Cinder's Wolf: A Shifter Retelling of Cinderella (A BBW Shifter Fairy Tale Retelling Book 2) (17 page)

And at that moment, just for that moment, Cynthia chose it.

“Yes.” She nodded and took Rex’s hands, buttoning up his cufflink with a pat on his wrist. “I’ll spend the night with you, Rex West.”

B
efore Rex had changed
for the first time. Before his father’s death. Before he had taken up the mantle of his company. Before his brother had found his mate. Before he had found his. Before he had lost her. Before all of that, Rex had been eighteen and had learned the toughest lesson of all. There was no such thing as forever. While it was his father who taught him about numbers and humans, it was his mother who taught him that truth.

She was a willowy woman who kept her long, sandy-grey hair in a single loose braid. Rex’s mother didn’t work like his father, but she spent half of her time looking after her three boys, Samson, Rex, and Luther, and the other half caring for her other children—her many exotic plants in the greenhouse. The rambunctious brothers weren’t allowed inside the conservatory for fear of them trampling over the exotic plants. Luther, who had started changing the earliest of them all at only thirteen, was especially forbidden from entering, but a day after Rex had taken over the company officially and was about to leave for New York, his mother had invited him to take a look at a new rosebush she had purchased from a secretive English breeder. She opened the glass doors and let him inside the humid, fragile house. She did so casually with a simple crook of her finger, not looking back to see if he followed.

His mother never looked back. Rex wasn’t sure what had happened to her before she bonded to his father, but from the little he knew, it hadn’t been good. Werewolf bonds usually had to be formed before the age of twenty-five at the latest, although they could be consummated at any time after the initial bond without damage. Unfortunately, his mother hadn’t met his father until her early thirties. Only something causing great emotional distress could forge a bond between two people who were already settled in themselves.

His mother always kept a shard of that sadness inside of her, and it splintered even the soul-consuming happiness she had with his father and the love she had for her sons. That day, for the first time, she shared that pain with Rex.

She sat him down on the little bench at the center of the greenhouse, right next to her rosebush, and patted him on the knee. She mumbled a while about how she had spent far too much on a silly old plant, and how handsome he looked in his suit, before she finally sighed and told him the reason she had brought him in.

It was time that he learned the truth about the bond between his father and her.

“There are a lot of beautiful stories about werebeasts, my darling,” she had said in that dreamy storyteller’s cadence of hers. “And you know lots of them. About the werewolf emperors who used to rule Rome and the lions who protected Queen Elizabeth, and of course, the princes who fought so valiantly to keep their territory in Europe. But they’re not all grand. Some of them don’t have happy endings, sweetheart.”

“I know that,” he said. “I’m not a child.”

“I’m not sure you do.”

“I know that we were slaughtered like dogs in the streets of London and Paris, and in the country side of Bavaria. I know the wolves were supposed to be divided up into four clans—the Wests, Norths, Souths, and the Easts, but we don’t even know if there are any other Wests out there, let alone Norths, Easts, or Souths because the risk of revealing our true identities is too high to seek out even our distant family. I know that we will never be free, except living here on the goddamn fringes of civilization, because if humans ever found us, they’d murder us all, still. Even after a century,” he recited, the words tumbling out faster and faster, hoping that if he told all their kind’s unhappy endings before she did, he could erase the glassiness in her eyes. He couldn’t.

“Oh sweetheart, that’s not the kind of sad story I’m talking about.” She shook her head. Then she smiled, a very old, very sad smile, and scooted off the bench to kneel at the foot of the rosebush. She parted the branches with a tender mastery before pulling out a single rose and joining him on the bench once more. Her warm, dirt-dusted hands folded over Rex’s own and she looked him straight in the eye. “Your father has cancer, Rex.”

“Oh,” Rex said.

He wished he felt shock, but instead, all Rex could think was how much sense it made. Terrible, messed-up sense. His father giving him the company at such a young age, guiding Luther through his shifting, instead of encouraging his younger brother to wait until he was older as was custom, the long walks he took with their eldest brother, Samson, from which he always came back looking as if he had trekked for miles instead of only a few acres.

“How serious is it?”

“He’s going to die,” his mother said. “If we’re lucky, in a couple of years. If we’re not…” Slowly, she twirled the rose between her fingertips, just narrowly avoiding the thorns. The bloom was closed.

Rex was suddenly keenly aware of how thin the glass walls were separating his mother and him from the coming snowstorm. Already, the air outside was growing more opaque, milky white snow clouding over the world like a blindness. The inside of the greenhouse was still warm, but a coldness settled in Rex’s lungs.

