by Various
Manimal
cranium and sharp cheekbones. Only the soft lines of his lips relieved the starkness of his countenance and provided a hint of sensuality.
Kelsey pressed her mouth to his temple before she could give in to the impulse of kissing those lips. A secluded cabin was definitely the place, but this wasn’t the time.
He felt warmer than normal, but not dangerously so. With luck, his temperature wouldn’t go any higher now that they were inside with a fire for warmth and he was wrapped protectively in blankets.
Brushing his hair back one more time, she started to stand when he grabbed her hand and pulled her back down close to him. His eyes were wide open and looking at her.
“This is developing into a bad habit,” she said.
His grip was as solid as iron, and he didn’t even flinch when she twisted her hand one way and then another, trying to break free. He was injured, cold, and possibly ill. It didn’t make sense that she couldn’t overpower him.
But none of this night made sense. Why was he out here in the first place? Why was he buck naked, sporting a hole the size of her fist in his side?
Why had the huge pawprints turned into his footprints?
“I need you,” he whispered, his voice dry and shaky.
For a split second, a canine muzzle replaced his face. She blinked and had the feeling that he had turned from man to beast to man again, rather than the image of a large dog superimposed over him. She shook her head. She was letting her imagination run away with her.
“What do you need?” she asked softly. “I brought plenty of food if you’d like something to eat. Or do you want water?”
His head shook in the negative, one short sharp jerk to the side. “I want you.”
Kelsey frowned. “You want me to what?”
He shook his head again. “I want you, Kelsey. No time to explain, but I need to discharge.”
“You mean you want to…” Her voice trailed off.
“Fuck you.”
Well, that was blunt. During her time with Charles she’d noticed Durak was a man of few words, and when he did speak he said exactly what he needed to say with no embellishment. His being delusional hadn’t changed that.
“You don’t know what you’re saying. You’ve been injured and you’re running a fever. When you get well, then we’ll talk.” She smiled and laid her hand over his to let him know that she was definitely interested.
He shook his head yet again and scowled. “You don’t under STAND—” And his voice rose into a howl of distress. His face once again changed into a canine muzzle and his hand morphed into a huge paw with claws instead of fingers. Almost instantly, he changed back to human.
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With strength born of panic, Kelsey jerked free of his grip. She scrambled away from him and whatever he was. It definitely wasn’t her imagination. She rubbed her wrist where she’d felt thick fur and sharp claws against her skin. Her heart hammered in her chest as she once again recalled how the pawprints had suddenly become footprints in the snow.
“What is going on?” she shouted at him, fear making her voice quiver.
His body jackknifed and he groaned, a deep mournful sound, as fur briefly replaced smooth, taut skin. “Werewolf,” he whispered.
“What? ”
“I’m a werewolf. No time…no…time…” His hand-paw-hand reached for her. “Too much energy. Overload. Can’t control. Need to discharge now—need to fuck you now.”
Kelsey drew back, beyond arm’s length, and watched him. Werewolves weren’t real! Yet, he was changing right before her eyes. And wasn’t that the thought she’d refused to consider while looking at the two sets of prints in the snow? That he’d somehow transmogrified from a four-legged beast into a two-legged human.
What if the reverse occurred right now and he turned completely into a wolf?
Legendary lycanthropes were ravening creatures that slaughtered anyone in their paths. Would he be any different?
Kelsey took a step toward the door, fully intending to run to the SUV and get the hell out of there. But his voice, crackling with the effort, stopped her in her tracks.
“I want you, Kelsey.”
He needed her, but he also wanted her. She looked back and his hand was still stretched out toward her. He wanted her. Didn’t that make all the difference in the world?
“I wish it could be different because I’ve wanted you a long time.”
Kelsey took a step, then hesitated. “I want you, too, but I’m scared.”
“No danger, I promise.” He changed again, from man to wolf to man. “I won’t hurt you.”
With a deep breath, Kelsey made the decision to take a chance and trust him. She took his hand-paw-hand, fascinated by the way it morphed from one to the other. If having sex would release him from this flickering between wolf and human, what else could she do?
Durak threw back the blankets and coat and suddenly the cabin was much too warm for her. His cock was fully erect, long and thick, jutting at an angle from its nest of dark hair. Heat flushed through her, hot desire she hadn’t felt in a long time curling in the pit of her belly. For months, she’d suppressed these feelings for him, thinking he was out of her reach. Now that she could allow them, they consumed her completely.
She undressed quickly, popping buttons in her haste to remove her sweater. She dropped her jeans and panties, already dampened with the juices of her desire, and pulled off boots and socks. She cast her leg over and straddled him. He must have 78
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reached critical because the change between human and wolf accelerated until she wasn’t sure which she’d mount, the man or the animal.
His hands-paws-hands gripped her hips and drove her down onto his cock. Kelsey moaned with the pleasure of him inside her and trembled with her own need. She placed her palms on his chest and closed her eyes. Her back arched as she moved with him, her hips undulating with the rhythm of his as he thrust deep inside her.
