Juli’s body trembled. She had to say no before desire got the better of them both. She tried to form the beginning sound of the word, but when she opened her mouth, an unnaturally long tongue rolled out. She needed to taste Neil’s skin before she did anything else. She leaned forward and licked him under the chin, then down the side of his neck. He tasted like rum-spiced salt, and she needed more. She licked down the other side of his neck, her tongue beginning to tease the collar of his shirt.
Neil threw back his head and howled. The sound split the tension of the night, and all manner of things seemed about to burst forth. Juli shivered. She came briefly to herself again. This was her last chance. She could run away now, but if she stayed even another second she would take every bit of him that she could get. She tried to form that word again, but then her lips seemed perfectly shaped to kiss him.
Her fingers shook with the effort of resisting the urge to touch, to grip, to claw.
“Juli, does this mean yes?” Neil sounded almost broken.
Juli tried to gather the strength to tell him what it really meant, but then she felt the beast again, closer than ever. But not closer, it reminded her. Part of her. A part that would not be denied, not here before the man she wanted, and certainly not now beneath the nearly full moon. She saw the two of them from a new perspective, animals alive with need and free to sate it. The only word she could manage after that was, “Yes.”
He growled and lifted her, his body changing around her, his clothes tearing. He grew taller and wider, hairier and stronger, but she couldn’t look at the differences in Neil because his kiss held her in place and absorbed her entire concentration. Long, clawed fingers slipped up the sides of her neck. Teeth dug into her lower lip.
Juli gasped as he gave her a love bite that drew blood. She could not hold her own beast back after that. She returned his passion with equal abandon, clawing at his already ruined clothes, and sometimes catching his skin below the fabric. Every flash of pain between them only increased the intensity, and the pace and volume of their groans.
Every instinct Juli possessed urged her to mate with Neil, but to her inner wolf, this wasn’t simply a matter of choosing to lie down with him. She wanted him, and would give him the opportunity to have her—after he won her and proved his worth.
In the distant, human part of Juli’s mind, pieces fell into place along with this knowledge. She’d lain awake plenty of recent nights wondering why she and Neil couldn’t make an agreement to be together, to share the pack. With the wolf up at the front of her mind, about to take control, Juli understood that two werewolf lovers could never rely on negotiation that way. Whatever happened between her and Neil, they would have to fight it out, whether the challenge took place as verbal, physical or sexual. They could not simply agree, and they could not avoid the struggle between them.
Juli pulled back from him with new authority, a wolfish grin forming across her lips. Neil, his human features obscured by the new planes of his oncoming wolf’s snout, panted hungrily. He looked farther gone than she felt, utterly blinded by need. Playful electricity rose into Juli’s chest. She’d get a good start on him. This would be a good night’s run.
“I want you, Neil. You have no idea what I’m going to do with you when we finally mate. I’m going to lick every inch of you, and sink my teeth into your shoulder and ride you hard.” He grunted and tried to pull her closer, but she kept him at arm’s length with extended claws. She watched his confused expression with amusement, thrilled and excited by the night’s prospects. “But first,” she continued, “before you have me, you’re going to have to catch me. And you’re going to have to prove that you can take me.”
With those words, Juli gave herself over to her wolf completely. She flowed smoothly through the intermediate werewolf stages, through the discomfort of being half human and half wolf. These forms embodied her inner conflict, her uncertainty about who she was. Right then, Juli felt no conflict. Her clothes fell away like a discarded peel. For the moment, she was unreservedly wolf.
She took a moment to settle herself on all fours, her clawed paws digging into the moist dirt beside the river. She knew this body well, and yet, since she wore it only once a month, it possessed a luster, a sense of newness. Because of her ruddy fur and small form, her father had nicknamed her Foxy. He used to sing the Jimi Hendrix song to her when the full moon approached.