His mother squeezed his hand, her grip getting tighter and tighter as the silence went on. She wasn’t crying, only gazing so intently at the bloom in her other hand it was as if she were trying to stop time. “Rex, my beautiful, beautiful son.”

Rex squeezed her hand back, the cold calcifying in his chest into dread. There was something more. How could there be something more? But there was.

“The bond between werebeast and weremate is a very serious thing. When I met your father, I—I can’t express how grateful I was for him. He saved me from a very, very bad place. And maybe if I were stronger—if we hadn’t met so late in life…”

“Mother, please, I—”

“I’m not very good at this, but you need to let me finish. Your father wanted to be the one to tell you, but I thought it was time for me to be strong, if only in this small way.” She sighed, or tried to. Her breath hitched halfway through.

“As I said, the bond between mates is very serious and different for each species. Wolves like you and your father bond quickly, but you can survive for years without your mates as long as you haven’t consummated the bond. And we mates can survive too. However, once the bond is consummated, it’s forever. In the early stages of the bond, separation is difficult and possibly fatal, and even after years, so, so many beautiful years…”

She cleared her throat. “If the female dies, the male will perish as well or risk insanity. Usually, if the male dies, the female can manage to survive, to fight through the pain. But sometimes, well, if the bond was made late, if the man’s inner alpha wolf is too strong or the woman too weak, the woman’s body will take up a kind of sympathetic response…”

“What are you saying?” Rex asked. The words hurt, his throat scratchy with tears he wouldn’t shed.

“You know what I’m saying, sweetie.”

Rex closed his eyes, bracing against the waves of aching rage. “You’re going to die, too.”

“Yes, Rex. I am.”

Rex understood. He understood he felt pain. He understood his whole face was slack and still. What he didn’t understand was how could she move? How could she be saying what he thought she was? He was about to take up the mantle of a soon-to-be billion dollar company. He was about to right the wrongs his people had faced for the past hundred years, and while the world would never know that a werebeast was once again the master of universe, he would. He would know.

He didn’t know anymore.

He was the master of nothing.

Gods, his heritage as a werewolf. He had known he’d never be a great fighter like Luther, or a true alpha one with his wolf and nature like Samson, but he had hoped that in his small way he might be able to be a good. To rule the humans, hidden in plain sight. To uphold the frayed tradition of the princes, emperors, and great werewolves who had come before him. He had been a fool.

There was nothing in his heritage but pain.
This was his father’s fault. His mother liked to take on the guilt, as if it was her weakness, but Rex had known the truth. It was his father’s cancer that was going to kill him and the beast inside of him, with its ravenous hunger for companionship, even in death, that would kill his mother.

“Rex.” Although his mother was inches away from him, her voice felt like it was filtering through a thick wall to reach his numb ears.

“Rex.” She brushed the silky petal of the rose against his cheek, which was finally growing into a man’s five o’clock shadow. “Rex, I want you to look at this flower.”

He didn’t look.

“People have it all wrong about roses, you know,” she said gently. “They think the tough thing about them is their thorns. But the thorns aren’t really so bad if you’re careful. Everything has thorns.”

“This is not just a thorn,” he said, flat and frigid. He knew he shouldn’t be angry with her. This wasn’t her fault. But what else could he be? What else could he do? Gods, what could he do?

“No, it’s not. And that’s my point. Everything ends, darling. There are no forevers. You have to remember that, or you get too caught up on worrying about the thorns instead of trying to enjoy the rose while it lasts. Because it doesn’t last long, sweetie. As much as we wish it would.”

The rose fell from her hand, landing on the cobblestone garden path of the greenhouse. Wrapping her willowy limbs around him, she held him as tightly as she could. Which, as it turned out, was never really all that tight after all.

T
here were no forevers
.

It was a truth Rex had imprinted on his soul.

But as he held Cynthia Cinders in his arms, both of them swaddled in the crimson sheets with a thread count too high to tally, shuddering as he inhaled her scent, he remembered the second part of his mother’s lesson.

Try to enjoy the rose while it lasts.

He had thought all these years that if he pushed away his wolf, the destructive chaos of his animal side, he could keep himself from losing anyone the way he had lost his mother. He had spent his whole life clipping thorns, trying to smooth his world into his vision of perfect peace and beauty.

And none of that had won her.

In fact, that had been the very thing to drive her away.