Beneath her fingertips, skin changed to fur and back again in a continuous flow. She felt his cock change each time as well. Neither was better nor worse than the other, just different. Both heightened her pleasure, until her throbbing clit reached its own critical stage.
She came, hard, the eruption flashing through her body. Her fingers touched skin-fur-skin and her head fell back. Durak’s thrusts quickened, his hands tightening on her hips, his groin grinding into her sex. As his body stiffened beneath hers, she felt skin against her hands…it was Durak the man releasing hot spurts inside her.
Breathing ragged, Kelsey leaned forward and watched his taut muscled chest rise and fall in deep breaths. Having sex must have worked because he hadn’t morphed since his release. Looking down at him, as she had dreamed of so often in the past few weeks, the idea that he was a werewolf was preposterous.
Her hand trailed down to his side. Still covered in dried blood, the torn edges had closed and the injury was half the size it had been when she first found him.
Less than two hours ago.
No normal person healed that fast. It proved more than anything else that Durak Voronin was something other than human. He was a werewolf.
A breath hitched in her chest and she pulled away from him, removing her hands from him. She had to back away, emotionally as well as physically, from him and what he was. She had to take some time to think.
But Durak caught her hands and intertwined his fingers with hers.
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking up at her through heavy lids.
Kelsey gasped and tears stung her eyes. Oh, wonderful. She had put her life and sanity on the line by having sex with him while he was in the throes of metamorphosis and now he was sorry. She reeled back, yanking her hands away.
“No,” he said and reclaimed her hands, holding tightly even though she struggled to get away. “I’m not sorry we fucked. I wish it had been under different circumstances.
It should have been because we wan
t each other and no other reason.”
Kelsey blinked back the unshed tears. He seemed sincere as he looked at her, his dark eyes intense. She took a deep breath and strengthened her resolve to trust him.
And her own feelings.
“I’m not sorry either.”
He released her and his fingers played lightly over her skin, sending little shivers through her.
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She laid her hands on his chest again. “You don’t feel feverish now.”
“I’m all right. I’ll tell you everything, but now I need…to sleep…” His voice trailed off and his hands stopped caressing her.
Kelsey raised up and looked at him. His eyes were closed and his breathing had evened. He was asleep. She eased out of his arms and stood over him, watching him as he turned on his side and settled in. She covered him with the blanket and afghan.
Man, animal, or manimal, males were all the same.
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Chapter 3
Kelsey drummed her fingers on the kitchen table and stared at the screen of her laptop.
She wrote erotic romances under a pseudonym, carefully protecting her true identity, and only Dee knew what she really did for a living. The rest of her friends and family thought she mooched off her parents until she started telling them she had made some lucky investments on the internet.
It wasn’t exactly a lie. Kelsey was electronically published online and considered it an investment in her writing career every time she connected to the net. She wasn’t rich, but she was making a comfortable living wage off her writing at the ripe old age of 25.
But right now, she couldn’t concentrate on finishing her latest erotic romance, Deep Thrust. And her deadline was Monday. The only deep thrust she could think about was Durak’s…and the heat rose in her cheeks.
While it was fun to write about her heroines having such thoughts, it was an entirely different matter to have them herself.
She never dreamed she’d meet a man who measured up, in every way, to one of her fictional heroes. She had thought Charles should be it. After all, he had everything most fictional heroes possessed. He was handsome and charming, successful and powerful, but he just didn’t quite cut it. He was controlling and too possessive, bordering on obsessive. To be brutally honest, something about Charles made her squeamish, but she wasn’t sure what it was. He didn’t seem…honest. He always acted as if he were hiding something.
She never should have gone out with him in the first place. And she never should have continued dating him because she wasn’t being particularly honest with herself.
The night of the dinner when she found she was instantly attracted to Durak, she should have said no to Charles and approached Durak instead.
Kelsey sighed and rested her chin in her cupped hands. It was always too easy to second-guess one’s decisions in hindsight.
And it was easy to face the truth here in the kitchen in the dead of night, so she had to admit Charles’ obsessive attention wasn’t the only reason she had escaped this weekend. It had been her own obsession with Durak. She hadn’t been able to keep her mind off of him long enough to finish the book. Whenever she tried to write, she spent most of the time daydreaming about him. A weekend away served double duty. It got her away from Charles and drove home the fact that she needed to get the book finished.
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But here he was, dropped in her lap, so to speak. It was difficult to stop thinking about a man when he was in the next room, naked, and she had already had sex with him once. She had the opportunity she’d desired, and she’d certainly taken advantage of it.
In her daydreams, one time with Durak was enough to satisfy her lust. In reality, she knew she’d never get enough of him. Hell, he had surpassed anything in her wildest imagination. And they weren’t really trying. She couldn’t imagine what would happen when they did try.
And then there was that werewolf thing.
