Wilding (3 page)

When she obeyed, Kim found the shifter with
his face over hers, his panting breath close enough to fill her mouth.
"Let go, baby. You have to," he practically begged. She'd have sworn
his eyes took on an amber glow behind the green irises, a golden corona, and
maybe they truly did. By now his body was driving so roughly and deeply into
her that his pelvis was grinding down on her engorged clitoris with every
forward lunge. It felt like liquid fire licking at the tender pearl, but only
for a moment, before he drew back for the next thrust. She was in torment. And
bliss.

"Every muscle," he told her, now
clearly growling, cheeks glistening with the sweat of his mounting exertion.
"Let go or I might... might…." He snarled as his cock head bumped her
cervix and made Kim yelp. The ache of need swallowed the piercing pain
instantly, but her cry seemed to make him tighten his body, strain, shiver.
"I might hurt you."

Truthfully Kim didn't obey or even try. She
had no conscious choice once Will pounded into her with two sudden jabs, then
two more. The tension she felt in his body made her think he was close to
losing his grip on himself, his wolf, his need. When two thrusts to her core
became three, the building orgasm teasing the base of Kim's spine blossomed
into a wash of heat. She went limp, shivering, whimpering at the warmth
rippling in waves from her groin, down her sweaty thighs, right to her curled
toes.

This was the surrender the shifter needed
from his mate.

W
ill had never held anything so tight in his arms as Kim's
lush body. His wolf had never wanted to take a female so savagely, to devour
her, to make her his own and no one else's. To mark her.

It was the final act of claiming his mate,
to sink his teeth into her shoulder in the moment that marked the height of
their intimacy. Thank the gods his instinct remained intact, to direct him,
because Will himself could hardly think with the wolf howling and snarling
inside his head. His pulse pounded at his temples and at the base of his balls,
swollen heavy.

He only knew he had to get insider her,
deeper, deeper, prying her wide open for him, for his seed. The shifter heard nothing
but his heartbeat and Kim's, his panting breath keeping time with hers. Nothing
mattered but binding her to him, and not because she had brought him back from
the wilding, but because he couldn't bear the thought of not binding her tight
and close.

The woman's pussy squeezed his shaft as she
came. "Fuck," Will swore and growled and dug into the mattress to one
side of her head as his claws extended. Kim did tense again as she climaxed,
but just for a moment, every limb, every full curve and delicate muscle. She
didn't buck. Gods, he couldn't have taken that. He might have ripped her apart
in a haze of furious need, ravenous lust, insanity. But she just tipped her
hips back and melted against him, opening her groin to his merciless thrusts as
his body pistoned wildly in and out of hers.

As his orgasm overcame him, Will found his
extended canines in Kim's shoulder, the taste of her blood in his mouth. It
wasn't enough to tip his wolf over the edge and into a frenzy, but just enough
that he knew her. He knew her scent and her feel and now her taste, and there
would be nowhere his mate might go that he would have been unable to find her,
protect her, defend her.

Her sheath squeezed him tight, and the
shifter came. And came. Spine bowed, hips tensed, and throat emitting a howl
that started even deeper than his chest or his gut, from the base of who he
was. Man met wolf inside the embrace of his mate's voluptuous body.

His mate. Will’s mate. The idea overcame the
shifter as sleep weighed him down, while he cradled this human woman in his
arms. There was hope for his kind, he thought as he drifted in a darkness that
for once was peaceful and comforting, in her bed. If the voice of his mate’s
spirit was strong enough to call him back from the wilding…. The shifters had
always believed mating with a female were was the only hope, but they had so
few females—the result of intentional hunts carried out by the government
and by Fenris Wolves. He knew only a couple of stories about weres finding
mates among humans, and he had always wondered if those women had really been
wolfkin, latent shifters themselves. Kim was no wolfkin. Her smell told him
that much. And yet she had not just staved off his wilding but reversed it.

