Healing the Wolf (BBW Paranormal Romance) (Luna Junction) (6 page)

Talon clenched his remaining hand into a
fist.  His tone grew icy.  “I don’t even recall the moment when I found out about Anton.  There’s nothing useful left in me, Sheree, no good.  I know you try.  But it only ever seems to make it worse.  All I feel, most of the time, is mind-numbing rage.”  His eyes narrowed.  “If that doesn’t frighten you, then it should.” 

“No!” I shouted, springing to my feet. 
My carefully purchased lingerie had torn hopelessly in our physical tussle and I ripped the last shreds of it away.  I grabbed his hand, laying it across my naked breasts.  “Don’t hold it in. Show me.”

Talon blinked but his jaw was set.  Whatever had briefly broken through his spell was gone and he was retreating again.  I pushed his hand between my legs, forcing his fingers inside me.  Still he didn’t move.  So I began beating on his chest with all of my strength, pounding his hard muscles, slapping his face. 

“SHOW ME YOU MOTHERFUCKER!”

Talon snarled and leapt from the bed, crashing into me, pushing my body against the wall so roughly my head bo
unced against the wood, causing me to see stars from the impact.  His hand was still between my legs.  He was hard but he wouldn’t take me.  His fingers invaded me so cruelly it hurt.  I opened myself wider, welcoming it.  The pain, the vague humiliation of his rough exploration. 

When he turned me around to face the wall,
his hot breath was on my neck.  His hand entered me again and lifted me up harshly.  I bit my lip. It would take more than that for me to cry out.

“Is this what you wanted?”
he growled. 

I gritted my teeth.  “Yes!” 

Talon pushed me onto the bed and bent me in half.  His fingers were inside me in one place.  And then, with a shock of agony, his mighty male shaft entered me in another.  He bored down and drove into me like an anvil hammering a spike.  I clutched at the thin quilt which covered the bed.  Tears formed in the corners of my eyes as I tried to bear it.  And then, with a sob, I couldn’t. 

“Stop!” I yelled, not at all sure that he would. Or could. 

But he withdrew all at once and collapsed against me with a noise I had never, not in ten years, ever heard from him.  Talon Ivanov, my mate, the fiercest werewolf I had ever met, sobbed with grief and hurt. 

I turned and held his head against me, pillowing his rugged face against my breasts.  He breathed deeply a few times and then, with almost excruciating tenderness, kissed me. 

“Sheree,” he whispered and I touched his lips with my tongue. 

Talon’s arms circled me and we sank onto the bed, our mouths glued together.  We had never kissed so long, or with so much gentleness. The hard currency of passion
had always interfered.  I could feel the ache of his want and I wanted him too but we stayed in that same pose for a long time. 

Gradually, a question in his eyes, he pulled back and spread my legs.  I nodde
d, reaching for him.  It was gentle this time.  So achingly sweet that tears, not of pain but of tender joy, came to my eyes and fell from my cheeks.  Talon moved inside of me slowly, carefully.  With his only thumb he rubbed my tears away. 

“Don’t leave me,” he said softly. 

I shook my head.  “Never.”

“You’re mine,” he said and began to move more urgently. 

I clutched at him willing him to pump faster.  “Yes.” 

“Always.”
Another thrust.

“Yes.” 

Deeper he plunged.  “Say it again.” 

“I’m yours.  I belong to you.”

“Mine,” he said, thrusting deeper.  “Mine.”

I was building slowly this time, a gradual rise to the incomparable ecstasy I had found with my mate thousands of times over.  He waited, pushing deliberately, bending his head and softly kissing my breasts, which still felt bruised from his rough treatment.  The nipples hardened, begging for his attention.  He willingly gave it. 

The shudder began slowly, from somewhere far too deep for me to ever reach myself.  Only Talon’s immense extension could plunge so completely into that secret place and bring me screaming to conclusion.  And, when was certain I had finished, he joined me. 

