by SM Reine
The image of being mounted suddenly smashed into me unbidden—being pinned by Trouble’s giant hands as his weight covered me, having his body forced into mine in a way that was much more animal than human. Being dominated. Owned. Marked. The idea didn’t scare me. It made heat thrill through my stomach.
That moment of fantasy passed, and I flipped over onto my back to see Trouble rearing over me on his knees. He straddled my legs. It was a position that would have been sexy a moment ago, since it put me up close and personal with the fly of his jeans. But now his seams were straining and it wasn’t because he was growing long and thick with arousal.
It was because he was…shifting.
I realized belatedly that there was a howling wolf tattooed on his chest—a huge, vicious beast with bared fangs just like Trouble’s.
But the change didn’t stop with his teeth. His spine arched. With a muffled crack, his nose and jaw began elongating to accommodate his growing fangs. His ears were becoming more pointed. His nails were becoming claws.
I thought of the tarot card. The Devil, number fifteen. I thought of his claws and salacious leer.
My mouth dropped open. I couldn’t breathe again, and this time, it wasn’t with lust.
Fur erupted over his shoulders, growing shaggy down his arms.
This guy was just between my legs.
I tried to squirm out from under him and couldn’t. He was heavy.
“Gloria!”
She couldn’t hear me. It was too loud in the bar.
All I could do was lie back as Trouble’s spine wrenched to the side. The change was hurting him. His howls were pained.
Momentary sympathy fluttered through my chest. “Stop,” I said, reaching for him.
He swatted my hands away, tearing at his own chest with claws that were each as long as a knife.
I was going to be slaughtered by a biker that was turning into a wolf, and nobody would even know until the sun rose.
And then I heard another howl—not Trouble’s, but a response from behind me. I craned around to see a beast flash through the night, rushing down the hill toward us. It had four legs, a tail, a ruff of fur around its neck. Definitely a wolf.
I knew wild dogs. I shot coyotes that got brave enough to creep up on us all the time. But this? This was too big to be an ordinary wolf. It was large enough to be a pony.
It was coming right at us.
“Watch out!” I shrieked. I didn’t know why I was warning Trouble—he had attacked me, bitten my thigh, refused to let me escape. But I suddenly feared for him. I wanted him to run, stay away from this new monster.
Before Trouble could even think to react, the wolf broadsided him, and they rolled into the sagebrush.
I screamed, hands flying to my mouth.
A smart girl would have gone back to the bar. But I ran over on wobbling legs to see Trouble underneath the wolf, jaws locked on his throat.
I swung a kick at the beast. “Let him go!” My Lucite heel connected with its skull. The wolf whirled on me, baring its teeth with a drooling snarl. One of its eyes was missing. Shock staggered me. “Big Papa?”
The wolf closed his teeth around Trouble’s neck, now covered in a thick ruff of fur.
He dragged the man deeper into the sage. They were both gone in seconds, and the night was silent.
IV
I didn’t realize that I had fallen asleep until I woke up to knocking at my front door.
Shock washed through me, cold and hot and tingling all at once. I had been dreaming of the week that I was given my scars again, lost in a hurricane of pain and fear, and I was disoriented to wake up free. The sight of the powder-blue walls and white furniture confused me even though I understood, rationally, that I had been waking up within those four walls for months now.
This was home. Yet something was amiss.
Someone knocked at my front door again, and the jolt of shock was even worse the second time. Probably because I knew who was knocking. There was no doubt in my mind who would be visiting me when the blue light of pre-dawn hadn’t even given way to sunlight.
Gloria had been angry at me for running out the night before, and angrier still when I hadn’t told her why my costume was destroyed, or why I was going home early. She was mean when she got pissed. She wouldn’t be speaking to me for days. Johnny and the whores, on the other hand, knew better than to darken my doorstep.
That only left one possible visitor.
Kicking off my sheets, I grabbed Little Bo Peep off the wall by my bed. Tucked her under my arm. Answered the door.