His mother had been right.
It was never the thorns you had to worry about, was it?
he thought ruefully as he pulled his mate tighter. She made a poor little spoon. Although she was short, she kept squirming, trying to find a better position, or perhaps even unconsciously escape his hold all together. She was willful. Thorny without question.

Those same thorns of hers, her penchant for running away, her desire to be independent, they would protect her if, God forbid, something were to happen to him. She was not his mother. She would not wither without him.

With every day Rex spent with his mate, this fact became clearer. When she moved in with her stepsister Reagan to a dumpy, questionably safe apartment in Harlem, she swatted his shoulder and told him she was carrying pepper spray after he voiced concerns about her safety. It was clear, too, when she slipped in to his bed late, long after she had promised to come over, because she was trying to streamline Boxes & Broom’s business processes, working so hard to solve a problem he had already fixed for her long ago.

He loved her.

He loved her in a way he had never loved anything else before in his life. So one Sunday, a month after they had first consummated the bond, he decided to invite her back to the farmhouse. It was time, he knew, to tell her the truth about what he was, about what they were. Just like his mother had told him her truth all those years ago.

R
ex West has a private jet
. I mean, of course he does
, Cynthia thought. The man owned a penthouse in one of the most storied hotels in Manhattan… no, the world. The thought of Rex flying economy class was silly. Still, the obviousness of Rex West owning a giant hulk of very expensive metal didn’t make it any less impressive, and as Cynthia stepped up the foldable stairs leading to the 787 Dreamliner, she found her hands trembling. She told herself that it was because she, the daughter of a millionaire a hundred times over, recognized the sheer majesty of the machine in front of her.

It was a lie.

As the hydraulics of the door to the plane hissed open, drowning out even the roar of the other planes overhead, she had to admit that the butterflies in her stomach had hatched from a different cocoon. Rex and she were keeping secrets from each other, and this trip was the biggest one of all. He had said he was inviting her to his hometown, but the serious, almost sad way he said it hinted that there was more to the story. And he wasn’t the only one hiding things.

Boxes & Broom was still bleeding capital. While a couple of her tricky business maneuvers had bought them a few more weeks, the truth was beginning to sneak up on her. The same streamlining she had hoped would increase profit only drove customers further away and made the staff rushed and unable to do as thorough a job cleaning and organizing as they had once done. As a result, even cutting salaries now, as Rex had originally suggested, wouldn’t be enough to save them.

The company was going to go bankrupt. Not in one month. Not even in one week. On Monday, she would have to have a meeting with the entire team informing them that Boxes & Broom was no more. There was nothing left to be done. She’d already drawn up the paperwork. All that was left was to make it official.

But not right now.

As Cynthia stepped onto the lushly carpeted floor of Rex’s jet, the back of her cerulean sundress brushed against her recently shaved legs. She smiled gamely at the pilot. “Hi, is Rex already here? I know I said I wouldn’t be able to meet him here until three, but I got done at work early.”

“Darling?” Rex’s cultured voice cut through the surprisingly spacious interior.

Cynthia turned, peering around a wooden wall to see the rest of the plane. Rex strode down where the center aisle would’ve been, if there had been row chairs left in the gutted-out Dreamliner. Because the weather had finally warmed, he donned a light linen suit. She could tell he had been pacing and messing with his hair, as it was in complete disarray, but when he saw her, his whole face relaxed, his lips breaking out into a grin.

“Cynthia.”

She’d never get tired of the way he said her name. When he glided the syllables together into a single sigh, the rest of the world faded and blurred until it was just them. He held out a hand that glinted with a gilded timepiece. “Come here,” he commanded.

In what felt like only one or two steps, she was in his arms. He grabbed the white vinyl belt on her dress and tugged, her mouth crashing into his. While his lips were gentle, his tongue was hungry, stroking her own and stoking a rising heat between her legs. People said that you knew someone loved you because every time they kissed you it felt like the first time, but lately, Rex gave every caress the intense attention as if it might be his last.

Her fingers trailed down his chest, catching on the top button of his breezy, cotton polo and undoing it to glimpse the curve of his well-shaped pectoral. Behind them the pilot had returned to the cockpit, fiddling with double-checks on the equipment.

Rex grabbed her hand and kissed it. “Naughty girl, we’re having dinner first. Then playtime.” His words were light, but his grip was tight.

Does he know I’m lying by omission by not telling him about Boxes & Broom’s impending bankruptcy? Is he pissed?

“Darling, is everything all right?”

