Moonburn (21 page)

Impatient, I flipped back to a previous scene, burrowing under the covers as the hero dragged the heroine into a bedroom with a hidden camera. Slipping my hand under the waistband of my sweatpants, I tried to relieve some of my tension, with no success. I didn’t want to be touching myself, I wanted to be touched. I didn’t want the gentle knowledge of my own fingers, I wanted to surrender myself to somebody else’s hands.

Maybe if I just slipped off the sweatpants. Perspiring with the effort, I managed to get myself even more wound up, but release remained tantalizingly out of reach.

Closing my eyes, I found the right rhythm and was just closing my eyes when someone pounded on the front door. My first thought was that it was Red, and my heart began pounding in excitement and trepidation. And then, as I hastily pulled my sweatpants right side out and shoved my legs back inside, I realized that Red would have had a key.

“Who is it?” The reply was muffled by the wind, but my hearing was still more acute than usual, so I knew the answer.

It was Hunter. My almost ex-husband.

I pressed my hand against the wood of the door, torn with indecision. I hadn’t been alone with Hunter in over a year, and part of me wanted to speak to him again. We had dated in college, drifted apart, become friends and roommates and finally married, and nothing in our long, amicable history had prepared me for becoming adversaries. Sometimes, in my fantasies, I asked Hunter how we had come to this. In some versions, I imagined that we managed one last transformation and became friends again.

But the reality was that there was no explaining away
Hunter’s betrayal, and no possible reconciliation. With Magda by his side, Hunter had broken into my mother’s home and hurt her. If I hadn’t prevented them from taking it further, I don’t believe they would have stopped themselves. Hunter might blame his behavior on the disease—it wasn’t me, honey, it was the beast talking—but I knew that he’d never liked my mother. Maybe you never really knew a man until you’d met his wolf.

From the other side of the door, I heard Hunter’s voice calling my name again. “Abra, I know you can hear me.”

“What do you want?”

There was no reply, and against all my better judgment, I opened the door a crack. “Hunter? What is it? Why did you come here?” Then I saw why he wasn’t responding.

His sharply handsome features bestial with the nearness of the change, Hunter gazed up at me with pain-dulled eyes. He was slumped awkwardly on the ground as white flakes of snow settled on his dark head. Despite the cold, I could smell blood, thick and fresh, the blood of something wounded but not yet dead.

Crap. Just what I needed on the night my hormones went into overdrive: my lying, cheating, seductive bastard of an almost ex-husband. “So,” Hunter said, “are you going to let me in, or watch me bleed to death out here?”

Red always says that when someone offers you two unpleasant choices, select a third. But the wind was whipping up the snow as it fell, obscuring the line of trees just twenty feet away, and I couldn’t come up with any other options. Not bothering to hide my irritation, I dragged my former husband over the threshold.

“Abra.” Hunter’s voice was rough with pain, but he gave me a weak smile.

“What were you doing out there?” I hadn’t been able to haul him into a chair, so he was lying on the braided rug by the fireplace, shivering with cold and, I suspected, shock. He’d stopped making snarky comments, I noticed as I laid a blanket over the lower half of his body. Christ, trust Hunter to wear Italian leather in a blizzard. “No wonder you’re freezing. Don’t tell me. You decided to go out for an after-dinner stroll.”

“Attacked.” He could hardly get the word out through his chattering teeth.

“Where are you injured?”

“R … right arm. I th-think … it’s bad.”

It had been a long time since I’d tended Hunter, I thought as I took out a heavy scissors and began cutting through the leather of his coat. He didn’t say anything; he just closed his eyes, as if keeping them open were too much effort. His skin was bone white. I snapped into medical mode, trying not to think about what kind of injury lay under his sleeve.

At one time, caring for Hunter had almost been a habit. In college, he’d come down with mono, and refused to stay in the infirmary for reasons he wouldn’t discuss. His mother was dead, he said, and there was no
one else at home to take care of him. Another time, years later, he came back from a trip to Africa with a combination of malaria and parasites that had nearly killed him.

