable power and age whose heat called to hers, but she remained focused only on one thing. Tracking Delanie’s scent. Finding her. Finding her friend.
The bush on either side of the road grew dense. Old trees and vegetation threaded with new trees and scrub, melaleuca strangled by roaming lantana vines. Salt and seaweed tainted the wind. The soft sound of lapping waves skipped over the gentle rustle of leaves and grass. They were drawing closer to the Bay of Fires’ waterline, following the deserted road as it wove around the inland body of water. Jackie lengthened her gait, Delanie’s scent becoming thin in the briny air. Faster. She needed to be faster.
A sudden gust of wind lashed at her side, ruffling her short coat, pouring over her tongue. She skidded to a halt, lifting her head and pointing her muzzle into its strength.
There. On her left. In amongst the scrub and ancient eucalypts.
Another gust of wind raced through the trees and with it came the stench again—metallic and cloying and fresh.
Human blood.
Delanie’s blood.
Cold dread slammed into Jackie’s chest. She streaked forward, leaping over vegetation and bush, weaving through the tangled mess of growth lining the road. Behind her, she heard the wolf do the same, his paws barely making a sound as he followed her into the scrub.
She ran, Delanie’s scent coating her nostrils, streaming over her olfactory nerve. Close. She was close.
Moonlight flickered above her, its pale light lost in the canopy above, but Jackie didn’t notice. Delanie’s scent directed her, led her through the bush, farther away from the road, the waterline until, in a clearing almost devoured by creeping vines, she came upon a wooden structure.
Del!
The human within her strained for release, fear and hope turning her natural thylacine wariness into charged urgency. She stood still, studying the shack. It stood silent. Dark. Revealing nothing.
Without a sound, she slunk closer to the structure, stare locked on its sole door, nose skimming the ground. A myriad of odors filtered into her breath: plant and animal alike. Tasmania. Wild Tasmania.
Jackie’s heart thumped and she lifted her head, her tail switching. Inside. She needed to go inside. Inside away from the intoxicating, delicious smells threading into her body.
Lowering her muzzle to the ground, she tasted the scents again. Tasmanian devil, echidna, snake, bandicoot. Saliva filled her mouth, dripped from her teeth. She ran her tongue over her muzzle, her whiskers. The scents called her. She pressed her nose harder to the soil, scuffing its sandy grains. New smells. New tastes. Wallaby. Plovers. Skinks.
Her tail wagged.
Deep in her existence, a sound roared. A sound she should know. A voice? What is a voice?
She lifted her head, looking at the shack. She was meant to do something. She was meant to go inside.
She cocked her head to the side, tail flicking side-to-side in a low, agitated arc. Why would she go inside? Inside the thing made by those on two legs? Those that hunted her and killed her family? Those that kept her caged for so many, many moons she almost ceased to be? Why would she go inside? She didn’t want to go inside. She wanted to run. She wanted to play. To feed. Wallaby had been on this very spot, only a moment ago. Young. Weak. Abandoned by its mother. The scent tickled her and she ran her tongue over her whiskers again. She wanted to feed.
A soft noise behind her flicked at her ears, and a new scent trickled into her breath. A male scent. She turned her head, the insistent heat in her core becoming an inferno of hungry need as an animal stepped out of the bush. Silver eyes burned at her in the darkness and she lifted her tail. She wanted this one. She remembered his smell.
The roar sheared through her again, louder. She bared her teeth, swinging her head back to the shack. Why was she standing there? Why wasn’t she—
Inside. Inside. Go inside now!
The command screamed in her head. She flinched, shame and guilt slicing into her. She was there for Delanie. Her friend. No matter what form she was in, Delanie was her friend. She needed to find her now. Before the hunter hurt her. Or worse.
She leapt forward, forcing the insistent need in her belly down. The night-damp grass and soil matted her fur, chilled the pads of her paws, and she focused her attention on those sensations, not the carnal call of her heat. The shack smelt wrong, but she needed to go inside. Pressing the tip of her muzzle to the edge of the shack’s door, the old wood like iron on her nose, she nudged it open.
