Spring Feve

by Emerald Wright

  Exasperated, I balled up my fists and drove them into the small of my back. “Are you two just going to dance around all night?”

  Both of them turned to me, and immediately the heat in my cheeks went up about eighty degrees. “Well! I just agreed to marry him! And now you show up for God knows what reason. I want this shit over with! Have it out, beat each other up again, do whatever you’re going to do, but right now you’re both just ruining my getting engaged. This is not how I imagined it!”

  “She’s certainly something, all right,” Dane said in his cocky asshole voice. “I’ll give you that. Those hips, too.” He made a kissing noise. “I’m going to love taking her for my own. I don’t know what you’re going to do when she finds out about the challenge. You did tell her, didn’t you?”

  Before that could process, Dane threw a punch that caught Jake square in the mouth, though Jake took it like nothing happened. “Get out,” he snarled.

  And then, something started... happening.

  “Oh dear,” Barney sighed. “I’d say you should look away, as the transformation process can be a bit jarring, but I suppose if you’re to be the vita... At least these two have been doing it for a good while, so it should be too—”

  I squeaked something similar to a curse as my fiancé hunched over, his hands twisted and stretched, and the front of his head elongated into something halfway between a nose and a snout. He gnashed his teeth, threw back his now slate-gray head and unleashed a roar that shook the pumpkin nearest him on the table. He flung his head from left to right, roaring in what was either extreme pain, or maybe felt really good. Teeth became daggers, fingernails extended into black claws, and his already muscular body thickened with long, tight muscles.

  The buttons of his beautiful, tailored shirt popped, one after another, and his tight slacks ripped up the side seam. Good thing I can sew, I guess.

  And for some reason, he got extremely bad posture out of the whole deal. He hunched forward, muscles in his back apparent with each breath that expanded his lungs.

  “You... want it your way?” he snapped. His voice was difficult to understand, as though he hadn’t spoken in quite a while and was getting back in practice. “Fine, brother. Leave her out of this.”

  “But Jacob,” Dane had an obnoxious, lecturing mother tone in his voice. “She’s what all this is about. How can I leave my mate-to-be out of this? I’m going to murder you, claim her, and then take my rightful place as the head of this family and alpha of the pack.”

  As I watched, Dane went through a similar process to Jake, although his seemed much easier – maybe he was more used to the whole thing? He seemed extremely comfortable in his half-lupine skin. His fur was inky black, just like his eyes. “Their eyes match their... uh... fur?”

  There was a lump in my throat, which I had to swallow four or five times to push down. “I can’t believe I’m taking this all so well.”

  “You’re in shock,” Barney said. “You’ll have a panic when the adrenaline passes. Also, no, eyes don’t match fur. Just a coincidence in their case. After all, I’d look rather silly with blue fur, wouldn’t I?”

  “You’d look like my sister,” I said out the side of my mouth. “During one of her phases.”

  He snorted a laugh. “I think you’ll do just fine. Don’t listen to Dane. He’s been a loudmouth since he was born.”

  The two of them came together in a thud of flesh and bone. Somehow, the first casualty of all their thrashing and clawing wasn’t either of them, but one of the innocent soup pumpkins, which exploded in a shower of orange parts and delicious, creamy soup. The majority of the gourd’s contents splashed on Jake, who understandably had other things to worry about.

  Dane caught him with a left hook that would have decapitated a normal person. Jake’s head wrenched sickeningly, but he seemed unhurt. He answered with a head butt that split Dane’s bottom lip and when he was momentarily stunned with pain, Jake kneed his brother in the diaphragm and then slammed the same knee straight into Dane’s face.

  “I don’t feel well,” I said, sitting down hard on the cool marble tile of the kitchen. The room swam around me.

  Barney grabbed a towel off one of the many ovens, wrung cool water out of it, and wrapped it loosely around my neck. Almost immediately the wave of nausea passed, but then when Dane answered Jake’s violence with an elbow to the side of Jake’s head that crunched like his skull cracked, the sensation of bile creeping up my esophagus reappeared. “I’m gonna puke,” I croaked.

