Reluctant Mates - 21 Paranormal Romance Stories (Werewolf, Vampire, Minotaur and Monster collection) (38 page)

Between my legs, I feel one of them or maybe two, rubbing me with their noses. I roll my head around the wall behind me, and shake myself to be sure I’m not dreaming. I snap open my eyes to an intense, deep, horrifyingly pleasing sensation, Stripe is grinding the flat part on the front of his massive fangs hard against the seam of my shorts, up and down. 

As I roll my head around against the smooth, cool stone behind me, and feel the waves of helpless warmth wash up and over my belly, my mind begins to fixate on the idea that these monsters – or wolves – or whatever they are, must be at least partially human.
They have to be. Otherwise why wouldn’t they have torn me limb from limb by now? It just doesn’t make sense. Normal wolves aren’t gonna scare me half to death and then drag me back to a cave just to...I dunno, play with me.

I let a light gasp spill out of my lips when one warm, rough tongue, then another, slides up my thighs and underneath the cuffs of my shorts. Without even looking at them, scent tells me which wolf is which. Something, but I can’t tell what, is certainly changing inside me. Eyes closed, I can see the whole interior of the cave where I’m being ravished, but it isn’t
vision
, not exactly. It seems like a dream. A bizarre, waking dream.

When I open my eyes, it’s too dark to see much of anything, but then when I clamp them shut again, the whole world fills with light. I can easily perceive every nook and crevice of my surroundings. That’s when the scents all hit me at once.

Mask and Red, both shoved between my legs, moving their tongues up and down my thighs in warm, wonderful strokes, are both almost hot to the touch when I reach out and take handfuls of their thick, full coats. Pacing nervously back and forth, Stripe lets out a soft whimpering sound, as though he’s afraid of something.

“Come back,” I call out to him, “come back and let me touch you. Come back.”

He freezes in place and stares. At exactly the same time, both of the delicious tongues stop moving and pull back. Both Red and his slightly larger compatriot take two steps back and join in the staring.

All three of them draw their lips up into silent snarls and begin to creep closer.

Panic sets in.

“What? Why are you trying to scare me again? What is this?” I plead with them. Water droplets hit a pool somewhere deep in the cave. They move a step closer. I smell rage inside Red for the first time. It smells like an old fire that’s been out for an hour. Ashen, cold, and dry, it fills me with dread. He bares his teeth fully, and clicks together his huge, finger-long fangs.

“You’re scaring me! Stop!” Just like earlier, when the teeth were threatening to clip my neck, I feel hot, wet tears streak down either side of my face. “Please! Please!”

“Don’t let up. We can’t let her get away, not yet. Maybe not ever.” An accented voice says.

Looking around, there’s no one. No humans anyway, just me and the three wolves.

“What? What was that?”

No answer.

No way. No way, nope, not possible. Just not possible
.

“What’s not possible?” It’s a Cajun voice. I’d know it anywhere. I think back to the dream from two nights ago that’s mostly faded from my mind, but somewhere in the back of my head I think I remember something, and then it’s gone.

Off in the distance, I hear the water again. The smell of Red’s anger fades slightly, but his teeth are still bare. He still looks ready to pounce and rip me apart.

“Who said that? Why are you torturing me? Please, please, please stop!” I sob, free and loud. Taking gasps to try and calm myself down does nothing except make my cries come in harder, shorter bursts.

“Look what you’re doing, Remy. There’s no need for this.” The calm, cool drawl again sounds off, and I finally realize what’s happening – the voice is inside me, just like the first one, the giant, silver-grey wolf who is now absent, had done.

“What kind of a fool are you? The first one we’ve seen in, well, ever as far as I know, and you want me to go easy on her?”

“She’s not the first, Remy, you’re just young. Remember.”

“This is just like the dream,” I say absently into the cave.

“A dream, you said? Of what, might I ask?” Stripe looks at me. It must be his voice I hear in my mind. “Was it of us? You’re a rare one indeed, aren’t you?”

“Rare what?”

For the first time, he answers, “rare who, not rare what. You’re a rare creature, Jasmine.”

“How do you know my name?” I start to cry again. I can’t help it, and I can’t stop myself. Tears roll down my cheeks as Stripe moves closer and I feel his breath against my throat. His gaze is soft. Those gold-flecked eyes seem calm. With his second exhale, my tears dry and cool my cheek.