It was late afternoon when Will untangled
himself from his sleeping mate. She lay exhausted, battered and bruised from
their joining. He felt guilt bite into his gut at the sight, right before the
urge to take her again started gnawing at him.
Too dangerous
, he
thought.
Give her a couple of days to heal
. But the idea of not holding
her and kissing her and fucking her….
One day
, he amended, gritting his
teeth even at that. He licked at the faint streaks of blood on her shoulder and
kissed the pink bite wound. His sense of her was even stronger now, overwhelming,
dangerously stirring. Will had to leave the bedroom to keep from disturbing
her, from taking her when her body was too tender to withstand it.

He was standing naked at her kitchen table
and staring blankly at a day-old newspaper—one that displayed a date
twenty-five
years
later than the last one he’d seen—when someone started pounding
on the cabin door. Will growled under his breath, considering responding to the
rude interruption himself and in all his natural glory, but Kim scurried from
the bedroom hastily wrapped in a dark bathrobe that left her unmarred shoulder
temptingly bare. Such a distraction, this woman. She still had bedhead, that
sexy as hell “I just got fucked into oblivion” hair, tangled in sensual curls.
A snarl of appetite from the shifter stopped her cold, and she stared at him
like a doe catching a sudden glimpse of the wolf that stalked her.

A male voice called from the porch. “Kim, I
know you’re in there. Your service jeep is out front. Open the door.”

The note of demand in the man’s tone bowed
up Will’s back
and
his wolf’s. Whoever that was, he thought he had some
special authority over Kim. The shifter wanted it
known—violently—that wasn’t the case. Kim held her hands out to
stop Will, though, her eyes pleading. He called his wolf back inch by inch,
bristle by bristle, and folded his arms across his chest, waiting sullenly. She
was being diplomatic,
reasonable
, something he hadn’t had to deal with
in, well, more than two decades, apparently. The reflection of himself he’d
seen in Kim’s bedroom mirror didn’t show those years. He still looked about
thirty-five, the same as when the wilding took him, though his actual age at
the time had been closer to fifty-five. Weres’ bodies aged slowly after the
change. Their dispositions, not so gracefully.

And yet Will doubted there had ever been a
time, alpha or not, wolf or man, when he would have tolerated the tone of voice
he was hearing a strange man using on his mate where she’d shut herself off on
the front porch.

“Of course I’m sick,” she protested, and
Will stalked up to the window and blatantly pulled down a couple of the plastic
blades of the blinds to peer through at the confrontation with the wiry blond
man.

With a puffed up chest, the stance of a
bully, the trespasser (as far as Will was concerned) folded his arms and
glared. “This just looks to me like more of the stalling that always comes up
when I’ve instructed you to file your field report on Wolf A217.”

Kim chewed her plump bottom lip while
obviously considering her answer. Because he was mated to her now, having
tasted her thoughts as well as her blood, Will knew she was fighting back her
anger and a decidedly defiant dislike for… Northrup, it said on the ID tag
below the man’s collar.

“What are you accusing me of, Daniel?” she
asked in a cool monotone.

“That’s Mr. Northrup. Don’t be
insubordinate, Kim. You can’t afford it. I’m saying it’s obvious you’re not
doing your job. Do you even have any field notes on the wolf, or have you been
up here the whole time watching television and eating junk food and sitting on
your….?”

Good thing this Northrup trailed off before
finishing the insult, or he might have had a naked shifter in his face, holding
him two feet off the ground by his neck. Of course, both Kim and Will knew the
bastard was trying to make a crack about her weight and the lazy, chubby girl
stereotype. They both also knew that dear Ranger Northrup had taken one look at
Kim all flushed and sensually mussed and sprung an erection in his snug
polyester uniform pants.

“You’re threatening to terminate me again,
is that is,
sir
?” she asked with caustic emphasis.

“I am.” When the woman didn’t dissolve into
a puddle of solicitousness befitting his attempt to terrorize her, her peacock
of a supervisor nodded more firmly. “I mean it, Kim. You are going to have a
full write-up on A217 on my desk before I get into the office tomorrow morning,
or I start your termination paperwork and have it faxed to regional
headquarters before lunch.”

