The Wolf of Haskell Hall

by Colleen Shannon

  When she broke off the engagement, her pride hurt more than her heart. Still, for the next few years, she’d held all men at a distance. And then when her parents both died in the same year, she’d learned to take over her father’s affairs. She didn’t have time to think of men.

  Until she came here. To the land of her ancestors.

  To be confronted with a man who appealed to all the womanly urges she’d deliberately stifled. If she was not a normal young woman, Ian Griffith was certainly not a normal man.

  Quite apart from his lupine tendencies, he was as complex and unexplored as the terrain around them. A commoner with a tormented artist’s soul. A practical leader of men with romantic notions he kept sacrosanct in his secretive heart. An intelligent, self-educated man, yet he was a believer in mystical things like omens and blood bonds.

  In short, he was as much a bundle of contradictions as was she. In many ways, her male counterpart, no matter the gap in their education, breeding and wealth. But even if he’d been her polar opposite, she only to look at him to think of shocking things.

  Romping naked on the moors. Smoothing her itching hands over those hard angles and intriguing planes of his body that were so harmonious with his personality.

  She looked down at Ian’s strong hands holding the reins before her, the black hair on his wrists, and longed to feel again his soft body hair titillating her own.

  This time, she couldn’t blame her madness on the moon, or his tempting nakedness.

  This time, she went with him openly, willingly. To fornicate, as Pa would call it.

  And she didn’t feel a whit of shame.

  She traced the fine black whorls on his wrist with a fingertip. Even that slight caress made him inhale sharply and draw back on the reins. “Don’t. Or we shan’t make it to my special place.”

  She kissed his hand in answer.

  Cursing under his breath, Ian turned her in the saddle to face him and kissed her. Desperately, with all the passion of both man and wolf. As if he would, in truth, eat her, consume her, absorb her.

  And she responded with equal hunger. She felt him grow erect, stabbing his need into her lower abdomen.

  Breathing raggedly, he gripped her shoulders and pushed her gently away. “I’ve never made love on a horse before. What I have in mind will take much longer and requires total freedom of movement. Now behave, vixen.”

  His dark face brightened by a smile, he softened the command with a kiss on each of her palms. He froze, staring down at their redness. “Did you mean what you said at my ancestor’s grave?” Ian asked softly.

  Nodding, she tensed, expecting him to tell her not to clean the rest of the graves, to save her tender hands. Not even to herself could she explain why she had to keep her vow, so how could she expect him to understand?

  Again, he surprised her, for he only lifted her palm and kissed it. An inch at a time. With a tenderness that honored her pain and made it his own, he trailed kisses over her hands from fingertips to wrists. And finally, when his soft, warm mouth had replaced the stinging with a delicious tingling, using the very tip of his tongue, he delicately licked her lifeline.

  Her fingers curled around the intimate caress, as if, with the simple movement, she could capture this moment and hold it forever in the palm of her hand. She was so moved she had to force herself to listen to his husky words, muttered into her lifeline.

  “Gypsies believe that a lifetime is marked in the palm of the hand, if you know how to read it.”

  “And do you know how to read it?” she asked, caressing his tousled black head with her free hand.

  His handsome face intent, he lifted his head and stared down at her palm. He traced the lines with his fingertip. “You have a heart too large for your small frame. You will have a long life, but see this break?” He indicated the sharp gap in the long, curving line that followed the base of her thumb to her wrist. “Something traumatic will happen to you sometime soon, something you may not overcome.”

  Some of her enjoyment was spoiled, and he must have read that in her expression, for he faced her back around, tightened his arms around her, grabbed the reins and cued the grazing stallion to go on. “Forgive my superstition. It’s a silly habit I gained from my grandmother. Such things mean nothing.”

  “You’ll never convince Safira of that. And it’s eerie, the way her predictions often come true. I’ve never doubted the existence of phenomena we cannot understand. Only our capacity to have faith in them. We seem to be born doubtful, and die confirmed skeptics.” She might have added she was living proof of that.