Trouble swayed on my step.
He was naked. It was the third and most powerful shock of my morning, and I hadn’t even been awake for five minutes yet. My eyes traveled down his sweaty, dirty chest, torn ragged by tooth and claw marks. I wasn’t sure why I was surprised to find that he was still hairless, but I was. Guess I’d expected that he would have to keep all that rust-brown fur once it had grown on him.
I hated that my body reacted to the sight of the cock hanging between his legs, heavy and large even when he wasn’t erect. I hated that he had almost bitten me the night before and that I still wanted to stroke him to life in my hand, in my mouth, between my legs.
And I really hated that it took me so long to get around to meeting his eyes.
The look he gave me was hollow. Pained.
I lifted Bo Peep to my shoulder and aimed her at his chest.
“Get the fuck off my doorstep.” I hoped that he would think my voice was quivering with rage.
Trouble’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, flashing the whites at me.
He collapsed bonelessly at my feet.
I jumped back. “Hijo de puta,” I swore, borrowing one of Gloria’s favorite curses. To her, every single man was an hijo de puta—a son of a bitch—and I was pretty sure that she would include Trouble in that assessment. Yet a maternal aching blossomed in my chest at the sight of the huge man unconscious, injured, and vulnerable on my step.
He wasn’t vulnerable. Not really. He was a fucking monster, a beast that shapeshifted into a wolf when the moon was high. I didn’t owe him anything. Not a second chance or a safe haven or even the time of day.
That was rationality speaking. Rationality also wanted me to deliver a swift kick to his shoulder, roll him off my steps, and lock the door behind him.
Rationality had never been one of my strong suits.
I forced my stiff hands to uncurl from the trigger, blowing out a slow breath. I set my shotgun against the wall. Peered out the door to see if anyone was watching. There were camps across the road from the bar, men who hadn’t found space at The Lodge or didn’t want to pay for it, but nobody close enough to see that Trouble was visiting me. Johnny and Gloria’s trailers were also dark. Neither of them were home. They were probably still working.
Whispering a prayer to deaf gods, I hooked my hands under Trouble’s armpits and hauled his unconscious ass into my trailer.
Trouble barely fit into my twin bed. He was too lanky. His muscular arms and legs spilled off the sides, dwarfing all my furniture, making my bedroom look like it belonged to a little girl.
Somehow, I managed to pile him up on top of my comforter. He was going to get his stink on all of my belongings. I thought that should probably annoy me, but it didn’t.
He began to stir when I wiped him down with a damp rag, but the struggle toward consciousness was slow. Judging by how thoroughly he had been chewed around the shoulders and back, it looked like he had lost his fight against the wolf the night before. It chilled me how similar his wounds were to mine, though they had been inflicted by completely different tools. I hadn’t been mauled by a wolf. My attacker had been something much worse.
Strangely, Trouble’s wounds—though bloody—looked like they were already halfway healed. The skin was trying to close.
It didn’t surprise me at this point. I didn’t think anything would surprise me ever again.
I took the quiet mi
nutes where he began to rouse to explore the rest of his body: the large wolf tattooed across his chest, the stubble near his navel where he needed to shave his happy trail again, the silvery scars over his ribcage. Those scars were the most interesting. I could only see them if I tilted my head the right way. They were big, too—four long gashes.
I spread my hand over the scar and fitted my fingertips to them. Whatever had delivered that wound had been twice the size of my hand.
My skin brushed his. Trouble’s fist clamped on my wrist.
I sucked in a hard breath, trying to pull back, but his grip was iron. His eyes opened and there was no struggle for consciousness within him now. He was awake. And he looked angry.
If he didn’t want me pawing his scars, then maybe he should have thought twice about falling down on my doorstep. “Let go of me,” I snapped, twisting my hand and jerking my arm toward me. I escaped the circle of his fingers. “You don’t touch me like that. Not ever again. You hear me, Trouble? I’m not a piece of meat for the Fang Brothers to chew on.”
