Werewolf: Impossible Love (2 page)

The silence made her nervous. Yes, Yandel had said that he wanted her out of his lonely cabin in these remote backwoods, but trusting the last man who had offered her shelter had already almost gotten her killed. And there was no guarantee about that “almost,” either. How had he known she was running from somebody? And had he really torched the car?

Serenity sat up in bed and pushed the covers down. Her leg was wrapped in thick bandages; it seemed to be splinted with stripped branches and strips of linen. A round, rust-colored stain was seeping through the bandage on her thigh.

Slowly, painfully, she dragged her suitcase toward her. With a grunt, she hefted it onto her lap and unzipped it. Everything was still inside—her plastic bags of clothes, what was left of her late mother’s jewelry, the $173 that she had saved in holes in the back yard and under heavy furniture over the course of the last year, a comb.

She picked up the comb, and tears welled in her eyes. You spent your whole life collecting things. You collected clothes and shoes and trinkets and photos and awards and dishes and books and
plush brown teddy bears, and you had these things. You had these things and you didn’t know that one day you might be running through your house grabbing all the things you could fit in a suitcase, and you wouldn’t think to take anything from the bathroom but a comb.

Serenity wasn’t sure how long she spent sitting there in bed with her suitcase in her lap, but she was still in that position when Yandel came back from feeding his mules.

He looked at her, rolled his eyes, and sighed. She waited for him to say something, but instead he ignored her as he went about the rest of his morning chores. He had a Johnny Cash CD that he played on his beat-up boombox while he did the dishes, swept the floor, shuffled things around in the fridge and made disapproving noises.

It was somehow comforting to Serenity to watch the big,
scowling man go about such mundane tasks as gathering chunks of dried mud up in a doormat and flinging them outside to the wind. He checked the time on the kitchen clock now and then; at eight fifteen he got two bottles, a package of swabs, and a package of hypodermic needles out of the cabinet.

His face was overcome with a trained, professional focus as he withdrew a dose from the bottle. “
I’m not giving you as much this time,” he said, “seeing as how you’re not screaming anymore.”

He brought the needle, the swabs, and the other bottle over to her. “Right arm,” he said. “Grip it here.”

Serenity did as he directed. Yandel wetted one of the swabs and wiped her inner elbow with it before giving her the shot. She winced as the morphine entered her bloodstream, but the painkiller haze made up for the brief moment of pain by the time Yandel had put his supplies back in the cabinet.

She shoved her suitcase to the foot of the bed and leaned back on the pillows. Yandel turned up the music and went to the cabin’s far corner, where the wood floor ended and a patch of concrete began. Serenity didn’t notice the shower spigot until he turned it on and stepped back to shed his flannel shirt, his undershirt, his work boots, and his loose cut jeans. He ignored her even as he dropped his boxers to the floor
.

Serenity couldn’t help but marvel at the beauty of that massive body, shaped by mountains and ri
vers and sudden thunderstorms. He wasn’t what the guys called “ripped,” but the fact that he was fully capable of ripping things—large, difficult-to-rip things—was obvious from his form. Even just shuffling around the shower scrubbing himself, he moved with a sturdy grace that reminded Serenity of some powerful predator on the hunt.

It could have been
the morphine, and it could have been just his feral beauty, but Serenity couldn’t help but blush and giggle when Yandel turned around. Maybe a man of a certain stature was bound by the laws of nature to be well-endowed, but Serenity was impressed nonetheless.

Yandel took notice at her giggle; he flattened his mouth, glanced down at his manhood, and shrugged. “It’s not going to jump off and chase you,” he grumbled.

Serenity pouted—now
that
was definitely the morphine. “I was kinda hoping.”

He snorted and shook his head. “You’re on drugs,” he said, turning around. “I’m gonna have a hell of a time getting you into the shower, aren’t I?”

“Nope.” Serenity grinned. “I’m gonna be a little naked angel.”