Human thoughts like these began to fade behind the wolf’s different, wilder awareness of the world. She smelled wet from the river and damp from beneath her, and the heat of the sun still lingering in the mountain rocks beside her. More than any of this, she smelled Neil, her potential mate, behind her, and instinct told her that no matter how much she wanted to be caught by him, she needed to run, to test him.
Air shuddered and thudded into her lungs. Muscles contracted and extended and exploded with power. Her body gathered, then sprang. She raced as if she were running down prey. She raced as if it were for her life. She raced so her paws barely touched the ground.
Power rushed through her, making her giddy. Neil hesitated just a moment, but then she sensed his shift, the smell of him changing to become more animal, more closely connected to this land of scent and insight. She shivered as he surged into action behind her. Everything in the world seemed to tie her closer to him, to make escape impossible. The ground beneath their feet linked them together, to the air she forced in and out of her lungs, and to moonlight—always that.
Juli increased her lead. The land grew wilder. She didn’t care for human trails, so she deviated from the path her other form had been walking. The river invited her to dive in and swim across. Without pausing on the other side, she plunged through the drooping fronds of a willow tree and into the green growth beyond.
Juli scented deer, song sparrows, and, somewhere nearby, a great blue heron. She longed to hunt, but that would have to wait. For the moment, she played prey to the magnificent predator who rushed and crashed behind her.
She had more run in her and gave in to it, leading him on a chase through the wilds with herself as the prize. She dodged and wound through bushes and trees, stretching herself in a way she never had before, running as hard and fast as she could.
Juli felt unstoppable, small, quick, light, maneuverable, and deadly. Much as she wanted Neil, the urge to win filled her and she dreamed of evading him forever, living forever in the speed of this moment. Her heart hammered as if it would burst from her ribcage. Each breath she took needed to be larger to support the needs of her pounding pulse.
Behind her, she heard Neil slow. She dared to take the opportunity to rest briefly. Then the sound of his paws stopped, and a moment later a heavy body slammed into her side. Neil must have closed the distance between them with a jump, though she could not believe he could travel so far through the air. Juli went down beneath him, aware of threatening claws and sharp teeth that prevented her from slipping out from under the big, black wolf that trapped her.
Never had she felt Neil’s size so clearly. His four legs caged her. He covered and overpowered her, but Juli would not give up so easily. She nipped at his legs, and at any flesh that came within reach of her jaws. She twisted and snapped and batted at him. She leapt and tested herself against the prison his body created.
Then his head lowered and his teeth slipped into the loose flesh at the back of her neck. Neil gave a little shake of the head to show that he had her. Juli stilled her struggles, instinctual fear and desire coursing through her. Need flared between them. It was time to surrender. They had both earned it.
Juli trembled, waiting for what would come next. She had never been with a male werewolf this way before. She didn’t know if he would bite her or touch her or take her. The night seemed suddenly cold, and she realized that in her vulnerability she had transformed back into a human woman, bare-skinned and shivering and at Neil’s mercy.
Rough fingertips skimmed the side of her arm. Neil’s hands covered hers. She felt no fur on him at
all. Their twin natures were both at peace, stable in the certainty of what would now happen between them. Juli could have spoken, but the night still felt wordless. Instead, she arched her back, pressing up toward Neil’s chest and stomach. His body heated hers, and his skin stretched smoothly over the hard muscle of his torso.
The bite that had stopped her softened and became a kiss and then another bite, this time with duller human teeth. He nibbled and sucked at the back of her neck, still holding her in place with his weight and position.
Juli’s fingers dug into the muddy ground. She tilted her head to the side to expose more of her neck to Neil. His erection pressed against her back. She longed to dip and wiggle so it could slip into place and fill her, but Neil’s teeth and grip still restricted her movement.
His left hand continued to cover hers, but his right came up to toy with her dangling breasts. He sucked on her neck and played with them, cupping and lifting them, pressing them back into her chest, then massaging them, his fingers working in concentric circles that moved ever closer to her nipples.