Weird, that’s what it was. If she hadn’t witnessed the shifting from man to beast with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have believed it. And now that she’d had a couple of hours to get used to the idea, the only thing she was sure of was that she still wanted Durak. No matter what he was.
“Writing your next best-seller, Ms. L’Amour?”
Kelsey gasped and turned to find Durak standing in the doorway. He was no longer naked, unfortunately. After she hauled her supplies from the SUV, she had found some clothes that Dee’s family kept stashed at the cabin and left them beside the couch for him. Dee’s brother’s jeans fit him well enough, although they were a little short. Durak wouldn’t have fit into his shirts, and Kelsey had to raid Dee’s father’s closet to find a shirt to accommodate his broad shoulders. A pair of his boots fit well enough, too.
“I thought you were still asleep.” Kelsey frowned. “And how do you know about Cherie L’Amour?”
Durak grinned and came to sit in a chair next to her.
“Charles Leland had me investigate you months ago.”
Kelsey closed the file and snapped the laptop shut. She had added a final love scene to her novel that duplicated what she and Durak had done on the couch. Without the werewolf stuff, of course. Beyond that, she hadn’t been able to write another word because her thoughts were consumed with Durak.
“Charles never said anything.”
“Because I never told him.”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t any of his business.”
Kelsey nodded. “Thank you. I’ve worked at keeping a low profile. Shadow Valley is such a small town, the news would spread like wildfire. I don’t want the attention.”
“I bought all your books and read a couple of them.”
She waited. He would either like them or hate them. When he didn’t say anything more, she stood and walked to the counter. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Yes, thank you.”
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She poured him a mug and handed it to him, then refilled hers, adding powdered creamer and sugar. She stirred it slowly, not at all ready to return to her seat and face him.
“I’m more of a visual person like most men,” he finally said. “But I enjoyed them.
You have a way with words. Your descriptive passages created nice pictures in my mind.”
“Thank you.” The awkward moment had passed and she sat down. “How’s your side?”
“Almost healed.” He raised the shirt to show her.
He had washed up before dressing as there was no trace of blood. A little puckering of skin was the only sign of the injury.
“That’ll disappear in a few more hours,” he added.
“Have you always been—you know…”
“A werewolf?”
Kelsey laughed a bit uncomfortably. “Yeah, a werewolf. It’s still hard to believe.”
“I was born a werewolf. My father is one, but my mother is fully human. So you see, I’m only half werewolf. I think that explains what happened earlier.”
“No, actually it doesn’t explain anything. How did you get that injury?”
Durak took a sip of coffee. “Leland ordered me to keep tabs on you. When I reported you were packing to leave, he suspected you were going off to meet another man for the weekend. I tried to tell him there had been no indication you were seeing another man, but he insisted I follow you.”
Kelsey slammed down her mug. “You know I broke it off with him weeks ago. He has no right!”
Durak nodded. “I agree. I tried to tell him that, too, but he threatened my job if I didn’t do as I was told.”
“Why do you continue to work for him? You obviously have excellent skills if you dug up that I’m Cherie L’Amour. You could get another job anywhere.”
Durak hesitated. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you why. Just know that I have to work for him for a while longer, and it is temporary.”
That sounded fishy. But he had kept h
er secret and she could do no less than not pry into his. “All right.”
“Because I’m only half werewolf, I need to shift regularly to keep everything in balance. It’s been a while, so I thought I’d follow you as a wolf. There’s a full moon tonight and that makes shifting easier. I knew you weren’t going to meet a man, and I didn’t think you were going far. And the run would do me good.”
“How did you get hurt?”
“Someone was following me.”
“Someone?”
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“Sam Brady.”
The other bodyguard-slash-henchman. “Oh, Durak, then he knows what you are.”
He nodded grimly. “I was distracted by you and didn’t notice anyone tracking me.
When I realized you were on Old Stanfield Road and headed for Lake Passion, I took the more direct route through the forest. I had been waiting at a place about a mile back down the road for some time. That allowed Brady to catch up to me and he shot me.”
“That was a bullet wound?” Kelsey cried out.
“It wasn’t a silver bullet or I’d be dead now. Brady must not have known what I was until I shifted to follow you. He wasn’t prepared.”
“If he didn’t suspect you of being a werewolf, then why was he following you?”
“I have an idea, but I can’t talk about it.” Durak sipped more coffee indicating that line of conversation was closed. “I ran but only about a mile. I was hurt too badly. Then all I could do was limp, and I thought I should be near the road again to watch for you.
And then I shifted without conscious effort. I stumbled out of the trees, and that’s when you came along.”
“I thought I saw a large dog or something at the side of the road before you stepped in front of me.”
“I was producing energy to fight the wound and heal it, but it was too much. That’s a result of being only half werewolf. My system takes too much time to adjust to changes. By the time I adjusted, my body was on overload and had to release the excess energy.”
“Like walking across a carpet will build up static electricity and touching something releases the charge?”