The still air hung heavy with human—delicate floral scents cut through with acrid terror. Jackie stood in the doorway, scanning the shack’s sparse interior, her ears low, her bristle raised.
Nothing. Delanie’s scent—thick in the confined space, sour in its fear and bitter in its anger—the only remains of its recent occupation.
Wherever her friend was, it wasn’t here.
Stepping into the shack, she put her nose to the ground, seeking answers. The human female’s sweat tainted the dusty floor, but not her blood.
Jackie lifted her head, studying the small dark area. Nothing left by those that walked on two legs to tell her anything. Just the smell of human rage and fear. She swished her tail. Nothing here. Nothing—from the far wall, like a potent imprint of life, wafted the coppery ting of human blood.
Head lowered, ears flattened, she crossed the small space, her nose locked on the scent.
Hunt, hunt, track, track.
Something cold and metal lay amongst the dust and dead insect bodies. Something small, circular.
Watch.
The word floated through her head and she flicked her tail, her heartbeat quickening. The watch belonged to the one with the long red hair who was always kind to her, always in her heart.
Delanie.
She nudged the cold metal thing with her nose, the rich coppery taste of blood trickling into her breath. Faint, yet there. She touched her tongue to the smooth surface.
Delanie’s blood—a tiny drop—slicked her taste buds and her heart beat harder. Faster.
A soft sound cracked the silence behind her and she snapped her head in its direction, her stare falling on the wolf.
He stopped at the door, filling its width with his massive frame, his silver eyes watching her, his tail still.
Jackie’s muscles thrummed, a base urge she could not understand claiming her. She held the wolf’s pinning gaze. Didn’t look away. His musky scent flowed into her breath, a scent of dominance and power and stretching time. Made her want to drop to her belly and submit to his force, even as it stirred a defiance deep within her existence as incomprehensible as the need in her belly. She let out a low growl.
An invitation.
A warning.
The wolf’s ears twitched. Silver eyes dilated, changed colour. Silver to ancient ice-blue. His inescapable stare held her imprisoned. A violent shudder wracked through his form, vibrating through the very earth into Jackie’s body. His thick black fur shimmered with unseen light, his blue eyes sparked with white fire and then he stood before her on two legs. Furless,
tailless. A wolf in a man’s body.
A naked man’s body. Panting, sweating, his muscles coiled, his desire long and thick and hard jutting up from between his corded thighs.
“Jackie.”
Rourke’s raw whisper scaled Jackie’s senses.
Explosive want detonated in her centre. She leapt at him and transformed mid-flight.
Her palms slammed into Rourke’s bare chest, driving him backward under her force. He tumbled, his hands knotting in her hair, his mouth claiming hers, crushing it, his tongue delving between her lips before his back could even make contact with the floor.
She slid down his body, straddling him, gripping his hips with her inner thighs, his sweat-slicked flesh hot against hers. Her sex, sodden with desire and want, pushed at his cock, the rigid organ parting her folds with ease.
God, she’d never been so wet.
Fisting her hands in his hair, ignoring the cruel knowledge what she was doing was insane, was dangerous beyond all measure. Her tongue mated with his, her heart hammering so hard she could barely draw breath. She rolled her hips slightly away, up the flatness of his abdomen before, with a low growl in her chest and mind, she shoved backward. Impaling herself on his cock.
Chapter Six
Fuck, he’d never felt someone so tight. So fucking tight. Marshall thrust into Jackie’s sex, his mind gibbering in ecstatic disbelief, his body incinerating from within. He moved inside her, pumping into her gripping heat, filling her with every inch he had.
She whimpered, the sound like aural ambrosia to his desire. Holy Hell, he wanted her. Wanted this. So much so he couldn’t stop. He didn’t care it fucked up his plans. He didn’t care it created a weakness he may never recover from. He wanted to fuck Jackie, mate with her, claim her, unlike any female—animal or human—he’d had before.