Yandel sighed and shook his head as he turned the shower off. He grabbed a towel from the table on the wood floor, rubbed his black hair dry with it, and wrapped it around his waist. As he walked toward her, the towel couldn’t quite hide the effect that Serenity’s un-subtle flirtations were having on him.

“Let’s get this over with,” he growled as he wrapped one arm around her shoulders and slid the other beneath her legs. “This is going to hurt like an absolute bitch.”

He was right. Serenity howled at the pain that shot up and down her leg as he picked her up with almost no effort. “Fuck!
Fuck!
” she screamed. “What did I
do?
”

“Well, you got a big chunk of glass wedged in your thigh,” Yandel said. “You needed a goddamn blood transfusion by the time you got back.” He walked over to the kitchen table and started kicking a chair over toward the shower. “And on top of that, you had a compound fracture of your right tibia that is not going to heal right without some help from Linda.”

“Holy shit,” Serenity said, her eyes gaping. She’d heard of panic attacks spurring mothers to lift cars and rape victims to tear their attackers’ throats out, so maybe her wounded sprint through the snow hadn’t been that much of an inhuman feat. “Wait—” She squinted up at Yandel. “You gave me a blood transfusion?”

“No roads in, no roads out,” he said. “I’ve got the only medical grade fridge within fifty miles, so I figure I may as well keep something useful in it.”

Serenity blinked. “How do you know—”

“Let’s make a deal,” Yandel said, fixing his gaze on hers. “You don’t have to talk about what you’re running from or who gave you that shiner, and I don’t have to talk about how I came to be practicing medicine.”

“Deal.” Serenity’s face fell. There had been some degree of annoyance on Yandel’s face since she’d met him, but not until now had she seen him look genuinely disturbed.

“Okay. Now I’m gonna lower you down onto the chair. Scream all you want.”

Serenity took him up on that as another burst of excruciating pain pulsed through her leg. As it faded, she clung to the seat, gasping and gritting her teeth.

             
“Top off,” Yandel said, making a hurry-up motion with one hand.

She complied without a word, revealing the bruises of various ages that covered her ribcage and spine.

              “Jesus H. Christ.” Yandel’s eyes widened as Serenity took her bra off.

Despite the morphine haze, the tips of her ears started burning red.

He snorted and shook his head. “We’re gonna have to cut those panties off,” he said. There was a straight razor hanging over the bath table. He took it from its hook and slid it under the waistband on the right, then under the left. Serenity blushed and grinned as the fabric fell away from her hips. Beneath the towel, she could feel Yandel’s cock pressing against her shoulder.

As she had before, she blamed the morphine for the impulse that drove her to snatch the towel off his waist. He jumped back, a mixture of perplexity and amusement twisting his features.

“And what the hell do you think you’re doing?” he growled.

“We’ve gotta get in the shower!” she giggled. “You’re gonna get the towel wet.”

A feral grin flashed across his face. “And I’m gonna—” He stopped himself; the willpower required was showing on his face. “You’re drugged out of your mind,” he said.

“And you’re really hot,” Serenity replied with a loopy grin. “Also, you’re hard as a rock.”

Yandel looked from his fully attentive manhood to Serenity, concern and desire mixed on his face. “It’s not gonna set you off?” he asked, crossing his arms.

Serenity was confused for a moment, but soon realized why he was so worried about
what might happen to her if she had an enormous, strong man fucking her senseless. “Oh.” She shook her head, trying to find the words to describe why she wanted
him
to touch her. “You’re safe,” she said, at last and lamely. “Okay? I—I know you’re safe.” She shrugged.

“Goddamn, do I hope this isn’t the morphine,” Yandel said, putting a hand on her shoulder as he knelt down to kiss her gently on the lips. “You are way, way too pretty for me as it is.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” Serenity said as he got up to turn the shower on.

“
I’ll say what I want,” Yandel said, dragging the chair over so that Serenity was sitting under the showerhead. “Actually, you’re giving me an idea.”

“I hope so,” she replied.

Yandel bobbed his brows and knelt between her knees. “Now, blood may not be in high demands around these parts,” he said as he began untying the bandage on her leg, “but antibiotics are, and if you come down with gangrene it’s on my head.”

