“What I’m going to tell you—well, you might laugh. Think I’m joking. And then you’ll probably get scared. But a part of you, the part you told me about, will understand.”
“Okay, tell me.”
“There’s no good way to do this,” he muttered. “Gilly, you’re feeling this way—the urge to be naked, to run under the moon—because you’re a wolf.”
She blinked. Once. Twice. Held back a laugh as she waited for his.
None came, from either of them. “So all of this is happening to me because I’m a wolf?”
Still, no laughter. The man was serious. Dead serious when he said, “Yes. Part of you knows instinctively. And part of you has been taught it’s too crazy to believe. But still you do.” Jinx handed her the book with her moon drawings that he must’ve grabbed before they left the hospital.
She took it from him but refused to look inside. It represented so many years of pain. “I’m not a very good artist.”
“It’s the way you interpret her. Raw. Primal. Basic, like your needs.”
Jinx’s voice whispered to something she’d already known as it skittered along her back and tingled like a caress. She wanted to mount him on the warm grass, take him inside of her so deeply until she . . .
Howled.
She blinked as Jinx’s eyes shifted. They looked like the ones she saw in her dreams. “You’re not . . . human.”
“Neither are you, sweetheart,” he murmured before directing her to look in the small mirror he’d brought outside with them without her noticing.
She gasped. Had this ever happened in the hospital? In front of her parents? “Wolf.”
“All wolf. Dire wolf. This is just the form that allows you to pass in this world unnoticed. Although you’re too beautiful to be ignored.”
Everything that had happened to her since Jinx found her led to this moment.
Mentally ill versus wolf. She figured she hadn’t drawn the short end of the stick.
And if he’s lying?
“You’re hearing rustling. That’s your wolf talking to you. And your back—I’ll bet if I looked, I’d see bruises there, but you don’t remember falling or hurting yourself.”
She took a step back. “Maybe I am going through some kind of drug withdrawal.”
“I have a glyph of my wolf on my back.”
He pulled his shirt up and waited, standing patiently as she circled him. A wolf stared at her from Jinx’s back. It was the color of Jinx’s hair, a handsome, ferocious creature. It had Jinx’s eyes, only with an otherworldly light shining through them.
This was more than a tattoo. This looked . . . alive.
She thought back to the large pattern of bruising she’d seen on her body yesterday and tried to picture a similar creature on her skin.
“It will have your hair color. Sister Wolf will be as pretty as you are,” Jinx told her without turning around. He was talking low, as if speaking to some wild animal he was trying to tame.
Except she got the feeling that Jinx would never try to tame anything about her. “In the hospital—I had dreams about the wolves. I told the doctor that when I was a little girl, I used to dream about turning into a wolf and running away. She told me that was my unconscious ego—that I was too little to protect myself, so in my dreams I turned myself into something that no one could hurt.”
“Sometimes, a wolf is just a wolf,” Jinx told her.
She reached out and touched the glyph. It seemed to move under her fingers, like the way heat off a sidewalk steamed and made everything look hazy and fluid. “I’m not dreaming.”
“No.” This time, he did turn to face her. “There’s a lot more for you to know.”
“I’m not ready to hear it.” She moved forward, touched his chest, pulled him close to her by the belt loops on his jeans. She was all revved up. Needy. And Jinx’s erection pressing her belly told her he had the same needs.
At that moment, she realized how badly her body ached with need. She reached out to touch Jinx, palms flat against his chest for a long moment before she surprised herself by viciously ripping off his shirt.
“Holy Odin,” Jinx murmured. “Gillian . . .”
“You can’t stop me.”
“I don’t want to.”
She cocked her head, not quite believing that. She sensed apprehension, but not about sex. “What is it?”
He moved away from her, sat heavily on the double lounger. “If you knew what I’ve done. When you know . . . you’ll be ashamed to be with me. When you know what I can do—”
“You got me out of jail. You saved me. That’s all I need to know.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
“For tonight, it will be.” They were the last words she spoke before pushing him on his back and straddling him. He looked surprised, especially when she took his wrists and raised them above his head. “I feel like I need to tie you. Bind you.”
When her hand moved to curl around his throat, something changed in his eyes.
“No binding,” was all he said.
“Not this time,” she agreed and his face flushed. She noted he left his hands above his head though, and she liked that. Instead of stripping herself under the cool night air, she first moved so she could unzip his jeans. She got them all the way off so he was totally naked under her.
She’d had some experience with boys, but never with a man. Not like this. She let his long, thick cock rub against her wet sex. Took her shirt off, played with her nipples, never taking her eyes from his face.
“I want to touch you,” he told her, his voice a growl. She leaned forward, teasing him with her breasts near his face. He reached up and caught a nipple in his mouth, suckled as she groaned in pleasure at the contact. His cock seemed to swell under her and all she knew was that she needed him inside of her. Foreplay didn’t matter— she didn’t have the time, the patience for foreplay.
She wondered if this was what it was like to be a guy and decided she liked it. Jinx didn’t mind it at all—he was thrusting into her with abandon and her body was taking it and wanting more.
When he came inside of her, he let out what sounded like a cross between a growl and a howl. The sound actually made her come again, her climax milking him to completion.
No condoms necessary. No diseases.
When she looked down, she saw that his eyes—
He couldn’t help the partial shift any more than he could’ve stopped his climax. Nor did he want to. She knew and now, he just had to wear her out in a way she’d never been before. He knew how to please a wolf warrior female and he would prove it.
She tried to push back as her eyes never left his, but he refused to let her. Put his hands on her biceps and pulled her back toward him. His cock was still encased in her sex and he was hard.
She hadn’t had nearly enough orgasms.
“Don’t be scared,” he told her.
“I’m not.”
“You’re lying. You can’t do that when I’m still inside of you.” He slid his grip to her hips to make sure it stayed that way.
“I’m scared.”
“You’re free, Gillian, in a way you never thought you could be. Everything you’ve been feeling, everything you thought wasn’t normal was normal for you. For a Dire wolf. That’s why I pulled you out of the hospital; and if I’d known you were in there before this, I never would’ve let you linger there.”
