Hungry Like a Wolf (16 page)

“Hands. Off.” She growled the threat, but the words lacked a certain authenticity. Her scent told him how his presence affected her.

Logan’s fingers slid a fraction deeper and teased small circles around her opening, drawing even more moisture from her body. Damn, but she was responsive. It made his mouth water almost as much as her scent did.

“Somehow I’m not convinced that’s what you really want, honey.” He leaned forward and nipped at her earlobe, savoring her small intake of breath. “Are you sure you don’t want something more like this?”

His hand shifted and two long fingers slid inside her, filling and stretching her eager body. She felt tight and hot and incredible around his fingers, and he moaned, nearly drowning out the soft sound of her cries. He could imagine few things more perfect in this world than the feel of her slick pussy closing around his cock and milking him to completion. And if he didn’t get his mind off that memory right now, he’d be “completing” right there in his jeans.

Quickly withdrawing his hand from between her legs, he used it to shove her jeans down until they tangled around her ankles. She growled a protest, but his urgency drove him, and he didn’t bother to pause to let her kick them off. Instead, he ripped her burgundy satin panties into shreds, not even taking time to appreciate the smooth, silky feel of the material or the contrast of the rich color against her fair skin. All he cared about was getting inside her, and the panties were in his way, so they had to be destroyed. It was that simple.

Logan threw away the scraps of fabric and reached for his own jeans, racing to get them out of the way before he died of a critical buildup of sperm. The top button defied him, refusing to slip from its hole, and he snarled in frustration. He released her hands so he could use both to tackle the issue, but the second she shifted and braced them beneath her as if to push herself up and drag herself away from him, his hands slammed back over hers. Irritated, he growled, a low, dark warning.

Honor growled right back. Shifting her weight, she braced her hands on one stair and her knees on another. The jeans still around her ankles and lower legs forced her to keep her thighs pressed together, but it made no difference. Pushing herself into place, she dropped to her elbows in front and thrust her bottom out behind her, raising her hips and curving her back until she had presented herself to him like an offering.

Logan froze in place. He recognized the mating stance for what it was, but he hadn’t been expecting it. For all the lust he could smell on her skin, he’d thought Honor meant to play the reluctant mate to the bitter end, and now here she was, presenting herself to him like a lusciously unwrapped birthday gift. For a few seconds all he could do was stare. Then she reached back and drew her hair forward over her shoulder and out of the way, turning to look back at him. She invited him with a look, and when she raised an eyebrow and canted her hips a fraction higher, he gave in to his instincts and covered her.

*   *   *

Honor fought fiercely, but in the end she was overpowered. Not by Logan, but by her own fierce desire. She needed to feel him inside her again and damn the consequences. She had done enough fighting against her instincts lately, enough self-denial, enough of what was good for the pack instead of what was good for her, and she was done. This time, this one time, she would take what she needed and damn the consequences.

If she was lucky, maybe he’d fuck her to death, and she wouldn’t be around to face any consequences.

By the time she decided this, though, and made him a clear offer, it was evident he barely remembered what to do with her. How quickly they forget. Drawing her hair over her shoulder, she put a little wriggle in her hips and looked back at him with one brow raised, as if to ask how much clearer she had to make it.

Not much.

He fell on her like a starving man on a feast table, with the same greed and the same touch of fear that the bounty before him was only an illusion and would fade away if he hesitated even a moment longer.

She heard his rough growl of hunger and approval, then felt his large hands gripping her hips, holding her in place while he positioned himself at her entrance. She felt him savoring that moment of quivering anticipation before sliding home with one deep, forceful thrust.

Honor threw her head back and screamed. He drove into her, the momentum of his body carrying him hard and high inside her. He parted her body and made a place for himself in her heat. Her internal muscles quaked and shivered and protested, but in the end they softened, letting him force his way inside. He repaid the kindness by stroking every nerve ending she possessed with his flared head and thick shaft. He reached deep inside her, to the heart of her, and paused there before drawing back for another assault.