He said, “Cooper.”
“What?”
“Cooper,” Trouble repeated, and it occurred to me that I had never heard him speak before. His voice was pleasantly gravelly. His accent was American, probably western side of the country, maybe even Californian—where I had come from originally. “My name’s Cooper.”
I tried the name out on my tongue, rolling it between my teeth. “Cooper.”
He gave a low growl, rumbling so softly through his chest that I wasn’t initially sure that it was coming from him. Fire sparked in his golden eyes.
There was something intimate about saying his name. Those simple syllables. I felt like he had just shared a secret with me, something dark and illicit that I wasn’t meant to know.
He lifted his hand toward my shoulder, and I jerked in anticipation of a violent touch. He froze at my reaction. Watched me closely. Waited to see if I would move.
After the previous night’s passion, it felt so strange to hesitate now. I didn’t want to fear him. My whole body ached for him, like I had become lost in the desert for days and he was the oasis on the other side of an impassible canyon. I wanted to throw myself across that distance.
But Pops, my grandpa, hadn’t raised a dumbass. I could be a dumbass sometimes, granted, but that was despite his best efforts. He’d drilled as much sense into me as I could take. And Pops’s girl wasn’t dumb enough to allow herself to get bitten twice.
I scooted back on the bed. Just an inch. I might as well have put a whole prison wall topped with barbed wire between us because Cooper’s expression shuttered and anger furrowed his brow.
Dipping the towel back into my bowl of water, I forced myself to concentrate on the ugly flower pattern rimming my dishes, not the pain in my chest that told me to surrender to all of Cooper’s whims.
“Now, here’s how the rest of the morning is going to play out, Trouble,” I said, carefully choosing not to use his real name. “I’m going to clean you up a bit because you’re making a mess of my house. While I’m doing that, you’re going to tell me exactly what happened last night, starting with the moment you came into my bar and ending with your collapse on my doorstep. And if you think you can skip anything in between, you’ve got another thing coming.”
I washed the blood off of his left shoulder. It was a safe place to touch, relative to his abs and everything below that.
He didn’t start talking.
“Well?” I prompted.
When he remained silent, I dared to glance up, meeting his eyes.
His gaze stabbed through me.
My hand had stopped moving and I wasn’t sure when it had happened. My knuckles were brushing his hip. He was so very warm, radiating heat like the sun-baked earth at mid-afternoon. “What are the Fang Brothers doing here?” I asked, but I didn’t manage a lot of conviction in that question.
“This is where they find the new guys,” Cooper said.
My eyebrows climbed my forehead. “The new guys? You mean, the new…” I stuttered over the word. I felt stupid even thinking it. “Werewolves.”
He nodded slowly, like it pained him.
“Are you new at this?” I asked. Another nod. That little gesture chipped away at my resolve and let the maternal warmth come creeping back. Silly to want to protect such a big guy. Probably outright stupid. “Did you know you were going to change last night?”
He leaned forward slightly so that I could wash around his shoulder blade. He didn’t even flinch when I touched his healing wounds. “Yes, but I smelled you, and I couldn’t stay away.”
“Smelled me?”
“You were calling for me with your body.”
Heat flushed my cheeks. Was it possible that he could smell my body when I danced? That I had somehow put some kind of sexy pheromones out into the universe, and that he had responded?
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised by the idea, or even all that weirded out by it. If I were to be honest with myself, I had been calling to him. Not just my body, but my mind and heart.
I’d been calling to him since the first moment I saw him. Maybe I had always been calling for him, even before we met.
The Devil, number fifteen, flashed through my mind again. The grinning satyr, the naked lovers.
I didn’t know what to think about that line of conversation, so I didn’t think about it. I wiped across his chest. Up his neck. Behind his jaw. There was blood caked under his ear but I didn’t see a wound.
