Bears of Burden: THORN

by Candace Ayers

  I laughed even harder. It was all so crazy. “I’m kidding, Alex. He will be like you, though, right?”

  He nodded and watched me curiously. “He will. And one day he will feel the same pull towards someone as I feel towards you. My whole family is like this. I’ll explain everything better later.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, you will.”

  “How are you taking this so well?”

  “I don’t know. I think all of this has just been crazy enough that I’m more stunned than anything. Maybe I’ll freak out later. Maybe I won’t. How do people normally take this news?”

  He touched my cheek. “People don’t normally find out. That’s why the town was so closed up when you got here. It’s a big secret to keep.”

  I pouted. “But they were nice to Sam.”

  At the mention of Sam’s name, Alex growled and pulled me into his chest. “Mine.”

  I nipped at his chest. “Were you trying to eat me earlier? Is that a thing?”

  His laughter rang out loud and clear through the forest.

  “No. We do not eat people. There is something I wanted to explain to you, though. About mates.”

  “Mates? Bailey used that word. Are we mates?”

  “Yes. Mates are just like they sound. Soulmates. You were meant for me and I was meant for you. I could feel it the very first time I laid eyes on you at the rodeo. I knew you were mine.”

  I kissed him then, desperate to feel something solid. “What does it mean?”

  He kissed me back. “It means that we’re going to be together for a long time. It means that I love you, and that my heart belongs to you.”

  I grinned up at him. “This is all so insane and I’m sure you’ll have to explain it all a million times to me later, but right now, I just want to be close to you. As close as I can get.”

  He ripped the straps of my dress and pushed it off my shoulders. With a predatory look on his face, he pushed me against the tree. “As close as possible?”

  My body reacted instantly, the same way it had this morning and three months ago. Maybe it was the mate thingy, or maybe it was just how hot Alex was. I couldn’t be sure, but either way, I wanted him. “What did you want to explain to me about mates? I have about two more minutes of listening before I’m tackling you and having my way with you.”

  He pushed my dress up over my belly and hips, over my head, and let it fall to the ground. His fingers cupped my sex and his mouth landed on my neck. “This. Mates claim each other. I wasn’t trying to eat you earlier. I was fighting the instinct to claim you as mine. Everything in me is screaming at me to mark you so no one else ever thinks they can touch you again.”

  His lips felt amazing against my skin and I was ready to agree to anything. “Is it a hickey?”

  He flicked his tongue over the same spot. “No. It’s a bite. It’s a bond between us.”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Probably. It’ll be worth it, though.”

  I rocked my hips against his hand, trying to get him to rub my clit. “Do you still want to?”

  He scraped his teeth there and made me gasp with pleasure. “Fuck, yes. I’ve wanted to mark you as mine since that first night. It took everything in me not to do it.”

  I tilted my head farther to the side. “I want you to mark me. I want to be yours. Do I mark you?”

  He yanked my panties down and easily lifted me until my core hovered over his dick. “When I mark you, Elizabeth, everyone will know that I belong to you. You own my heart, little one.”

  I cried out as he dropped me slowly onto his shaft and pinned me against the tree. I dug my nails into his shoulders and held on. I wanted him more than anything. Nothing else mattered.

  Alex drove into me again and again, filling my body until I thought I couldn’t take anymore. “I’ve missed you so much. Never leave me again.”

  “My bear, make me yours.”

  My body was close already. Alex seemed like he was right there with me. His thrusts were erratic and his grip on my thighs punishing. I tilted my head to the side, inviting him to claim me. I wanted to be tied to him forever.

  Alex let out a roar louder than anything I’d ever heard and then sank his teeth into my neck. Stinging pain lasted for only a second before blinding pleasure filled me and I tumbled into the strongest orgasm of my life. I ripped my nails across his back as the pleasure shook me. Alex jerked into me once more before I felt his seed filling me.

  I felt him licking my neck but my head was so light that it just rolled back. My body felt like all my bones had been removed. I slumped against the tree behind me and mumbled his name.

  Alex held me tightly in his arms and lowered us both to the ground. He laid me on his chest and held me tight. “It’s okay, little one.”

  I lost track of how much time we’d been there, recovering, but the night had fallen without my noticing. I idly played with Alex’s hair and pressed kisses against his chest.

  “How do you feel?”

  I lifted my tired head to stare at him and gave him a satisfied grin. “Like I should’ve stayed here five months ago and kept doing that.”

  He grunted. “I should’ve tied you up and made you stay.”

  I flicked my tongue over his nipple. “You should’ve, mate.”

  Alex hardened under me and shifted us so that I was straddling him. “Are you too tired?”

  I grabbed him and then lowered myself onto him, filling myself with my mate. “Never.”

  He reached up and wrapped his hands over my breasts. “I love you like this. Ride me, Elizabeth.”

  Who was I to deny my mate? I leaned over him and kissed him long and hard. “I love you, bear.”

  “Always.”