Kim didn’t argue, just fumed quietly. Will
gathered from Northrup’s perplexed reaction, as the man lingered there
awkwardly when he should have just walked away, that she was usually more of an
arguer who stood up for herself. And Will liked that idea just fine. Though
none of them would ever have said so, alpha male shifters thrived on the
challenge, the sass, the passion of mouthy little mates who weren’t afraid to
put them in their place.

When the woman stepped back inside,
clenching her jaw and slamming the door, Will met her with a cocked brow. “You
never slept with that asshole, did you?”

Kim blinked at him, her pretty mouth screwed
up in an expression of disgust. “I hope you don’t think I hate myself that
much. Why would you even ask?”

“I didn’t think so,” Will said, admitting to
himself that her reaction pleased him, soothed the possessive streak in him.
“But it’s not for lack of him wanting you. A man can’t get much more passive
aggressive than that without being a woman.” Will grinned for the first time in
years, a
lot
of years, at the nonplussed look his mate gave him.

“He’s a miserable, sexually frustrated
bastard, for sure,” she agreed. “All the more reason not to give him any
information on Wolf A217. That’s you, ya know.”

“I figured.”

“Need to give him something, though,” she
said, tugging on the luscious pad of her lower lip with her teeth again. Will
wanted to do that. “If I give him nothing, he’ll send someone else around.
They’ll keep after you, maybe attract the wrong kind of attention. I can’t have
anything I’ve written endanger you or any other were, especially if it means
the federal government will come hunting you down.” She combed her fingers
through her unruly hair and blew out a tired breath. “I’ll write up a bullshit
report debunking all the extraordinary claims about A217, say I haven’t been
able to locate him for a couple of weeks, point people in the wrong direction.
Maybe I can even convince them the wolf died trying to attack the bear that’s
been causing us so much trouble in the park. I’ll drop it off on Northrup’s
desk with my resignation at eight sharp.”

Will stepped up over his mate, watching her
face, reading her reaction, gauging whether she was ready for this, for him.
“Make it 7:45. We leave for upstate New York at eight.”

T
hat quickly. Kim’s life was changing that quickly, or so she
thought before she hurried down from the porch of her cabin only to have Will
catch her by the arm at the foot of the steps.

“Not yet,” he said, his handsome face
anxious and hollow-cheeked.

“What? I thought you said….” Kim recognized
a soul-deep dread inside her, a fear that she’d been foolish to believe Will
really intended to take her away with him, to think someone like him wanted
someone like her. He’d just been caught up in the moment, in a rash fancy at a
time when returning to human form has overwhelmed him, but now….

“I’m asking you to walk away from your whole
life here to come into my world with me. It’s sudden and dangerous and clear
across the country from everything and everyone you’ve ever known. Before I do
that, I have to know.”

Now he was scaring Kim, not just his words
but the melancholy weighing down his tone. “Know what?” she asked.

“If I’m really free of the wilding.”

A chill flowed down Kim’s spine in a stream
like ice water. “You said I’d brought you back. You felt that, right?”

“I felt that, but I have to try, Kim. I have
to change back again, just once more before we go, to know the wilding won’t
take me the next time I have to shift. And there will be a next time, little
one. I’m an alpha. I’ll be expected to lead again, to fight.”

All of which was too much for Kim to absorb
at one time. She hid her eyes behind her hands, rubbing at her eyelids roughly,
until she felt Will moving away from her. He was walking around behind the
cabin, into the forest. “Now? You have to do this now? I haven’t even….” She
bit her tongue.

Will slowed to a stop, then looked over his
shoulder at his mate. “Haven’t even said goodbye? Just in case?”

