Avery
“You don’t follow orders,” Alcaeus continued talking to himself, tugging at the back of his neck. “It’s like your wolf can’t even feel my commands.”
“It’s nothing personal.”
He shook his head. “You have no pack. You’ve been run off by every pack you’ve ever tried to join.”
I didn’t like where this line of revelation appeared to be headed. I shrugged, even as my breath quickened. “I’ve always been a loner-ish type.”
“But you’re not a rogue.” His hazel eyes caught mine. “You can connect.” He licked his bottom lip. “Really, really well in fact.” His voice lowered and his eyes darkened as he said it. “And you bit me.” He took a step toward me. “Your wolf claimed mine.”
Where was he going with this? His behavior was making me nervous. I was too tired to deal. And suddenly very horny.
“I—I think I should go upstairs now and apologize to Kai,” I announced, standing up from the couch. “I need to shower, too. I’ll just go do that as well.” And masturbate.
“Sit down.”
I sat.
He came to stand directly in front of me. A certain hardness and determination had settled over his features, raising my hackles. “Kai says that you’re on multiple rogue hunters’ hit lists throughout the U.S. because you’ve been tracking and assassinating rogue hunters for the past decade. Is that true?”
He was throwing off that hardass Alpha mojo of his again. It hit me like a sucker punch to my clit.
“I haven’t killed that many,” I said with a huff.
He nodded slowly, his expression stern as his eyes traveled over me. I couldn’t tell if he was gearing up to lecture me or fuck me.
“And you survived a rogue attack. That’s how you were infected with werewolf venom, correct?”
I nodded. There was no point in denying it. I knew he’d heard it from Clifton and the Highlands Ranch pack already. Kai had gathered more than enough information on me to confirm it as well. And there was little to no chance Kai hadn’t already shared that information with Chaos.
“I need to know how you survived the rogue attack.”
I swallowed. “Um, well, there were four of us. I managed to grab a rifle while the rogue attacked the other three campers. I got lucky.”
“Why’d you just do that?”
“What? Grab a rifle?”
“No. Lie to me.”
“I didn—”
“I can smell it loud and clear when you lie, Avery. You aren’t adept at masking the scent of it. At all.”
Well, I’d never had to worry about it before.
“And why did you refer to them as ‘campers’ a moment ago,” he continued to interrogate me, “as if they were strangers who happened to be at the same campsite as you?”
Yep. Kai had told him plenty.
“Because people who camp are called campers,” I returned tartly. “In fact, the police report, park ranger report, and all the newspapers referred to them as ‘campers,’ too. The headlines literally read: ‘Three campers found mauled to death in the White Mountains.’ ”
“But they were your friends who died. Your fiancé.”
The last part seemed harder for him to say.
“And they were also campers.” I contended. “Labeling them ‘campers’ doesn’t marginalize them in my heart, Chaos. Sure, maybe it compartmentalizes them a bit. Maybe I do it to avoid the innate emotional response tied to words like ‘fiancé’ and ‘best friend,’ but that doesn’t mean I’m pretending to myself that they weren’t important to me, or that I love them any less today than I did that day that I lost them.”
“I didn’t say that.” In one fluid movement, he’d invaded my space and was leaning over me—a hand braced on either side of me against the back of the couch—his muscular frame and delicious masculine scent scrambling my senses all over again.
“You didn’t have to.” I pushed my palm against his rock-solid chest, trying to put more distance between us. But his huge, hard form didn’t budge.
Fuck, the man was hot. And confusing. Why did he have to poke at me like this?
“Look, I don’t know what you’re getting at here, or what you expect me to say. I’m not perfect, all right? My shifting skills aren’t the most pretty or graceful. But I’m not broken. Stop looking for ways to fix me.”
“That’s not what I’m doing, Avery.”
“Yes, you are. Know how I know?” Crap. My voice had gone breathy.
“How?” His tongue swept his generous bottom lip as his hungry eyes feasted on my own mouth. His nostrils flared, and I knew he scented how wet I’d become.
“Because I know all about trying to fix people,” I continued with a brittle laugh. “I know all about trying to save people, too. And just so we’re clear, fixing and rescuing other people is a you problem.”