Plunging his tongue deeper into her willing mouth, he drove his heels into the ground, planting his weight more firmly on the floor so as to gain greater force in his thrusts. She whimpered again, a guttural noise that sent shards of wet electricity to his balls.
He tore his hands from her hair, raked them down her back and cupped her arse, squeezing each cheek with brutal impatience. He wanted to touch all of her. At once and immediately. He wanted to mark every delicious part of her body as his own. Fuck if he would ever let anyone else have her. She was his. His.
The thought raised a growl in his chest—whether his or his beast’s, he didn’t know or care—and he dragged his hands back up to her hair, tangling his fingers in its silken strands. He nipped at her bottom lip, drew it into his mouth. Sucked on its fullness before, desperate to taste her further, her sweat, her cream, he tore his mouth from hers and slid his lips down her throat.
She rolled her head back, bowing her neck, her sex constricting on his cock as she rode his penetrations in harmony with his mouth’s exploration. He traveled the firm column of her throat, up to her jaw, her ear. Capturing her earlobe between his teeth, he nipped its softness, suckled it gently. Her flesh tasted sweet on his tongue and he moaned, sliding his mouth from her ear down to her jaw, her chin. “Christ,” he murmured against her flesh, tightening his fists in her hair to roll her head to the side, exposing the other side of her neck to his mouth. “You taste good. Delicate and subtle, like the air in the Rio Grande after rain.” He slanted his lips across hers again, dipped into her mouth with his tongue, traced her teeth. “It’s addictive. Powerful. I can’t get enough of you.”
Jackie’s groan vibrated down her throat, into her chest and she arched on top of him, rolling her hips to take him deeper still. “Please,” she gasped, her nails sinking into his shoulders.
Squirming tension twisted in Marshall’s groin. “Please what, detective?”
She didn’t answer. Just shook her head and rode him harder, her thighs gripping his sides, her nails scoring his flesh.
Staring at her face, its pleasure-enrapt beauty mesmerizing, he smoothed one hand from her hair and stroked his fingers down the line of her spine. A shiver rippled through her body, pinching her already hard nipples into puckered tips. He smiled and tasted her collarbone with a string of lingering kisses. “Tell me.”
She shook her head again, licking her lips as she closed her eyes.
A little pulse beat wildly below her ear and he pressed his lips to it, breathing in her scent through his nose as he smoothed his hand from her back to her ribcage. “Tell me,” he ordered against her neck, punctuating each word with a tiny bite. “Tell me what you want me to do to you.”
Jackie’s breath quickened. Grew shallow. Ragged. “I want…” A hitching moan fell from her as he moved his hand between their bodies and captured her nipple between his knuckles. She arched her back, grinding her sex harder to his cock. “Oh…”
Marshall squeezed her nipple again, freeing his other hand from her hair and placing it on her shoulder. He pushed—gently but with undeniable command—creating space between them enough to cup her other breast and palm its swollen weight. “You want me to suck your nipples?”
The question was a statement. Before Jackie could respond, he grabbed her arse with both hands and moved into a sitting position, the sudden action stabbing his cock against the inner wall of her pussy.
She cried out, the sound raw and loud, her back arching, her sex taking him deeper still.
He grabbed each breast as the cry burst past her lips, scooped them together and rolled his thumb pad over each pinched nipple. “Shall I take these into my mouth, detective?” He looked up into her face, the heat in her eyes sending new blood to his cock. Without waiting for her to respond, he lowered his head and closed his lips over one nipple, drawing it into his mouth with gentle suction, flicking his tongue over its tip in soft stabs before moving to the other.
“Jesus!” Jackie groaned, pushing her hips forward, her hands raking his back, scoring lines of exquisite pain across his flesh with her nails.
