by Wilde, Kati
“For your students? None. Just the birds and bees. Mostly the bees.”
That probably explains why he’s standing in a field of wildflowers. “Telling them about colony collapse disorder and how we’re all going to starve if western honey bees go extinct?”
“Yup. That species doesn’t live here, but they don’t need to know that. I’ll scare the shit out of them. And if fear of cannibalizing their own families doesn’t keep their attention, I’ll fight a grizzly for a pot of honey.”
“That sounds so educational. ‘How to Die in Alaska 101.’”
“Nah, this grizzly is real friendly. Lazy, too. He’ll roll over after the first punch.” Despite his joking, Ranger’s expression slowly hardens, his gaze like a dark, magnetic force through the screen. “Those kids I’m hearing…are they in your classroom or are you alone?”
Kids? I glance up. A pair of students are halfway down the hall, chatting as they open up their lockers. “They’re out in the corridor.”
“Good.” The soot in his voice deepens. “Now you go close your classroom door, Miss Simmons. I don’t want to get you into trouble with what I’m about to say to you.”
My heart hammers. What could get me into trouble? “Why? Are you going to whip out a really big innuendo?”
A growl rips from him. “Shut the door, Alicia.”
An answering growl begins in my chest, and that sends me running away from my desk faster than his command could. Because that wasn’t me responding. That was the…thing inside me.
The monster. The beast.
Usually it’s quiet. Not sleeping, exactly. Just…dormant. It usually stays that way, as long as I feed it. That’s the best way to fight it—except during the full moon, when it’s useless to fight.
And except when I talk to Ranger. Because the monster wants him as much as I do. It wants me on my hands and knees while he mounts me from behind, each thrust ruthless and hard and deep. It wants me to ride his thick cock until I feel the hot pulse of his cum flooding my cunt. It wants me filled and fucked and screaming for him.
And the monster dreams of Ranger with me. I wake up growling his name with my pussy hot and slick and my bedsheets torn to shreds.
It’s terrifying, this ravenous need inside me. I’m only glad that need is directed solely at Ranger—and that my craving for him isn’t like the hunger in my stomach, sated by anything I stuff into my mouth. Otherwise I might have fucked my way through half the town the past six months. But the monster is like me. It doesn’t want sex.
It wants Ranger. Only Ranger.
But he’s safely away. So it’ll be okay.
Shutting the classroom door, I whisper that reassurance to myself. That it’ll be okay. Whatever he says, whatever happens. I’ll get through it.
I’ve got this. I can deal with this. I can.
I can. Because aside from that growl, the beast doesn’t control my mouth. So even as it howls for Ranger to mount me, fuck me—I face him again, my inner muscles aching for release, my panties drenched with arousal, my blood pulsing hot and thick. But Ranger can’t see any of that through the screen. So he can’t see the monster inside me.
I’ll never let him see it. “Door closed,” I tell him. “So what kind of trouble are we talking about?”
“The kind that’s me, if you want it,” he replies gruffly and my heart stills in my chest. “Because I’m going to be in your neck of the woods next weekend.”
I barely stop my body from moving as everything inside me lurches toward the screen. Toward him. As if he’s already here. So close. The effort of keeping still makes my hands shake beneath the desk, makes my thighs ache from clenching so hard.
Yes, I want it. I want you. Yes yes yes.
Only gritted teeth prevent me from growling my answer—but it isn’t only the beast responding. It’s me. Needing. So much.
Desperately I struggle for control, my heart swooping through my chest and the beast roaring as I finally manage a soft, “Oh? For a conference or something?”
Slowly he nods, his gaze locked on mine through the laptop’s screen. “Something like that. I’ve got a few meetings lined up toward the end of the following week. A whole lotta empty hours in between. And you’re completely done with school next Friday?”
Breathlessly I confirm that I am.
