by Seere, Diana
“Me? No, don’t you dare worry about me, not here,” she said, holding him more tightly. His muscles tensed under her hands, and she was afraid he was going to push her away. But then she heard the intake of breath, the ragged exhale, and realized Asher, as hard as the granite headstones over the graves, was crying.
She didn’t say anything, just held him, pushing back her own tears. The most loving, generous act she could provide was to help him carry this pain without adding to it.
“I failed them,” he said. A ragged whisper.
“You are not a god,” she said. “Life and death aren’t your responsibility.”
“I was her husband. I was his father.”
She pulled back to look into his anguished face. “And you’ve grieved.” She stroked a tear off his cheek, loving him so much her chest ached, as if both headstones pressed against her ribs. “Almost dying inside in the process.”
He cupped her face, stroked her hair, pressed his forehead against hers. “I can’t forgive myself.”
“You’ve got to, Asher,” she said. “It’s time.”
He continued stroking her hair. She sighed against him, feeling good just to be near him, wishing he could enjoy the same pleasure. Losing his first love had scarred him; she would gladly take some of that pain into herself if it relieved some of his.
Their bodies moved more closely together—knee, leg, hip, stomach, shoulder, chin, forehead—his parts blending with hers, their form becoming One.
She heard him sigh, felt him relax into her embrace.
But then he tensed again. “What if I cannot give you what you deserve?” he asked.
She drew back and gazed into his dark blue eyes. “Whatever you have is enough.”
He held her gaze, his jaw clenching with the pressure of holding back intense emotion. If he needed to weep, she would be there for him. She would wait. She would help him through the grief.
But…
Instead of tears, instead of grief—this time what he gave her was a smile. A faint but wolfish one.
“Don’t be hasty,” he said, leaning closer. His voice was a low growl in her ear, raising delicate hairs on the back of her neck. “Perhaps I should show you what I have before you promise to settle for it.”
Heat poured into her blood. She wrapped her arms around his neck, giving herself to whatever fate had in store for them, whether it be joy or tragedy. So long as it was with him.
Her One.
Chapter 15
He was torn.
Split in two but without the ragged, painful edges he remembered from years ago when Claire and the baby had died. The world itself had cracked into halves, floating apart, pulling him down into an endless scream without sound.
On cold, difficult nights, Asher could hear it. That scream. Faint and wheezy in the distance, far away enough to shut out but close enough to be heard in the worst of moments.
With Samantha in his arms now, standing before Claire and the baby’s grave, he felt that split again.
This time, he wasn’t two halves.
He was two men. Two shifters. Holding himself together and staying alive had felt like a curse back then. He was Before and After. Old Asher and… even Older Asher.
Now, he realized as Samantha’s pulse quickened under his palm, her cheek in his hand, her eyes tipping up to meet his, it had been a blessing. She made him feel a sense of possibility again. A sense of renewal.
A sense—dare he feel it?
Of hope.
The Asher Stanton who had come here years before, bare-chested and sweaty, digging the grave for his wife and child with his own two blistered, bleeding hands was now a man who loved anew, fierce and hot, deep and hard.
The Beat had never made an appearance with Claire. Back then the idea of a One was a fairy tale, a silly legend, a joke.
Feeling Samantha’s heartbeat in his ears, his mind’s eye, in each chamber of his own heart convinced him it was anything but.
It was fate.
Eyes slowly moving across the gravestone of his first wife, he let emotion choke him, filling his throat with a love that lived dual timelines.
“I have spent all these lonely years castigating myself for being the reason Claire and Matthew died,” he said, the words foreign but so true. Saying this aloud was a confession, a baptism, a righteous act of a man who needed to be reborn.
“Matthew?”
He winced, hearing his boy’s name on her lips. “We— He did not survive. I did not officially name him. But Claire loved the name Matthew. And thus I think of him as little Matthew. I’ve… I’ve not said this to anyone before, Samantha. Never.” He allowed one tear to escape and roll down his cheek, an indictment, an offering.
A drop of holy water.
“Matthew,” she said through her own tears, holding tighter to him. “She chose a beautiful name for your son.”
“And you, Samantha, have made it possible so that no other male shifter shall ever experience the pain that felt like a boulder I dragged through life. Your laboratory research—research I openly scorned, erroneously and with a mule-headed stupidity I deeply regret. You pioneered the only treatment for human-shifter couples to prevent BirthDeath. You.” He whispered the last word, in awestruck wonder. “Fate brought you to me.”
“Too late for Claire,” she said, so soft he barely heard her. “Too late for Matthew.”
He could not argue. All he could do was open his mouth and let his feelings pour out.
“I’ve mourned them. Cherished them. But I have to let my past go, my dear. I have to honor who they were and who I was with them, but embrace who I am now. Who I am meant to be now. Who you and I will be together—in the future. Samantha,” he said, looking down into those deep green pools of love that stared back up at him. Dusk settled in over the hills behind her, the prairie rolling light before the ragged peaks. “I love you so fiercely. I need you. I am a broken man who feels whole, but the scars remain. The rough spots that hold me together are never going to be knit smoothly.”
