Forbidden Shifters Complete Series (Books 1-6): A Wolf Shifter Paranormal Romance

by Selena Scott

  She came off of him. “You like this?” she asked breathlessly.

  He blinked down into her face, trying like hell to understand english. “More.”

  She bent back over him, a little smile on her face, when he realized that there was something off about the way she looked. Ah. She’d taken off her glasses.

  He didn’t like that one bit. Her glasses were what she used to see and what there was for her to see was him. He wanted her to see him, especially while his cock was in her mouth. He wanted her to remember exactly who it was that she was with at that moment.

  He slicked a hand in her hair and pulled her off his cock. Her eyes flashed and he knew she’d liked that move. With his other hand he scrabbled for her glasses on the nightstand and tried to put them on her face. She took over the risky maneuver and put her glasses on, this time swallowing him down so far she choked just a little.

  His hand was still tangled in her hair so he reflexively pulled her off of himself, not wanting her to choke. When her bright, intelligent gaze hit his, he realized that that was exactly what she’d wanted him to do. She was asking him to guide her up and down with his hand.

  So, that’s exactly what he did. Without really asking himself to, suddenly he was standing and Ida’s hands were around the backs of his thighs, gripping him tightly, her eyes open and clear, peering up at him from behind her glasses.

  Again, he didn’t ask them to, but his hips starting moving, jutting forward into her mouth, soft, tentative strokes at first, and then, at her encouragement, deeper, slower strokes. Strokes that left him gasping in tension as she gave a swirling suck to the head of his cock each time he pulled her back far enough.

  And then, one last time, his body did something without his permission. His orgasm was sudden and sharp, so hard it was almost painful. But that didn’t mean it was quick. She swallowed and sucked and tugged at him, and every time he thought it might be over, she took more from him, greedily tugging every last bit of his pleasure from him. His legs were shaking by the time he finally stopped coming, both hands in her hair and his cock jumping in her mouth. She came off him and then gave him a quick, sweet little kiss on the tip before she looked up at him and grinned.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  She was going to assume that him collapsing back onto the bed like a rag doll was a good sign. His breath sawed in and out of his chest and even with his clothes sweaty and pulled every which way, he was beautiful. Simply gorgeous.

  He was the most stunning man she’d ever seen in her life. And she wasn’t thinking that just because she’d had his man-parts in her mouth. Well, maybe that was part of it. Love drunk was a thing, after all, but still, Ida thought his beauty to be remarkable.

  He stirred a little bit and tugged listlessly at the collar of his shirt. One of his eyes cracked.

  “Ida, if you wouldn’t mind,” he started.

  “You wanna get naked?” she asked, reading his mind a little bit. She knew how important it was to him to follow human rules and not violate her. But seeing as they’d just had a particularly energetic round of oral sex -his first ever- she wanted him to be as comfortable as possible.

  “Yes.” He sat up and tugged at his shirt and she tugged at his socks and pants and underwear. And then he was naked and she was naked and there was nowhere to go but his open arms. He tugged her close and rolled them both under the covers of her bed where he arranged her onto his right side, tucking the sheets carefully over his left side.

  “Phoenix,” she asked gently, resisting the urge to untuck the sheets that were hiding his scarring from her. “Everything all right?”

  “Yes,” he murmured and lapsed into silence, his arms tight around her, his breath in her hair.

  After ten minutes of laying just like that, she pushed up a little bit. “I’m kinda thinking that maybe you’re not all right.”

  She didn’t want to push him. He was bound to feel a little funny after having done something so intimate for the first time. But she wanted to give him the opportunity to talk about it if he wanted to.

  “I’m… confused,” he said after a second, his eyes on the ceiling.

  “Do you want to talk about it? Questions I could answer?”

  He shook his head, his eyes on the ceiling still.

  They fell back into silence.

  “Phoenix,” she said after ten more minutes of silence. “You know that your scars don’t offend me, right? I hate that you experienced so much pain, but I think you’re the most attractive man in the world, and the scars are a part of you. You don’t have to hide them from me.”