I had loved him then, with a fierceness that made me queasy when he suffered. And there was my triumph in his recovery, when he was too weak to do anything but look up at me with love and devotion.

The problems started when he got better, and hardly looked at me at all.

Struggling with the scissors, I managed to cut partway through the jacket before having to take a break. Thanks to the sheriff’s wormwood drink, I looked and felt human, but there was a fine tremor in my hands, and I didn’t have complete fine motor control. When I started cutting again, Hunter winced. “I’m sorry if I’m hurting you.”

“Liar.” His dark eyes met mine, and despite the pain and tension, or maybe because of it, we both burst out laughing. It was the first time in over a year that we had been in accord, and it brought back memories. But the moment passed, and Hunter closed his eyes again, his chest rising and falling with his rapid, shallow breaths.

“All right. Let’s get your jacket off you before you bleed out.” I gritted my teeth and sawed through the leather with as much strength as I could muster. Hunter was silent, but he slumped when I finally split the sleeve in two and could pull the sides of the jacket away from his arm. I tried to be as careful as I could not to touch the wound while cutting through his shirt, so it was a few minutes before I could really see the whole arm. Putting down the scissors, I peeled the jacket and shirt away from Hunter’s arm.

“How bad is it, Abs?”

“Well, you’re not going to bleed to death right away,
but it’s not pretty.” The blood flow had slowed, which was good, but there were jagged teeth marks on his forearm, two of them deep enough to reveal the white gleam of bone underneath. Defensive wounds, I thought, the kind you get when you bring your arm up to protect your face. Whatever had tangled with him had also crushed the lower part of his arm, and I could see the tip of the ulna protruding from his skin. Without an X-ray, I couldn’t tell if the break had been a clean one or not, but I suspected there was more than one fracture.

Hunter struggled to lift himself up onto his good elbow. “Is it broken?”

“Yes,” I said simply, leaving out that the break was complex, compound, and probably comminuted. “Now, lie back down while I figure out what to do next.” The bleeding wasn’t too bad, but there wasn’t much I could do besides icing and splinting the limb, and I was concerned that Hunter might need an operation to align the bones properly. “What happened? Was it manitou?”

Hunter looked puzzled. “Bear man,” I clarified. “Or I guess it could be some other kind of combination. It seems we’ve got new shoppers at our local supernatural clearinghouse.”

Hunter grunted as I irrigated the wound with saline. “Bear. He was on our property.”

“So he just attacked you with no warning?”

“Arggh—Jesus, woman.” Hunter grimaced as I finished cleaning his arm. “Talk about no warning.”

“Sorry, I’m not used to patients who can talk.”

Hunter smiled at the joke, then winced as I cracked a cold pack and pressed it against his arm, and I felt a rush of my old affection for him.

“So Bruin didn’t talk to you at all?”

“Bruin?”

“That’s what he told me to call him. I’ve run into him, too,” I said, but instead of replying, Hunter just lay there on the floor, his eyes closed. “Hey,” I said, touching his face. “You still with me?”

“Hurts to breathe,” Hunter said, and I cursed as I realized I hadn’t really checked him over properly.

“Shit, you probably have a broken rib … Come on, Hunter, stay with me.” I didn’t say it out loud, but I was also wondering if my former husband hadn’t sustained some internal injuries. His face was going gray now, and the minor blood loss from his arm didn’t justify that. Shit. I didn’t have the facilities to treat Hunter for anything serious here, and with a blizzard outside, calling an ambulance to take him to Poughkeepsie might take too long.

There was only one good option left.

“We’re going to have to get you to change,” I said, sitting back on my heels. The shift took place on a cellular level, and accelerated healing.

“Too tired.”

“I know you are, Hunter, but if you don’t change, there’s a chance your injuries are going to kill you.” Throwing the blanket aside, I pulled off his snow boots and socks, then hesitated, my hands on the snap of his jeans. “Hunter?”