  Barney stroked my face with the towel and led me back, further into the kitchen, and well out of sight of my mate-to-be and his brother beating each other to death. It was the sounds though – the crunch the thud and the crash of fists into jaws and knees into stomachs – that really hit me.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about that instant of violence, the crackle in the air I’d felt in the moment before the two of them slammed together. My mind turned to the trail of blood, the soup on Jake’s side, and then to the cascade of orange bits that exploded out from underneath him when Dane slammed him into that enormous dining table.

  “Here,” Barney said softly, tilting a cup to my lips. “This will help.”

  “This isn’t water,” I said. “Vodka?”

  “Water isn’t going to do much good when you just saw your boyfriend turn into a wolf. I think you needed some stronger drink.”

  “Good,” I swallowed the rest and then the lump in my throat that seemed unwilling to go away, faded as the liquor burned down into my guts. “Yeah, good call. Are they – is he – going to be okay?”

  Barney took a deep breath that he released in a sigh. “This is the less glamorous side of being lupine. Our animal urges overwhelm us and we frequently solve problems that are rather silly ones by being very violent. Jake is unlike most wolves in that respect.”

  “You mean most of them are worse with the punchy business?”

  “Vastly. The reason his father chose him as alpha over his brother was that he wanted to become more palatable to normal society, and he figured rightly that the only way to do that was to have an alpha who thought more reasonably.”

  A vase broke in the other room, which made Barney wince.

  “That was a Ming,” he said. “The table is from Haverty’s though.”

  “Really?” I asked. “But it looks so fancy.”

  “Yes. Well, after you break three or four priceless antiquities from old palaces, you dial it down a little.”

  Almost on cue, a massing crash from the other room once again had Barney wincing. “Besides, priceless antiquities don’t come with no-questions-asked warranties.”

  I nodded in agreement as something smashed into something else, and Barney just rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Someday they’ll stop honoring it, but then again, they haven’t yet, so perhaps not.”

  He sipped at some tea that I hadn’t noticed him making. Someone hit a wall, shaking the entire house. Jake shouted something incoherent and Dane shouted something I also couldn’t understand but the tone of his voice and the way Jake hissed gave away the context.

  “What was he talking about the challenge?” I asked.

  Barney shrugged and shook his head.

  We’d noticed the dining room had fallen silent and stayed that way for a long moment. “Should we...?”

  Barney nodded. The motorcycle on the table was on fire, but just a little. As predicted, the beautiful, six-foot vase which had been on the shelves, was lying on the ground in a heap of shards, some of them with a bit of blood coloring the clay. Jake was cut up, bruised, battered, and mostly back to human, but some remnants of his transformation remained. The muscles of his back and his arms were still swollen to their lupine size, and he was nursing a broken lip, but he seemed otherwise fine.

  “Where did Dane go?” I asked as I cradled his head against my chest and dabbed at the lip with a cloth Barney handed me. “And I guess you weren’t kidding about th
e werewolf business.”

  He winced and then snarled when Barney returned with some hydrogen peroxide. He handed me the bottle. “Less likely to bite you,” he said with a sly grin. I dabbed the stuff onto his cuts, and he did wince, and flinch just a bit, but I was safe from being bitten.

  “I made a deal with him. He leaves you alone, and he gets the pack.”

  Barney and I both exchanged a glance, but by the time I looked back down, Jake had picked himself up and shrugged me off. “I don’t want this life anyway,” he said. “All I want is you.”

  “Uh, Master Somerset?” Barney entreated, “I think you’re forgetting any number of reasons for that to be a wretchedly bad idea.”

  “No,” Jake said. “What I’m forgetting – what I’ve always forgotten – is that I have a life too. I have needs and desires, and none of them involve fighting with my brother for the rest of my natural existence, or running a company from a penthouse office with a goddamn golf green in it. This isn’t me Barney, you know that.”

