Wolf Tales VI (23 page)

“Come with us. Now that we know the reason why you ignored all our invitations for so long, Xandi and I figure we have a lot of time to make up for.”

“Plus, it’ll keep you from sitting here thinking about Mei and Anton.” Xandi leaned close and kissed him. Her lips were smooth and warm and Oliver couldn’t help but kiss her back. Her tongue breached the seam of his mouth and quickly teased, and then she backed away. “I’d like to think the two of us are capable of taking your mind off one adorable little leopard.”

He felt the heat in his chest expand, and it wasn’t arousal so much as love. It burst out of him in laughter, the kind that healed, that made one whole. “I imagine you’re right.” He held his arms out, elbows cocked. Xandi slipped a hand around one, Keisha around the other. Then they led him into the house, heading in the opposite direction from the one Anton and Mei had taken.

Chapter 13

Mei’s shyness evaporated the minute Anton led her into one of the guest rooms and closed the door. She wasn’t certain how it happened, but all the misgivings she’d had, all the self-confidence she’d always lacked, seemed to float away. Instead, she felt a sense of her own power as a woman and her strength as a snow leopard.

She might be different from the rest of the pack, but she was no less. She was as strong, as intelligent, as beautiful.

“Yes, you are. More beautiful than even you imagine.”

Anton stood on the far side of the bed. He removed his shirt, slowly unbuttoning it as he watched her with a feral gleam in his eyes. Mei slipped her own cotton top over her head.

Anton kicked his shoes off and reached for the zipper to his slacks. Mei realized she’d never seen him in shorts or even wearing a shirt that didn’t button. “You’re not a T-shirt and shorts kind of guy, are you?”

He laughed and shook his head. “Keisha’s been trying to get me to relax my style habits. It hasn’t worked.” He stepped out of his pants and folded them neatly over the chair. His knit boxers didn’t come close to disguising the size of his erection or the fullness of his sac.

Mei slipped out of her short skirt and stood there in her panties. This felt so bizarre, stripping down in front of a man she barely knew, knowing she was about to get completely naked with him, have sex with him. Even more bizarre was the hot flow of fluids between her legs, the awareness of her labia swelling, her clit rising out of its prepuce.

She didn’t do this. Ever. At least she didn’t used to do this, but now it seemed right. Oliver said her brain was different now, her sex drive paramount, her needs more intense.

“He was right.”

Mei rolled her eyes. “Are you always in my brain?”

“Most of the time. It’s a fascinating brain to visit. I’m looking forward to the secrets I expect to find.”

She parked her hands on her hips and thrust her breasts forward. “If that line’s supposed to turn me on, it’s not working.”

Anton threw back his head and laughed. “Ah, Mei. I have much better methods than using a line on you.” He stripped his shorts down his long legs and her mouth went dry.

Oliver was an average-sized man with a good-sized package. Anton was scary. In a good way. She licked her lips and stared, unabashed. Anton held his hand out to her. “Time for me to see if my methods work.”

Still wearing her panties, Mei took Anton’s hand and let him pull her onto the bed, but she lay on her side, propped up on one elbow, and stared at him. “Oliver said Chanku don’t age as fast as regular humans. How old are you?”

Anton stopped, as if taken aback by her question. “I’m fifty-three.”

“You barely look thirty. Is Stefan older than you?”

“No. He’s younger, but the gray in his hair might make him look older.” He sat on the side of the bed. Mei felt the heat from his body. Her sensitive Chanku nostrils caught the faint musky scent she recognized as aroused male. “He’ll be forty-five tomorrow. It’s his birthday.”

“Oh, yeah. The truck.” Mei drew a little design on the bedspread with her finger. “I’m twenty-seven. Does that bother you?”

“Should it?”

She shook her head and suddenly felt tired and confused. “I don’t know. This is all new to me. Not just the fact I can turn into an animal, but the change in my senses, the way things smell, the way I see stuff. My perception of things is different. My needs.”

“That’s the biggest change. Arousal becomes a constant. Desire affects every decision we make, every thought we have. I desire you. Equally, I desire Oliver and Stefan, Xandi and Keisha. Adam and Eve. My body craves the sensual contact, the sexual release, and the connection that comes with that release. For Chanku, an orgasm isn’t merely the body convulsing in pleasure. It’s the mind wrapped in sensation, the heart beating in sync with one partner, or two…or more. It’s the link during orgasm that’s addictive. We never have enough. Never.”