Juli moaned and ground her ass up and back against him. His cock felt ten degrees hotter than the rest of him, and she wanted it inside her. She tried to tell him with her body, by the way she moved her hips, but all she felt was his smile against her neck. Neil made his way to her nipples, rubbing a callused thumb back and forth over one nub and then the other, as if he had all the time in the world.
His patience undid her. Juli had waited years for this moment, and she could not bear the way he made it so difficult to close the last distance between them. “Neil,” she growled. “Will you hurry up?”
He chuckled, the rumble in his chest vibrating down into her body. “I finally have you where I want you,” he said, with nibbles on her neck between words that emphasized his point. “There’s no way I’m letting you go before I’m good and ready.”
Juli made a frustrated noise, but in another, deeper part of herself, she melted. With every bit of surrender that he demanded, she felt more completely joined to him. No matter how much she feared what would happen in the morning, she could not hold back from giving herself to him this way, from becoming his mate in body and spirit alike.
Neil licked the place where he’d been biting, his tongue hot and rough on Juli’s sensitized skin. On any other night, she would have worried about his leaving marks, but not tonight. Not with the wolf so strong within her. “Harder,” she whispered, and he growled in the back of his throat and did as she asked.
His teeth sank into her flesh a little farther and the pressure of his sucking increased. His fingers on her nipple tightened into a pinch, then a tug, stretching her breast gently toward the earth. Juli cried out, shivering, her body not sure which way to move to get relief. She wasn’t sure if she even wanted relief.
She craved more sensation, so she asked Neil to bite her again, lower this time. He obliged, his mouth finding the spot where her neck met her shoulder. His teeth rested against her flesh gently, her squirming causing them to scrape her very lightly. She needed more, and he wasn’t giving it to her. She growled and pushed up toward his mouth, noticing that her arms had gotten furry again.
“You’re feeling wild, Juli,” Neil murmured, and the amusement in his voice spurred her to a greater height of irritated arousal. She flexed her shoulder, ready to throw him off her back, except that he answered with a real bite, with a wolf’s sharp teeth and strong jaws behind it. Juli howled. She didn’t know anymore if she was human or wolf or something else altogether. All sense of her form disappeared beneath the knowledge of herself as woman and Neil as man, and the two of them as mates.
As if he tasted this final surrender in her flesh, Neil lined his cock up to her entrance and pressed inside. Juli arched her back to meet it, gritting her teeth as Neil worked it steadily deeper. She needed it to reach as far into her as a thing could go, far enough inside to hurt a little, to get to the middle of her so that he could claim her whole being.
His cock dragged against her inner walls, which clutched and fluttered around it. Neil returned to his previous position, his hands holding hers down, and his biting grip on her neck reminding her of his dominance. The head of his cock found a spot deep inside Juli that made her yelp. She thought she could not bear his touch there, and yet part of her wanted to feel him press that spot even harder.
Her arms lost their strength, unable to continue holding her up against his weight and the steady assault of his cock. She dropped to her elbows, the mud squelching around her bare forearms. Neil released the skin of her neck just in time, but not before she spent a moment hanging by his teeth.
This new position opened her up to him even more, and made him press against her even more intensely. Neil took advantage and reared back, half-human hands on Juli’s waist. He brought her with him, holding her up, using her hips as leverage to drive himself into her. She felt like a rag doll hanging forward from his cock. Every nerve ending in her body seemed to radiate from that spot he had found deep within.
If she’d had the coordination, she would have tried to work a hand around to touch her clit, but she was too much at his mercy. It throbbed, neglected, but this did not mean Juli would be denied an orgasm. From within, a different and powerful sensation built. With every stroke of Neil’s cock, Juli screamed a little. His thrusts wrung her out, turned her inside out, and filled her with a taut sensation that needed release.
Behind her, Neil cried out every bit as loudly as she did. He pounded into her even harder. Juli squealed and tried to get away, but his body still enclosed hers like a cage, leaving her with no choice but to take what he gave.
