Dire Desires: A Novel of the Eternal Wolf Clan (9 page)

T
he roof was the
second-best place for this discussion. Jinx would’ve much preferred the woods, but everyone was on high alert looking for Gillian and her five-million-dollar self. So Jez would go out hunting around, making sure the monsters from purgatory weren’t out and about, and Jinx wondered if Rogue would be too.

When Rogue saw the monsters for himself, Jinx knew he’d hear from his twin. For now, he led Gillian to the rooftop terrace where he’d laid out Chinese food and beers and for the better part of an hour, they ate and laughed a little. She’d spent the day parked in front of the TV, getting angry with each sentence her parents spoke, but she hadn’t mentioned it yet.

Instead, she curled her feet up on the chair, her bare feet under her, beer balanced on her thigh. “That was great. Thanks.”

“Welcome.” He drained his own beer. It would take him at least a case to feel any kind of drunk, and tonight, he’d welcome that. He thought about Rifter—he could’ve gone to his king, asked what it was like to have to tell a woman who thought she was human that she wasn’t. Could’ve asked Gwen’s advice too. Hell, Gwen might be the best person to give this talk.

But Jinx’s wolf didn’t want anyone near Gillian. Brother was . . . attached. And ready to attack anyone who got in his way.

“How’re you feeling?” he asked finally. “I know you’re restless.”

Indeed, when she wasn’t staring at the TV screen, she’d been pacing so much he was sure she wore the floor down.

“I’ve got a lot of energy lately,” she admitted. “I wish I could go for a walk.”

He nodded in understanding, but they both knew it wasn’t possible, not with the amount of scrutiny her picture was receiving at this moment. Even if she cut her hair and dyed it, covered her eyes with contacts, he had an odd feeling she’d still be discovered.

And she’d told him she didn’t relish the thought of walking around in a disguise for the rest of her life. If it came down to it, however, she would do it before she ever went back to her parents or the hospital.

“I have a few things I need to know about you,” he started, breaking her from her reverie. She stared at him with something akin to disappointment in her eyes, but not surprise. She had to have known he’d need to know about all of it sooner or later. And maybe because he’d saved her or maybe for other reasons he didn’t yet know, she said, “You want to know more about why I was in that institution to start with.”

“Only if you want to talk about it.”

She shrugged, and he knew she’d rather talk about anything else. But learning her symptoms was an important lead-in. “I was always a little hard for them to handle. My mother always looked at me like I was some alien who’d landed on her doorstep. When I started to refuse to wear the fussy dresses, she shipped me off to a boarding school. I didn’t mind that so much. But when I came back for summer vacations, that was the worst. The year I turned seventeen, I was doing the same things as others in my so-called social circle—running around, drinking, smoking. Making out with boys . . . did you just growl?”

He touched his canines with his tongue, keeping his mouth closed because they’d extended.
Down Brother . . . she’s talking past.

But Brother didn’t differentiate. “Just clearing my throat. So yeah, basically what teenage girls do.”

“Right,” she said, casting a doubting look at him. “I mean, I had my parents’ money behind me, so my idea of partying was probably more extensive. I felt indelible, like I couldn’t get hurt or in trouble. My behavior was wild—and it was escalating. Staying out all night, taking lots of dangerous risks. I had the means to get out of any kind of trouble.”

But whatever happened made her face grow dark with the memory. He wanted to wipe that pain away, stop her from thinking about it, but this was important shit. He had to know it.

She sighed, grabbed a second beer but held it instead of drinking it. “I’d had a lot of shots that night. I was spinning. I was high as well, but the weird thing was, I don’t think the drugs were actually making me feel the way I did.”

“How’s that?”

“Indestructible. I got behind the wheel of a car and I ended up crashing into a telephone pole. I was so lucky because I could’ve killed someone. As it was, I broke my legs and spent time in the hospital recovering. My parents told me they were placing me under psychiatric care because of the drugs and drinking, and I agreed. I felt so guilty. I was dangerous. They’d been warning me to get myself under control for months and months and I just kept ignoring them. I thought the hospital could fix me, but things got worse. I knew that I’d never be released. No one could figure out what was wrong with me. I didn’t respond to meds. I couldn’t just behave, no matter how much I wanted to. After a while, they placed me in a long-term facility and I figured I’d be there forever.”

“Plenty of kids are wild, Gilly, but not all of them get sent to psych wards.”

“I was clawing at the walls. One night, I woke up howling. I jumped through windows. I would get bursts of anger and adrenaline and throw tables at the staff. I was uncontrollable at times,” she told him in a burst of angry confession. “None of that’s normal.”

It was. His heart broke for just how damned normal it was, but she continued. “I feel like I’m two people. Gillian—the girl who just wants to find a boyfriend and have fun and this other person who likes to run naked and lately, it’s like they’re blending and it’s getting harder and harder to separate them and I hear this voice—it tells me things. It calms me. The doctors said I’m the right age for schizophrenia to manifest.”

He put his hand over hers, his palm searing heat onto her skin. “I can promise you that you’re not schizophrenic. That you don’t have any mental illness.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you can’t. Genetically. Physically. You do not get mentally ill or get any other diseases.”

Maybe Gillian had been right the first time—Jinx did belong back in that mental ward. She could go back with him and they could grow old together there. Because that was all she wanted—to be together with him.

At least he appeared to want the same thing.

“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?

He’s not,
the rustling said.

“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.

I can’t wait to see his wolf,
the rustling said.

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.

Because you’re a wolf.

When she looked down, she saw that his eyes—
his eyes
had changed. They looked like the wolf’s eyes on his back and for really the first time, she believed.

•   •   •

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.”

She believed him, because she’d stopped fighting his grip. There were tears in her eyes. “Those years—they were wasted.”

“We’ll make up for them.”

“You’re not going to leave me?”

“Why would you think that?” he asked, a tug in his gut when he thought about how bad for her he actually was.

“Because in the past, everyone has,” she told him and he sat up and kissed her so fiercely, a promise, a pledge and everything else in between. Her tears wet both their cheeks as she kissed him back. They remained like that for a long while, kissing, the air cooling their too-hot skin. She was content, but didn’t remain that way for long.