His voice was low and sexy, but it was his mind that seduced. Words of pleasure tickled and aroused her body, while something deeper, visceral, tantalized and seduced her mind.

He was linking with her, already sharing his thoughts and his own arousal, and her body responded. Oliver had said Anton’s abilities were beyond description. She believed him, now. Not only the man’s ability to read her thoughts, but to plant thoughts of his own.

He fantasized and shared the images. His tongue between her legs, his fingers plunging into her sex, his cock slowly filling her as his tongue made slow, leisurely love to her mouth. Caught in his mental foreplay, Mei suddenly realized he knelt between her legs and had already removed her panties. It was no longer his fantasy that filled her. Now it was his tongue, lapping at her swollen labia, tasting the juices flowing so copiously.

She lay back and moaned and her fingers clutched at the bedspread. Anton had told her this was about her pleasure, her desires, and she took without guilt, lost in sensation, her body centered on the tongue laving her sensitive tissues.

The fantasies continued as he poured them into her open mind. His tongue speared her deep, lapping from ass to clit and she spread her legs, only vaguely aware of the fur roughened shoulders between her thighs, the cold, wet nose pressing against her clitoris.

She would have opened her eyes, but the fantasy held her in its grasp. She was the leopard, but it was a wolf that pleasured her, and that couldn’t be. No, she was a woman. A slim, dark-haired woman and the paws that held her still definitely belonged to a wolf.

She felt her natural blocks crumble as her arousal grew, felt the subtle pressure of another mind, unlike hers, traveling deep within her brain, flowing along her synapses and tracing the coils and loops within the gray matter that controlled the woman. The tongue speared deeper, licked harder. Her desire was a flower, opening to meet each sensual touch.

At the edge of a great abyss, the tongue deserted her, the paws disappeared, a thick shaft nestled in the sensitive valley between her thighs and slowly forced its way between her labia.

She felt the pressure again, felt the subtle intrusion of another mind, the not so subtle intrusion of thick, hard cock. He shared with her then, and she knew what Anton felt, how her vaginal walls clamped down on the velvety surface of his shaft and the way her muscles rippled along his length.

Muscles pulling him in, holding him deep inside. When he touched the mouth of her womb, she knew what he felt. When he withdrew to thrust yet again, Mei whimpered with the pleasure Anton experienced, and she arched her hips to take him deeper. When her tissues stretched to hold his great size, she took pleasure in the tight clasp around his erection, and all the while he was there, in her head, in her thoughts.

Harder, faster, her fingers tangled in the blankets, her body a receptacle for pleasure. Hips lifting to meet each solid thrust, muscles rippling and convulsing around him, she teetered there, a scream caught in her throat, a million images flooding her mind.

She saw Anton. Knew him as she knew no other man. She wanted this with Oliver, this pure sharing, the sense of connection she’d never experienced with another person. Anton saw everything, the secrets she’d kept, the desires she’d hidden. Saw and accepted. There was no judgment in him, no criticism or censure.

Only love. Pure, uncomplicated love, totally without reservation. She knew he loved. Her. Oliver. All of them, and she saw that love like the scattered images in a kaleidoscope, all shape and form and color, repeated over and over again, growing in scope and size until the colors were her entire existence. Higher, sharper, she screamed with the sweet pain of orgasm roiling through her body like sunlight spilling over a dark plain. Her climax, when it finally subsided, left her shaken, filled with a bittersweet knowledge that she was, and would always be, closer to this man than the one she truly wanted.

Anton was her first. He would always be the first to have taken her beyond life as she knew it. He had taken her into the vast universe of her own mind and at the same time, had freely shared all the knowledge in his.

He was brilliant and she would never understand half of what he knew, but she respected his honesty, his generosity, his openness. He’d opened himself to her, warts and all. Mei turned and smiled at him. He lay there beside her with a frown on his beautiful face. She knew him now for what he was. Not a perfect man, not by any means. Not always as self-assured as he appeared. Frightened, sometimes, of what he didn’t know, what he would never fully understand.

He was flawed in many ways, but always struggling to be better. He loved his wife and daughter more than life itself, loved the members of his pack, loved Mei.

“Thank you,” she said. “Your secret’s out.”

He rolled his head to one side and smiled. She watched as a tiny bead of sweat rolled from his hairline across his temple. “Which one? I have…had, more than most.”