  That got his attention. His dark eyes were on her again, blinking, taking her in. A moment passed before he untucked the sheet and turned onto his side, facing her, his injured side facing up.

  His eyes still on hers, he slowly lifted one arm, inviting her to look at his scars. She did just that. She thought she’d have to school her expression to keep from showing any of her dismay on her face, but she didn’t have to. His burn scars were a complicated, knotted organism on his side. Some parts shiny and smooth and too tight, other parts pitted and angry. He still had a long way to go with healing and from what Ida had read, she knew that the healing would involve musculoskeletal pain as well as nerve pain. But there was nothing ugly about them. No part of her wanted to shy away from him. If anything, his scars made her want to pull even closer to him.

  God, he bore it all so quietly. Stoically. She wished she could carry it for him. Give him some relief. Without thinking, she laid a soft palm over his scarred hip and pressed her forehead to his chest, needing to soothe in any way that she could.

  “Ida,” he groaned, rolling to his back and hugging her to his chest. “You’re confusing me even more.”

  Her head popped up. “Really? What do you mean? I’m not meaning to confuse you. Let me help!”

  He laughed and leaned up to press a kiss to her lips. She marveled at what a fast turnaround he’d made on his stance on kissing. A week ago he’d been strongly against the act in all forms. Today he’d made out with her woman-parts for damn near fifteen minutes.

  “I just mean that I didn’t think being human would… feel this good,” he admitted after a moment. “I just thought it would be something to endure until I—”

  He cut off but Ida knew what he was going to say. Until he went back into his permanent wolf form. Back to the wilderness. Back to his real life. Of course. How could she have let herself forget? Even for a little while. He had no intention to live in her world. He only intended to heal and leave.

  “But,” he continued. “But now that I know what it’s like to be naked in a bed with you. Your warm skin. Your hair across my chest. Now that I know what it’s like to be inside your mouth. To have you inside mine…” He groaned again and pressed his head back into the pillow. “How am I supposed to leave all that to the human world?”

  Ida’s stomach knotted. She had the distinct impression that his questions were not rhetorical. That he was actually asking her for advice. Advice on how to leave her when all this was done. For the first time since she’d met him, Ida felt herself resistant to helping him. She knew the answer. In fact, she’d been intending to tell him the answer next week when he asked to be her boyfriend. But the words felt like burning chalk dust in her throat when she tried to push them out now.

  She already knew that she couldn’t truly get involved with a man who was going to leave her. Fooling around was one thing, but real commitment? This, today, was the furthest she’d ever gone with someone she wasn’t committed to.

  She and Phoenix lived in different worlds. Not today they didn’t. But some day soon he’d heal and be on his way and she’d have to be okay with that. He’d never been anything but honest with her. Even now. Even right now, he was taking the hard route and reminding her that he was temporary. This was temporary. Even though he could have just rolled her over and taken things even further between them, he didn’t do that. Because even if he was a wolf, he was st
ill a good, honest man.

  He deserved that kind of honesty from her.

  “Did you know that I had a brother?” she asked quietly, her fingers tracing his dark chest hair.

  He stiffened a little. “No. I didn’t know.”

  “He was a shifter. A black bear.”

  Phoenix tipped her back and peered down at her. “But you’re not.”

  “Right. That can happen sometimes. My parents aren’t either. Sometimes the mutation skips a few generations. My mom’s mom was a shifter and my dad’s uncle was one. So, I guess they both had the gene and my brother got it, but I didn’t.”

  Phoenix thought for a long moment. “Lonely,” he mused in a low voice. “For both of you. Not to be like the other one. I couldn’t imagine being a shifter if my siblings weren’t like me.”

  Ida squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. It was painful how clearly and swiftly he saw to the heart of the matter. “Yes. It was lonely at times, for both of us. But we were also very close to one another. We used to play together when he’d shift. He was always so careful with me. Gentle. Sweet. Not harmful or out of control at all.”