  He spun on his heel and strode out of the dining room.

  I have never heard a door slam quite that hard.

  -11-

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had bad dates before, but that was... special.”

  -Delilah

  The ride back to my house was bumpy, silent and awkward, but as soon as we stepped in the front door, I needed answers.

  I took a deep, impatient breath and pursed my lips before exhaling sharply. “What the hell was all that?”

  Jake was all surly and stormy. He very obviously wasn’t in the mood to deal with me questioning him, but after what just happened, I wasn’t in the frame of mind to go on like everything was copacetic, so I kept prodding.

  “Okay, let me get this straight. You live in a mansion, and your family has farmland of... thirty acres? Forty? How many did you say?”

  “Hundred and ten,” he said, grumbling. “Little more.”

  “And we’re going to my tiny house? Would you care to explain why that might be? For right now let’s just look past the whole ‘forsaking your duty’ thing and look at logistics. You live in a goddamn mansion and we’re back at my two bedroom, one bath split level? Really?”

  He shot me a dark look. “I needed to get away. I needed to feel secure. And that meant getting away from the house. It might be stupid, but I needed time to think.”

  I took another deep breath, fairly proud of myself for how reserved I was being. “Then you need to come clean, and now.”

  “You don’t tell me what to do,” Jake growled.

  Those eyes, those steel, beautiful eyes, put that same squiggle in my belly that I felt last time we were together.

  “Or what?” I asked, slightly breathless. “You gonna punish me?”

  The corner of his mouth twitched in what could easily be either a grin or a grimace. “You want to find out?”

  I took another deep breath, trying to steel myself against his admittedly incredible charm. “No,” I said at first, “I want answers, not orgasms.”

  Jake lifted his hands to my face, his thumbs lying along the line of my jaw. “That’s not what your body is saying.”

  I was half-consciously moving my hips against one of his massively muscled legs. Just the heat of his skin through his torn slacks, between my legs, was enough to have me almost aching to feel more. Before I knew I was doing it, my head was tilted backwards, and looking up at Jake’s beautiful face. “If you’re going to punish me,” I said in between desperate, sucking kisses, “you better do more than just kiss me and then make me come again.”

  Giggling, despite myself, I tried to chase a kiss, but he pulled back. “You will,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “But so will I. Probably not as many times as you, but...”

  “Oh he’s cocky, too,” I said, biting my bottom lip to quiet my second round of inadvertent giggling. “Well, teach me a lesson then, you big werewolf. Wait,” I said, “tell me one more thing. Do you really howl?”

  “That,” Jake said, with a growl that shook me to my very core, “is up to you.”

  “If I do,” I asked, my hands trembling as I unbuttoned his jeans, “will the neighbors hear?”

  His only answer was to moan as I slid my hand under the denim and around the bulge in his underwear. Soft, cotton boxer-briefs were the only barricade between my fingertips and the thing in the world that I wanted most right then. I squeezed, feeling him move under the palm of my hand, his softest skin burning to the touch.

  “How are you so hot?” I asked.

  “Wolf thing.”

  “You’re serious about all this?” I felt him harden and thicken underneath that damn underwear that was starting to constrict around my wrist.

  “Find out,” was all he answered before I freed his hardness from the cotton that squeezed him. Better my hand than a bunch of heartless fabric. Jake took a sharp breath, and let it trickle slowly out of his nose. “Your smell,” he said between clenched teeth. “It’s doing it again, it’s making me feel like I’m losing... control...”

  Flattening my other hand against Jake’s muscled chest, I got a hint of what he was talking about. The smell of hard manliness, earth, the outdoors, sweat, it stung my nostrils for a second and then warmed me all the way to my bones. I felt a shiver creep through me, and from the sweat popping up on my forehead, figured it wasn’t the heat.

  Well, it was some kinda heat.

