Fur Factor (13 page)

“You’re not being funny, just human.” He grinned. “Sorry, but I forgot about that little quirk of yours.”

“Quirk?”

He ignored her yelp and freed her hand so he could pull aside her shirt collar and examine the reddened bruise where he’d bitten her. She’d seen it when she changed and had wiped away the faint traces of blood that had dried there. All in all, it looked worse than it actually was.

“Quirk,” he repeated, tracing the faint marks left by his teeth. “It’s easy for me to forget you’re human when you smell so damned good, but then you get all embarrassed about something perfectly natural, like sex, and it all comes back to me.

You people are so weird about that.”

“Weird!?”

He leaned forward to lave the bruise with his tongue and made her almost swallow hers. “Yeah. See, Lupines aren’t embarrassed by sex. It’s natural and healthy, not to mention a hell of a lot of fun. We’ve all seen mates fucking since the time we were pups, and we don’t really see any reason to bother with the kind of inhibitions you humans like to wrap yourselves in.”

“I am not wrapped in inhibitions,” Missy protested, struggling for dignity while her bare toes curled and her belly launched its newly familiar tumbling routine. “I’m not ashamed of sex, but that doesn’t mean I want strangers to watch me having it.” Graham’s hand slid under the loose waistband of her jeans and cupped her warm mound. His fingertip briefly tickled her dark curls before sliding between her lips and finding the moisture hidden there. “Now, now. Tell the truth, Melissa,” he sing-songed as he closed his teeth around her earlobe and tugged delicately. “Having Logan watch us turned you on.”

“It did not.” She wrapped her fingers around his wrist and pulled hard, but his hand stayed buried between her legs, and he slid one finger deeper to press against her opening.

“Liar. I was right there. Right
here
.” His finger penetrated, sliding deep, the rough, callused surface abrading her already tender interior walls. “I felt you shudder around my cock. It didn’t feel like disgust to me.”

She bit back a moan, her nails digging into the leather upholstery. “I-i-it was surprise.”

Christine Warren

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“No,
this
is what surprise feels like.” His finger withdrew in a reluctant glide and suddenly thrust back, three fingers this time that stretched and filled her. Her head fell back on a moan even as her muscles clamped around him. “I recognize surprise. I also recognize pleasure.” One nail lightly scraped inside her, and she gasped. “And want.” His fingers worked forward and backward in a relentless sawing motion that brought tears to her eyes and set her pussy on fire for him. “And need.”

“Graham!”

His fingers thrust hard, his thumb pressed against her clit, and he screwed his hand against her so his little finger rubbed lightly against her perineum. She shuddered.

He bent over her until she felt his breath against the mark he’d made on her shoulder, and his voice sounded in her ear like the voice of temptation itself. “You weren’t hot and wet because you were embarrassed, Melissa. You didn’t press back against me in disgust. Your pussy didn’t cream around me out of anger. Having Logan standing there watching us made you hot.”

She whimpered a protest, even as her hips lifted toward him, pressing against his clever fingers in a blatant demand for more.

“Admit it, Melissa.” His voice was a growl and a purr, and it caressed her hot skin with puffs of humid air. He screwed his fingers deeper, ruthlessly driving her higher and closer to the precipice. “You liked it when he watched us. You saw how hard it made him, how much he liked watching you. How he loved seeing you pinned to the floor while I fucked you from behind like the big, bad wolf.” His hand closed around her thigh in a grip just short of bruising and shifted it to the side, spreading her wide and giving him more room to play with her dripping pussy.

His thumb pressed harder, moved in tighter circles around her engorged clit and sent clenching bursts of pleasure straight to her womb.

“No,” she muttered, shaking her head. Beneath the frantic haze of her arousal, she knew he was right. She
had
been aroused when Graham fucked her in front of Logan.

She’d have been aroused if he’d fucked her in front of the Pope, but her conscience didn’t like having to admit it.

“Yes.” He shifted his thumb to pinch her clit against her pubic bone, and she shuddered and squirmed to get away. He didn’t let her move an inch, unless it was an inch closer to him. “You loved it. And you loved it even more when I told him I wasn’t sharing.”