“Who wants perfection?” Her smile made the tears in her eyes spill over, down the sides of her cheeks. “I want you. I love you, Asher Stanton. I’m fated to be with you. And knowing I’ve spent years in a lab, creating something that saves lives, is the reward. I need nothing more than you, time, a purpose to all my days—and children.”
“Yes. Children. A family.” Their mouths tasted like salty redemption, the sweet surrender of her lips and tongue to his the only flavor he ever wanted to devour. Her hair was a warm cocoon into which his fingers thread, her arms tight around him, anchoring him to a world that spun until it stopped, perfectly balanced, the heavy stone deep inside that pinned him to earth suddenly lifted, moved, relocated.
The old Asher Stanton was buried under it, the gravestone he stored in his chest now outside where it belonged.
Next to his beloved Claire and Matthew.
Samantha broke the kiss, breathless and wide-eyed, her chest rising and falling with shallow movement. “You— What was that?”
With ease, he stretched his arm around her shoulders and curled their bodies, backs to the graves. “What was what, my dear?”
“The kiss. At the end. There was a moment—oh, Asher, you became so light! Like air, nothing but air and sun, strong and bold. But the heaviness was gone.”
He smiled.
She pointed. “Like that!” Her eyebrows lifted, voice turning from surprise to the unbearably sweet giggle of a woman filled with joy. Wiping her eyes, she gave him a strange look. “It’s like you’re younger suddenly.”
“You feel it too? You should. You did this to me, Samantha. You do this.”
“Me? What did I do?”
“You love me.”
“Yes, but—”
“And I let you.”
His words were meant to be lighthearted, a counterbalance to the gravity of the moment, but his voice betrayed him, revealing more emotion than intended, but then again—this was his One.
If any being in the world should be privy to his innermost state, it should be Samantha Baird.
Soon to be Samantha Stanton, if Asher had anything to say about it.
And he most certainly did.
“You are a hard man to love, Asher,” she said, the words firm and blunt as they walked together toward the ranch, his arm around her shoulders, hers curled about his waist, warm and welcome. Her tone should have set him on edge. Instead, it made him soften. Relax. Close his eyes and let his defenses down as he paused before a small grove of trees at the base of a slight incline, the main house off to the right.
She followed his lead, stopping, but keeping herself slightly at bay.
“I am a hard man, period,” he agreed, the stirring below his belt a hint of how deeply true those words were. “But no, Samantha. I am easy to love. I am easy to love when we are fated to be together. The hard part is the rest of the world. You and I? We are so easy.”
Her kiss startled him, making him stagger back one—but only one—step as her full weight pressed into him, all curves and softness against his ever-hard body. Muscles that wished to stand down could not, the marble-like quality of his cock making his bones ache. Urgency tinged with a need to reset his body, his blood—hell, his memory—swept him into her like a tempest, a typhoon, forces bigger than them both swirling about them until he felt it.
The shift.
She knew it before his cells, her inner Yes leading him on, his tendons lengthening, nose elongating, the scent of her more maddening than ever before. As skin turned to fur and eyesight sharpened, Asher let himself move into his other existence with a silver grace he enjoyed. Shifting in an emergency was an entirely different experience, one fraught with peril.
Shifting by choice was elegant. Enjoyable. It rivaled orgasm, truth be told.
Turning to catch her eye, he was in full wolf form before he could complete the gesture, Samantha’s hands buried in the thick fur about his neck. Closing his eyes, he let himself breathe, stilling at her touch.
He smelled her emotions before she spoke.
She was in heat. The human version of it, at any rate.
She wanted him.
Not as a wolf, of course. His essence. His manhood.
And while Asher Stanton was not a man as he sniffed and moved slowly, Samantha following wordlessly, fingers twirling in his ash-colored coat, he was still her One.
* * *
Slippery. So slippery.
Not the path.
Her.
Sam was embarrassed by how her thighs pressed against each other as they walked into woods that darkened as they thickened, the slick of her arousal twinning with the pulse of her clit between her legs. Stumbling slightly, she caught her footing quickly as Asher the Wolf led her confidently away from the main estate, into a forest primeval that felt mysterious, alluring, dangerous.
Like the Asher she loved.
She knew he smelled her want, knew that as her hand kneaded the thick, rolling muscle of his shoulder and her belly warmed with need, he wanted her, too. Shifters had always been a source of obsession for her, first from a purely genetic perspective, but later, after watching the epic shift before battle with Tomas in Boston, they’d become an obsessive sort of fantasy.
That a shifter would turn out to be the love of her life felt like a fairy tale. A joke. An impossible dream.
Yet here she was.
Doubly mortified that she was so turned on in the wake of finding Asher at his dead wife and child’s grave, Sam castigated herself as they walked.
Stop, Asher said inside her head.
She looked at the wolf, uncertain.
And then she realized he hadn’t said the word. She just knew that’s what he said.
Her mind went blissfully blank.