Cynthia smiled and adjusted her leather satchel over her shoulder. Inside it, her laptop felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. “Everything’s fine. You said something about dinner?”

He returned her tight smile, and rotated to motion behind where he previously stood.

Cynthia gaped.

She had been so distracted by Rex she hadn’t fully appreciated the understated majesty that was his jet. For one thing, it didn’t look like the inside of a plane. Cynthia had been on private jets before, and no matter how fancy the leather the seats were or how well stocked the cramped bar, they always felt like a slightly souped-up version of an ordinary plane.

Decorated in the same wood-paneled style of Rex’s penthouse, oriental carpets ran the length of the fuselage bordered by leather chairs on one end. A full dining room table filled the other. Beyond the dining room table were more rooms, but Cynthia’s eyes didn’t get that far. She was stuck on the plates stacked with steaming ribs and the tall lager glasses filled with lightly bubbling hard cider.

“This is literally a flying palace, Rex.”

Rex chuckled, and some of the tension that had taken up permeant residence around his mouth in the last couple of days lifted. “I’m glad you like it. I bought it from a Saudi prince.”

“Of course you did.” Still gaping, Cynthia rolled her eyes, making sure he could see, before slipping by him and toward the table.

“It was a prince-to-prince kind of deal.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you buy into your own mythology too much?” Cynthia glanced at the ribs. Their smoky aroma was making her generate enough saliva to power an electric dam, but the fatty bones were caked in mountains of sauce. How could she attack them without getting her hands dirty?

“Only you.” Rex pulled out his chair and sat down to join her, wasting no time rolling up his sleeves and grabbing a couple of ribs. It turned out he was something of a real-life carnivore. He almost exclusively consumed meat, and he knew all the best places to eat it. Yet another one of his quirks.

After he had finished his second rib, he looked up from chowing down. With the way he gobbled at the bone, it was a miracle he didn’t get sauce everywhere. “So. How was Boxes & Broom today?”

Cynthia worked hard to keep her smile from falling, but she couldn’t quite prop it up. “I’ll tell you, if you tell me why you’ve been so tense these last few days?”

He held up one of the rib bones as if it were a fencing épée. “Touché.”

“What's going on, Rex?”

“It will make much more sense if I show you after we arrive.”

“Fine.” This time when Cynthia rolled her eyes, she wasn’t smiling. She just hoped whatever he was concealing wasn’t as bad as what she was. She had promised herself she wouldn’t turn into her trophy wife of a stepmother, and yet, as of Monday, with her company in pieces, that was exactly what she would become. If she was even still Rex’s girlfriend by then.

Cynthia leaned forward, appraising the stack of ribs as if it were a game of Jenga. She grabbed one of the smallest bones by its dry end and was just about to slide it onto her plate with as minimal mess as possible when Rex’s hands closed around hers.

Even that simple touch was enough to weaken her knees. “Hey,” she said, frowning as she tried to tug her hand back, but Rex held her firm.

He bowed his head to kiss her hand. “You taste delicious.”

Her whole body felt light and high, even though they hadn’t yet ascended into the clouds. Her mouth parted. Maybe if she just told him how she really felt, what he’d come to mean to her, he could tell her truth too. Even if it meant the end of everything. “You,” was all she could manage to say. “I…”

But before words she knew it was too soon to say could pop out, Rex moved her hand back to the plate of ribs and pushed it down to the thickest, sloppiest cut.

“Rex!” she squealed, but it was too late. Her fingers were already smeared in the puddles of sticky, smokey sauce.

“You need to eat,” he said with authority. “These are delicious with the sauce, and if you tell me you’re worried about your weight, I’ll spank you. That’s a promise.”

“I’m not on a diet.” Her nose wrinkled, although the hot scent of the Cajun ribs was the opposite of nose wrinkling, and all she wanted to do was inhale as much of it as possible. “I just don’t want to get messy.”

“Sometimes to have the good stuff,” he winked, “we have to get a little dirty.” At that, he scooped a dollop of sauce and painted it right on the tip of her nose.

“Hey!”

“Eat.”

“Fine.” She dabbed at the stain on her nose then her hands with her napkin before taking a few hearty bites of ribs.

Rex smiled and dug into his own meal with an animal relish she wouldn’t have expected from a man who liked to sing opera in the shower. For a moment, there were only the sounds of chewing, the perfect bliss of fall-off-the-bone ribs, and a silence as comforting as the cuisine.

You could lose all of this. Tomorrow.