The tension inside her built to the breaking point, to the point where she was ready to shove her
own
hand down her jeans just to finish herself off. He caught her wrists in his free hand and held them captive as if he sensed her thoughts. She moaned and pressed herself harder onto his thrusting fingers.

“I’ll never share,” he growled. “No one else will ever touch you the way I’m touching you. I’ll kill anyone who tries.”

She heard the violence in his tone, but he kept her too hot to care.

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“And the reason for that, Melissa Jane,” he continued turning his head so that his lips brushed hers and his luminescent eyes burned as they stared at her heavy-lidded brown ones, “is because—“ He punctuated his words with a hard dig of his fingers and a firm press against her clit.

“You.”

Thrust.

“Are.”

Twist.

“My.”

Press.

“Mate!”

He shoved his three fingers deeply inside, and held them there while her orgasm consumed her. She broke apart, raining down on him in tiny little fragments, each of which pulsed with the heavy rush of blood in her spasming pussy. She sobbed and curled her hands into fists and moaned her pleasure into his mouth when he caught hers for a hungry, possessive kiss.

She tore her lips from his after a few seconds, desperate to catch her breath. His shoulder offered her a hiding place and a refuge while she tried to put her scattered wits back together, and he held her there tenderly. He released her wrists, and she curled her trembling arms around his neck, feeling his finger slip from between her legs, ruffle affectionately through her curls and then slide around her waist to cuddle her close. He petted her like a kitten, and she found it soothing. At least, until her brain kicked back into gear.

“I’m your
what
?”

Her head spun around so fast that she knocked him in the nose with her forehead, and Graham winced.

“My—ow!—mate. Hey! Hold still before you cause any permanent damage.” He pinned her arms to her sides and scowled down at her. “Like I was saying—“

“I don’t want you to say anything else, since you aren’t making the slightest bit of sense. What I want—”

It was his turn to interrupt, so he shook her gently. “What do you think I’m trying to do? But you need to shut up long enough for me to get a word in edgewise, okay?” Her teeth clicked shut, and he glared at her for another minute before he seemed satisfied that she intended to behave. “If you’d been listening when Logan and I were talking—“

“You were having sex with me!” Her disbelief mixed with embarrassment and exploded into something that looked a lot like anger. “How was I supposed to listen to anyone—?“

Graham slapped his hand over her mouth and gave her a reprimanding look. “If you’d been listening,” he continued, arching the cup of his hand to avoid her sharp Christine Warren

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teeth, “you would have heard what was going on, and all of this would make a lot more sense.”

Ha! She’d believe
that
when she heard it. She crossed her arms over her chest and arched an eyebrow over his fingers.

“Logan has been keeping me up to date on some trouble a lesser member of the pack is causing. Unfortunately, the upstart gamma in question is my cousin, Curtis.” Missy subsided from fulminating into listening. She was just constitutionally unable to not give anyone the benefit of the doubt. She inclined her head for him to go on.

“It turns out that Curtis thinks he’d make a better alpha than I do.” She snorted, and Graham grinned.

“Thanks. That’s what I think, too. Anyway, alphas aren’t like elected presidents or anything. Our packs operate a lot like wolf packs. Alphas earn their position by being the strongest, and if another Lupine wants to be alpha, he or she has to prove their worth by beating the current alpha in a fight. And no, there’s no way my cousin could beat me.”

She rolled her eyes at his arrogance, but inside she admitted she couldn’t really picture
anyone
beating Graham in a fight, fair or foul.

“But like the spineless little coward he is,” Graham continued, “Curtis has come up with another way that he thinks he can use to have me ousted. There’s an old Lupine tradition that says only Lupines with mates can be alphas of their pack. My cousin thinks he can force me to step down because I had never chosen a mate. Until now.” His eyes, deep and green and glowing locked onto her and made Missy’s stomach clench. They made some lower things clench, too.

“Now,” Graham said, leaning toward her until his forehead rested against hers and she could feel his breath tickling her face where it wasn’t covered by his hand, “the rules no longer apply. Because now, I
have
a mate. I have you.” She had to let the rumble of his voice settle before her muscles could relax and his meaning could penetrate. And that’s when she bit him. Hard.