She felt flattened, completely opened, wetter than she’d ever thought possible. Then her insides clutched, tight as a fist then even tighter, and the orgasm that took her started on the underside of her clit and worked its way out. It flipped her insides over and flashed lights behind her eyes and hurt her head. She opened her mouth in a voiceless scream and gave herself up to it, relaxing completely under Neil’s onslaught.
After that, every movement of his cock, from the longest thrust to the tiniest twitch, spread through her body as if it traveled in her veins. She gasped and sobbed and came some more, until she no longer separated them even into man and woman. In the grip of the pleasure that consumed their bodies, Juli lost track of where she stopped and where he began.
When Neil came at last, Juli moaned as if his orgasm had been her own.
She panted beneath him, staring at fingers that seemed strange to her. She knew she had passed through every possible form, but did not know which had come when. Neil slowly slid his cock out of her, but Juli knew they could never truly be separate again.
More shaken now than when they had begun, Juli eased her aching limbs around so that she could face him. The fear on his face told her he had felt every part of what she did, that he knew how deeply they had bonded.
If werewolves mated this way, Juli did not know how her mother could ever have left her father. She reached for Neil with a trembling hand. He took it and squeezed it tight, then gathered her into his arms.
Naked with him like this, not sure where in the wilds their run had taken them, Juli felt small and lost. No person had ever been so close to her, and still she did not know his mind. Slowly, she lifted her head and looked into Neil’s eyes, seeing tenderness, along with the reflected light of the moon. Juli swallowed hard. “What the hell do we do now?”
Chapter Ten
“What the hell do we do now?” The question rang in Neil’s ears, mocking him. The night before, mating with Juli had taken him to a height of perfection he’d never dreamed possible. Had taken them—he was sure she’d felt it too.
Yet when she’d turned to him with vulnerability in her eyes and that question on her lips, he had failed so utterly he feared he had lost her forever.
Neil growled at the memory. He flipped down the sun shade on the driver’s side of his truck and examined himself in the scratched mirror.
He didn’t look like a total fool, and yet... The dark circles stamped beneath his eyes could have been bruises, they seemed so deep. He had stubble to spare and bits of mud caked behind his ears. He raked his fingers through his hair and shook his head, barely able to meet his own eyes.
“We don’t have to tell anyone this happened,” he mouthed at the glass. Where the hell had that come from? He never seemed able to say the right thing with her, but any moron would know that sentence was about as wrong as he could possibly get. He hadn’t even meant it, and yet some sort of fear trembled within him that pushed those words through his lips before he could think better of them.
Maybe it had been a hint of Lewistown, a fear they would suffer some sort of terrible punishment for unauthorized, unscheduled mating. He honestly didn’t know what procedures Heather Compton and her like would have wanted him and Juli to follow. However, he did know he couldn’t care less. Nothing in the world was more right and natural than what had passed between them under the moon. He understood the sacred union of mating now in a way that no words from Sarah Edmond could ever convey. He would fight to defend the beauty of it, die for it if necessary, even if he couldn’t explain himself to Juli.
Maybe he’d wanted her to comfort him, to ante up ahead of him so he could be certain she felt the same before he copped to how much the sex had changed his world.
Whatever had inspired his foolish comment, he’d blundered as usual. Her eyes had widened as if he’d slapped her. Then, before he could say anything further or make any attempt to explain, she’d become that little red wolf again and shot away into the night as if the devil himself ran behind her. On second thought, maybe that had been better than giving him a chance to speak any more and shove his foot even farther into his mouth.
Neil made a fist and ground it into the empty passenger seat beside him. Juli hadn’t come back to Darrow’s house as far as he could tell. He’d eventually crawled back to the spot where they’d changed to salvage what he could of his clothes and retrieve his keys and cell phone. Juli had already picked her stuff up, but she hadn’t answered any of his calls. Sarah Edmond hadn’t admitted to knowing anything about where she was. Heather Compton did have specific GPS coordinates for the challenge site, provided by Juli, but the stuck-up Lewistown investigator had only sneered when Neil pressed for more information.
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