  “He lived illegally?”

  “Yeah. My parents kept it a secret. Made sure we knew how serious it all was. That if anyone ever found out he’d be taken away.”

  “He’s dead?”

  Ida winced at the blunt question but knew that that was just Phoenix’s unschooled way. It wasn’t him being impolite.

  “Yes. He died in his last year of high school. He was at a dance. Prom. Do you know what prom is?”

  Phoenix nodded his head. “Like on that TV show we watched the other week.”

  She smiled and nodded. He was learning so much in his time in the human world. “Right. He went with this girl he’d really liked, but her twin brother hated him. Didn’t want her to date. He thought Ian was sketchy, started following him around.”

  Phoenix’s eyes darkened. “He discovered your brother was a shifter.”

  “Yeah. I think—” Ida’s voice quavered because this was the hard part, this was the part that had taken her a few years in therapy to really understand. To forgive. “I’m pretty sure that he didn’t know what would happen when he publicly accused Ian of being a shifter. It was on stage at the dance. Everyone gasped, jumped away, started running from Ian. Including his date. There were community officers there, just as a way to keep kids from drinking or having sex in the parking lot, that kind of thing. But one of them called and reported Ian right away. I tried to get him to leave, but he didn’t want to go without talking to his date. She was long gone, though. It wasn’t twenty minutes later that they came and picked him up. All they had to do was some sort of blood test and they knew exactly what he was. They put him in an SUV and took him away. To the nearest shifter camp.”

  “You were there? For all of it?”

  Ida’s eyes stung with tears and Phoenix held her even closer. “Yeah. It was the last time I saw him alive.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He tried to escape. Shifted in the car. Made it halfway out of the vehicle before they shot him dead. Apparently the officer who shot thought he was shooting tranquilizers. Either way, my brother never even made it to the camp. The news outlets all spun the story to make it seem either like he’d been a dangerous threat to the officers in the car or that he knew what was going to happen, that it was his way of committing suicide. It wasn’t either. I knew my brother. He was just a kid, really. He just wanted to get out of there any way that he could.”

  Phoenix’s arms tightened around Ida. “I’m so sorry, Ida,” he whispered into her hair. “To lose a sibling… that’s unimaginable.”

  “I’m telling you this for a reason," she said, rolling off of him and up onto her elbows, staring him full in the face for the first time since they’d gotten naked together. “I learned, in a brutal way, that life is short. My brother’s was just eighteen years long.” She took a deep breath and pitched him the idea that had been rolling around in her head since she’d discovered that he’d quit the center for her. “This thing between us, it’s intense. But it doesn’t have to be painful, you know?”

  He eyed her, obviously wary of the direction she was taking this. He neither agreed or disagreed with her statement.

  She took a deep breath. “Look, Phoenix. I want to be a source of happiness for you. Not one of dread or strife. When we hook up, wouldn’t you rather think, dang that was so great, than how am I going to live without that? I think there’s something really great between us. An attraction. It would be dumb to pretend there wasn’t. But I also think there’s no reason to make it all more complicated with commitment. The way I see it, there’s two ways we could go. We could step back and pretend we don’t want to keep getting naked together, or we could continue exploring this thing in a casual way. And, yeah, maybe we shouldn’t talk ourselves out of a good thing just because it’s got an expiration date on it.”

  Her voice was shaking just slightly by the end of her speech. She had never, not once in her life said something like that to a man. She’d never once in her life felt something like that before. Because the truth was, she was not a casual person. She was the kind of girl that commitment-phobes avoided at all costs. They saw her babydoll dresses and big doe eyes and just knew that she kept a private white picket fence in her heart. The only player who’d ever tried to get with her was Watt and that hadn’t lasted more than one kiss. Because Ida was not interested in being somebody’s plaything. She was interested in stability and growth and intimacy.

