Ride the Wicked Woodsman (A Night Falls Alpha Werebear Shapeshifter Romance) (10 page)

And still he drove me on.

********************

After sucking and fingering me to my third climax, a gloat entered the bear's gaze.

He got off the bed and stared for a few seconds at my still squirming body. My fingers reached for the unflagging erection but he sidestepped my grasp.

"Patience, love. I'll only deprive you a few seconds longer before I take what is mine."

Me -- he was talking about me, or at least that part of me that lived between my legs.

Rolling onto my side, I watched him cross to the bathroom and open one of the vanity drawers.

Seeing him pull out a condom twisted like a knife through my gut.

He saw the change as soon as he turned to leave the bathroom. Absently gripping the source of my pain, he returned to the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress.

"What?" he asked, not moving to touch me.

"I'm not contagious," I choked out. "Fucking me with a bare cock isn't going to give you human DNA."

I rolled onto my back, my body open and my mind resigned to letting him take what he wanted. It would seal the betrayal, make leaving easier.

With a growl, Taron covered my body with his, the condom abandoned and his hands locked around the sides of my head so I could only avoid his burning gaze by closing my eyes.

"What put the stupid idea into your head that I think you're contagious?"

Stupid, really?

"Eric," I said, giving him my brother's name before adding more. "Selisma, Ruben, Alana..."

I moved past naming my little sister and parents and on to the shifters my age, male and female, within the pack.

"Stop."

My tongue ceased but I tried to burn more names into the back of his skull through my eyes.

"This," he snarled, finding the condom and tapping it against my forehead a few times. "This is because I don't want your choice to stay with me to come down to the fact I put a cub in you."

Who was the one spouting stupid ideas now?

"That's not possible, so don't even think of using it as an excuse."

"Damn it, I want to throttle you right now!"

"Try it, Bear," I bit back.

Throwing his arms around me, Taron jerked me onto his lap, my legs draped around his hips and my heels against his ass.

"I don't care how many pack leaders have lied to you just so they could keep a tight grip on their power structure for a few more generations, but it absolutely is possible."

I glared at him, my puckered lips practically yelling for him to offer up some piece of tangible proof.

"We don't bring the little ones around the club house," he growled. "Too much shit happens there. But if we did, you'd find children born from a union of bear and cat, cat and wolf, elk and wolf--"

"Elk?"

Now he was talking major bullshit -- had to be. I had never even heard of Elk or any other kind of deer shifter. Shifters were predators, not prey.

He rolled off the bed, huffing at me over his shoulder as he walked away.

"Fine, babe. I get it. That's your 'honeycomb.'"

Reaching the bathroom, he tossed the unopened condom into the trashcan then closed the door. I listened to the sounds of him getting ready for bed, brushing his teeth, draining his bladder, angry growls punctuating the process.

When he emerged, I was still on the bed, sitting with the quilt pulled up to shield more than my naked body. He didn't glance my way, not that I could tell. He put a fresh log on the fire, grabbed the spare blanket I had used the night before then settled into the rocking chair, his back to me.

I hugged the quilt a little tighter, the cold prickling my skin coming from the inside. I tried to make sense of what had happened and what I had experienced since entering Night Falls and compare it against twenty-three years of being fed "facts" and rules from my pack.

Have no doubt -- packs are essentially cults. Within each pack, one man's word is law. There is no democratic selection of that male, and, over the last century, the practice of combat challenges has died out to avoid detection among the larger human population. It is forbidden to be part of two packs, and thus it is also forbidden to be part of two cults, so there is no practice of religion.

Most important in identifying a pack as a cult is the threat of excommunication. Aside from leaders meeting, wolves don't mix with cats and the cats don't mix among their different species. We're told this is because offspring is impossible and shifters are an endangered species. Reproducing is not only a biological drive but a duty to the pack. Any wolf that tries to cross that line is packless with a giant target on his or her back.