Serenity nodded, wincing as he began to tug the bandages away from her leg. “Now, you don’t have to look at this,” he said. “Shit, even I don’t want to look at it until Linda gets here.”

“Who’s Linda?”

“The baddest bitch in the Beartooths,” Yandel replied. “She doesn’t exactly take kindly to white people, but she owes me a favor and her word is bond.”

That didn’t sound promising, but it was hard to focus on worries with Yandel’s strong but gentle hands easing her bandages off her legs. The combination of desire for him and pain from hot water on her wounds made her squirm in the chair.

“Easy now,” he murmured, pressing his lips against the skin of her other thigh as he tugged painfully on a reluctant strip of bandaging.
Serenity whimpered, and then cried out when the water met a wound.

Her cry of pain rapidly warped into a moan of pleasure as Yandel’s lips moved from her thigh to the folds between her legs. His mouth was as skilled as his hands; he gently nibbled at her lips and sucked on her clit until she was thoroughly distracted from the pain in her leg.

She almost didn’t notice when the splints clattered to the floor, but the pain of having her broken leg unsupported was too much to bear. She threw her head back and howled like a beast caught in a trap until Yandel propped it up on the branches he had splinted it with.

He
held her to the chair. Gentle as he was, his arms were still far stronger than any of Serenity’s pained contortions. “We’ve got to get you clean,” he said, looking up into her eyes. “I don’t care if I’ve gotta give you eight goddamn orgasms in a row.”

Despite the pain, Serenity giggled. “
Okay,” she said, running her fingers through his hair. “Just be gent—aah!” Her head fell back and her jaw fell open as Yandel returned his lips to her clit. His hands kept unwrapping her leg, exposing more and more wounded flesh to the sting of the hot water. Serenity saw that he’d already stitched up two long gashes in her thigh; she was glad she’d been unconscious for that part.

The pain battled the pleas
ure for dominance of her senses. Either her right leg was becoming used to the hot water or Yandel was incredibly talented with his tongue, because pleasure was rapidly gaining ground. She whined and sighed in his arms as he stroked her wounded leg.

Suddenly, he stood up.

“Oh, don’t—”

“I’m not done yet,” he said as he went to his cabinet and took out a gauze pad and a bottle that looked uncomfortably like antiseptic. He took the pad from its package and doused it in the rust-colored fluid as he wacked back to the chair.

Serenity grimaced. “Don’t—”

Yandel gave her a thin smile and leaned down to kiss her hard on the lips. One massive hand held her leg to the chair while the other one swabbed Serenity’s wounds with the pad. Her raw flesh burned at contact with the antiseptic. She screamed into Yandel’s shoulder as he worked his way around all of her torn skin.

When he was done, he kissed her again and stood back. “That was the worst of it,” he said. “And just think—those were just the wounds that didn’t need stitches.”

Serenity smiled sheepishly. “Thanks,” she murmured.

“Let’s get the rest of you cleaned up,” he said, grabbing the soap and washcloth and handing them to her. “I can’t very well fuck you while your leg’s making you scream like that.”

Serenity hurriedly scrubbed herself clean while he watched, his impatience evident from both his scowl and his rigid cock. It didn’t take too long to scrub last night’s grit and ash and dried blood from her skin, and she felt much better for it when she was done. She tried to scoot herself toward the shower nozzle; her effort only earned her a sympathetic chuckle from Yandel as
he turned the shower off and traded her the washcloth and soap for a dry towel.

She helped him dry her leg, which he carefully re-splinted as she rubbed the rest of her body dry. His big hands nonetheless worked carefully and delicately. It was sorely tempting to press him on how he’d
learned his skills, but Serenity resisted the urge.
              It didn’t take him long to bandage her back up—of course, he
did
seem particularly motivated to get her leg back in a less unwieldy condition. Serenity only yelped a little when he lifted her off the chair; after the ordeal of cleaning the still-bleeding wounds on her leg, it didn’t seem as painful as before.