  On the surface, Phoenix was offering her those things. Quitting the center, moving his place of residence, job-hunting, those were all the grandest and sweetest gestures a man had ever made for her. But none of them were permanent. It was like serving delicious food on used paper plates. She couldn’t enjoy it when she knew it was going to get taken away. But if they subtracted all the grandness of what he was offering her, the boyfriend part, the commitment part, then maybe she could enjoy the rest of it.

  His eyes were unblinking, dark and shuttered. “You’re saying you don’t want me to be your boyfriend.”

  No. Actually she was saying that she desperately wanted him to be her boyfriend but her heart wouldn’t be able to take it when he left. But she wasn’t about to tell him that.

  Ida cleared her throat and sat up. She felt vulnerable when the sheet pooled at her hips but she kind of hoped that her blatant nudity would take a little bit of the sting out of what she was about to tell him. She picked her words carefully, so as not to lie, even if she couldn’t quite bring herself to tell him the entire truth. “I don’t think us becoming boyfriend and girlfriend is a good idea.”

  His eyes, which had stuttered out on her bare chest zipped up to her face. “You’re going to say no when I ask you, even if I have a job,” he said flatly.

  “I won’t have to say no if you don’t bother asking,” Ida said with a twisted, sad little smile on her face.

  He frowned at her. “Is this because I don’t have a job? I told you, I’m getting one next week. I’ll be a better boyfriend then.”

  “No! Phoenix, it’s not that. I swear. It’s that…” She trailed off, trying to gather her thoughts. Everything made so much more sense when they weren’t naked and pressed against one another. “Look, the center is extremely important to me. The most important. Besides Wren, I kind of don’t have much else going for me. Taking care of the shifters that come through those doors,” she bit her lip, “it’s the honor of my lifetime to be doing that work. After what happened with my brother… yeah. I’m not going to risk failing anyone. And getting all tangled up with you just to have you leave in a couple weeks or months or whenever you’re all healed up, well, I already know that it’s just going to screw with me. It’ll affect everything. And I don’t want that. I don’t want to commit to someone who is not only going away, but who doesn’t even plan to be the same species as me in the future. That’s, like, the ultimate break up, Phoen
ix. And I’m not into doing that to myself.”

  As she spoke, his hands had found their way to her hips, holding her still next to him. She only realized how tightly he’d been holding her when suddenly his hands flew off of her and into his own hair. “I wish that didn’t make sense,” he growled, low in his throat. One of those hands that had been so tight on her hips reached up to gently touch her cheekbone. “I don’t want to hurt you, Ida. And if you’re saying that being your boyfriend would hurt you when I left, then… I won’t ask.”

  That was what she wanted, so she didn’t understand why his words made her stomach sink like a stone in a pond.

  He touched her cheek again. “Do you also want to not be together in this way?” He gestured to their nakedness.

  Yes, I do! Everything inside her screamed. “I want to say yes,” she whispered.

  He waited, his eyes dark.

  “Do you think we could keep hooking up,” she asked after a moment, “ and not make things too complicated?”

  His brow furrowed and his eyes got darker. “You’re saying that you want to keep getting naked together but I won’t be your boyfriend.”

  She couldn’t tell from his darkened expression exactly what he was thinking, but she didn’t think it was good. “I- I think that would be best. Look, if we’re hooking up, we’re bound to catch some feelings, right? But this way, I’ll be able to keep a lid on things. I’ll keep my heart in check. I’ll know, for a fact, that we’re never going to be serious. We’re not getting married or moving in together someday. There are no golden retriever puppies in boxes under the Christmas tree for us. I won’t get confused. If you’re my boyfriend and you’re doing boyfriendy things then I’m gonna get all mixed up. I’ll start to hope, and then you’ll go back to the wilderness and I’ll be crushed. So, yeah. I think that if you wanted to also, we could just kind of be friends. Friends who get naked together.”

  These words all came out in a rather explosive rush and when she was done, she had pretty much no clue what he’d thought about any of it. He blinked at her with those dark eyes and she was reminded again of that first time she’d ever met him. How different he’d turned out to be than she’d first thought, but still, those eyes could be unnerving.