Not The Leader Of The Pack (15 page)

Neil’s hands came up to grip her hips, but she fought them off, wild with need for him and unwilling to give up any of her control over the pace at which she would take him. She growled in the back of her throat, sank her claws into his chest, and levered herself all the way up off his cock, all for maximum effect when she dropped down again to take it to the hilt. She repeated this experiment several times, though she had to transfer her grip from his chest to his wrists to hold him in place while she did.

Again and again, she crashed onto him so hard it made her bones shake, and still she wanted more. She increased her force until the sensation of his cock dragging in and out along her inner walls began to make her muscles tighten and flutter. Juli was getting close. She whimpered and slowed, savoring the excruciating bliss of the hot skin of his cock stroking her in a deeper place than she could ever reach on her own.

She must have let down her guard, because the next thing Juli knew, her back crashed into the dirt and Neil took a new position above her, his teeth snapping and his fingers hard and fierce. She giggled and growled as he dragged her legs up over his shoulders, hooking her knees in place and folding her in half beneath him.

“Oh, no way,” Juli said, grabbing for his arms as he thrust into her again. She drummed her heels on his back, but he shook off the blows as if he didn’t feel them. She opened her mouth to make another joke, but a howl replaced her words when he plunged to a new depth and angle, hitting her with pleasure far too intense to endure.

She didn’t know whether to collapse in mindless surrender or redouble her efforts to battle him, so she jerked and writhed beneath him as his cock stabbed into her, letting out a series of yips and whines.

Above Juli, Neil suddenly froze. She nudged him, wondering why he wouldn’t continue. He gave an exaggerated sniff. Juli followed his lead. Beyond the smells of sex, dirt, and sweat, she detected several humans approaching.

“I told you security was going to come to check this out,” Juli hissed.

Neil only grinned. “It’s pretty hard to regret what we’ve been doing.”

“I guess if we make sure we look totally human...” Juli trailed off as she looked down and saw her body just as mixed as Neil’s, as thoroughly werewolf as it had ever been.

He shook his head quickly. “No way can I cool down this fast.” His cock jumped inside her, and she had to stifle another moan. Juli heard shoes crunching through the crisp grass. Neil kissed her cheek. “Turn to wolf and run away. We’ll give them a good story, but that’s okay.”

“What about the Council? The full-moon exemption is over.”

The voices of the approaching security guards sharpened into distinct words. Neil smiled boyishly, eased his body away from Juli’s and became the big, black wolf. Juli sighed. Much as she didn’t like it, Neil was right—it would be far worse to be caught half-shifted than to be seen as a wolf. Besides, she couldn’t let her mate disregard regulations without her, could she? She grinned and followed him into the shift.

He licked her face once, then took off like a flash, racing for the fence at the far end of the outfield.

“A wolf?” The security guards’ voices rose with shocked exclamations.

Juli zipped out after Neil. He knew the stadium well. He led her straight to a narrow break in the wall behind the bleachers that they could just squeeze through.

No one cared for the grass on the other side of the wall. Long fronds draped over their backs and tickled Juli’s nose. Neil’s body blurred again, back to the werewolf he had been in the outfield grass.

The ache inside her where his cock had been prevented Juli from thinking anymore about Lewistown and the Council’s regulations. She just wanted to rejoin the union that had been interrupted, to see if she could still capture the monster orgasm that had been building within her. Again, she matched his form.

She restarted their sexual battle of wills even before her body stabilized. Juli lunged for Neil, her meaty palms striking his chest hard and knocking him to the ground. She climbed atop him and lodged his cock back in the spot that had brought her such pleasure before. This time Neil did not fight her. He only arched up with as much force as she slammed her hips down.

There might be bruises later, but right then Juli didn’t care. She clawed the ground beside him as she took him. Neil adjusted her hands to grip his chest, and she let her claws dig in there too. Her breasts hung over his face as she arched and strained. He covered them with piercing love bites.

Every muscle in Juli’s body worked and tensed, fighting to get every possible bit of him. In her struggle to get the relief she craved, it didn’t matter that her muscles screamed from the exertion and her breath came in rasping pants. She didn’t have a clue what she would have looked like to him or anyone else, and the thought didn’t bother her. All she needed was Neil, her mate.