She whimpered and dropped her head to the cold, wooden step. The sensations threatened to overwhelm her, so intense she could barely draw breath. The denim around her ankles forced her to keep her legs pressed together, and that made her channel tighter, forcing it to clamp down hard around him and milk him from the very first. She wondered what it felt like to Logan, if it could possibly feel as amazing to him as it did to her. Her entire body seemed on fire, shaking and twisting like a flame as he rode her hard there on the steps to her father’s office.

She felt his fingers bite deeply into her hips, then he shifted, falling forward on top of her, his chest pressed tightly against her back, his hands coming down to pin hers to the rough wood. His hips continued to thrust against hers, his cock working a hard, regular rhythm inside her. She shivered wildly and the tremor passed from her flesh to his, making him growl softly right into her ear.

“More.” His voice touched her like another hand, and abruptly Honor found that she wanted to give him more.

Dropping her chest to the steps, she drew her knees in until the tops of her thighs were digging into the front of one of the stairs and lifted her hips higher. The change in position shifted his cock inside her, sliding him a fraction deeper when she’d thought that he already filled her to overflowing. Now she could feel him so deeply, she thought her heart might explode.

Logan rumbled his approval and increased the speed and force of his thrusts. In her position, Honor had given up all of her leverage and now all she could do was kneel before her mate and take him, however hard and fast and deep he wanted to go. The knowledge of her position sent another shiver through her—one of delight—and she could have laughed at how positively unalpha she was in this moment. She couldn’t have cared less. She’d have cheerfully agreed to be omega at that point if it meant this man would never stop mating her.

Whimpering with the impact of his thrusts, wanting to give him everything he needed, Honor reached up behind her, hesitated a moment, then swept her hair to the side and pulled it taut, exposing her back and the nape of her neck to the Silverback beta. She felt him freeze, hesitating as he stayed buried deep inside her. Then her ears rang with his roar as he nudged ever deeper inside her and claimed the right she had given him. His teeth sank deep into the tender exposed nape of her neck, definitely deep enough to leave a mark. That was the point. Honor had given this man permission to mark her as his mate, and she would deal with the consequences later.

Right now, she operated on pure instinct, and her instincts told her she would never do anything more right than what she did in this moment.

She felt the breaking of her skin, the warm, slow trickle of blood from the wound, and it made her clench around him. His shaft leaped inside her, as excited as he was by the dark eroticism of the moment. She felt the tightly coiled tension inside her begin to break, and all she could do was brace herself for the wave.

It nearly dragged her under; the force of it caught her so strongly. She threw back her head and howled to the skies as she came and came and came beneath him. The climax seemed endless and painfully intense, shaking the foundations of her world. She felt him tense and explode as well, pulled along not by the force of her pleasure, but by the sweetly tight contractions of her body around his. He echoed her howl, the sound muffled against her neck, and poured himself into her body, quivering in ecstasy.

The world slowed and blurred and the only stable point in the swirling riot became the place where his teeth joined to her flesh, making them one in a way even him buried inside her hadn’t been able to accomplish. As the tension of arousal and climax began to fade, they remained locked together, shivering with the faint ripples of aftershock. She bowed her head, feeling with acute awareness that faint trickle of blood against her skin, and she shivered again. This was joining, in the truest Lupine sense of the word. Logan had become her mate, and she had become his.

And what fresh kind of hell had she just sentenced herself to?

Ten

She still hadn’t figured that out an hour later, when they were separated, cleaned, and clothed, and sitting in her father’s office, eyeing each other warily. Well, her gaze remained wary. Logan’s had gone all wicked and focused again as he stared intently at her neck, waiting for her to turn her head so he could admire his handiwork.

Silence stretched between them for several long moments. Logan looked too self-satisfied to speak, and Honor wasn’t quite sure what to say. Were there rules of etiquette for handling this type of situation? Did Emily Post have a chapter on Postcoital Small Talk for the Modern Werewolf? If she didn’t, she really should.