A left, a right, a twig scratching her arm—all the movement took place in growing darkness until Asher halted. To her surprise, she found him at the trunk of an enormous tree, the base deeply scarred as if Paul Bunyan himself had taken an ax and chopped one-third of it off from the top. The exposed wood had weathered over time, turning the color of ash, bleached by sun and rain.
Asher stepped forward, lifting his front right paw onto a small, flat spot of exposed wood grain.
And the base of the tree opened. A portal to another world had been created.
“Eeee!” she said, the sound more of surprise than fear, but she tightened her grip on him regardless. Pausing, he let her, then gently moved forward, like liquid metal, hard and unyielding. Inside the tree she was blind. Her eyes were useless.
Asher had to be her eyes. He was her heart, too, so why not?
“What is this?” she whispered as her breath caught in her throat, her senses on edge. A thick spiderweb caught on her hair. Instinct made her let go of Asher, batting her hands to rid herself of the nasty silk, her scream so close, so close.
And then a shaft of light. The outline of a man. Another door.
What was this place?
It is I, the man said inside her head. Come.
Looking behind her, she saw only darkness. The path inside the tree had shut. She had no choice.
Besides, that voice was Asher. She had followed him this far. As she moved into the light, she saw his back, his ass, thick thighs covered with sandy fur. Carved shoulders moved with power as he bent over a small table, a water pitcher and bowl like something from an earlier century before him. He was washing his hands.
Human again.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“Mine,” he said simply.
“Asher.”
An amused laugh greeted her reply. “It is… I do not know what this is, Samantha. Call it a hermit’s den. A secret hideaway. A refuge. In here, I can be myself.”
“How did you— Who built this?” Looking up into the soaring ceiling, she realized only a fine woodworker with a strong unconventional streak could have made such a haven. The ceiling was comprised of the tree’s actual root structure, the carver an artist, the beauty extraordinary. Sam felt like she was nurtured by the tree, sheltered and fed.
A light melody played at the edges of her mind, making her smile, a song she didn’t know but that felt like a backdrop to a place she should know. This space felt holy, sweet, a sanctuary.
There was a large bed. A wingback leather chair. A dresser with a washing bowl and pitcher. Low-level, warm lights, LEDs, she suspected, filled the space. It was high-tech and low stress.
“I designed it, but it was Morgan who put the special finishing touches in this refuge,” Asher said, flattening one palm against a soaring support arch, his hand caressing the polished wood with love. A smile tickled his lips, one nuanced and layered.
It made Sam smile too.
“Morgan? The shifter? Your—” The word servant was on the tip of her tongue. Such an old, antiquated word.
“He has served the Stanton family for many years, in addition to his butler duties at the Novo. Woodworking is a hobby. I had Manny help with installing the paw-print locks. I can only enter this abode in wolf form. It is a protection I built in to keep this truly private.”
“Morgan? Really? He’s ancient!” Sam blurted out, fixated on the strange point. “How old is he?” She knew about elongated lifespans for shifters. While the Stanton family members had always answered her scientific questions about their ages, she had never had a more personal conversation about the passage of time.
She had calculated Asher’s exact age last year, and the number took her breath away. How could a man who had lived so many years look so young, so virile, so—
So Asher.
“Morgan is exactly two hundred and twelve years old,” Asher said, the amused smile turning to something more impish as he stretched before her, his erection far more interesting than old Morgan.
“You say that,” she whispered, licking her lips, “like it’s normal to know someone who was born before Mary Shelley published Frankenstein.”
“Wha
t an interesting work of literature to use as a benchmark.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you consider Morgan to be a monster?” Taking a step forward, he asked the question with the full weight of the real one behind it.
Am I a monster, Samantha? The words echoed in her mind.
Lord, no. You’re a god, she thought to herself.
His mouth spread with the most lascivious grin, her legs melting as she watched him, read him, wondered how many mysteries that fascinating mind held.
And how much that magnificent body could do.
With her.
“Thank you for showing me such a special place.” Her breath was ragged, uneven, hard to keep steady as she battled emotions and thoughts, the body fighting over and over.
“Of course. I am an open book for you. And only you.” He turned then, his hands running up his face and into his hair, the gesture so human, so revealing as his thick chest and strong, corded arms stretched up, showing off the glory of Asher’s nude form. In an instant, she flipped back into a state of being that was all body.
No thought.
No thought other than him.
He sensed it, covering the space between them with a swiftness born of need. Their kiss was a fire starter, her legs moving to mold to his as she craved the friction of their pressed bodies. He slid one hand down and oh, the touch. It was all she could do not to ride him right there.
And yet, as the kiss deepened, Asher’s touch more sensual, less rushed, she remembered. Words came inside her body, images a rush from earlier. Asher’s need turned between them, like a prism in the sun. Healing was what her One needed most now. Revealing this den to her was an act of will.
Of trust.
Of love.
Sam broke the kiss and put a hand on Asher’s chest, stilling him with her gaze as she stepped back. The connection between them was electric, all knowing, and playful. Smiling seductively, she brought her hands to her throat and began removing her clothes. She moved slowly, teasing him not because she wanted to bring him pain but because she knew it would heighten his pleasure. A man, like a wild animal, enjoyed his food more when he had to work for it.