Luke nuzzled the nape of her neck. "Because of what we are," he whispered, "we are blessed with two worlds. The true wolves live in innocence, even when they kill. But they are helpless to control their world or fight it when it breaks the pattern and turns on them. We have the ability to choose our destiny, to run as wolves but not be bound to the harshness of their existence. It is the gift we have been given. Not to use that gift..." He broke off when her fingers came up to grip his forearms with desperate intensity.
"I'm not ready." Her breath shuddered. "I'm not ready to be what you are, Luke. Not yet."
He soothed her with his voice and hands while her trembling subsided. "Don't be afraid, Joelle. There will be all the time you need to accept the gift and make it a part of you."
"And if I can't accept it?"
Her question made him close his eyes. This thing, this one thing, must be her choice. He had taken too much from her already.
"No one will force you, Joelle. You must want the change to make it happen. Only you can control it."
That much was absolute truth, and he savagely rejected the powerful desire to release her from her fears and make her want it, as he had freed her of the demands of past and future. To know and feel what she was, and never to have her run beside him—that would be a loss and a tragic waste, but not beyond bearing. Not as long as she stayed with him.
He knew his words had penetrated, for her body loosened again, sliding along his until the water almost touched her chin. "Thank you, Luke," she murmured. "For explaining and for understanding."
The stab of guilt he felt then pierced his heart. She believed she had something to thank him for. In her innocence she trusted him. She had given everything, and he had taken what she offered and gone beyond to steal what she did not yet know how to give.
Suddenly the savage pain of his thoughts twisted within him, and he felt his hands moving down to her hips, sliding up to her waist with an urgency impossible to deny. He knew it when she came to full awareness, her nipples already hard as his hands closed over her breasts, pulling her against his rigid flesh. He growled her name into her neck, biting her there not quite gently, hearing her gasp and knowing it was excitement and not fear by the heat of her body when he touched the place he longed to possess.
She gasped again, hard and ragged, when he pulled her up with him, the water streaming in rivulets over her tantalizing skin. He pressed into her softness as he licked the wetness from her shoulders, her neck, the delicate and sensitive flesh that trembled under his tongue. When he turned her in his arms and sucked the drops that clung to her nipples, she arched against him and cried out, burying her fingers deeply in his hair with a frenzy that matched his own. She wanted this, without gentleness, as he wanted to take without asking. Her breasts rose and fell sharply as he stroked them, drawing the water away until none remained, following the curve of her body to her belly as he lifted her. Her thighs clenched around his hips, silken bonds that claimed him as he cupped the sweet curve of her buttocks in his hands.
Her body was like fire when he thrust into her, one hard stroke into her molten core. She flung back her head and clutched his shoulders, moaning as he carried her across the room and through the door, so deeply inside her that he could not conceive of withdrawing. But his body was demanding release, and so he moved, he watched her face, eyelids fluttering, lips parted in passion, her breath coming hard and fast in time to his driving rhythm.
He stopped once, to ease her back onto the bed, pulling free of her long enough to feel the ache that could only be relieved by losing himself deep within her. It was her hands that urged him down, her eyes swallowed in black and gold fire that begged for her own sweet release.
"Do you want this, Joey?" he growled, hovering at the entrance of her body, stroking the quivering, moist flesh with his own hardness. "Do you want me and everything I am?"
Her eyes opened, and for a single blazing instant they looked deeply into his soul. "Yes."
There was a certainty and acceptance in that one gasped word that came from a place he could not touch, beyond the reach of his influence, beyond even the rule of her own intellect. "Yes, I want you, Luke. All of you."
With a groan of overwhelming need Luke plunged down and sank deep within her. Her body arched to accept him, and in that moment she made a gift of what he would have taken, so that his guilt and fury were shattered in the sublime and terrible moment of release.