  Had she not scorned the very existence of werewolves when she first arrived here?

  She knew better now. And she was glad, so glad, that fate had proved otherwise.

  With a smile the original Delilah might have envied, Lil snuggled her shoulders against his back. She was meant to come here, to meet and meld with this man. If that meant she loved him, then so be it. Whether she had a few weeks with him or a lifetime, she wanted to make the best of them. And if that made her a harlot, as some of her own servants whispered, well, Delilah Trent had never lived her life according to any mores but her own, and neither would Lil Haskell.

  When they approached a rock outcropping, the stallion shied sideways, snorting. Ian soon had the horse under control, but for an instant, he paused, staring off to his right.

  Lil followed the direction of his gaze. At first she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary except something white. A scrap of ragged fabric was caught on a low bush, fluttering in the breeze. Feeling something odd in his reaction, Lil glanced up at Ian.

  He was still as death for a moment, that bleakness back in his eyes as he stared at the fabric. But when he caught her gaze, he mustered a smile and turned the stallion sharply in the opposite direction.

  For some reason, his reaction made her uneasy, but before she had time to pinpoint why, they were headed straight into a rocky slope. She gripped the saddle in alarm, but then she saw, almost hidden until they were upon it, a narrow opening in the rock. There was a jagged split in the huge outcropping, half grown over with reeds and scrub, so one couldn’t see it until one entered.

  Ian wove the stallion adroitly through the jagged-toothed walls, and at times the space was so close Lil felt stone brush her leg. But as they approached the end, and light split the tiny canyon’s exit, Lil heard the rush of water.

  They emerged onto the little patch of Eden Ian had described to her so vividly that day in the salon. Ian’s arms tightened about her midriff as he let the reins dangle. The stallion dipped his head and grazed on the lush grass surrounding this sheltered nook that was crowded on all sides by rocky slopes.

  The tiny stream that trailed a serpentine path through Bodmin moor must broaden through a huge gap in the rock above, for it tumbled in a merry waterfall into a natural spring below. The two water sources burbled, cavorting in a sylph-like dance, then merging into one fluid entity where neither waterfall nor spring had any separate identity.

  Slipping off the horse, Ian held up his arms. Without hesitation, she reached down to him, and he carefully, gently, as if she were unutterably precious to him, lifted her down. After unsaddling the stallion, he held her back against his broad chest, clasping his arms about her waist, and let her look at his secret place.

  “I finally understand why you love the moors so much,” she whispered, noting the patch of soft moss growing to the edge of the spring, down its banks, to merge its destiny into the pool, too. “Who would have suspected such grace in such a bleak place?”

  He turned her in the circle of his arms. “That’s why I….lust for you so much. Who would have thought a pampered, spoiled heiress could have the heart and spirit of my moors? No one will ever conquer you, Delilah. A man might lose himself in you for an hour, a day, a week. Even delude himself that when he beds you, he owns you. But he can only embrace you for the night and hope that by daylight, you still want to be held.”

  Lil slipped her
arms around his neck and leaned back in his clasp to stare deeply into his eyes. “We are much alike, Ian. I only realized it a few minutes ago, but I think the power between us has little to do with curses and blood bonds, and much to do with our own natures. In a way, we’ve both been lone wolves. Forging our own paths, under our own terms, alone rather than compromising who we are and what we want. We were fated to meet, and end our wandering here, in this perfect place, in this perfect way. No woman will ever hold you, either, Ian Griffith. Unless you want to stay….”

  His brown throat moved as he swallowed harshly, but then he framed her face in his hands. “And what if…the next time I don’t–?” His voice became muffled under her fingertip.

  “No what if. Only what is. You. Me. A patch of Eden. And a memory neither of us will ever forget.” Lifting on her toes to kiss him, her breath mingling with his in a gentle caress, she whispered, “Give me a child, Ian. Then no matter what happens, the curse will end as it began. With a child and a new generation unhaunted by fear of the night.”