Now Taron was telling me that was a lie. Or maybe the shifter gene had learned to adapt as numbers dwindled and what was true for my generation's great grandparents was no longer relevant and pack law prevented us from making that discovery.

And after all that Taron had done for me since I first set foot in his clearing, who did I want to believe? Him or the pack that had made me a prisoner and an outcast at the same time?

I slid off the bed, my footsteps hesitant. Taron had remained motionless since he sat down in the chair, but I knew he was nowhere near relaxed or asleep. An angry heat emanated from him, his muscles remaining tense all through his torso and limbs.

His hands gripped the ends of the rocker's armrests. Cautiously, I settled onto his lap, heart thudding in my chest. A week before, with this much fear and trepidation, I would have wished my traitorous body to quiet itself. But I wanted him to feel my energy, to hear the rapid pulse and smell my anxiety.

When he didn't react to my presence, I pulled my legs up and turned into his broad chest. I rested my head against one shoulder and curled my hand around his neck on the other side.

"I get it," I whispered, my fingers petting at his neck. "You aren't like anybody I've met before."

I waited, got nothing in return.

Taron had said I carried the alpha strain. I wanted to push that energy at him but didn't know how. I worried that any attempt would just fill him with the same coldness that iced my bones.

I kept stroking at his flesh, my thumb massaging the tense line of his jaw.

"You won't lie to me."

I burrowed my face closer against his neck. As tempting as I apparently was during estrus, I was no seductress. I didn't want to play with his body to draw him out. That wasn't me. And I hadn't hurt or insulted his body. Whether it revealed itself as a deep wound or a mere scratch, I had injured his heart.

"You'll always protect me," I continued, my nails lightly scraping at his scalp as my nose and lips made contact with the flesh of his neck.

Out of words, I stopped talking. My hand retreated to my lap. I didn't understand what had been so unforgivable in my actions that he would harden as he had. I had been little better than a leper in my pack, I couldn't forget that in the course of a single day.

My reaction had been knee-jerk, but only from painful experience.

I stayed on his lap, too exhausted to raise the flag of surrender and retreat to the bed. At some point, he had started rocking, the motion so slight it took a few minutes to register. I pressed a little tighter against him to keep from sliding off.

That's when his hands finally left the armrests to brace me, the placement of his hold utilitarian instead of intimate. I would take what I could get. I curled my hand around his opposite shoulder and snuggled deeper against him.

Still naked with the blanket beneath me, my muscles tightened from the cold. That brought his arms up to surround me, but he still projected the air of a disinterested caregiver.

"You should go back to bed," he rasped in a dark tone.

I gripped him a little tighter. "Not without you."

If there was some magic phrase to make him surrender, that wasn't it.

"You need to go back to bed," he repeated, the slight change in wording bringing it closer to a command.

I threw his arms off me, everything aching too much to produce a single tear or admonishing cry. I could barely breathe as I walked back to the bed. I thought about putting my clothes on and leaving. The woods were still dangerous, but if I was ready to shift, as he had said, then maybe all I needed was to be thrown into the pit and let instinct take over.

Climbing onto the mattress, I didn't burying my cold flesh beneath the quilt. I crawled across to the curtain and drew it all the way open, moonlight flooding the cabin's interior. I pressed the front of my body against the glass, my palms and cheek resting against the chilly pane.

There was no religion among the packs and prides I had known -- but there was always the moon, the sun, the many-hued earth and blue skies. The sun and moon looked down, observed or didn't and then moved on. But every day they reaffirmed that we were primal.

I looked up at the moon, tried to draw on her energy even though I knew it would be as icy as I felt and as remote as the man sitting a few feet away from me.

As I stared out and up, my gaze watery, a hand snaked around my neck and squeezed lightly.

"This was not what I meant when I warned you back to bed."

He pushed into me with no further warning, his entry hard and complete. I choked out a gasp. Heat flared inside me, fire jumping from nerve ending to nerve ending as Taron slid back and slammed inside again.