Cynthia pushed the thought down and away. The weird mark on her ankle hummed with contentment because, as her doctor had explained, she had some sort of localized hormone imbalance messing with her serotonin levels. Not that it made sense to Cynthia, from the little she knew of medicine. But she couldn't analyze any of it too deeply, because if she did, she was half convinced she'd have to check herself into a mental hospital. Nothing made sense lately.
In the past week, she and Rex had fallen into an easy intimacy built on patterns and compromises it usually took most couples years to refine. That comfort was almost better than their sex life.

Almost
.

She had thought she'd only have a one-night stand with Rex. This was all borrowed time. No. Stolen. Best enjoy it while it lasted. Grinning to herself, Cynthia slipped her foot out of her low heel and brushed it against Rex’s pant leg.

He stiffened, surprised, but then his eyes narrowed.

She moved higher and higher until her toes flirted with the cool metal tag of his zipper.

“What are you doing?” he growled.

The animal was back. It could only hide for so long. She liked knowing that she was the only one he felt comfortable enough to show it to. “Ooh, nothing,” she cooed.

“If you keep doing nothing, I’m going to have to take you back to bed.”

“You have a bed here?” she asked innocently, massaging his groin with the pad of her foot.

“Yes, although I’m not sure we’ll even get that far.” He leaned over the table and laced the fingers of his other hand through her hair, drawing her lips to his mouth.
It was a little too far to reach, so she ended up falling forward, her elbows dipping into the sauce of the rib plate. She squealed, and he silenced her with a punishing kiss that tingled with the spices from the ribs. Below it, the heady flavor that was uniquely his shocked her like a lick of lightning. When they parted, she found she still couldn’t breathe.

He wasn’t breathing either judging by the paleness of his face. His features were drawn, his eyes focused on some point far away, outside of the plane.

What was wrong with him? She was the one who should be gazing mournfully out the window. It was her company that was going bankrupt. Not that he knew that. Unless he was hiding something even worse.

“Rex?”
His attention snapped back to her, his blue eyes darkening.

“Cynthia.”

A shiver spread outward from her spine and across her back as the space between her thighs swelled and clenched. “Yes?”

“Do you remember how I took you that first night?”

“Yes.”

“I need to fuck you that way again.”

“Oh,” Cynthia breathed out, crossing her legs. Her center was on fire. She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but it wasn’t that.
He rose abruptly from the chair. On the third night they had spent together, he had confessed he liked how short she was and how he could tower over her. That it showed off his strength. That he could protect her. That he would never hurt her.

She was glad she remembered that right now. Because at the moment, she was sure he was about to do something terrible to her. And the only thing more frightening than that, was how much she wanted him to.

He outstretched his hand, looking stony. “You want me to fuck you. So that’s what we’re going to do.”

“I don’t know where you get this idea that I’m going to do what you say.” She didn’t take it, and she didn’t stand up. Instead, she slid out of the chair and folded herself onto her knees beneath him. From this angle, she knew Rex could see all the way down her shirt.

“What are you doing?”

“Did you ever consider that maybe it’s not that you need to have control during sex?” She deftly unlatched his belt buckle. “But just that
someone
does.”

Rex made a completely inhuman sound as she hooked a finger underneath his boxers, but he managed to restrain himself from moving as she freed his cock. As his member bumped against her nose, there was no denying how large it was. Since they had started dating, Rex had stopped shaving his balls, but the hair had grown back weirdly fast.

She cupped them with one hand, massaging them. “Let me control you now, Prince of Wall Street.” She took the length of him in her mouth.

“Fuck, darling.”

No man’s cock had the right to taste as delicious as Rex’s did. Warm and vanilla. It pulsed in her mouth. Her tongue couldn’t help but swirl up and down its length, and the back of her throat yearned to accept more of him. She pushed down until the tip of it brushed against her tonsils.

“You’re taking me all the way down, aren’t you?” he asked in awe. He stroked her hair with his hand, slightly bucking his hips. He was hers. The thought made her hum excitedly around the tip of his dick. She knew from the way Rex blinked, showing the whites of his eyes, that his orgasm was impending.

Slowly, she moved her lips up and off him until they finally separated with a little pop. A string of saliva hung down from her plump bottom lip until she wiped it away. Or tried too.

He caught her wrist halfway there. “I like seeing you dirty for me.”

Her heart raced all the way into her fingertips, and with their hands together he could feel it too. He cocked his head, looking down at her with sharp hunger. “And it’s my turn now.”