He kept staring at me like that as I cleaned him, as if I were saying something immensely interesting, even though we sat in silence together. He didn’t move as I sponged a path from his clavicle down to his abs again. He wasn’t bloody there, but he didn’t protest at my touch, either.
Something about the stubble down there was kinda cute. One little flaw to humanize an otherwise flawless body.
“Why are you smiling?” he asked.
“You don’t seem like a shaving guy,” I said, squeezing the towel out in the bowl. The water was rusty brown.
He shrugged one shoulder. Even that small gesture seemed to take a lot of effort. “It’s one way to…” He struggled to find a word, searching my face as if I might have all the answers. “It’s how I keep control.”
My fist clenched on the rag. “Because you grow fur on full moons.” I ran the cloth over his chest again, watching the water course down his pectorals and become redirected by the natural channels in his abs. I thought about tracing that path with my tongue.
How quickly I was willing to forget the terror of his fangs against my tender inner thigh.
“Tell me how it happened,” I said. “Tell me how you became a werewolf.”
Guess I wasn’t real surprised that he remained silent, but I was disappointed.
The pain in his eyes was palpable. The darkness.
I traced my fingertip around the edge of the scars again, careful not to touch them. “It looks like it must have hurt.”
He flinched. “It did.”
I was done cleaning him. I’d washed every inch that I could touch without crossing my newly discovered boundaries. If I went any farther south than his navel, I wasn’t going to be able to control myself anymore—I could already feel that insane, intense need that had driven me the night before clawing at my gut.
Setting the bowl aside, I dried my hands on my pajama pants. They were patterned with Christmas penguins. Yeah, I wear them year ‘round, even when it’s hot. The penguins are cute. “Is Big Papa your…uh… I don’t know the word. Leader?”
“Alpha,” he said. “Sorta, yeah. It’s hard to explain.”
I guess I didn’t really care anyway. “He was the wolf.”
Cooper nodded.
That meant that Big Papa might have saved me. I didn’t like the thought that Cooper would have hurt me, nor did I like the idea that I might be indebted to the one-eyed leader of his biker gang, but it seemed like I at least owed the man a drink.
“I thin
k maybe next time you know you’re going to change, you stay out of my bar,” I said, keeping my eyes lowered. “I can’t do anything about you and your gang being in Lobo Norte. We need your business. But I don’t need your business on those kinds of nights, so you keep your distance.”
“Then don’t dance,” Cooper said.
I clenched my hands into fists. I’d known that it would come to this—that he was going to be pissed I’d danced for Mad Dog. “Nobody tells me what to do. If you’re going to get all jealous of me, then you need to stay away from my bar every night, because that’s how I make my living. And you can just deal with that.”
“Just not on the moons,” he said.
“Yes, on the moons. On any fucking night I want.”
“You don’t get it,” he said with sudden heat. “I don’t care if you dance for Mad Dog. I don’t even care if you dance for Papa. You dance whenever you want for anyone you want, except on the moons, because that’s how you stay safe. And when you dance, you remember that you’re still mine.”
Those were the most words I had heard him string together so far. And it had been to declare me his property.
I liked the sound of that. I liked it a lot.
Too much, actually.
“I barely know you,” I whispered.
His fingers dug into my wrist and turned it, exposing the tender flesh on the underside of my forearm. Still watching my eyes, still so very careful, he lifted my palm to his lips. His breath was hot on my hand. His stubble grazed that delicate flesh as he drew a line from my pulse point to the inside of my elbow.
Cooper paused at the junction between forearm and bicep. He pressed a warm kiss there. His nose brushed my shoulder as he pulled me just a little closer, leaning forward to place a second kiss on the side of my neck.
“Mine,” Cooper said. “I knew it the moment I smelled you.” His hand cupped my head. A whimper escaped my throat. “And you do smell…amazing.”
Fighting against the urge to climb on top of him made my whole body tremble. I wanted to melt together. Make our bodies one piece. “What does it mean?” I asked, barely able to breathe.