Chapter Eighteen
Winter arrived to grip Luke's world with its perpetual cold and endless snowfalls, providing ample opportunities for use of the new bathtub, and sometimes even for long, hot soaks that Joey appreciated as the blissful luxuries they were.
Luke spent the days with her, except when he went for his runs, alone or with either of the two packs that accepted: him that of the village, and that of the true wolves whose territory overlapped the boundaries of his land. In the evenings Joey worked her way through Luke's extensive collection of books as he carved his graceful wooden beasts, and they often talked by firelight long into the night before making love.
It was during these quiet intervals that Joey drew Luke most completely out of himself. She learned that he was as intensely interested in discussion and debate as she was and as fully capable of it, they fell frequently into long silences that never seemed awkward, but for the first time Luke seemed as ready to fill the quiet as keep it. Their lovemaking made him gentle and fiercely vulnerable and sometimes exposed more of him than he might have wished, but their long evening talks revealed his intense curiosity, his hunger for knowledge, and his driving need to understand what he was.
One night while Joey was curled up on the sofa, frowning over a passage in a particularly large and imposing volume, she looked up to find him watching her from his chair across the room, such an unguarded expression of tenderness on his face that the text fled her mind in a rush. His eyes transfixed her, and she stuttered out the first thing that came into her head. "Silver bullets!"
Luke raised his eyebrows in question, almost smiling. "I mean," she amended quickly, "the legends all say that silver bullets..." She trailed off as heat rushed into her face.
"Kill werewolves?" Luke supplied amiably.
Joey felt her flush deepening. "Well, it doesn't seem very logical to me, but—"
"Neither does anything else," he finished for her. Setting his most recent carving aside, he stretched his long legs toward the fire. "That's a legend with very little truth to it. There are no particularly deadly qualities to silver bullets, not for us." Abruptly his face grew serious, and he glanced aside at the two wolf pelts hung on the wall. "A sufficient number of the regular kind will do the job." There was enough bitter memory in his words that Joey felt no desire to pursue the topic.
She flipped a few pages of the book in her lap and changed the subject. "What about full moons?" She said it playfully, trying to win back his smile; he turned his attention to her and visibly relaxed. "I haven't seen any evidence so far that one is required," she added with a grin.
Luke surprised her by laughing, a brief, dark chuckle. "The change isn't subject to the phases of the moon or of any other supernatural force. " His eyes sparked on hers. "It comes with the end of childhood and, barring certain circumstances, is under our control entirely after that."
Shifting to ease a cramp in her legs, Joey gnawed her lower lip. "Then where do you suppose all these legends started—silver bullets and full moons and the like?"
"We don't know all the answers." Luke nodded toward the shelves of books that lined three of the walls. "Ever since I learned what I was, I began to collect books, magazines, anything that could tell me the things I needed to know. All I found were scraps, most so distorted that they had no bearing on our reality."
"Such as," Joey consulted the text in her lap, "a lust for human blood?"
Luke grimaced. "Humans fear what they don't understand. That never changes. Though it's possible," he added reluctantly, "that some of our k
ind, our ancestors in Europe, went rogue and took the easiest prey." His expression was grim. "Which makes us no worse than humankind."
Joey swallowed, knowing that his "us" included herself. Not quite human—or more than human.
"As for full moons," he continued, "it may be that we were simply more visible then. European peasants didn't have the benefit of electricity. You've seen what the light of a full moon can do out here."
Leaning an elbow on the armrest of the sofa, Joey dropped her chin in her hand. "It's breathtaking, the way the moon and stars light up the night sky. Back home..." She blinked, suddenly confused. For a moment she struggled to regain her train of thought. Whatever she had been about to say drifted away like windblown snow. "I can see you've given this a lot of thought," she said at last, smiling into his eyes. "Which is exactly what I would have done if I—if I had known."