“That’s the day I fly in. Throw in driving time from Portland, and I’ll pick you up at seven, yeah? I’ll take you to dinner and then—”
“I can’t,” I break in, my heart twisting so hard it feels as if it’s tearing from my chest. “Not next Friday night.”
The night of the full moon.
His expression darkens. “You’ve got another date?”
“No. Just…other plans.”
“Blow them off.”
“I can’t,” I whisper painfully. “I really can’t.”
His face hardens. A muscle in his jaw clenches and unclenches before he continues. “Saturday, then?”
Do I dare?
It might be the only time that I can dare. The week following the full moon is the easiest. As if the monster sates itself while roaming free, and for a few days that beast isn’t as needy, isn’t as hungry.
But I am. I’m so hungry for more of Ranger. To hear that sooty voice and rumbling laugh in person and not through a speaker. To watch the powerful movements of his big body uncaged from a small screen. To feel the roughness of his hand against mine when we greet each other.
And to smell him. To draw in his scent and fill myself with it, the same way I’d fill my body with him, if I could. To smell him, and be mounted and fucked and—
“It doesn’t have to be dinner.” His voice sounds hoarser now, his gaze burning through the screen as he waits for my answer. “Whatever you feel comfortable with, I’ll make sure—”
“Dinner’s good,” I tell him, praying that it’ll be true. That I’ll have control. “It sounds really good.”
“Okay. All right,” he says but doesn’t seem relieved, raking a big hand through his black hair and looking away from the camera. His lips draw back in a taut grimace and his breath hisses through his teeth, a multitude of emotions warring over his face. As if he’s fighting himself. And when he looks back to me with torment in his eyes, I don’t know if he’s won or lost that battle. “It’s not just dinner I want from you, Alicia. But if dinner’s all you want, say so now and I won’t show up at your door with expectation of more.”
A quake rolls through me, hope and fear tumbling over each other. Hoping that I understood him correctly. Afraid that I didn’t.
Afraid that I did. “What kind of more?”
“The kind that gets my hands and mouth all over you,” he says, and in the harshness of his voice I can already feel them on me. “The kind that has your thighs spread wide and my cock deep inside you, fucking you the way I’ve wanted to from the first goddamn second I saw you. If you don’t want that, you tell me and I’ll take the edge off before I get there.”
I’m shuddering and shaking with need but that last part is a bucket of ice water over my head. “Take the edge off by hooking up with someone else?”
“By jacking my dick raw.” He looms in closer to the camera, a snarl twisting his mouth. “You think I’d touch anyone else now? After I spent a year wanting you, you think any other woman would do?”
“It doesn’t matter to some men,” I whisper.
“I’m not some men.” Those dark eyes narrow. “Is that what’s got you wary all of a sudden? Some asshole did you wrong?”
Biting my lip, I shake my head. That’s not why I’m wary. But the truth is, despite how much I want him, I probably am looking for reasons to push Ranger away. To keep him at a safe distance.
But if he’s only here for a short time…it should be okay.
“I want all that, too,” I tell him. “I want it so bad.”
“I fucking hope so.” He studies me for a long second. “How about this, instead? You show up at my hotel with an overnight ba
g, and we order room service for dinner—after.”
My inner muscles constrict with anticipation. “Okay. Or you could stay at my place.”
“No, I can’t. A sweet girl like you, I show up and you change your mind, you might not feel so comfortable sending me away after promising me somewhere to stay.”
“I won’t change my mind, Ranger Ranger.”
Like it always does, using his title and name like that makes his lips quirk, but his gaze remains intent. “We’ll see. Because you’ve never seen anyone standing next to me, don’t know how big I really am. You might take one look and run screaming. So we’ll meet in the hotel bar or the lobby, and if you decide dinner is all you want, no hard feelings. Yeah?”
“All right. But I’m not changing my mind.”
He relents a little. “Even if you did, I’d spend all that dinner trying to persuade you—preferably by spreading your pretty thighs and getting a taste of your hot pussy.”