  I kissed his chest, and let my lips and tongue trail down his body until I heard him groan and felt him shudder. The trail down his chest continued down his length. I held him tight in both hands, pulling, tugging, twisting gently, and then felt a hand on the side of my face. I looked up into those silver-gray eyes, and when he smiled at me, there was a pull in my chest, then a flush of warmth.

  The closest I can get to explaining the sensation that filled my soul right then is that it’s the same general tingling I get when I’m about to eat a chimichanga that has way too much queso sauce on top. Well, except the feeling Jake gave me was about a million times more intense.

  As I took him into my mouth, his groaning became thicker, huskier, more urgent. The hand on my face stiffened along with the rest of him. Circling my tongue around his tip, the taste of Jake mixed with the scent of his hard, rough masculinity had my knees weak and my inhibitions weaker.

  I’m not exactly pent-up and I’m not exactly wild when it comes to how I act in the throes of passion, so when I reached up and dragged my nails down Jake’s chest without even thinking about it, I was just as surprised as he was.

  His huffing groans sharpened again. He hissed, first with either surprise or pain and then immediately afterward with pleasure. He moaned my name, and tried to pull me to my feet, but the instant I slid the tip of my tongue along the most sensitive little point underneath his tip, I knew that I, little Delilah Coltrane had somehow tamed a big, bad wolf.

  Jake grabbed my hair, desperately clinging to me like he was holding on to life itself.

  “Bite me,” he hissed.

  I did, but I guess not quite like what he had in mind.

  “Harder, harder, drag your teeth down... oh... yes!”

  He had me nibbling, then biting, at the underside of his tip, running my teeth up and down his shaft so hard that I have no idea how it didn’t hurt like hell, but from how he was carrying on, I knew it didn’t. Or, at least if it did, he was really into pain.

  Jake pushed his hips against me, gasping and moaning and throwing his head from side to side as he called my name over and over. I slid one of my hands down his leg and then back up to squeeze his base. Pausing to take a breath, I tasted a drop of him with the tip of my tongue and felt another wave of heat, then cool, then heat again, pulse through me.

  “I can’t stop,” he said. “You got me, you really got me. I’m...”

  I felt his body tense, his muscles contract. He went completely rigid and then all at once, the tension and tightness
relaxed all at once. He hissed my name, he held me tight as he pulsed, and then he howled.

  Oh my God did he ever howl.

  -12-

  “I have no idea why the neighbors didn’t call the cops, I’m gonna be honest.”

  -Delilah

  “You weren’t kidding,” I said with a chuckle as my snoring fiancée finally opened his eyes when the sun was right outside the window.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He smiled, even though the sun was obviously blinding him. His squinting made the laugh lines in the corners of Jake’s eyes stand out, and a split second later, I was back in bed with my arms around his muscular neck, and my legs on either side of him.

  The heat in his body warmed me through and through. I reached down and felt him harden at just the first brush of my fingertips. He made a sort of clucking sound when I touched him to the place between my legs, the place I wanted him more than anything in the world.

  I bit my lip, almost trembling with anticipation, but he clicked the tongue against the roof of his mouth again, and flipped me over so that I felt him, big and heavy, against my clit.

  “Unless you want a cub right here and now, we better hold off for a while.”

  “What do you mean? Oh,” I blushed. “Wait, how do you know I’m ovulating?”

  He laughed a little. “It’s a wolf thing.”

  I gave him a playful scratch. His hot, bronze skin warmed my fingers. “I mean, there’s always condoms. Kinda what I was intending anyway.”

  His laugh turned into a snort. “No can do,” he said with a wistful sigh. “Have to use special ones. Latex isn’t made for... er, well it isn’t strong enough. You ever heard that old phrase ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’?”

  “Er, I’m pretty sure that refers to Little Red Riding Hood, not how werewolf sperm can only be contained by the power of a sheep’s intestine.”

  Jake looked thoughtful for a moment. “Never thought of that. And honestly I don’t know if the sheepskin would work anyway.”