The Thing About Weres

“Sometimes the act leaves one on the woman.” Pensively, he touched the place that had no spot to mark something so precious and wonderful. “But it’s good. It would be a crime to ruin your skin.”

He stroked my shoulder softly, his downcast gaze shielding his thoughts. My skin looked very white, and very smooth, in contrast to his tanned, scarred hand.

“It’s soft as a baby’s,” he said. “I’ll need to be careful or I’ll bruise you.”

I don’t want careful. I want God-I’m-dying-for-you passion.

That’s when it occurred to me—right at that moment when I was astride his lap wearing nothing but a pair of damp cotton panties and his well-worn T-shirt—that the gap between our ages and experiences was in danger of becoming a freakin’ fjord. And if I didn’t find a way to span it—if I let him point to someplace up ahead where presumably a rope bridge swung—all would be lost.

Soft as a baby? Tender as a chick? Is that how he saw me now?

Probably. He’d carried me to this bed, and wiped my eyes dry of tears. To him, I was still Hedi, not much changed. Impossibly young. While he’d evolved into the savior of the Raha’ells and the Creemore pack’s returned hero.

Talk about a disparity.

Suddenly his gentleness felt less worshipful than cautious. His kisses practiced and controlled.

He was holding himself back.

No. No. No.

The guy I’d shoved through the gates had been an eager, impetuous lover. That is where we’d communicated. That is when I’d known that his passion matched mine.

I’d felt his equal when we lay skin to skin.

I’m not giving that up.

With a sigh, I cradled my mate’s face between my hands.

“What?” he said, his eyes narrowing.

So this was my new lover?

This complicated man with all his new complex angles, and unexpected hollows, and thin, tight skin? Given to command. Tempered to the role of leader?

Yes, mine.

If I was willing to dig for the Robbie Trowbridge buried deep. If I didn’t let him relegate me to the fragile and breakable category. If I believed that he meant what he said before he’d carried me to this ancestral bed. That it didn’t matter that he was one thing, and I was another. That all the other stuff really amounted to shit that we’d figure out later.

Well, here was Part I of the later shit.

His face had grown shuttered under my silent inspection.

I brooded over his mouth. Upper lip sharply defined, lower lip wide and firm. It used to be mobile and prone to ironic grins but now, more often than not, it was taut and tense. No longer the mouth of a man rebelliously clinging to his rogue status. This mouth belonged to a man who’d seen too much. Lost more than he’d owned. Thinned his lips and clamped down on private suffering too many times.

I can’t make love to the Son of Lukynae.

Not with this reservoir of guilt ceaselessly circling inside me like a dirty whirlpool.

Within days of pushing him through the gates, self-loathing and reproach had started twining itself around my battered self-esteem. How could I not remember the words to bring the portal back? I couldn’t reconcile myself to the enormity of that stupidity, any more than I could dismiss the fact that the mantle of leadership did not fit me.

And now, I’d seen the whole measure of my crime.

Remorse could drown me if I let it.

Yes, I could tell him “I’m sorry” again—hoping he’d give me some get-out-of-jail pass that would make me feel better—but even if I did, and cried another monsoon of tears, it still wouldn’t change one damn thing. Because my “sorry” was both a truth and a lie; all at the same time.

I’d known that, too. Whenever the whirlpool had dragged me down to the choking mire of self-hatred, I kept on finding the skeleton of the truth lying at the bottom.

Because I was sorry, and yet I was not.

I opened my mouth and out popped the truth. “You should know that this ‘kid’ would do it again.”

He tilted his head, his brows drawn together.

I hardened my voice. “Even knowing what world I was sending you to. As long as there was a chance that we could be here together—that I could see your face, smell your scent wrapping around me—I would do it again. I’d shove you through a thousand portals, over and over again, if I could save your life. I’d close my ears to the sound of the whiplash just so that I could bargain for another hour with you.”

In this bed, let there be no lies.

“I’m not a noble person. I’ll never be one. I don’t want to be. Not if it means I have to lose what I have. I have too little left, and what I have, I value too much.”

A flush tinted his high cheekbones as I cocked my hip, so that the soft folds of my sex eased to fit against his erection.

Yes. This is the way to find him again. Through words and action.

Blue eyes fixed on me.

And me alone.

I pulled his chin down—so slowly, so deliberately—and placed a hard kiss on the corner of his tense mouth. “I value you too much.” Then I forced his head back so that our mouths were aligned to my satisfaction and comfort and kissed him over and over again, with tongue and little tugs on his lower lip, and sneaky little rocking motions of my hip, until his arms were hard urgent bands around me, and I felt a deep tremor rack through him.

That’s when I flattened my hands on his hard chest.

He lifted a brow—his only outward comment on the ludicrous notion that I could overpower him—but he let me slowly push him flat.

There he lay, all parts of him rigid with desire, his body laid out for me to feast on. Face of a warrior. Hard belly, so much definition in his muscles that they looked like they’d been carved from a piece of marble. Light scattering of dark hair between those two slabs of pectoral muscles. A thinner trail leading south from his tight navel to his heavy cock.

“This is new,” he said huskily, his lids at half-mast, his head tilted back.

“I want to make love to the guy who stalked across the living room,” I informed him as I crossed my arms and took hold of my T-shirt’s hem. And then very slowly, I lifted my arms and the shirt rose, exposing for both our pleasure the rounded curve of my hip, the white skin of my soft belly, the rib cage within which my heart pounded, the undercurve of my heavy breast, and finally, the hollow of my tender throat.

The woman in me preened as his lips parted.

For another taunting second, I held my arms above my head, slightly canted back, knowing that it lifted my breasts up in a seize-me salute before letting the T-shirt fall to the bed.

I gazed down at my lover.

A blue comet spun in a lazy circuit around a dark dilated pupil.

My eyes began to burn, a prelude to my own flare. I removed the hand that seemed intent on working its way to my pussy, and splayed open his fingers. A hard callus sat at the base of what was left of each digit, testament to the harshness that he’d endured.

“I’m so sorry you suffered.” His brows slanted downward in an expression almost akin to pain as I brought his palm to my mouth and pressed a kiss to that callus, then did it again, and once more, following the rough line of them all the way to that rounded nub of that pinkie—all the time watching the skin sink in the hollows of his cheeks as he fought to hold on to his emotions.

“But you have to understand, Trowbridge. I’m no kid.”

He sucked in a sharp, quick breath through his teeth as I moved his hand to my breast. The women of the