Juli blinked at the word “mate.” Looking down at his expression of desperate pleasure, her doubts vanished, swept away by the force of their coupling. Her body released into a shattering orgasm ripe with the power of transformation. She sobbed as if she were breaking apart.

The hard length buried deep within her began to pulse. Neil grabbed her ass and pushed up into her with staggering force as he emptied himself.

Juli collapsed onto his chest, a little stunned. She knew she could never go on as she was before returning to Missoula. No longer could she close herself off from Neil, or from her pack, or from all the difficulty and responsibility that waited for her in her hometown. She shivered, thinking of all that she and Neil would have to face together, and of all they might build.

Slowly, he lifted his hands to embrace her, stroking soft circles on her back with his fingers.

“I love you,” Neil said. “More than I ever imagined possible. I don’t give a damn what the Council says about anything. This is right. We’re doing the right thing together, and we’ll lead well together.”

“You don’t need to be on top? You’re okay with sharing the number one position?”

He gave a low growl. “You do just fine on top, as long as you give me my turn.”

“That about sums it up.” Juli sighed. She rested her cheek against his.

“There’s just one problem,” Neil said.

She smiled wryly. “Just one? I thought we had way more than that. Jesse Hoak. The Council. Whatever fines we have to pay.”

“Well, I was thinking about more immediate things. Like the fact that we left our clothes beneath the osprey nest.”

Juli lifted her head and grinned. “That doesn’t have to be a problem. We can always get them later.” She knew she should not, but she shifted to wolf form again, savoring the freedom of transforming as the time was right rather than waiting for the full moon and official permission. Neil shook his head, but he joined her.

Together, they turned their backs on the stadium and ran for her childhood home. Juli planned to take a long detour into the mountains along the way. She hoped they wouldn’t come out before morning.

She increased her speed and sent Neil a challenging look over her shoulder. Her paws gripped the dirt beneath her. She tried not to let him keep up, even while her body shivered with the awareness of what would happen when he caught her.

Chapter Twelve

Neil gripped Juli’s hand as they approached the Motel 6 where Heather Compton and the Lewistown investigators had set up. The motel sat in the middle of a parking lot in the middle of a manicured lawn in the middle of a heavily developed region. After a night running wild under the moon with his new mate, the sight of the place unnerved him.

“Are you sure they’re actually werewolves? Anyone sane would have chosen a place with a little more to offer the wolf.”

“They don’t believe in placating the beast within,” Juli said.

“So we shouldn’t tell them what we’ve been up to.”

She arched an eyebrow, but he noticed her slow grin. He’d bruised her with kisses and bites over the course of the night’s transformations, and she’d probably done the same to him. His body ached in all the right places. He couldn’t move without thinking of her scent, her howls of pleasure, or her passionate claws.

Neil shook himself. He’d start getting hairy if he didn’t stop thinking about Juli’s body. Not for the first time, the level of control the Werewolf Council expected seemed cruel and unusual.

The group had informed Juli they planned to remain in town until they confirmed Neil had obeyed the terms of his punishment. Juli seemed confident that the loopholes she’d found for mated alphas would convince them to reverse their position, but Neil wasn’t so sure. The Werewolf Council possessed a regulation for every occasion, and its officials weren’t shy about pulling them out at the most inopportune moments, in defiance of reason.

He hadn’t told Juli, but he’d determined early that morning that he would go down fighting before he would leave her. He scanned the barren parking lot for likely places to make his stand.

Movement flickered behind a silver SUV. Neil froze, pulling Juli to a stop with him. “Don’t make a sudden movement,” Neil whispered between clenched teeth, “but gray wolves really aren’t common around here unless they’re with us.”

“One of the investigators?” Juli offered her suggestion in the same style.

Neil bit back a dry laugh. “Please. I’m not even sure they shift on the full moon.”

They didn’t have time to continue their speculation. The gray wolf Neil had spotted hurtled out from behind the line of cars, headed directly for Juli. Quicker than thought, Neil shifted and interposed himself, snarling at the intruder.