  THE END

  LOVING THE ALPHA

  STORY DESCRIPTION

  Curvy Kira Bentley is smart, beautiful, frightened and alone. She is a freshly cursed werewolf, and clearly ignorant on the subject of what's happening to her. As if that weren’t bad enough, she can’t seem to avoid her sexy English professor, either inside or outside of the classroom, and not only does Professor Sawyer Donovan have looks to die for, he also invokes feelings in her unlike any Kira has ever experienced before.

  The last thing Sawyer Donovan expected was to find a pretty she-wolf in his English class. A ruggedly handsome young English professor at a prestigious university, the solitary werewolf has enough trouble dodging the unwanted attention of his female students without deliberately seeking one out. Yet, Professor Donovan’s sense of honor demands he shelter and guide his student in the transformation that she’s experiencing.

  When he vows to reach out to her through any means necessary… even calling her into his office at inconvenient hours and detaining her after class, what he isn’t planning on are his wolf’s strong insistence on his young protégé being his mate.

  As the full moon draws nearer, and student and professor find themselves reluctantly drawn to one another, can Sawyer fight his growing attraction to the one woman he knows he can't have? Can Kira, convince Sawyer to give in to forbidden passion, if only just this once?

  What will happen when Sawyer reveals the secret he has been guarding - that the date Kira was mysteriously bitten aligns a little too perfectly with his last blackout?

  CHAPTER 1

  There were certain students who attracted notice.

  As a young male professor at Rider University, he had expected, even prepared, for this. It was something advisors went over discreetly, and something that was brought up again and again in staff meetings, though never expressly named. There will be students, went the school of thought, who you will want to look at more than the others. Don't look at them more than the others.

  Sawyer Donovan was looking at the girl strategically stationed in the back of his classroom toward the window. He had seen her around campus before now, in snatched moments when he shouldn't have been looking, but a man would have to be dead not to notice her: she was a natural blonde of average height, wit
h long, loping legs and a devastatingly athletic body. She was a freshman, he knew, otherwise she wouldn't be in his class. He had noticed the way the male students perked up when she entered, late, and took a seat alone in the back. He had noticed the way they deflated, too, upon being passed over.

  There was no denying that the girl—she had responded to the name Bentley, Kira when he had read it off his chart—was beautiful. Donovan was certain he was the only (relatively) young male in the classroom glad to have her sequestered in the back. It meant he wouldn't have to look at her as often. It meant he wouldn't have to notice.

  Because there was something else about Kira Bentley that drew his attention to her, something that he wanted to ignore, desperately. Feelings of sexual attraction he could deal with, had dealt with, before—but what attracted Professor Donovan to his student was something very different. Something horrible.

  He recognized the bags beneath her eyes. He recognized the weight loss; the unwashed hair; the woodland scratches she tried to conceal beneath her sweatshirt, but made themselves apparent every time she shifted and her sleeves rode up her wrists or her hood fell back from her neck. If he hadn't noticed the little details already, he would have sensed her in an instant: her pheromones were, to him, nearly overpowering in the small room.

  He didn't remember this about her before the break. When he had passed her then in the cafeteria, or on the footbridge as strangers, he had not smelled a fellow wolf.

  She had been bitten. Likely in the past month. The physical signs seemed to indicate that she had already undergone her first change.

  The timing was too perfect, and dread pooled like cold standing water in the pit of his stomach. But Donovan had a class to teach, the subject of which was decidedly not werewolves. He turned from the rows of expectant eyes to write his name on the board.

  "I'm Professor Donovan," he introduced himself to the class. "And this semester I'll be your guide through English 101."

  "Aren't you a bit young to be a professor?" a female student more toward the front asked without putting her hand up. It was usually the first question to be voiced.

  "If you'll turn to page two of the syllabus," Donovan continued. "You'll find that I have already addressed this concern. I turned twenty-eight in December, for those interested. Belated birthday presents are welcome, though they will have no effect on your final grade."

  A few of his students groaned, at least half of them in response to his deliberately lame attempt at humor. Donovan had a great sense of humor, he just enjoyed hearing their vocalizations of pain more.

  Kira Bentley said nothing.

  "You'll notice on that same page that I outline my philosophy on tardiness," Donovan continued, raising his eyes from beneath his brows as he continued to track the girl's nonresponse. "Lateness by my students will not be excused. Starting today."

  Bentley raised her brown-gold eyes from a continued spot of interest on her desk to meet his stare; when she saw the direction he was gazing, a muscle in her face tightened almost imperceptibly. Her look of veiled distress her cheekbones more pronounced. Leave it to the young and beautiful to make the effects of the curse look good.

  Donovan spent the remainder of the hour going over the rest of the syllabus. It was an easy first week for his students; it should have been an easy first week for him. But nothing about English 101 was going to be easy now that there was another wolf in the room. He would have preferred the proverbial elephant at this point.

  The analog clock wound down the hour, and his students rose, grappling with their books and backpacks and putting out hands to introduce themselves to one another. Kira Bentley didn't take part in the overtures, and instead moved along the back wall in an attempt to slip quietly out the door.

  He was half-tempted to ignore her. He should just let her go, and figure things out on her own the way he had. He could be lenient with her attendance, even her grades, to help make navigating her newfound shifterhood easier; he could remain a removed presence all the while. He should just stay out of it.