  She took his groan of denial and capitulation from his lips. But just as he kissed her back, his hard mouth consuming her, stealing her self away, she had time for one last thought.

  What if his malady was transferred into the child? Could the curse be passed on in that way, too?

  But she had to chance it. She’d never met a man she wanted to procreate with, and she knew herself well enough to know that she might never meet such a man again. Be hanged to the whispers, the scandal. She had plenty of money and backbone if she had to raise the child alone. And forever after, she’d have something of Ian to cherish.

  His fingers trembling, Ian undid the buttons of her dress and slipped the garment off. The corset, the petticoats, the chemise quickly followed. Then Lil was covered only by a blush, a breeze, sheer stockings gartered at her thighs–and by a passionate amber glow.

  The look in Ian’s eyes not only surrounded her, in some odd way it absorbed her, too. Forgetting embarrassment, who he was, who she was, even where she was, she only knew why she was. To mate with this wild man in a melding as elemental and natural as the merging of the waterfall and the spring.

  Closer….she had to get closer. She squirmed against him, pulling at his own soft shirt with urgent hands. What were these strange barriers between them? She felt the roughness of fabric against all her exposed, sensitive areas.

  She wanted skin!

  She moved into him so close that he had to steady himself to keep from being driven backward. Shapely female arms, torso sinuously brushed up against him, tempting him as her namesake had tempted her own Samson. Still he stood invincible, staring arrogantly down at her, fully dressed, only his hands resting on her shoulders.

  Delicious anger quivered through her, for she knew what he was doing. Tempting her. Taunting her. Making her face her own need for him.

  Two could play that game.

  She undid the top two buttons of his breeches and slipped her fingers inside. So much for his act of invincibility. She couldn’t quite clasp her fingers around the prize in the close confines of the fabric, but she felt enough to know that he was fully aroused. She used one forefinger and stroked along the ridged length of that upthrust need.

  A choked sound came from him. He pressed his palm against her hand, trapping her in the intimate caress. “You have it. Now what are you going to do with it?”

  Blushing at her own boldness, but compelled by something beyond lust, beyond body, something that went deeper in both of them than they were comfortable admitting, she used her free hand to unfasten the rest of his buttons. She pulled him, pulsing with a carnality no subterfuge could hide, into her palm. Clasping her fingers around the proud eminence, she purred, “Do with it? Why I intend to use it well.”

  His mouth fell open. He blinked, and blinked again, the muted glow in his amber eyes dimming with confusion. She knew no woman had ever spoken to him so. He was the one accustomed to doing the leading, and he expected women to follow.

  But a situation such as this didn’t require either a leader or a follower–it required mutual cooperation. How she wanted to cooperate….

  Smiling wickedly at her own thoughts, she brought up her other hand and gently brushed both palms against each side of his sensitive erection. He shuddered. His neck arching back, he blindly caught her hands to pull her away. As if he feared what he’d do if she continued to touch him so.

  First rubber to me, she thought, a sensual, sleepy smile on her lips. She giggled at her own misnomer. There was nothing flexible about this man, least of all this part of this man!

  Finally aroused beyond his own formidable level of control, Ian clasped her wrists in one hand and tugged her beside him to the welcoming bed of moss. Fully as possessive as an alpha male wolf about to mate the dominant female, he shoved her down and stood over her, slowly pulling off his shirt while he raked her with feral eyes. Lil stretched luxuriously against the moss, all her back’s nerve endings exquisitely sensitive to the sensual stroke of nature’s hand.

  And her front was equally aroused by hot amber eyes and the waterfall’s fine misty spray. Then Ian was naked, too. For a moment he stood, primitive and unadorned, as much a part of nature as this secluded piece of Eden.