Those thighs squeeze tight, so tight, trying to hold in the needy ache between. “You’d have to be gentle when you do that,” I tell him. “My pussy’s really shy.”
“Is it?” His breathing harshens, his teeth scraping over his bottom lip as he hungrily stares at me through the screen. “Fuck, I want that shy little pussy now. I want to get so damn deep inside you, baby.”
“You can do that, Ranger—” The ringing of the period bell interrupts me. As soon as it falls silent, I lean in closer and tease him, “But first you have to pass your oral examination in front of the class.”
He groans and laughs. “Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll put you up on your desk and give those kids a hell of a lesson in biological reproduction.”
My classroom door opens and I bite my lip to stop the response I would have made. Another student follows the first inside, and suddenly the room is filled with the scraping of desk legs and the thudding of books onto desktops and the shuffling of papers.
Onscreen, Ranger closes his eyes as if in pain. “Maybe I’ll step off-camera for a minute. You hear any weird grunts, it’s just the bears roaming around up here.”
I muffle a giggle behind my hand and that draws his gaze to mine again.
Quietly he says, “So next Saturday, yeah?”
“Yes,” I confirm softly.
“All right. I’ll be staying at the—”
“Don’t tell me,” I interrupt urgently. My entire body is suddenly taut with fear. “Don’t tell me the hotel, don’t tell me which city. Just…text me the details on Saturday morning.”
Face unreadable, he looks at me steadily for a long, long minute. “Why?”
I can’t answer that. I can’t even think of a good answer for it.
Ranger comes up with one, teasing me a little, as if sensing my terror and deliberately trying to put me at ease. “Afraid you’ll blow off those Friday night plans and come looking for me?”
I laugh shakily and nod. The ringing of the next bell saves me from answering.
But that’s exactly why I’m afraid.
2
Ranger
“If the food chain collapses and we start cannibalizing our family members,” my brother muses from his bed of wildflowers, “I call dibs on Grandma Florence. She’s already salty—and real well seasoned.”
I grunt out a short laugh, shoving my laptop and satellite uplink into their cases. I’m almost sorry to say goodbye to those kids. But not sorry the end of the school year means Alicia has free time coming up.
“Where’s the pot of honey?” my brother asks.
“What pot of honey?”
“The one we were going to fight over if the little fuckers didn’t pay attention. Though I wouldn’t have keeled over until at least the second punch. I have some pride,” Brandon says, sprawled out naked in the field with purple flower petals in his hair and idly scratching his belly.
“I don’t have a damn pot of honey.”
“So you’d have lied to a bunch of little kids? I don’t think you’re cut out for this teacher gig.”
I’m not. It was some bureaucratic bullshit that got me roped into this long distance learning thing last summer, and I had every intention of being such a surly bastard that they’d make someone else take over. Then Miss Alicia Simmons came onscreen, so fucking pretty and sweet and sharp, and changed my mind.
Hell, she changed everything for me.
“I notice you didn’t say a thing about that new job as district ranger and moving to her little hometown. Maybe you aren’t as sure of her as you think?”
“I’m sure of her.” Whether Alicia’s sure of me is the question. She seemed real spooked when I told her that I was visiting. Spooked and aroused. So I’ll use that arousal to keep her with me while trying to soothe whatever fears she has.
Finished packing up, I haul my equipment toward my truck. Brandon lumbers to his feet, following along.
“I notice you didn’t say a thing about biting her, either.”
“That’s a conversation that we’ll only have if we need to.”
I hope to fuck that we don’t need to.
“She didn’t look sick to me,” Brandon says. “You ask me, she looked damn good.”
“That’s because you only saw her this one time.” While Brandon was ambling around behind me, with the kids screaming that there was a bear and to look out. So I had their attention the whole time.
Alicia’s attention, too. And she does look damn good. That long red hair is thick and shiny, just waiting for me to mess it up with my big hands. Her eyes are clear and bright, and her porcelain skin blushes so damn easy. But last autumn, she didn’t have hollows in her cheeks and her clothes didn’t hang off her body like they do now.
