Her walls were already tightening against his fingers, making his cock ache with such need to be in her. He kissed a path down the back of her blouse, wishing she’d let him remove the top and bare herself to him completely. He loved listening to her soft moans, watching her back arch and her thighs clamp together.
With one final push as she fucked herself on his fingers, her walls tightened with such force it traveled to his cock. The sound of her reaching her peak was too much. He let go, shooting his seed onto her ass. He’d never seen such a beautiful a sight as his cum sliding down her cheeks, glistening against her smooth skin.
She sank to the mattress as he rubbed his cum over and into her ass, massaging her, listening to her moan, his cock already hardening from the sight, the feel of her beneath his hands. It felt so natural to slide the tip of his finger into her tight bud. In and out, his finger disappeared inside of her, as he soon would.
“Damien?”
“Tess?” he answered casually as he eased his finger in and out, slightly deeper this time, with a slow rhythm.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.” He’d take it real slow with her, make sure she enjoyed it as much as he did.
“I’m not ready.”
The hesitation in her voice stopped him. She wasn’t ready, though he knew she would give in if he insisted. But he wasn’t his wolf. Damien laid a kiss at the top of each cheek as he withdrew. Working his way up her back, he planted small kisses over her blouse, until he reached the base of her neck where he moved her silky hair aside and kissed the scar above the neckline. One day, when she felt comfortable about removing her shirt entirely and letting him see her burns and scars, he’d kiss each and every one of them, to let her know how beautiful she was.
When he returned from the bathroom with a warm, soapy washcloth, she had climbed onto the bed and was lying flat on her stomach, but she wasn’t moving.
“Tess?” he said, a jolt of fear coursing through him. He eased her hair to the side to expose her face. Tired… exhausted. He cursed. He had pushed her too hard.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Good in fact. Real good,” she said, sounding as if she were drifting off to sleep.
“You should have let me leave,” he said as he as the washcloth over soft, delicate skin.
“You’re safer here.”
Safer? She was the one in danger, by letting him stay. Damien stretched out on the bed but left a gap between them. That’s how this relationship with her felt, as if there was a huge gap between them. He needed her, and she needed him; he was sure of it. If only he could make her see that…
“You needed to confront him, your wolf,” she said, as if that explained the risk she had taken stopping him at the door and kissing him, enticing him.
“You take too many risks,” he said, barely containing his growl. Confront his wolf? Damien had done exactly that, and he was losing. Either way, she had no business putting herself in danger. “My job as alpha is to protect my pack, Tess. That includes you, now.”
“It shouldn’t,” she said, with the softest of voices.
“Why? Because you can’t shift? We’ve been through that.”
“A good alpha does more than protect, Damien. He has to be strong for his pack, so the shifters feel safe. And from what I’ve seen, you’re a very good alpha. Maybe too good. That’s why you don’t want to share much of yourself with me or the others. You call Callen, Blade, Hayden, Frank, and Pryce your brothers, but you keep them at a distance. Sometimes being strong is knowing when to show your weakness, when to depend on someone else.”
That’s who he had been, before his wolf had started taking over, but no longer. She saw right through him.
“You don’t trust yourself, do you?” she asked.
He hesitated, then released a deep breath. He hadn’t told anyone, not even Hayden. “My wolf is gaining more and more control each day.”
“Is that why you want the blood-bond?”
“That’s why I need the blood-bond. But I want it too, with you.”
She paled. “I… I don’t think I… please don’t ask that of me.”
Time, she needed time. “Go to sleep,” he said as he pulled the blanket over her. Her body remained tense for a moment, and then finally she nestled in against him. When her breathing struck his side, he slid his arm around her. It was a heady feeling having her lying against him, of having someone so precious to protect. He had an entire pack to protect, but never had he felt the weight of that responsibility like he did now, with her. She trusted him completely, and it was his job to protect her—even from himself.
Her hand pressed against his cheek as she stared at him with an intensity he’d never seen in her. “You’ll beat your wolf. I’m sure of it, Damien.”
Her smile, her faith in him… He shook his head, unable to believe he’d found her. He’d do anything for her, including kill. It wasn’t a fact to be proud of, but it was something he knew he’d do, in a heartbeat. Yeah. And here he thought he had all the control in this relationship. He was so wrong. Tess had the control, she just didn’t know it.
She settled against his side, and he kissed the top of her head.
“I don’t want to leave,” she said.
Good, because he didn’t plan on letting her.
“But I may have to—”
“Your wolf isn’t gone.”
She didn’t look convinced. Hell, he wasn’t convinced. He didn’t know what would happen with her wolf, if anything could be done for her, but he did know he wasn’t giving Tess up.
“Wolf or no wolf, you’re still staying.”
“Damien…”
“Go to sleep, Tess,” he said as he closed his eyes. He had ultimately forced his wolf to submit tonight. How often would his wolf’s needs endanger her, and would Damien be able to protect her? The only way to ensure her safety was to blood-bond, but it was a very real possibility that she was now—hell, he still didn’t want to think it—human.