“We’ve known you for a long time. A very long time.” He turned his head as though waiting for a response. “Or I should say we’ve known
about
you.”

With every calm, even-tempered word echoing through my mind, I smelled rage bubbling up inside Red – inside Remy. I remember Stripe saying he’s young. It begins to make sense.

“A – about me? I don’t understand.”

“Good,” he says, “you’ve learned you don’t need to speak out loud. You’re a fast learner. Of course, you’re supposed to be.”

The drip, drip, drip of water echoes again through the cave. Stripe and Mask seem very calm, but I can sense somehow that barely under the surface, they are fighting a terrible battle against their very natures to remain so. I feel the tension inside them both and wonder how long they’re going to be able to keep it inside before something explodes.

“Supposed to be? I don’t-”

“Of course you don’t. You have no idea what I’m talking about. Stop interrupting.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“No, no, I shouldn’t have snapped.” Stripe says, chastising himself.

His scent changes slowly – it becomes tinged with a vaguely cinnamon smell. Guilt? Shame?

“It’s my fault,” he says in my mind. “We’ve been alone for a very long time. Started to think that maybe you weren’t real. Maybe the whole thing was Sebastien’s imagination. That there was no cure for our curse.”

Sebastien, where do I know that name? Why is it so familiar? Did I dream this? Did I dream these creatures?

Suddenly, memories flood through me, crowding out Stripe’s voice. If that’s really what it is, I think, then why can’t I remember the whole thing? My head starts to pound. I curse under my breath.
Not now, not here, get a grip, Jaz
. I let my head slump forward and hold my face with my hands, pinching my temples.

“Look,” a new voice – this one very deep – says. “Look what’s happening to her. Leroux, she’s... I’m not crazy am I? You can you see this?”

“I can.” Stripe says.

Red is Remy, and Stripe is Leroux. And my head feels like it’s about to explode. Why won’t this stop?

My eyes snap open, or at least I think they do. I see the inside of the cave like it’s a new world, like I’ve traveled to some other dimension where gray slate is full of color, full of life. Every single crack and crevice seems alive. Tiny droplets of water are plainly visible to me fifty yards away in a part of the cave that is – or was a moment ago – shrouded in utter darkness. It’s just like before, but now my eyes are wide open.
The color, there’s so, so much color
.

“Look at her eyes,” Leroux says in a slow baritone. “No, Remy, stay back there. Don’t get any closer. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Remy growls. It’s out loud this time. I hear him on the edge of my consciousness, but I’m completely agape, staring around the cave, looking at tiny, clear bugs scamper into and out of cracks in places that I should never be able to see. I watch a roly poly totter on the edge of a rock probably a hundred yards away. His little legs twitch and wiggle, trying to grasp a rock, but he tumbles backwards, rolls in a ball, and has to climb all the way back up.

“Remy! I said stay away! I have no idea what she’s capable of and neither do you!”

I am an alien exploring another world. My entire field of vision sparkles to life, yellow and green flickers around the edges of my sight, and the scent of the three wolves is lost in a sea of other smells. The sound of Leroux’s voice in my head pleading with Remy to stay back, to stay away, is drowned out by a symphony of things I’ve never heard before. I listen to a cricket somewhere rub his legs together then the sound of his tiny hairs zipping apart, and I hear a cave swallow chirp, take a breath, then chirp again.

My senses fade back to something approaching normal as a paw brushes against my leg. Hard, hot and heavy, it pushes against my knee so hard that I yelp out with a start. Teeth snap out, jaws flashing right in front of my eyes. I feel my hair pull hard, and my scalp begins to burn. Remy has a hold of my hair, and he’s dragging me along the floor of the cave. I keep kicking with my feet, scrabbling along the ground on my heels to lessen the pain. He stops momentarily, and so do I. When he jerks again, I shriek, and then shudder.

For some reason, the agony of his tugging my hair trails into a warm pleasure. The next time he yanks, I do not resist, do not try to push with my feet. As he stands over me, pinning my arms to the ground, I feel an ecstasy I’ve never known creep over me. My flesh prickles and my nipples grow hard.