  But he couldn't. He had pursued a career as an educator because he believed in taking a positive, active role in the development of his students' lives. He couldn't let the one who might need him most slip out of reach because confronting her would be uncomfortable.

  He put up a hand to her, and Bentley froze in the doorway as if she had been expecting it. He feigned interest with his seating chart as she approached his desk.

  "Miss Bentley, I believe I mentioned my policy on tardiness?"

  "It won't happen again, professor." She cast her eyes from him and looked longingly toward the exit. Donovan sat back and removed his glasses, retiring them to the far corner of his desk.

  "Rough night?" he asked her.

  The girl bristled, before shooting a quick glance around her to see if anyone had heard him. With the exception of a few stragglers, the classroom had nearly completely emptied by this point. "Excuse me?"

  "I'm intimating that you were out all night," he said patiently. Kira Bentley's eyes narrowed, flashing at him like twin burnished coins, and he thought he could see some of the wolf rearing up inside her.

  "I don't smoke. I don't drink. And I would appreciate it if you kept your baseless accusations to yourself," she said. She was more articulate than he had expected for a freshman, and completely justified in making her preferences known; her confidence was on par with that of other, older gorgeous women he had met, but he knew what she was feeling on the inside. She was terrified. English 101 was a core requirement, and she needed to do well in his estimation for him to open the door for her to more advances courses.

  "Let's not start this semester off on the wrong foot," Donovan suggested. He rose from behind his desk to collect his things; Kira Bentley didn't budge from where she stood, evidently waiting for him to show her where to put the right foot. "Come by my office tomorrow with lunch and I'll forget all about it."

  "Excuse me?" Bentley demanded again.

  He could almost find it in him to feel sorry for the additional toll this interview was taking on an already sick and stressed-out young woman, but he alone knew how necessary it was. He needed to establish a connection with her immediately, and the only way he was going to manage it was outside of a classroom. His office was the perfect place: it wasn't as off-putting as suggesting some place outside of campus, and he was almost always in there, anyway. They needed a scene change to get familiar, and fast, if he stood a chance of helping her at all before her next full moon phase. They had less than a month.

  "See you at noon. Don't be late," he added as he brushed past her. While his hearing was preternatural, Donovan couldn't claim to have heard the internal scream that Kira Bentley was surely emitting. He contented himself with imagining it all the same.

  If his occupation prevented him from flirting with the pretty girl, making her life miserable would have to be second best.

  CHAPTER 2

  "This isn't quaint or quirky. This is blackmail."

  Kira Bentley was standing in the doorway of her least favorite professor's office. While she wanted to make her opinion clear, she was also holding a takeaway bag from one of the sandwich vendors in the quad.

  Professor Donovan—as if she knew, or cared to know, his first name—glanced up from grading a stack of papers, although she couldn't shake the distinct impression that he had known she was there all along. She supposed it was possible he had heard her coming down the hallway. He was wearing his glasses, although he never seemed to wear them when he was addressing the glass, leading her to believe that he was farsighted. Kira hadn't been farsighted herself until very recently, but she was afraid to go to the optometrist to get a prescription. She didn't know what an eye doctor might do if he suspected she could now see half a mile in every direction.

  With or without glasses, Professor Donovan was incredibly good-looking. His hair was that silver-brown color that his cherished literature would have described as "mouse-brown", although that w
asn't quite right to Kira's mind. It matured him without giving him any indication of the early onset of gray hair. He might have stood a better chance at fitting in with his older colleagues if he wore it shorter, but it reached to his strong jawline, and he kept it swept back behind slightly-pronounced ears. The aforementioned jawline, the one that drove Kira's fellow freshman females crazy upon sight, was overshadowed by a deliberately-maintained stubble that accentuated his disaffected image.

  The pale eyes that regarded her from behind the glasses were deep-set, and probably a breathtaking gray, but Kira had only ever seen them look at her with an infuriating twinkle reflected in their depths. As if they shared some great secret or joke, when the reality was that she was the punchline. No wonder girls of every age made themselves crazy about him; the amused, carefully-guarded look on his face gave him the distinct appearance of flirting, when in reality that impression couldn't have been further from the truth.

  "You're not helping your case, Bentley. Well, maybe you are," he amended when she moved to his desk and deposited his sack lunch. "How did you know roast beef was my favorite?"

  "Who said anything about bringing you roast beef?" That had been her selection, of course, but it seemed weird to her that he would know that. Professor Donovan ignored her in favor of opening his spoils. The crinkling of the paper was almost painfully loud to Kira; it was strange, and borderline debilitating, the sounds that could invade her mind and break her concentration now. She couldn't deal with the enhanced hearing in the same way she couldn't deal with her new eyesight. Satisfied that she had delivered on the terms of their agreement, she turned to go.

  "Take a seat, Bentley," Professor Donovan invited her in a manner that clearly wasn't an invitation. She turned in the doorway, her mouth set grimly, and crossed once more into the room to deposit herself on the edge of the only other available chair.