* * *
TESS
Tess woke. She had fallen asleep nestled against Damien. It had been the most restful sleep of her life, despite what had led up to it. She knew the stories of male shifters losing control to their wolves. It was a gradual process, and one most guys didn’t talk about, until it was too late. Human women thought their males had overinflated male pride. Hah! Whether it was male pride or the fact that he was alpha, Damien didn’t want to share his struggle with his top shifters, and yet he’d told her. He trusted her. And while he trusted her, he expected too much from her. A blood-bond. What was he thinking? He was an alpha, the one shifter who required another shifter in the blood-bond. Bonding to a human would kill him, and despite how much he wanted to think otherwise, she was human now.
Last night proved walking away from Damien wasn’t going to be as easy as she had thought. His wolf was pushing Damien—and her. When he had pushed her face down onto the bed, she had been scared because Damien had never forced her to do anything. Then she’d realized what was happening, how hard he was fighting his wolf, what it was doing to Damien—and that had terrified her.
That’s when she decided to give in to him, to help him as well as finally give in to her own desires and have him for herself. She wanted Damien in her bed, had wanted him for days, even before he lifted her onto that kitchen table. But for as much as she wanted to feel him moving inside her, letting him claim her would only make leaving that much harder.
After showering, Tess found yet more clothing on the dresser. She smiled. It was like having a secret admirer. With a perfect fitting bra, jeans, and a simple pink blouse, Tess headed downstairs for breakfast.
Trent was taking the teens to the river and teaching them about tracking in and around water today. When there was no wind to carry a scent, or a wolf was upwind, then the wolf needed to know other ways to track prey. It was training she had never received, and she thought it would be interesting, with or without her wolf. She was starting to understand that life
didn’t end because she had lost a part of herself. It meant she had to learn to do things differently.
“Where are you going?” Damien asked as Tess reached the front door.
Damien emerged from his office, wearing a form-fitting black shirt and jeans. The shirt showed off every muscle of his chest and arms, only to taper at his waist, drawing the eye to his pants and lower. The idea of sauntering over, unzipping his fly, and easing his pants low enough to hang off that tantalizing dip of his waist was making her mouth water.
He cocked a brow.
He couldn’t possibly know what she was thinking, could he? “You first,” she said, smiling.
His eyes narrowed for a moment. “I’ll be gone most of the day, checking on some problems.”
“What problems? Do you want my help?”
Damien straightened his spine. “It’s dirty work. Literally. I need to look into why our sanitation team can’t seem to get rid of the odor coming from the septic tanks.”
That certainly killed any ideas she had. “They’re septic tanks. What do you expect?’
“Less odor. And you still haven’t answered my question. What has you running out the door before I’ve had a chance to taste those luscious lips of yours?”
“Which ones?” she asked, unintentionally running her tongue over her lips.
The smile that crept onto his face said it all. Her nipples hardened from the mere thought of having him between her legs again.
“Why don’t you come over here and find out?”
Ooh, how her thighs were clenching at the thought, but if she touched him, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to pull away. And she was already running late.
“I’m escorting the teens down to the river for a lesson on tracking.” She grabbed the jean jacket hanging on the hook by the door. “And before you ask, yes, Mr. Tall Dark and Dreamy will be there teaching me a thing or two.”
Damien’s face darkened with jealousy and suddenly his muscles were flexing, making him appear twice as dangerous. That sexy edge of his had her entire body thrumming, but for as much fun as he was to tease, she’d caught the low growl coming from him. She didn’t want to get Trent killed by pushing Damien too far.
Tess ran up to him and jumped. With lightning-fast reflexes, Damien caught her and slammed her up against a wall as she wrapped her legs around him. His jean-clad erection felt so good pressed against her core. Her blood raced as she fit her mouth to his and slid her tongue along strong lips.
Before she lost total control and reached down to unzip his jeans, she broke the kiss. “You can put me down, now.” She gave him another quick kiss on the lips, so he’d know he was the only one she was interested in.
“I can. But I won’t.” His lips curled into a grin.
“I need to go.”
“Give me one good reason to let you go.”
“I want to learn how to track.”
He arched a brow. “You never learned?”
“Tracking in Apopka means using an app on your cell phone to locate who or whatever you want.”
“Then I guess you should learn how to track as a shifter, in case any more kids wander off late at night. The quicker we track them down, the sooner I get to enjoy my late-night snacks.”
Oh, his grin was utterly delicious. He was making leaving hard, really hard. “I told you already. I’m not on the menu.” Now she was getting wet thinking about his head between her thighs.
There it was, his nose flaring as he scented her arousal. “Sweetness, you are the menu.”
She swatted his shoulder, which probably felt like someone hitting him with a piece of paper given all those muscles.
“Keep your hands…” His mouth came down on hers for one very long and sensual kiss. “… and mouth off of the teacher and everyone else out there. I’m wearing my favorite shirt today, and I don’t want to see it covered in blood or shredded, if I have to rip someone’s throat out.”
He let her slide down his long body. She enjoyed feeling every hard muscle and bulge along the way. “My hands and mouth are only for you.”
“And everything else is mine, too,” he added, as she opened the door.
“Yes, everything else, too!”
