The Wolf Ring (2 page)

Now
.

She stroked herself, hard and fast, caressing the aching, swollen bud of her clitoris beneath the satin, feeling her inner muscles clenching wildly. Need and desire ran over her skin in unbearably hot waves. She strained frantically for an orgasm, gasping with the need.

She could feel the moisture spilling from her body, wetting her panties, but she couldn't quite reach the climax she could feel surging just out of reach. The need burned brighter and brighter, but it wasn’t enough.

Desperate, she reached up with her other hand and pinched her own nipple brutally.

Ecstasy burst through her like a nuclear explosion. She screamed as her body convulsed with the purest, most intense pleasure she'd ever experienced in her lifetime. Heat poured over her skin and through her body, and she slowly collapsed to the floor, still sobbing for breath.

It was so good, far and away the best orgasm she'd ever had in her life.

And yet she needed so much
more
.

*****

Faelan
.

From the stairwell of her apartment, two flights down, he could hear her screaming. Alarmed, he lifted his head and listened intently for an instant, then raced up the stairs.

Seconds later he was at her door. All he heard now was silence. He darted in without bothering to knock—neither of them knocked at the other’s door any more-- and found her curled up on the floor, silvery blonde hair fanned out around her.

He knelt next to her. "Faelan," he whispered. "Are you okay?"

"Oh, God." Her voice was harsh and unusually low, and she was panting. "Conner.
Help
me."

All of a sudden he realized she'd stripped off her jeans, and abruptly it dawned on him exactly what she'd been doing, and why she’d been screaming. Suddenly horrifically embarrassed by his thoughtless intrusion on her privacy, he shifted back, moving away from her a bit and dropping onto the floor.

"I'm sorry," he said, staring at the wooden planks. He could feel his cheeks flaming like an out-of-control forest fire. "I, uh, didn't mean to, uh..."

"Please." She caught at him wildly. "You have to help me."

He was pretty sure she'd already helped herself, and his cheeks went redder than before. "Faelan, I..."

"I need you." She caught his arms and pulled herself to a sitting position, staring at him with a strange intensity. Her eyes gleamed a brilliant golden green, and her hands clutched his arms desperately. "Conner.
Fuck me
."

Chapter 3

Conner hesitated, so Faelan put her hands on him. He felt good beneath her palms, a solid, unyielding wall of muscle, and she gave into temptation and let her hands start sliding all over him. He was wearing an old leather jacket and a gray sweater over a plain white t-shirt, and her hands delved under all his clothing and found his warm, smooth skin. He uttered a little moan and put his arms around her.

"Hey," he said softly. "What's going on here?"

"I told you." She buried her face in his throat, inhaling the intensely masculine scent of him, and licked at his skin. "I want you to fuck me. Now."

"Yeah, but..." She could hear the frown in his voice. "I'm not complaining, believe me. But you're just acting kind of... strange."

"Please." She wrapped her arms around him. His long legs were stretched out, and she climbed right into his lap. "Please, Conner, you have to help me."

She rubbed against his cock fiercely, and he made another of those little sounds. She knew she was turning him on, because he was already hard. He felt so good up pressed against her hot, throbbing body, felt exactly like what she wanted, what she
needed
. She moved against him more urgently than before.

"Okay," he
said,
his voice hoarse. "But I'm taking you back to my house first."

“I can’t wait…”

“My house,” he repeated firmly. “Or no deal.”

She remembered the way she'd screamed as she came, and she had to admit that might be a good idea. She was so overwhelmed with need she hardly cared if someone overheard them, but Conner would never survive the embarrassment if someone happened to hear them. Reluctantly, she nodded.

"Okay."

*****

A few minutes later, Conner lay Faelan gently down in his bed. She’d twitched the whole way, squirming in the car like ants were biting her, gasping and moaning as if she were already on the verge of orgasm. He’d seriously thought about pulling the car over, yanking her into his lap, and making love to her right on the side of the road. Only the knowledge that small town cops frowned on that kind of thing had stopped him.

Now she lay sprawled out on his navy blue comforter, looking up at him, her eyes heavy-lidded and dark. She looked so purely sexual it made his lower belly tighten with need. He knelt on the bed, between her legs, and bent over her, still looking into her eyes.

Her right hand lifted, touching the side of his face, and all of a sudden he noticed something that shouldn't be on her hand. She was still wearing the ring, but around it...

He caught her arm and looked at it carefully. "Hey," he said. "The skin on your finger. It looks weird. Kind of silvery."

"I know." She tried to pull her arm away. "Forget about it. Right now, I need you, Conner."

"Hang on, Faelan. Wait just a second, okay?"

He tried to pull the ring off her finger, and couldn't. It was as if it were growing into her skin somehow. He thought about trying to break it, but he wasn't sure he could. It might be delicate metal, but it was still metal. Anyway, it looked almost as if it were melding into her body, and if he broke it, he might very well hurt her.

He stared at it, horrified.
What the hell is going on?

"Faelan," he said. "The ring..."

"
Forget
the ring." She whimpered with frustration, lifting her legs and wrapping them right around his thighs. "I need you. Please."

"No, Faelan. It's… it’s
doing
something to you, okay? This is not normal. We need to stop and figure this out, before it gets any worse. I'm not going to..."

She reached up and put her hands against his shoulders, grabbing a handful of sweater in either fist, and yanked hard, wrenching him to the side. To his shock, he found himself on his back on the bed. She’d thrown him over as easily if she were a two-hundred pound guy with muscles like a gorilla, rather than a very petite woman.