Luke rose to his feet, moving to the hearth to stare into the fire. "When I first learned what I was—just after my mother died—I was too isolated to understand all the changes." He gave a harsh laugh. "Too many things happened too fast. I'd lost my mother, found Val Cache—and changed, all in the same brief span of time. I knew I had to keep what I was hidden from the other kids in school, even though there were several occasions when I was sorely tempted to change right in the middle of class and chase a few bullies around the room."
Joey laughed, imagining just such a scene, and Luke's smile was less strained as he looked at her. "About six months after my mother died, there was a series of old movies shown in the theater in East Fork. One of them was The Wolf Man."
"The one with Lon Chaney, Jr ?" Joey asked.
"Yes. And of course I had to see it, thinking I might learn something. I badgered Allan for days to take me into East Fork."
"Don't tell me," Joey said with a grin. "He kept saying no, and you never left him alone until you got your way."
Luke arched a dark eyebrow. "I usually do."
There was a sudden sinister quality to his voice that made Joey shake her head.
"Allan finally found the time to take me in for a matinee. I remember feeling stunned by what I saw on the screen. I didn't know whether to laugh or take offense. Even then I knew enough to realize how much they'd twisted what we were."
"You didn't see it as a curse," she said softly, as much statement as question.
"Being what I am?" Luke shook his head. "No. Even though it had killed my mother." He turned away quickly so that she could not see his eyes. "Even when I didn't understand it, it was a marvel to me. But after I saw the movie, I had a hunger to know more. To see the truth behind what I was. That evening when we returned to town, I tried to make myself become what I had seen."
Joey started. "A real werewolf? The kind that… ?"
"Is neither man nor wolf, but something in between? Yes." Shuddering visibly, he looked back at her again. "It was not pleasant."
"Then you can't take that form—the one that all the legends seem fixated on?"
"It might be possible," he admitted, lifting his upper lip, "but I would never want to try it again. It was exceedingly painful. Unnatural. That was my first real lesson."
Unnatural. Joey tested the word. "Being what you are," she said at last, "is natural. Part of the pattern."
His eyes brightened at her understanding. "We live within the pattern, as much as we can." All at once the green-gold of his gaze darkened to dull verdigris. "It gets harder every year. When I was old enough to use the money my father had set aside for me, I bought up as much land as possible, as many acres as money could buy. To protect the wilderness, my people, and the true wolves who held this land before we did."
Joey closed her eyes, too many thoughts and emotions crowding together behind them. There was silence for a long moment, and then Luke's weight settled on the sofa beside her, and his arms drew her in. His presence and his warmth stilled her brain's mad whirling, and she opened her eyes to the silver beam of the moon trailing a bright path from the near window, drawing them close in gossamer bonds of light.
The bond between them grew stronger as winter threw up almost impenetrable walls that locked the cabin in a world out of time, the snowbound woods became the bars of a sweet cage Joey had no desire to escape.
She heard the eerie whine of the winds lament at night when she lay beside Luke after their lovemaking, unafraid because it could not reach her, kept at bay by the sturdy cabin walls and the steady cadence of his heartbeat under her cheek. She thought at times she almost understood the gale's language, it hovered just beyond her grasp, like the vague memories and faded images that haunted the edges of sleep. It was only when the wind cried and snow slapped against the windows, deep into the night, that she reached within herself to find the stillness and wonder why it seemed to hide uneasy secrets.
But the days always came too brightly to permit the presence of shadows.
There were still countless new things to be learned from Luke, and about him—and for him to learn of her. And there were surprises, the bathtub had been only the first of many gifts he brought her through the long season of cold.
The second surprise came at a time of the year that Joey had almost forgotten, so little had she noticed the passing of the days and nights. One morning she woke to the sharp, resiny scent of the forest, and when she got out of bed to trace it—and Luke—she found him flat on his back in a corner of the main room, muttering softly to himself as he worked at the base of a small and very fat fir.
"No peeking," he commanded, spitting out needles. "Go back to bed and stay there until I come get you."