Swinging our bodies toward the center of the bed, he pushed me into a submissive position, my cheek down low and pressed against the mattress, pussy and ass molding around his groin.

Taron draped his long body over me, the crushing weight an odd comfort. His teeth grazed along my shoulder as one hand pushed between my body and the bed. The scraping of his teeth turned to bites and licks. His fingers found my clit, rubbed mercilessly at its quickly swelling flesh. The harder he slammed his thick cock into me, the harder he bit at my shoulder and stroked at my pussy.

I groaned, squirmed, tension coiling tighter and tighter, its base the hot, wet core between my legs where Taron fucked in and out, his huffs and growls growing louder with each turn of the screw inside my gut.

"No leaving," he rasped before biting at my ear. "Not ever."

"Not ever," I promised, eyes leaking with the flood of sensations raging through my body. His cock was inside me, taking me unsheathed, raw and unrelenting. But even as ruthless as the act of mating had turned, his energy poured out from his flesh and into mine, easing the hurts, wrapping me in a safe, golden bubble that matched his eyes.

Pulling up on my hair, he lifted my head from the mattress, held me trophy-like as he claimed my mouth and continued to ram into my pussy. My juices ran down my thighs, the stream trailing all the way to my knees and the bedding beneath them.

His tongue swept inside my mouth, his kiss a series of bites and licks and long, drawn out sucking, all the while his grip on my hair tightening and tightening, the tension magnified a hundred times as it traveled from head to weeping cunt.

"Mine," he growled, breaking the kiss.

"And mine," I growled in return, my eyes cutting to the side to hook his.

Taron leaned back, his hands seizing my hips as he made his final thrusts, our gazes locked and burning with the most primitive of promises -- to create, to nourish, and then to fade together but always in the circle of the other's embrace.

"Onyx," he called, his energy reaching out again to wrap around mine.

"I'm here," I answered, even as my release threatened to carry me away for a few bone shattering seconds.

"I'll always be here."

********************

Five more days and nights passed. Taron and I barely left his property. The few visitors bold enough to stop by were not encouraged to linger.

We fucked, we made love, we mated, usually raw and animalistic like that first night, but some of it so damn tender and loving I felt as if I had a thousand razor blades slicing through my skin from the sweet ache of being Taron's woman.

Since it wasn't likely he and I could make it to the nearest real city with real clothing stores without stopping half a dozen times to mate alongside the road or in one of the changing booths, Clover and Braeden took me.

My car was sold off before that because there were too many signs that it was being watched. Taron made it look like the Crockers had it towed, but we arranged with the mechanic to sell it with a fifty-fifty split. He filed a mechanic's lien and I signed the title over to him to cover his ass for selling it before the thirty-day lien period was up.

A little illegal, yes, but shifters have learned to do what they must when it comes to the laws of humans. With all the scanners in the airports and things like that, the day is fast approaching when every last strand of our DNA will be illegal.

Wrapped in my big bear's arms, the only strain during those five days was when we had to visit the MC's clubhouse, which only happened when Braeden had to be there at the same time as Taron so he couldn't stand guard over me and his baby sister.

Landa was always there, glaring at me and making snide little remarks. But it was the comments of some of the others that were wearing me down. The first few days it was all talk about "outsiders" and the trouble they invariably brought with them -- this coming from shifters who had come to Night Falls as strangers. But after virtually every shifter in the area knew Taron and I had been hitting it hard, his scent all over me even after I showered, the not-so-subtle messages changed directions.

All because I was still in estrus. Just like all the other female shifters in the wolf packs I had known, estrus would stop within a day of conception. So we'd been hitting it hard and long and I was still in heat.

The comments made me feel like I was right back in my pack in Champaign where a "bitch" who couldn't conceive was the least valuable member of the pack and how every male and female had a duty to reproduce.

The speakers never pointed at me, never said Taron and I were bringing things down. But I caught all the sly looks, the pauses in conversation when I passed by, and every other jab they had to offer.