“Shit!” Graham jerked his hand from her mouth and shook it, then examined the delicate teeth marks she’d left in the fleshy part of his palm. “What the hell was that for, you little savage?”

Missy pushed herself off his lap, planted her hands on her hips and glared at him. With him still on the sofa and her standing on the ground, she was almost taller than him. No more craning her neck while she chewed him out.

“Don’t call me a savage, you barbarian!” she countered. “I’m not the one who figuratively just whacked someone over the head with a mastodon bone and dragged her by her hair all the way to his cave. What do you mean you ‘have’ me? Did I miss the part where I get to have a say in whose ‘mate’ I am?” Christine Warren

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Graham rubbed the marks in his hand with the opposite thumb and frowned.

“I’m Lupine, not Libertarian. You don’t get sole dominion over your life when you mate with a werewolf.”

“And that is just the point. I did
not
mate with a werewolf. I don’t remember doing anything of the sort.”

His eyes narrowed. “If you want me to ruin another set of clothes, I could refresh your memory.”

“Don’t be an ass,” she dismissed. “That was sex. Your definition of mate seems to include a lot more than that, buster. You aren’t talking about the verb anymore.

You’re getting all noun-y here.”

Missy watched while his mouth tightened and he crossed his arms over his broad chest. “And what if I am?”

“Then we need to talk about it,” she said. “You can’t just
announce
that I’m your mate. That’s like just
announcing
that we’re married. It doesn’t work like that. You have to ask first.”

Graham snorted. “Maybe humans ask, but like I said, I’m not human.” She glared at him, drawing herself up to her full height, which wasn’t much, but which made her feel better. “Yeah, well, I am, so you can’t just treat me like some cocker spaniel. I don’t take orders from men who don’t ask my opinion about the important things.”

“It doesn’t matter what your opinion is. It doesn’t even matter what my opinion is,” he growled. “We’re mates. It’s a fact. There’s no asking, no negotiating, no backing out. It’s a done deal, and you’d damned well better get used to it, or I can’t be responsible for what happens tonight.”

She opened her mouth for another tirade, but his words stopped her. She eyed him suspiciously. “Why? What happens tonight?”

“I was trying to explain that before you decided to strike the latest blow for feminism.”

She ignored the tense, snappish tone of his growl and took a step back until she could perch on the edge of the coffee table. “Fine. Finish explaining, then. But it doesn’t change the fact that I am
not
your mate.” He snarled at her, the corner of his mouth kicking up to reveal his even, white teeth and the extent of his foul mood. “You’d damned well better hope you are my mate, otherwise you won’t like what happens to you tonight. We’re going to a matehunt, sweetheart, and if you don’t let everyone know you’re already taken, you’re going to get
a lot
closer acquainted to
a lot
more werewolves than just me.” His threat made her eyes widen and her muscles stiffen. “What are you talking about? What’s a matehunt?”

“A matehunt is what Logan came to tell me about. It’s what Cousin Curtis is pulling next,” Graham explained, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees Christine Warren

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until he got so close she could feel the heat radiating off of him like a pool of lava. She swallowed hard, then did it again when he grinned at the show of nerves. Only his grin didn’t look amused. It looked predatory.

“A matehunt is a traditional way for my kind to form breeding pairs,” he explained.

His voice was low and rumbling and more than a bit threatening. “It’s where all the unmated members of the pack gather in the nearest wooded area, Central Park in our case, and the females get a thirty second head start.”

“F-for what?” she stammered. His eyes burned into her and made her shiver. She shivered harder when he chuckled evilly.

“For making the hunt more exciting,” he murmured smoothly. “Because after thirty seconds, the males shift into our wereforms. Then we’re turned loose, and we go hunting.”

Her eyes opened even wider. Her jaw dropped to her chin, and her breath stopped dead in her throat.

“And do you know what we do when we catch a female, Melissa Jane?” He purred it. Not the way a kitten purrs when it gets its belly rubbed, but the way a lion purrs when it’s ripping through the tender belly of its prey.