“Talon,” I whispered, cradling his head as he caught his breath. 

He was startled when I pushed his body away, but I had a reason.  Taking the thin covers from our mating bed, I spread them on the floor in the front room.  The wind still howled against the cabin as if it held the rage of a thousand blood wolves.  Ice crusted around the panes of the small square windows. 

I lay back on the clumsy pallet I had created and pulled him to me.  “Keep me warm,” I said. 

Talon stroked me with his hand, letting his fingers play along the spongy flesh of my stomach, scarred and distended from the years of childbearing.  His thumb found the place where his seed still dripped from me and he carefully touched that battered opening. 

“You are warm,” he said, and bend between my legs, kissing the insides of my thighs.  When his
tongue reached inside of me I gasped but he was insistent, holding me down and exploring that tender place. 

After the fullness of another orgasm, I drifted off to sleep.  My mate’s body covered mine and with all his weight settled on top of me, I drifted off to sleep. 

Chapter 7

The voices didn’t make sense.  I had been in the fog of agony for so many hours it was all I knew. My body was tiring and the tiny creature inside of me fought to be freed. 

I recognized the growling.  It was my mate.  Someone had angered him. 

“I have the right to overrule you here.”

The other voice was female.  I struggled to understand it.  “Don’t you lecture me, boy.  I’ve birthed seven times.” 

I struggled to open my eyes.  Talon towered over his mother, Kate. It was rare that he contradicted the head of the Ivanov family
but with his face a mask of rage and his fists clenched he seemed ready to violently battle her right there at the foot of our bed. 

She
shrugged.  “The child will come eventually.  She’s had three others, after all.” 

My sister, Amy, loomed over me, white faced.  She sponged my forehead.  I didn’t need to be told something was wrong.  Her face was a mask of fear. 

Kate was unmovable.  “That medicine has no place here.”

Talon’s voice was deadly.  “And can you live with being wrong?”

Another spasm of agony rent my body but I scarcely had the strength to even whimper any longer.  As my mate bent over me, I thought there had never been a more terrifying sight than the hideous dread in his face.

The knock was loud and precise.
Talon ran to the door. 

“What did you do?”  Kate shouted
.

He yelled over his shoulder.
“I already called him. And I don’t want to hear another fucking word.” 

I heard murmurings of a strange voice.  I vaguely recognized the doctor, having seen him in passing on the rare occasions we visited the office in Flagstaff.  The one in which the pair of werewolf doctors practiced. 

He was handsome and dark-haired with eyes which were almost intimidatingly sharp.  As he bent to examine me, Anton entered the room and firmly escorted a blustering Kate away. 

“
Sheree,” the doctor said crisply.  “Your child faces the wrong way.  He is too far into the birth canal for me to turn him. And I do not have the tools here to safely remove him. The only way is to push him out.” 

Push him out. 
The words kept ringing in my head.  It seemed impossible.  I had labored so long and was so very tired.  I sank back onto the bed, wanting only to close my eyes again. 

“
Sheree,” the doctor held my chin firmly, “you need to do this now.  Otherwise both you and your baby will die.”

I felt myself being picked up from behind. Talon had lifted me and settled resolutely at my back.  His arms came around from either side, each tightly seiz
ing each of my legs at the thigh and pulling them backwards.  He breathed heavily in my ear. 

“Push,” he ordered. 

I leaned into him, trying to conjure what little strength I had left. 

“PUSH!” 

He tightened his hold on my legs, pulling me wider as another contraction seized me. 

“I can’t,”
I whimpered. 

Talon’s grip tightened.  His voice was low but lethal. “
Sheree Ivanov, you are the mother of wolves.  Now PUSH!”

His hold was solid
as rock as the doctor reached between my legs and with a scream which threatened to dissolve me, I forced the baby outside of my womb. 

The doctor worked intently
and a few seconds later I heard the plaintive cry of a new life. 