“I know it is, honey.”
“I mean it’s a me problem. And a you problem. Whatever. You get what I mean.” I was nervous-rambling now.
He looked like he was about to kiss me.
“I do,” he agreed with a hint of a smile. “We’re both fixers. It’s a shared problem.”
“Don’t look so pleased about it. It’s a bad thing.”
“If you say so.”
Just when I was sure he was going to kiss me, he pushed off the back of the couch, moving out of my space as he stood upright—leaving me feeling flustered and bereft at the loss.
My disappointment was short-lived, however, because he reached one hand behind his thick neck, grabbed his shirt collar, and pulled his T-shirt over his head and off in one sexy move.
I saw my mark at the juncture of his neck and shoulder, and my mouth watered at the sight.
It was still there. He hadn’t blocked the progress of my werewolf mating venom to prevent it from becoming permanent, as Kai had said that he was capable of doing.
He reached for the button fly of his jeans next, and my stomach flip-flopped.
My inner wolf did a happy dance.
He could have easily vanished his clothing. But it was as if he wanted me to watch him strip naked—knowing full well what it was doing to me. And there was no hiding what it was doing to me.
He pulled his jeans down next.
He wasn’t wearing any briefs.
He bent at the waist as he removed his pants at the ankles, one long, powerfully muscled leg at a time.
With his jeans discarded, he casually straightened to his full height again, unabashedly displaying just how virile a man-slash-superbeast he was.
Damn.
I forced my eyes up to his face when I realized that he’d asked me a question.
“Huh?”
“I said, how did you get bitten by the rogue if you had the rifle and shot him?”
What?
Who the hell strips down to their birthday suit to ask that question?
“Are you kidding?” My voice sounded every bit as annoyed and sexually frustrated as I felt. “It takes multiple shots.” I waved my hand around, struggling to regain my composure as the scent of his sex grew stronger in the air—calling to weaker parts of me. “He charged me and got a bite in somewhere between the fourth and sixth bullet.”
“So he got close enough to bite you—bite you hard and long enough to release his venom—but you managed to keep the rifle in your hands and continue shooting him?”
He’d begun casually stroking the length of his erection as he asked the question, throwing me off kilter even more with his bizarre behavior.
What the—?
“Are you getting off hearing about this?” I balked. “About my rogue attack? Is this some kind of freaky kinky shit you’re into? Because I am not down with—”
“No. No—not at all.” His eyes widened at me in disbelief before rolling away, and he began to pace—while still stroking his dick. “I’m using physical sensation to try and keep my wolf—and myself—calm as we discuss things that I know I’m going to have a hard time hearing about. Because I need to understand how you were infected and how you survived.”
He stopped pacing and planted his hands on his hips, confronting me head on—with his giant dong pointed in the air. “And so far, Avery, I have to tell you, your story doesn’t check out. If you were pumping bullets into an attacking rogue, he’d have been so crazed that he would have bitten to kill, not just infect. In the situation you’ve described, you’d have been more likely to bleed out from a wound by an angry, unstable rogue.”
He reached down and cupped and rolled his balls in the palm of his hand briefly before resuming slow, measured strokes up and down his shaft as he awaited my response.
I decided this was the most bizarrely staged exchange I’d ever had with someone. Even for my life it was odd—which was saying something.
God, we probably were true mates.
I shrugged and muttered the only snarky excuse I could think of. “Maybe he didn’t like the taste of me.”
“Where did he bite you?”
“In the woods, by our campsite.”
“This isn’t a joke, Avery.”
That werelock cock of his pointing straight up to the sky taunting me was no joke either.
“He bit my throat,” I admitted.
“There’s no scar on your throat.”
“It healed after I turned.” I was grasping at straws.
“But none of your other scars did.”
“The others were old scars. The neck wound was still fresh when I turned werewolf.”
He raised a sardonic brow. “Ah, that how it works then?”
I pursed my lips. I didn’t know how it worked, and he knew it.
He filled the silence. “The wound would’ve been a week old by the time you shifted. Old enough that it would’ve left a scar despite your new healing capacity. Unless someone with extraordinary healing capability—such as a werelock—intervened to heal your neck wound and assist your first shift.”