He didn’t recognize the attacker’s scent. His human mind wanted to guess and analyze, but the wolf knew those ponderings needed to wait until later.

Neil burst into action, his focus narrowed completely onto the rival. He scented Juli behind him, but trusted her to take care of herself. He and the gray wolf began the ancient and familiar dance of death.

Neil circled. He snapped. He displayed his strength and bulk, while sizing up what his opponent offered. The strange wolf outweighed Neil pound for pound, but it also betrayed little weaknesses. A trace of a limp in the right rear leg. A subtle popping sound when the jaw traveled through a certain range of motion. If Neil attacked these weaknesses, he might gain an advantage despite the other’s obvious power and experience.

Behind him, Juli still smelled human. He decided she must be nervous about shifting so close to a bunch of Lewistown investigators. No such qualms interfered with his determination to keep Juli safe from the threat of a fully shifted werewolf.

Neil bared his teeth and feinted toward the attacker’s neck. When the gray wolf danced away, Neil snapped in earnest at that trick back leg. His teeth tore flesh. The gray wolf yipped. The bitter and exhilarating taste of blood filled Neil’s mouth.

Now Neil made the other come for him. He relied on his speed and maneuverability, making the gray wolf work to reach him, forcing him to continue to stress that weak leg. Neil pushed himself, trying to dart as fast as Juli would. He wanted to tangle the attacker’s legs in each other. By keeping his distance, he could wear his opponent down.

A quick step left, then an abrupt reversal. The gray wolf tried to follow Neil, but lost his footing. His bleeding leg slipped, and Neil leapt for his back before he had a chance to recover. Once there, Neil raked his rival’s sides with his claws and clamped his teeth into the loose skin at the back of the neck.

In legal challenges, Neil avoided kills or even significant damage, but the nature of this attack made him feel differently. This werewolf had attacked his mate illegally and dishonorably. He wanted to shake him to death. His muscles flexed.

“Stop.” The voice didn’t shout, but it invested the single word with such unmistakable authority that both wolves froze. Neil slowly relaxed his jaw and looked up at a frowning Heather Compton, flanked as always by her two subordinates. “What is the meaning of this?”

Now, Juli stepped in front of Neil. “He was defending me from an unlawful attack.”

“He’s supposed to be packing his things.”

“Well, we were on our way to talk to you about that.”

Heather leaned forward daintily and put a fingertip to one of the hickeys on Juli’s neck. She sniffed at the side of Juli’s face. “I see,” she said, her tone carrying a clear note of condescension. She straightened and fixed Juli, Neil, and the gray wolf with her hard, cold gaze. “Is it too much to ask that you come out of your illegal shifts while we work this out?”

Neil extricated himself from his clinch and shifted back to human. Keeping an eye on the other, he retrieved what he could of the clothes he’d been wearing and covered himself to the best of his ability. He made sure to keep his body between the attacker and Juli at all times.

“All the way,” Heather said.

Neil started, thinking he’d already obeyed her request. However, when he looked down at himself, he saw claws still extended from his fingers, and too much hair for an ordinary man. He closed his eyes and tried to relax, but these parts would not cooperate. He still feared for Juli too much, and wanted her too much. “I’m sorry,” Neil said. “That’s the best I can do.”

Juli began to spout a stream of regulations and justifications at Heather. Council law allowed for shifts in self-defense, she argued. She gave the explanation about mated alphas that the two of them had worked out ahead of time. She quoted numbers and legal jargon with a facility that rivaled Heather herself.

The alpha-level investigator pursed her lips and folded her arms across her chest, but she nodded in all the right places. When Juli completed her final citation, Heather cocked her head, her expression still stern. “I think you know you’re not going to avoid paying for the crimes you admit to committing.”

Neil stepped to Juli’s side, meeting Heather’s eyes with a level gaze. “Neil and I are prepared to subject ourselves to all punishments required by law,” Juli said.

At that, Heather’s lips twitched in a bit of a smile. “You must have done well in Lewistown. It’s too bad we didn’t know each other there.”