“Talon,” I moaned, leaning back into his broad chest. 

“Shhh,” he whispered, rocking me.  “It’s another son.  He’s okay.”

I opened my eyes and saw the tiny baby had already been wrapped neatly.  But I was so exhausted I couldn’t raise my arms to take him.

Amy glanced at Talon with a question in her eyes and then took the warm bundle from the doctor. 

The doctor looked at me kindly and patted my arm before retreating into the front room. 

Talon held me to his chest as I fell into a deep and blissful sleep.  Dimly, before the black hold of oblivion took me for many hours, I felt my mate’s hand gently stroking my hair. 

***

I knew the first wisps of light were peeking over the horizon even before I saw their soft glow.  The storm had finished its fury and retreated in front of the sun.  The floor of the cabin would have been uncomfortably cold were it not for the warm cover of Talon’s body. 

My mate’s arms curled around me protectively as he slept.  As I looked carefully I noted the easy peace in his resting face.  His sleep in recent months had become so fitful he needed a
hearty dose of the bottle to vanquish its demons.  I hoped those terrible nights were over.  My fingertips lightly touched his brow and after a moment small smile played on his lips. 

Ours had never been a storybook romance. 
Perhaps there was no such thing.  Maybe those lives and loves I’d envied were as imperfect as anything I had with my mate.  We were not alike, Talon and I, and most of our days were fraught with trouble and misunderstanding in one form or another. 

But I’d spent a lot of time recently lost in the re
veries of the past.  The bliss and the furies, the weariness and the lust.  There were so many way in which we were bound.  Our connection wasn’t just physical.  Talon was my heart. 

“What are you doing?” He was staring at me.  

“Tracing your heart.” I kissed his chest, at first with light little pecks and then, as I ran my hands down his hard muscles, I kissed him more insistently. 

Talon only watched me as I straddled him.  He was ready, of course.  He was always ready. 

I pumped as furiously as I could, reveling on wave after wave of pleasure as he stayed rigid inside of me.  He fondled my heavy breasts with his one hand.  After he had groaned his way to satisfaction, I carefully took his arm, the one which had nothing at the end, and placed it over my left breast so he could feel how he made my blood pound.  We stared into one another’s eyes and I didn’t believe that in our ten years together we had ever seen one another quite so clearly as we did in that moment. 

He touched my face.  His voice was gruff.
“I never said I loved you.”

“No,” I admitted.  “You never did.
” 

His only hand gripped me at the base of the neck.  His strong right arm which ended in a void, circled me non
etheless and he spoke with intensity.  “I do, Sheree.  Always have.”

I pulled his other arm toward me, stroking his forearm.  I
kissed the place where Talon’s right hand once was.  “I love you too,” I said simply.  But I meant something deeper.  What I mean to say to Talon Ivanov, my mate, was
‘for all your faults and all our fights, for the nights we couldn’t get enough of each other and the days when we could barely stand the sight of the other, you have my heart.’ 

Talon
heard the words I said and the words I didn’t say.  “Sheree,” he whispered.  “I’ll try my damnest.  I can’t swear that I’ll be a perfect mate or even a pale shadow of one, but I’ll stay out of the darkness.  For you, and for the boys.” 

“The darkness.”  I sighed and looked over to the window above the kitchen sink.  The sun was slowly rising over Luna Junction.  “Are they still out there?”  I asked. 

He knew what I meant. The wolves. “Somewhere,” he said, and pulled me back down the floor.  “But not here.  And not today.” 

I giggled like a school girl, teasing him.  “Again?” 

“Again,” he insisted and we rocked together in our familiar dance.  It was as good as it always had been, as it always would be. 

When it was over he raised himself on his elbows and looked at me seriously.  “I don’t know what to give you,” he said, “that can match what you’ve done for me, for us.”

I sat up and placed his hand on my belly, raising
an eyebrow.  “How about if we try for a daughter this time?” 

***