“No werelock helped me,” I insisted, popping up off the couch in my anger and frustration at his striptease interrogation tactics. How was I supposed to focus with him naked and stroking his cock in front of me?
“When you went to the police to report the attack,” he calmly relayed, “there were no abrasions on your neck or anywhere else. You were dirty and your clothing was torn and bloodied, but there were no physical injuries anywhere on your body that they could see—which is what initially landed you on rogue hunters’ hit lists when they looked into the incident and read human law enforcement’s ‘unofficial’ record of your account of the attack.”
Hellfire.
I walked to the bar shelf and poured myself a glass of water. With my back to him, I said, “Look, I got lucky, okay? What the hell do you want from me? I thought you saw me as your perfect, predestined mate that your ancestors had protected on your behalf all this time. Now you’re sorry that I managed to somehow survive the unsurvivable?”
I took a long gulp to soothe the dryness in my throat. And the panic in my heart. Then I took another to delay turning around to face him.
“No,” he responded from behind me. “I’m sorry that you still feel the need to lie to me. That you can’t trust me yet—can’t sense how much I adore you. How loyal and devoted to you my wolf and I are already.”
I closed my eyes at his words.
I felt his tempting warmth stealing up behind me. Before he could get too close, I turned and sidestepped, holding my water in front of me—as if the cool glass could shield my heart and keep distance between us.
His brow wrinkled. “Don’t you know I’m on your side, Avery? That I’ll do anything to protect you—no matter who your enemy is?” His hazel eyes on me were searching. Intent.
And his words … they felt pure—in my heart.
But when he went in for his face-cupping move, I took a step back, challenging, “Why would I know that, Chaos? Trust is something that takes time.”
“I agree, honey. But you were smart and courageous enough to make it this far—to survive for this long keeping your daughter’s identity a secret from our world.”
My heart punch-started and fluttered violently in my chest at his revelation.
He knew.
“And I know you’re smart enough to understand that we won’t have the luxury of time much longer where your daughter’s life is concerned. So I hope you can find the courage to take a leap of faith and trust me.”
With every word, he confirmed it: He knew about Sloane. How much he knew, I wasn’t sure. It sounded like he knew enough.
My heart pounded. The crazy part was it didn’t feel so much like terror and panic gripping the organ beating like a wild drum in my chest anymore. It felt like excitement. Maybe even relief.
“Trust that I’ll protect your daughter with my life just as I’ll protect you.”
I didn’t stop him or step out of the way when he went in for his face-cupping move a second time.
He knew my daughter was the Rogue that he’d been hunting so many years for. And he wanted to protect her.
I swallowed. “I don’t understand.”
His smiling eyes beamed back at me. “I’m all in, Avery. Forever.”
His palms were warm on my cheeks as his long fingers slipped into the hair behind my ears to rub in soothing circles against my scalp. He sighed gently and pressed his forehead to mine, and that strange sense of familiarity washed over me again—like we’d done this a million times before.
Or maybe it was the sense that we were going to do this a million times again. The intuition that we were meant to.
And I knew in that moment that I wanted us to. More than I’d ever dared hope for such a thing before.
I wanted him—the big hot werelock with the weird name who for serious was totally into me despite all the obvious obstacles to our union.
My glass flew out of my hand and shattered somewhere as I reached for him—for the massive erection between us that curved the right way.
My clothing evaporated as he groaned and lifted me off the floor, our mouths fusing in a messy convergence of hope and fear, cemented by primal lust as we invaded one another, body and soul.
My hands were frantic to touch him everywhere; my legs locked around his waist. He fisted my hair and his tongue overpowered mine in a kiss that was as exquisite as it was rough. Consuming.
All in.
My back hit the wall. Something crashed to the ground nearby as he shoved inside of me, filling me to perfection.
My claws extended and scored down his back as he thrust hard. Deep. Withdrawing and slamming into me with a grunting force that was all animal, his hips rolling and pumping into my slick center that was swollen with need and gripping onto his invading organ as if fearing it might not return each time he pulled it away.
But it did. Returning again and again with a blinding passion that said it’d always be back for more.
He fucked me like his cock was claiming me—because it was.
He was.