And then I feel his cock against my belly. Just like his tongue, it isn’t what I expect. Warm and hard, something very similar to the cock of a man relaxes against me. I take a breath, hold it, and let it out.

Before I know what’s happening, another of my senses explodes to life. I can taste his musk, his sweat and his monstrously feral lust, in the back of my throat. A moment later, another phantom taste joins his desire.

Mine.

With my shoulders driving so hard against the rocky floor of the cave that I feel tiny pieces of grit pushing deep into my skin, all I can manage to do is bend my elbows and reach for Remy’s fur. It’s hard, thick, and warm under my fingertips, but he doesn’t seem interested in being touched. Or in listening to Leroux’s shouts to leave off, to get away and wait for Sebastien to come back because surely the biggest and oldest of the wolves will better know what to do with me.

He snarls an inch from my face and his red-black fur bristles around his throat.

“She’s mine! Mine! Mine! None of you can have her!”

Remy’s voice is ragged and savage. It sounds like he’s either completely lost to lust, or under some kind of spell that’s taken away his ability to reason. Still, he
is
young, if what the other one says is true, and youth can do all kinds of crazy things to a person.
He kept saying that I’m the first – first what? No one will say, but they all seem fascinated with me. And then there’s the whole vision thing. Oh my God, what is happening to me?

“Logan,” Leroux’s rich, calm voice says, and I realize he’s talking to Mask, “see if you can do anything. You go around this side. I’ll go around the other. We’ve got to get him away from her before he does something he’ll regret – that we’ll all regret.”

“Right, boss. We just gonna give him a bum’s rush?” Answers Logan.

“Unless I think of something better, that seems like the best idea.”

I open my mouth to protest, but all that comes out is a pleasured, dripping moan that seems to run out of my lips and down the front of my neck. Something furry pushes underneath the cuff of my shorts, and I moan again as its tip drags along one side of my sex, against my soft, cotton panties.

Squirming against the tremendous weight on my shoulders, I try to push Remy off. I think I’m more afraid of my own desire for something so inhuman, so strange and powerful, as I am of anything he might do to me. I push, but it’s very obviously not going to do anything. He’s so strong, so heavy, and... Oh my God, that cock is pushing against me. How long have I wanted something like this but been too afraid to ask? How many times have I wanted to grab one of my boyfriends and make him throw me around, pin me to the floor and fuck me until I couldn’t see?

But I never did. Always too scared, or too timid, I just buried my longings and figured there was something wrong with me for wanting all that in the first place.
It sure does make it easier when you don’t have much of a choice
.

I open my eyes, and barely see Logan and Leroux circling. I think to move my head in one direction or the other to get a better view, but something forces me to keep my eyes locked on Remy. His hot, sultry breath sliding easy over my throat and the silent curl of his pulled back mouth excite something very, very deep in my core. I can’t tell exactly what it is, but a heat burns there, so far inside me that it seems like just another psychic suggestion.

He lowers his head and again I feel that tongue glide along the line of my throat and then the cold sharpness of his teeth when he drags them against my skin. The way he does it – the sensual, seductive way he thrills me and terrifies me reminds me that there’s something more to this wolf than his fur and his teeth.

“Ow! Ung! What are you doing?”

Holding me down, digging in deep, savage Remy grabs the stiff fabric of my shirt in his powerful jaws and wrenches at me, just like he had done to drag me around by the hair. He yanks three times, then adjusts his bite and goes again. My shirt begins to split in a line between the buttonholes. He’s torn down to the third. The top of my milky-white breasts, above my bra, prickle a little when he touches first with his nose and then with his tongue.

“Oh!” I gasp. “What are you doing? It feels so...good...” My breathy moan seems to excite the wolf, to encourage him. He repositions himself again to get another mouthful of cloth. The pads of his feet slip slightly down my arms and start to pinch my skin on the floor of the cave. His claws dig into the flesh on the front of my shoulders, and I scream out, “stop! You’re hurting!” but halfway through the words, the stinging melts into a dripping, sweet pleasure.

I find myself wishing that the other two would stop being so damnably sensible and jump on me right alongside their brother, or their friend, or whatever they were to each other. Also my thoughts twisted around to the giant silver wolf that they call Sebastien.
Where is he? I want him, too.