The implication of the tree, and the overwhelming emotions it evoked, gave Joey little inclination to argue. She sat up in the bed and pulled the blankets up over her knees, listening to the tattoo of a hammer, Luke's almost inaudible footfalls, and her own rapid heartbeat. She had nearly forgotten. There were teasing, haunting images again of Christmases long ago with her parents, trees that towered above her head, dazzling with light and promise. The past.
It was a blur, almost lost, almost without meaning. But the tree had shaken her unquestioning contentment, revealed things that had been hidden, and she felt her eyes filling in response to emotions that hung suspended within her, bereft of the anchor of concrete memory.
When Luke came for her, the tears were gone, and the images had faded again. She was left with little time to brood. He stood back to watch her as she took it in the chubby little tree hung with strings of berries and with his animals—dozens of them, small delicate wooden figurines strung over the branches—simple but profound beyond words. She flung herself at him so hard that they almost went down together amid the fallen needles, and it was some time before she had any desire to speak. She hadn't meant to cry again, but the tears came back in spite of her sternest efforts. Luke held her tightly until the last of them had dried.
"Do you like it?" Luke asked gruffly. She looked at his face, it was carefully blank, as if he were preparing himself for a painful rejection of his gift.
Her heart melted. "Luke, whenever I start to think you're the most unusual man I've ever known, you ask a question like that. Of course I like it." She flung her arms around his waist and dropped a kiss at the base of his neck, he pulled her up and returned it enthusiastically.
"How did you know?" she said softly after she had caught her breath again. They had settled down on the floor before the tree, the smell of fir was pungent and wonderful. "I'd almost forgotten... " She blinked several times. Whenever she thought of passing time, or the past, or the future, it was as if the corners of her mind were lost in shadow. "I've always loved Christmas trees."
Luke arched his jaw along the top of her head, his voice vibrating into her bones. "I knew. I guessed. Does it matter?"
Shaking her head, Joey leaned back to gaze at the tree, not missing electric lights or glittering tinsel. At last she found the gifts, wrapped in plain brown paper, half-hidden under the lowest branches. "Are those for me?" she whispered i
diotically. She turned into his chest and hid her face there, too moved and too vulnerable to do more than shiver.
He pried her away and cupped her face in his hands. "I wish I could give you more, Joelle. Everything. All the things you deserve." His kiss was gentle, tender rather than sensual. Her heart skipped a beat, and she spread her hands against his chest for support.
"And is it Christmas yet?" she murmured, knowing how absurd she must look and sound, knowing that Luke didn't care.
The smile he gave her was a gift in itself. "Tomorrow. Today is Christmas Eve."
"Then I guess I'll have to wait," she sighed, leaning back into the cradle of his arms.
Luke chuckled into her hair. "Somewhere in the world," he reminded her softly, "it's the right time." He eased her away from him and retrieved two of the gifts-each a flat box, neatly but plainly wrapped, a cluster of autumn's bright leaves at the center in place of ribbons—and presented them to her gravely.
Her fingers were trembling as she opened the first. The long chemise was of sheerest silk, flowing like water in her hands, pale silver-gold in the filtered light. There was nothing deliberately risque in the cut of it, or in the delicate matching robe she found in the second box. Nothing but the sensual sheerness of it that stroked her skin like Luke's kisses. "The color of your hair," Luke explained, his lips caressing her cheek.
"It's beautiful," she whispered Luke had never cared that all she wore each day were the same jeans and oversized shirts, but suddenly Joey felt genuinely worthy of the gift Genuinely as beautiful as he claimed She closed her eyes and rubbed the wisps of silk against her skin The feel of it kindled a warmth deep within her, she opened her eyes to see the same heat reflected in Luke's
She leaned against him, letting the silk flow into her lap. "I don't have anything for you," she admitted sadly.
"Oh, yes, Joelle. You do. " His touch turned the warmth into a blaze. There were many gifts yet to be given.
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