He lay there, breathing hard, and she scrambled on top of him, her thighs on either side of his. Her body pressed eagerly against his, and her hands were all over him once again.

He bit back a moan and tried to find some self-control, but where she was concerned he'd never had much. And she wouldn't stop touching him, wouldn't stop moving her hips against him, and it felt so good...

He drew on every iota of self-control he had, and pushed her back over onto the bed, pinning her with his big body. He spoke as sternly as he could.

"Cut it out, Faelan. This is a serious problem."

She shoved him again, harder this time, and suddenly he was falling through the air, with her on top of him. He had just enough time to realize she'd pushed him over again, in the other direction this time. And then they landed on the floor with a teeth-jarring thud, their bodies intertwined.

“Ow,” he moaned, rubbing at his head, which had struck the wooden floorplanks pretty hard.

But then her hips moved against his, and he couldn't stop the groan that rose out of his throat. And it wasn't a groan of pain.

"
Faelan
."

He rolled her over and tried to pin her, trying to regain some measure of control, but she shoved him over again. Even through the hormones addling his brain, he knew that something was not right here, not right at all.

He was a big, strong guy, and she barely came up to his shoulder. She shouldn't be strong enough to push him around this way, unless he let her. And yet she was doing it easily. If he had to speculate, he'd guess she was just about as strong as he was. Maybe even stronger.

But that was impossible.

The ring
. It had to be. Somehow, the ring was affecting her, changing her, making her stronger.

But that’s crazy
, he thought, turning his head and glaring down at the ring like it was a mortal enemy. How could it be the ring? It was just a little piece of jewelry, a pretty bit of silver and topaz. It couldn’t possibly affect her that way. It couldn’t possibly affect her
any
way.

Then again, he thought, if it were just an ordinary piece of jewelry, it wouldn’t be turning her skin silver.

Something weird was definitely going on here.

He was still trying to pin her and hold her still, and not succeeding too well. Not only was she inhumanly and insanely strong, but the movement of her hips against his was a pretty major distraction.

He realized she was yanking his sweater off, so frantically that he heard the woolen fibers rip, and then tugging his t-shirt off over his head. Despite his awareness that he had to figure out what the hell was going on with that ring, he couldn't quite seem to stop her.

The shirts off, she paused and stared hungrily at his bare chest.

"My God," she said softly. "You're so gorgeous, Conner."

A warmth that wasn't sexual bloomed inside him, and he ducked his head to hide the flush on his cheeks. Even after six months of a very intense relationship, her compliments tended to disarm him. The fact that this gorgeous, intelligent, totally awesome woman loved him somehow took him by surprise, every time.

"Thanks," he muttered.

Her hands began to roam all over his chest, and he closed his eyes and let himself succumb. Somewhere deep inside he knew he shouldn't, but she felt so good. Her hands were gentle and assertive at the same time, and her mouth was everywhere, kissing him, licking him
..

He felt her mouth open against his shoulder.

And then she bit into him, really hard.

The sensual spell she'd cast over him was abruptly broken. He yelled with shock and pain, and his eyes snapped open.

That had
hurt
, damn it.

She pulled her head away from his shoulder, and he looked at her in shocked bewilderment. She’d nipped him before in sexual play, but she’d never done anything like
that
before. Her lips were drawn back in a snarl, her mouth red with his blood. There was something wild and feral in her eyes, and her teeth...

Fangs
, he thought, staring at her in shocked bewilderment.
She has fangs
.

A shudder ran through him, and his thoughts ran on wildly and irrationally, like a runaway freight train.
A vampire
.
She’s somehow turned into a vampire… some sort of weird infection… or something
…

He couldn’t manage to think clearly about it, because inside him something was growing that shouldn't be there, something wild and animalistic and gloriously primitive. Whatever the contagion might be, it seemed to spread from his shoulder wound throughout his whole body, swirling through his blood, pounding through him in a steady, relentless beat.

When she’d bitten him, she’d done something to him. She’d changed him somehow.

He wondered if she'd made him a vampire, or... something else.

"What did you do to me?" he demanded.

"I have no idea." She licked the blood off her lips, and he stared at her, bizarrely aroused by the sight of her tongue tasting his blood. "I just... I couldn't help it, Conner. I had to bite you."

To his shock, he felt his wound knitting itself closed, but the skin around it was beginning to turn dark, and whatever was inside him didn't fade. In fact, it only grew stronger, until it felt like he was burning with it. As the flame spread through him, his skin began to itch and ripple in a very strange way. He squirmed, fighting the urge to claw at his own skin, because he knew it wouldn't help. Somehow he knew that the only thing that would help soothe the strange sensation was her touch.

He needed her hands on him, her body against his, her mouth kissing him and licking him and biting him...

He pushed the images away, struggling to resist the primitive urges snarling inside him. He needed to apply logic to this situation, needed to figure out what was wrong with Faelan and how to fix it. He had to ignore the desperate itching of his skin and the heat that burned deep in his body. He couldn't give in to the demands pouring through his bloodstream, couldn't give into the wild need for sex that pounded through him.

He had to keep control.

But even as he thought that, he was lowering his head to kiss her.

Chapter 4

Conner's mouth took hers in a long, intense kiss. She could still taste the coppery flavor of his blood, but beneath that she could taste his mouth, a more subtle flavor, an intoxicating mixture of spices and honey and sheer maleness that made her skin ripple worse than ever.