It took her a moment, only a moment, to
straighten her shoulders and march up to the man. “Kissed you for good luck,”
she insisted and came up as high as she could on tiptoes to put her mouth to
his. Salty earth, she thought again at the taste of the man. Sex and musk. Her
mate. Breathless after sucking at his full lips, she rasped, “Now let’s get
this over with. We have to be down the mountain to the ranger station in twenty
minutes.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The shifter was wearing old clothes, a snug
gray t-shirt and jeans left behind by an old boyfriend, and filling them out a
hell of a lot better than the original owner. What an ass the man had. Kim
concentrated on that, not on the anxiety she felt, not on all the terrible
possibilities, as Will paused in the shade of a tree and started to strip as
naked as she’d found him.

Her body stirred at the sight of his perfect
body, contoured like a Roman statue. He couldn’t lose that body, she thought.
She
couldn’t lose him, not after just one night. He had even refused to take her
again the night before, afraid he’d hurt her if he didn’t give her time to
recover from the joining and himself time to come to grips with the renewed
appetites of his human form.

Kim almost couldn’t watch as he stilled
himself, lowered his head, started to shiver and sweat. It was so quick it took
her breath away, the shift. No half-form this time. Will was a man, and then he
bent forward into the furry, sinewy shape of a steely gray wolf. Half of her
wanted to cry for the loss of Will’s image. The other half of her felt the
strangest surge of reassurance at the familiar sight of Wolf A217. Her wolf.
But was he still her mate? Was he still Will, inside there somewhere?

When the wolf, without so much as a glance
back at her, started to run into the trees, Kim gasped and darted after him.
Her panting breath, as she struggled to keep pace with the canid as best she
could, mixed with muffled tears at what his actions might have meant. Was Will
gone so quickly? Had he held too much faith in the connection he felt to her?
Had she somehow failed him? Kim crashed and stumbled clumsily through
underbrush and ignored the branches lashing at her hair and face. She was
losing sight of Will, her wolf.

The beast disappeared over a hill, and Kim
was alone, panting, sides aching, thighs burning as she pushed herself to keep
running. Only the sound of splashing water stilled the flurry of panic inside
her, and she couldn’t have said why. Then over that hill she found him, Wolf
A217, bounding into the river from which Will had strode two days before to
claim her. Was she losing him to the forest, to the very path from which he’d
come?

Kim collapsed to her knees crying on the
riverbank as Wolf A217 swam farther and farther away. Great heaving sobs bent
her forward until she covered her head with her arms, her forehead pressed to
the dirt and grass. She could still hear him splashing and didn’t think to
wonder at the nearness of the sound until chill water dripped on the back of
her neck.

The woman jerked herself upright to find
Will, Man A217, standing over her with a victorious smile on his face. When she
started to clamber to her feet, Will reached down for his mate and lifted her
into his arms, clear off the ground.

“I needed one more swim in that river before
we left,” he murmured into their embrace, into Kim’s hair.

The woman lifted her head to look him in the
eye. “Are you saying you knew as soon as you changed? You knew you had control
of it? You fucking bastard!” She punished him with a hard, deep kiss that ended
with a sharp nip to his lower lip. He even yelped himself. Then grinned. “You didn’t
have to make me run after you, jerk,” she huffed against his cheek.

Will chuckled. “I like the sight of you and
the smell of you when you’re all sweaty and breathless. If you’d like, we can
wash you off in the water.” He was carrying Kim toward the river as he spoke,
but she didn’t notice until it was too late to keep the man—keep her
mate—from throwing her into the clear, cold water.

Kim wanted to cuss at Will, but the chill
stole her breath, at least at first. All she could do was cling to the shifter,
the naked, hulking, thoroughly aroused shifter holding her tight to him as the
current washed past them in rapid swirls and eddies.

“Northrup’s not going to have his report on
his desk at eight,” she warned Will, though she could barely get the words out.

“No, he’s not,” the shifter agreed, laying
light nipping kisses against Kim’s apple cheeks. “We’ll fucking mail it to him,
maybe from Nevada or Texas.”

The shifter stripped his mate, letting the
rushing water carry her dreary uniform away, carry her dreary life away. It was
the beginning of a new life, starting with the one he was about to place inside
the soft, curvy belly he so adored.

The
End

If
you enjoyed Wilding, please consider leaving a review wherever you purchased it
or on any of the major retailers.