With a lighter than usual bounce to her step, Tess bounded from the house and took the path Trent had pointed out to her yesterday. Maybe she could do this, stay with Damien. They might have to wait a bit longer, but Damien could be right. Her wolf might surface eventually, and then they could blood-bond. Everything would be more than fine, it would be perfect.
Chapter Twelve
DAMIEN
Tess’s screams filled Damien’s office. Each cry, each plea, each whimper coming from her was like claws slicing down his torso, leaving every nerve ending raw and exposed. Damien tensed as Ian laid the edge of the knife against her bare back and sliced a long line over her shoulder blade.
“It’s enough, Damien,” Hayden said.
“I need to see it all.”
All morning, Damien and his top shifters had been watching the recordings and pouring over the files Blade had stolen from the WSSO research facility outside of Boulder. Damien finally had evidence that Tess was a shifter, but it wasn’t evidence he could show anyone in the pack, other than the few trusted confidants watching with him. The recordings were so horrific that they would scare his pack by revealing the viciousness of the WSSO, but it was Tess he was really concerned about. She was finally starting to settle into daily life with his pack. To expose her to the recordings, to bring up those memories, would be beyond cruel.
Hayden pulled up the next video file. Pryce, Callen, Blade, and Frank watched in utter silence, their faces betraying their emotions. The humans—no, not humans, monsters—had placed Tess in a twelve-by-twelve-foot cage. Naked, shivering, and already covered in bruises, Tess was cowering against the bars, her eyes turned down and away from the approaching shadow.
“Shit,” Callen said as Ian drew a red hot iron close to her eyes. Green eyes, already filled with fear, grew wider. The first flutter of bones moving beneath her skin could be seen in her face and arms.
“That’s it. Shift for me, bitch,” Ian said as he grabbed a fist full of her hair and slammed her head against the bars.
“No!” Tess’s voice bit out between cries.
The rod was handed to someone off camera, and then the dull thuds of Ian’s fists driving into Tess’s ribs in rapid succession, as if she were a punching bag, filled the room. Beneath his skin, Damien’s wolf clawed at him and tried to force a shift, the need to kill overwhelming. Tess had held out against extreme torture, never giving Ian or any of her captors what they wanted. Damien could certainly contain his wolf as she had contained hers, especially since he needed to watch what had happened to her, not just to learn the WSSO’s game plan, but to better understand what she’d been through. He would help her—if she let him. His Tess didn’t like appearing weak, which he understood, but she couldn’t hide from what her past. Even if she hid the trauma from him, she’d have to confront it, sooner or later, or it would catch up to her. No one would think her weak after seeing what she’d survived, especially him.
On the video, Ian delivered a particularly nasty punch to her face and finally dropped his hold on her hair, allowing her to slump to the floor. The shifters in the room with Damien all heard the growl erupt from Tess, a fraction of a second before her bones started to move beneath her skin. Ian had finally forced her to shift, and she nearly made it. The bones of her arms, legs, torso, and head reformed into a wolf wickedly fast, but Ian had been waiting for that precise moment when she was only half-way through the shift—when a shifter was most vulnerable—mid-shift.
Ian applied the hot iron to her back, searing her skin, and disrupting her shift. Her entire body seized up, trapped in mid-shift as smoke rose from her flesh. The most painful part of shifting was that mid-point between human and wolf forms. It was a pain all shifters experienced during puberty, when they were still learning how to s
hift. Mid-shift felt as if the shifter was being skinned alive while someone shredded his tendons and muscles with a cheese grater. Getting stuck mid-sift prolonged the pain.
Once they mastered shifting, strong shifters never felt that pain of mid-shift, whereas weak shifters felt it every time. But even for weak shifters, their shifts only took a minute or two at most. Ian had trapped Tess between her two forms, holding her there, drawing out her suffering for more than five minutes.
Five fucking minutes.
Each one of those burn marks on her back was from a session similar to the one Damien’s inner circle now watched. Twenty-two burns on her back. Pryce had counted them when he’d treated her. Twenty-two.
Someone threw up behind Damien. Damien would do the same, except he had to emotionally distance himself, or he wouldn’t be able to think straight. Blade leapt up and shut the volume as Ian held the iron to her back so long that she screamed until she passed out, ending her attempt to shift. Tess lay on the floor, naked, tortured… so broken, unlike the woman who had smiled at him just a few hours ago as she had bounded out of the house eager to learn how to track.
Muting the audio would do nothing. As long as Damien lived, he’d never forget what he’d seen and heard. Damien’s wolf hungered for Ian’s blood, but even his wolf’s rage could not match his own. Damien and his wolf both wanted to rip out Ian’s throat and tear his torso into so many pieces no one would ever know what he was. Someone had robbed them of that pleasure by slitting Ian’s throat, giving Ian an easy death. Someone in his pack knew Ian’s secret. A partner who also supported the WSSO. A partner who remained a threat to Tess.
“Now we know why she freaked out and attacked him in her room,” Pryce said.
“He was there to kill her.” Callen’s eyes burned a bright yellow. “When it was clear she would live, he couldn’t take the chance she’d identify him.”
Damien’s Dilemma Page 16