Marshall’s cock grew thicker, harder in her pussy and he dragged his mouth from her breasts, moving it to her neck. She whimpered, letting her head fall to the side as he explored her jawline, the shallow dip below her ear. He pressed his tongue to the rapid beat dancing there, pinching her nipples as he did so, enjoying the raw moan slipping past her lips. He created that sound in her. He created the pleasure it signified.
The knowledge filled him with power, and he growled, sliding his arms around her waist and up to her shoulders. He curled his hands into her hair, holding her locked to him, his balls swelling with heat so tight and heavy he felt sure he would lose his mind. He was close to coming. Very close, and he so much wanted to do more to the woman impaled on his shaft.
Mark her. Claim her.
Gazing into her shining amber eyes, he pulled in a ragged breath. “I can’t control the wolf in me for much longer, Jackie.”
His statement made Jackie’s eyelids flutter closed for a second before she shifted on his lap, taking him deeper, deeper still into her sex. “Then don’t.”
A growl rumbled in his chest, his wolf’s growl. He thrust into her, stabbing her core with driving need, each stroke growing faster, faster. She rode him completely, her stare locked on his face, her lips parted, her breath rapid. Her sex squeezed his cock in a series of pulses, each one increasing in strength until she threw back her head and let out a long raw sound. The howl of an animal in rapture.
It was too much. Marshall’s tenuous hold on his control incinerated. His wolf howled, racing for release, turning his already burning muscles to liquid fire. Wanting to mount her, claim her, mark her, mate, fuck…
He had to stop it, he had to—
Mark her as your own.
He let out a roar, his orgasm consuming him, flooding her sex with his seed as he fisted her hair, yanked her head to the side and sank his teeth into her neck.
The cool night air bit into Daeved Einar’s flesh, turned his breath to mist as it passed his lips. He stood motionless beneath a tall tree, its dense foliage concealing his whereabouts, h
iding him amongst a curtain of slender light-grey leaves and long bottle-brush-type flowers, their cloying fragrance overpowering any scent he may excrete while watching those in the shack.
He curled his hands into two tight fists, cold rage and disgust unfurling in his stomach. How considerate of them to leave the door open.
Stare locked on the two “humans” within the structure’s walls, he studied their actions, noting the smooth, feminine muscles of the female and the coiled, ropey muscles of the male.
The male.
Rourke.
A soft crack shattered the heavy silence in his head and Einar bit back a curse, the dull ache in his jaw telling him he’d ground his jaw so tight one of his molars had fractured.
He pressed his fingers to the side of his face, not daring to rub in case the two in the shack heard the scraping sound of flesh-on-flesh. He ran his stare over the naked form of his ex-partner, mindless to the erotic display. The rage and disgust in his gut twisted into a knot. Marshall Rourke was a dire werewolf.
Disgust turned to contempt and he narrowed his eyes. Icy pain sliced into his head but he ignored it. It was irrelevant, inconsequential. Compared to the revelation he’d just discovered, a broken tooth was nothing. Marshall I’m-Too-Fucking-Righteous Rourke was a dire wolf. How did he not know that? How had the cocky Texan kept that little fact a secret? They’d been partners for years. Years fighting the “good fight”, working so closely together in the hunt and extermination of dangerous paranormal creatures they’d shared the same fucking toothbrush, and he was only discovering now the man was a fucking dire werewolf? A creature as extinct as the thylacine Einar now hunted?
And yet, it explained so much. His phenomenal sense of smell, his preternatural strength and speed, his failure to age in the entire duration they were partners.
His pathetic empathy for paranormals below his own standing.
No wonder he’d never shifted into his wolf form in all the years they were partners. He’d been keeping a big, fat secret.
Einar sank his nails into the centre of his palms. Rourke had fooled him. Fooled the P.A.C. suits as well. All P.A.C. agents were creatures of paranormal origin—they had to be—but only those approved by the Executive Director. A dire wolf, an animal classified extinct for over ten thousand years with little available data known on its behaviour and psyche, was not on that list. Einar himself had needed to jump through more hoops than he’d found comfortable when joining P.A.C. So many hoops his true origin had come close to being discovered.
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