He had passed out. Working as quickly as I could, I tugged off his jeans, and there he was, the man I had once loved, naked on the rug. His skin was clammy and there were livid bruises forming along his abdomen, but despite everything, he was still a handsome man, tall and broad, his chest hairier than it had been twelve years ago, in college. “Hunter,” I said, lightly slapping his face. “Wake up! Look at me.”

He opened his eyes. “Abs.” My name was barely a whisper.

“You have to change, Hunter. I think you might have
internal injuries, and I can’t do anything about that here.”

Hunter lifted his good hand toward my face, then let it drop. “Sorry to disappoint,” he said, then groaned.

“What is it? Is it your chest? Is the pain getting worse? Hunter!” But he had passed out again.
Shit
. And then I remembered something so basic, it seemed impossible I could have forgotten.

You can’t shift without being in an altered state. Yes, the full moon was part of the equation, and so was nudity, but the final ingredient was a release of inhibitions. Usually, the release came right along with the moon and the nudity, but not always. I would have thought pain was a disinhibitor, too, but either Hunter was in too much pain, not enough, or he was holding on to his control.

Looking down at Hunter’s inert form, I racked my brains for a solution. Extreme arousal, in any form, would do it. Excitement, anger—lust. Since it didn’t seem smart to pick a fight with an invalid, that only left one choice. Pulling off my own clothing, I carefully aligned my body with his. I didn’t feel aroused; I felt like I was trying to seduce an unconscious man. I could have tried to do this with clothes on, but sometimes one lycanthrope’s change can trigger another’s. I wasn’t sure if the wormwood potion had worn off enough yet, but I figured it made sense to try everything. I put my hand between Hunter’s legs, and gripped him.

Hunter moaned a little, and I felt the first stirrings of his response in my palm. That’s it, I thought, remembering how he liked to be touched. I bit him, lightly, on the earlobe, and Hunter’s eyelids flew open. “Ab,” he panted. “Can’t … hurts.”

“You have to change,” I told him again. “Forget the pain. Just let go, and let yourself change.”

I saw his eyes change as comprehension dawned, and
then he was holding me, kissing me, and for a moment, it was strange, because it had been so long, a year of living with another man, and then it wasn’t strange, because my body remembered.

I felt Hunter’s erection press between my thighs, and to my surprise, I felt the warm rush of my own response. The wormwood was wearing off.

“God,” Hunter moaned, “your smell … didn’t notice before …”

“Yes, Hunter, let go,” I encouraged him, wanting him to change now, not wanting to go any farther. This was bad enough, but to allow that final intimacy felt like a real betrayal of Red and our relationship.

“Abs … always … loved you.”

I stroked his thick, dark, sweat-dampened hair back from his brow as Hunter thrust himself against my hand, again and again. With my own heat rising, I felt muzzy, boneless, adrift in my own skin, until Hunter reached around with his good hand, and brought my face in for a kiss. With that tender touch and his familiar scent surrounding me, I felt the ghost of old love brush over my skin.

And then the ghost possessed me, flooding desire through my veins. My naked skin slid against his, my breasts felt so sensitive as they grazed his hard chest that I cried out. You’re going to regret this, said a little voice in my head, but I ignored it. I was on fire, and too much animal to think about what came after.

“My ribs … Abra … help me …”

I moved to straddle Hunter’s hips and then paused. This was not my favorite position, and for a moment, I felt a flash of cold, clear thought: This is a bad idea. But then I could feel Hunter probing at my entrance, and the combination of sheer animal lust and inescapable familiarity overwhelmed me.

And then he pushed inside.

“God,” Hunter moaned. It had been over a year since we had last made love, and with a little shock I realized that my body had adjusted to Red’s larger size. I rocked my hips, and Hunter threw back his head again, gasping in pleasure. But my flesh felt oversensitive, aching, and even though arousal kept me sliding myself against Hunter, release—of this sexual tension, of my too-tight human skin—remained just out of reach.