We reach the truck and Brandon starts dragging on the jeans he left in the front seat. “Maybe she’s doing that…what’s it called? The diet where you mostly eat fat and meat. The kitty diet? Shit, we’ve been on that diet our entire lives.” He snorts out a laugh. “Which is fine for a bear. But you? A big bad wolf, eating a kitty diet. You ought to be hanging your head in shame.”
“It’s not a fucking diet.”
A diet might have carved away the softness in her cheeks but it sure as hell didn’t put the shadows in her eyes. A diet didn’t give her the haunted, hunted look that she doesn’t always manage to conceal.
Something happened to her this winter. Something bad. That was obvious from the first day I saw her again in January, but she said there was nothing.
But there’s something. Something that’s consumed her from the inside out for six months. So I figure that over the winter, she got some bad news. News that she’s sick, and that’s what has been taking a toll on her body and her spirit.
Maybe I’m wrong. But it doesn’t matter. Whatever she’s dealing with, I’m going to be there for her and help her through it.
And the truth is, I’d already planned to go. Last October, I started looking for job openings in Alicia’s area—and I’d have taken anything within driving distance of her. Even if it meant leaving the Forest Service. I never figured I’d get the district station smack dab in the middle of the little city where she lives. But I see it as a sign that it’s where I’m meant to be. Right beside her.
We load up and start off across the field, the truck bumping over the uneven ground. The windows are down and Brandon tilts his face into the wind, dragging in a lungful of air.
“Fuck me, that’s pure. You’re really going to leave all this? No people for miles, all this space to roam…it’s a damn paradise of pristine wilderness.”
“Oregon’s got plenty of wilderness.” And Alicia lives right at the edge of one.
“Not like this. There’s nowhere else like this.”
True. But there’s no one else like Alicia, either. “You don’t have to come. Stay here and be king of the grizzlies. I’ll leave word at the station that you might wander in to see a human face now and then.”
“Nah, I’ll come. I can’t think of a better way to spend my retirem
ent than irritating the hell out of my older brother.”
Separating from the military sure as fuck isn’t the same as retirement. “You’ll have to figure out something besides that.”
“I’m not in a hurry.”
Brandon’s never in a hurry. Drives me crazy, sometimes. I’m never in a rush, either, but I also don’t wait to get shit done. If it needs doing, I’ll do it. But Brandon, he’ll put shit off until it has to be done.
Which is why I’m surprised he left the Army. I figured he’d make a career of it, simply because he’d wait so long before putting his discharge into motion that it truly would be retirement. But he just got out—and then he only spent a few days at home in Wyoming before traveling all the way up here to the Alaskan interior last week. So something’s gotten into him. But he’s in no hurry to say what it is.
He isn’t slow to shove his nose into my business, though. “She might rather be sick than be bit. They call it a curse for a reason.”
When someone’s bit instead of born, like we were. “I know it.”
“She’ll have a real beast inside her. A fucking beast. And there’s only one way to tame that thing.”
My knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. “I know it.”
Both she and her beast would have to fall in love. And the man she loves has to accept both of them in return.
“And if she doesn’t fall for you? We’re big hairy assholes. And women drool all over that shit on Instagram, but in real life, they take one look and run for the fucking hills.”
Yeah, they do. So if Alicia takes off for the hills, it’s a damn good thing I’m good at tracking. “I know it.”
“Or worse, she does fall for you—but maybe she’s not the woman you think she is after only talking to her through a computer, and you don’t fall for her.”
The truck bounces through a shallow gully, the struts screeching in protest. “That won’t be an issue.”
“You’d better hope so. Because she’ll wish you’d left her alone if her beast dies of a broken heart and takes her with it—”
“I fucking know it!” I roar up all the poisonous shit that’s been building in my chest for months. “But what the fuck would you do, Brandon, if your woman was sick? What the fuck would you do?”