Honor shifted in her seat and tried to ignore the raw, liquid feeling between her legs. As hard as he’d just taken her, she ought to be screaming at him to never lay another hand on her as long as he lived, and here she was trying to keep him from noticing how damned horny she still felt. Was
that
in Emily Post?

“You can relax, you know.” His drawling tone sounded sleepy and rough and sexy in the small cabin. Honor couldn’t suppress a shiver of reaction. “I’ll give you a couple of hours before I attack you again. I’m not entirely uncivilized.”

She drew a deep breath. “See … about that ‘again’ thing…”

He raised an eyebrow and settled into a deeper slouch. “You surely don’t intend to tell me, your mate, that I can’t touch you again, do you? You couldn’t be quite that foolish, honey. Tell me.”

She scowled. “You know, I really hate those casual endearments. Ones like ‘honey.’ It always makes me wonder if you just can’t remember my name.”

“Oh, I remember it. It just don’t think ‘Honor’ is something I can hear myself yelling out in a heated moment. It would be like yelling ‘Mother Teresa’ or something.”

She rolled her eyes. “Now that’s just nasty.”

“That’s what I thought. So you have two choices. You can have ‘honey,’ or you can have ‘Nora.’ Up to you.”

“Those are my only choices?”

He shrugged. “They are if ‘Honor’ is your only name.”

She grumbled and crossed her arms over her chest.

Logan cupped his hand to his ear and cocked his head to the side. “Sorry, what was that? I couldn’t quite catch it.”

“Honor Strength.” She bit it out like a particularly vile curse and then glared, as if it were his fault. It was actually her father’s, but if she could have a few minutes to think, she’d find a way to make it Logan’s fault. She’d put it on his tab.

He blinked. “Right. Those are your only choices.”

She opened her mouth to protest, then caught herself and shook her head. “And that is so not important right now. We have other things we need to discuss at the moment.”

“Not if those discussions are anything like the one you were about to start where you tell me I can’t touch my own mate anymore.”

“Do you honestly think that what we just did has changed anything?”

“I honestly do,” he snapped, eyes flashing gold. “I think it’s changed your status from my potential mate to my actual mate. You’re mine now, Honor, and don’t try to say anything different, because you gave yourself to me. If you’re feeling forgetful, try touching the back of your neck. It might jog your memory.”

Honor tried not to flinch at the vicious sarcasm of that remark. As if she needed to touch the mating mark to remember it was there. She damned well couldn’t forget it, and she damned well couldn’t stop calling herself ten kinds of fool for giving in to the instinct that had prompted her to let him put it there. She could chalk it up to the heat of the moment, or to her own heat, which was getting harder to control with every passing moment, but blaming either of those things wouldn’t change the fact that she’d allowed him to mark her. Just like it wouldn’t change the fact that the question still hanging over their heads remained a choice between true or false. A hot fuck and a mating mark hadn’t miraculously opened door number three.

Goddess, how she wished that it had, though. The wolf inside her had already begun to pace and whine in grief. It wanted to return the mating, to mark Logan as hers as surely and as visibly as she’d been marked by him. It wanted them to do whatever they had to, to run off to the woods, live in a cave, and get down to the serious business of making love and pups and a future together. Her human brain, though, knew that was impossible. She still had a pack to lead, or to die trying. Having a mate made not one iota of difference to that fact.

She steeled her expression and erected a wall around her cracking heart, all while the sounds of her wolf’s howl of despair echoed in her mind.

“I haven’t forgotten anything,” she told him, keeping her voice even and emotionless. She had practiced that a lot lately. “I haven’t forgotten your mark, just like I haven’t forgotten that I haven’t marked you in turn, or that I have no plans to do so. I also haven’t forgotten that I have a pack to run, and that you have a decision to make. Mate or no mate.”

His lip curled as he glared at her. “You insult me if you think that being my mate doesn’t mean that I would do anything and everything in my power to ensure your safety and your happiness. Damn you for thinking that poorly of me.”