  They ate one another with their eyes. In the darkness of their first joining, she’d only had one feeble lantern to light the wonder of his presence. Now, in full daylight, she saw that his legs were long, lithe, and muscled but not bulging, like his arms. His stomach was flat, furred with a narrow line of black hair that broadened to a vee on his broad chest and flared again at his loins.

  As she looked at him there, saw the rampant maleness that would shortly engorge the soft, aching center of her, Lil no longer knew who seduced whom. And it no longer mattered.

  This game, they’d both win.

  Unable to speak, she held her arms up to him.

  With a soft sigh that might have been surrender in a weaker man, he knelt beside her.

  Immediately she tried to latch on to him. The aching, empty void deep inside her desperately needed filling. But this time, the estate manager so lordly in all but blood was firmly in control of the wolf. He caught both her hands in one of his and manacled them above her head. Slowly, leisurely, he stroked her with his other hand. Neck to collarbone, lightly tracing a curlicue path between, but not touching, her aching breasts. His hand gently traced every contour of her stomach, and then the heel of his hand pressed into the rounded curve just above her womanhood.

  Flaring amber eyes spoke the volumes and wisdom of the ages, passed down through both human and wolf instincts. She knew as surely as if he’d spoken that he, too, wanted that pulsing void filled. She began struggling at his clasp, trying to get free so she could end this torment in its inevitable way.

  He only gritted his teeth, gripped her slipping wrists more firmly, and lowered his hand to trace the poetic contours of her hip bones, one side to the other. He didn’t touch the feminine flower unfurled, waiting to be plucked like a rose hungry for dew.

  And it was deliberate, damn him!

  As his hand wandered down the length of her stockinged thigh, she said through her teeth, “I have some thumb screws and an iron maiden you can use, too.”

  The tormenting caress stopped. His eyes leapt to her face, startled, but then white teeth flashed in a reckless grin. “Oh, I don’t need them to torture you into submission. Every weapon I need to win this little battle of wills is attached to my person.” He shifted his weight slightly, and for one maddening moment, she felt the silken slide of his manhood questing between her legs. He touched her exactly where she needed it most, at the aching kernel or her womanhood.

  Instinctively, she moved her legs apart, her eyes drifting closed as she decided to let him win this artful duel of words and bodies. She might die, otherwise….But to her tooth-grinding frustration, as quickly as he pressed into her in the urgent caress, he withheld himself.

  She felt teeth raking her leg.
Her eyes popped open. Somehow, he managed to retain his hold on her wrists with his much longer reach and still catch her garter in his teeth. He pulled the garter down, and her stocking with it, inch by inch, his teeth grazing her tingling thigh all along the way.

  But when he came to her knee, he couldn’t move lower any more without letting her go. Amber eyes flashed up to meet her gaze. Assessing how far to take her in this sensual journey before he gave her what they both wanted.

  Playing along though every inch of her body burned with need for him, Delilah gave him a lazy smile. “Decisions, decisions. Are you going to feed me or eat me?”

  He went very still, but then he saw the teasing gleam in her eyes. He relaxed and replied huskily, “Both, I think.” It was her turn to be shocked, but long lashes veiled his beautiful eyes as he smiled back. Secretively. Making her wait.

  First he used the same torturous process on her other stocking and garter, but this time he flicked his tongue across the path along with his teeth. Then, finally, blessedly, he straddled her, the flaring, excited head of his tumescence a vanguard to his intent. With a will of its own, it pointed toward the prize it sought.

  His effort obvious in the strained muscles of his neck, Ian still managed to maintain control. He rested his cheek between her breasts, listening to the frantic pace of her heart. “Sometimes I want to hold your heart in my hands and cherish it as a valiant talisman to ward off evil. And sometimes….” He finally let her go, but when she tried to grasp his manhood, he pressed her palms flat against his chest. “Sometimes I want to rip my own heart from my chest and watch it pulse to your touch. We both feed one another, Delilah. With every smile, every touch, we sustain who we are and grow a bit more into who we can be. Together.”