She fought an impulse to taste the salt of his sweat. It wasn’t her right to reach for more intimacy. “You’re not perfect. You make mistakes, just like the rest of us. You want to do better, but sometimes your ego gets in the way, and if Keisha didn’t occasionally slap a little common sense into you, you’d be totally insufferable.”

He rolled to his back and laughed. “That about nails it. Thank you, Mei. You’re as lovely on the inside as you are on the outside and I find your honesty extremely refreshing. Oliver is a lucky man to have found you.”

She hesitated to ask the one question they’d both avoided. But wasn’t that the reason they were here together in this bed, both of them still recovering from an orgasm of almost frightening proportions?

“I know more than I did,” he said, answering her unspoken question. “Still not enough, but I think that will come as I sort through the knowledge I’ve gained. This much I know—you, Mei the woman, are by nature a solitary creature. So is the snow leopard. You have a natural grace that is feline, a feisty disposition more feline than lupine. Is it because you are a snow leopard when you shift, or do you shift and become the leopard because it more closely matches your nature? I don’t know, but I have a lot more information now than I did.”

Damn. Mei flopped back down. “Then you can’t make me a wolf? Can’t turn Oliver into a leopard?”

“Not yet, but don’t give up.” He rolled away and went into the small bath. Mei heard water running. He returned with a damp washcloth and handed it to her. “I’d offer to do this for you, but I don’t want to push my luck.”

She laughed and carefully wiped his seed from between her legs. He took the washcloth and threw it into the hamper. “Do you have anyone do housekeeping here?” she asked. She’d never really thought about the logistics. “This place is huge.”

“When it was only the five of us and Oliver still just Oliver, he handled almost everything. Now we share the chores. I think tomorrow’s a laundry day.” He flipped the top down on the hamper. “We can’t very well hire a housekeeper. Too hard to explain the occasional shifts from human to wolf, and the constantly changing bed partners. Better to do the chores ourselves.”

Mei nodded and crawled out of bed. She dressed herself while Anton did the same. It was strange, talking about mundane things like housekeeping and laundry with a man with whom she’d just shared such an amazingly intimate act. She felt off-kilter. Out of balance. She wanted to shift. She knew Oliver always talked about wanting to become the wolf and run, but her snow leopard self wanted to hunt and eat and find a sunny spot on a flat rock and bask.

So different, by nature.

Wolves and leopards. So completely different.

Adam loped along the beaten path with Eve to his left and behind. He’d wanted to give her the lead, but she’d deferred. He knew this country better than she.

Didn’t she realize he wanted to watch her perfect gray tail and follow her scent? Tongue lolling, he led her deeper into the cool depths of the forest before finally veering off the track and winding through thick brambles and even thicker willows.

I hope you’re not getting us lost.

I could only be so lucky. He loved the sound of laughter in her voice. When they’d first met just a month ago, that laughter hadn’t been as light. She’d not been at all flirtatious, too recently traumatized by her assault. Now Adam felt as if he was finally getting to know the real Eve. She was even more perfect than the lady he’d fallen in love with.

Here. What do you think?

She almost ran into him when he stopped at the edge of a small, flower-studded glade. Water trickled through green grass and bright yellow wildflowers to a small pool at the base of a rocky cliff. Thick ferns grew at the water’s edge, even now in the depth of summer. It was shaded and cool here, with sun breaking through in dimples of light.

Eve sat. She turned and looked at him in wolven amazement. This is gorgeous! It’s perfect.

Today is our wedding, Eve. It has to be perfect.

She blinked. I hadn’t thought of it like that, but you’re right. Adam, I love you so!

There really were no words to express his feelings, but the need in him rose, powerful enough it was almost a separate entity. His vision glazed for a moment and he felt as if his muscles swelled along with his cock.

He brushed Eve’s shoulder lightly with one front paw. She stood up, turned and looked over her shoulder and her thick plume of a tail waved. Like a flag to a bull, it called him. Adam felt the growl low in his throat, felt the rush of blood through his body.

Eve was his. His mate. A worthy adversary as well as someone to protect, to love. The feelings engulfed him—human as well as wolf. This time he raked her shoulder with his claws and bit at the thick ruff of fur around her neck. She snarled, an invitation.

He mounted her quickly, as if he’d mated in this form before. His cock pierced her hot sex on his first jabbing thrust. Eve yipped and tried to pull away, but the thick knot at the base of his wolven penis slipped easily between her vaginal lips, swelling and holding her tight against him. His forelegs gripped her shoulders, his rear paws scored the soft, damp earth as he struggled for purchase.