Storm Shades (11 page)

Sofie nods, squeezing his shaft gently. Then, she smiles when she’s rewarded by Ashton’s intake of breath, letting her know that he wants this as much as she does.

“Say it.” He locks eyes with her, enjoying that she’s under his control. Right now he could do anything that he wants to her and not only would she let him, but she would go crazy for it.

“I want your cock,” she says against his mouth, their hot breath mingling together. She has never been into dirty talk but being with Ashton strips all of her inhibitions away. She has no problem telling him exactly what she needs. “I want you to take me.”

Ashton takes a moment, breathing in deep, like he’s trying to calm himself. She takes his head between her hands and lifts it up to look at her. “You’re not going to hurt me.” Her confidence and trust in him is exactly what he needs.

He reaches down between them, testing her slickness with his fingers, but there’s no need, she’s been ready for him since she first set eyes on him. Sofie takes hold of his shaft and guides him towards her wet opening. He’s bigger than anyone she’s been with, and when his cock starts to push through her folds, it’s like he’s filling her up. He goes as slowly as he can, trying to give her body time to adjust around his hardness. She lifts her hips and crosses her legs behind his back, letting him go deeper inside of her. He is breathing hard and a look of surprise crosses his face, as he sheathes himself inside of her. For a moment they lie like that, perfectly still, fitting against each other, inside each other, perfectly. Like one was made with the other already in mind.

Sofie groans as she feels him filling her up. Then, Ashton pulls out and then dives into her again, harder this time, making her gasp in surprise and pleasure. He builds up a rhythm, thrusting into her, hard and fast. She cries out, as his cock stimulates her G-spot. She feels like she’s about to come again, right there and then.

He reaches down between them, rubbing her clit as he pulls out and plunges back into her. His cock slides in and out of her, coated in her wetness. Both of them are glistening with sweat, pumping their hips in time, so turned on they can barely breathe.

Ashton leans down and kisses her lips. His tongue flicking into her mouth and his cock inside of her almost make her insane with excitement. He pulls back and buries himself in her pussy again, hard, grunting as he tries to stop himself from erupting.

However, he doesn’t need to hold back because Sofie’s ready for him. He’s pushing her over the edge. She can feel her orgasm building, as his hard cock owns her slippery cunt. “I’m going to fuck you hard now, fast and hard.” He growls the words against her mouth, and they groan together as she traps his bottom lip between her teeth, biting him gently.

“Fuck me, Ash. Fuck me hard,” she pleas. She locks her hands behind his head so their eyes are locked onto each other’s, as he plows into her, filling her up again and again. She cries out, as he pumps his hips, his cock sliding into her sensitive pussy. The heat that has been building between her thighs moves up, turning the temperature of her whole body up. “I’m coming,” she cries out, closing her eyes as she falls over the edge.

“Look at me. I want to see you come.” Ashton growls at her, a primal, animalistic noise that speaks to her very core.

Her eyes fly open, and she finds herself locked into his gaze. She feels her climax overtake her, and she screams out his name. A split second later, Ashton lets out a sound, like a rumble of thunder, as he explodes inside of her. As they’re both rocked by their orgasms, they keep their eyes on each other. It’s a connection that makes it feel as if they’re both experiencing the other’s pleasure along with their own. It’s the most intense moment Sofie has ever known.

“Jesus, running girl, what are you doing to me?” Ashton looks down at her with a mixture of awe and fear.

“I could say the same for you, birdwatcher.” She smiles lazily up at him, feeling more satisfied that she thought possible.

He’s still inside of her as, tenderly, he strokes her hair away from her face. “This makes you mine, now.” There’s no doubt, no question in his voice, only certainty.

Sofie’s eyes are wide, and her heart is filled with warmth at his words. She reaches up to touch his face. “I have been from the moment I saw you.” Love at first sight, it was the kind of thing that she would have scoffed at and called irrational before. But what she felt for this man, what she’d felt for him from the instant their eyes met, isn’t rational. It’s basic and primal and wonderful.

The alarm clock on her night stand rings, and automatically Sofie reaches over to switch it off. But there’s no clock and no night stand. There isn’t even any bed. For a few moments Sofie is completely disoriented; but, when she hears the deep tones of a familiar voice, where she is and, more importantly, who she’s with comes back to her.

Ashton is talking into his cell in a low voice, like he doesn’t want to be overheard.

“No, G. It’s not a great time.” Ashton slides out from under the blanket he’d draped over them both earlier that night. He pads around the floor silently, and Sofie can’t help but think how perfectly he’s shaped. She feels a stirring between her thighs, as she watches him. But there’s something about the way he moves, the sound of his voice that doesn’t seem right, like he’s saying one thing but meaning another.

“It’s nothing. I’ll be there in 5...I’ll be there I said.” Ashton almost snarls the last words. He hangs up abruptly, his back still to her. He probably hasn’t even realized that she’s woken up.

Sofie tries to lie still and keep her breathing as regular as she can. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t just tell him that she’s awake and see what his reaction is. Perhaps everything that happened with her dad has made her even more suspicious than she thought she was. Perhaps she’s too scared that whatever is between them can’t be real, and she’s looking for reasons to puncture the dream. Whatever the rationale is, she keeps quiet and as still as she can.

She hears Ashton pull his jeans on and senses him hesitating before he walks away from the nest they’ve made on the floor. The door closes quietly behind him, and Sofie scrambles up, only a few paces behind him. But when she gets to the door, Ashton is already at the edge of the clearing, running at speed before disappearing into the trees altogether.
Damn, he’s fast
, she thinks.

She heads out onto the decking at the back of the house and looks out. The moon is high and although it’s not quite full yet, it’s close. In the silver light, she can see that the house is placed in the middle of a clearing, and it seems to be surrounded by woods on all sides. The house is beautiful and peaceful, but there’s something about being out in the middle of nowhere, especially when no one has any idea where she is that makes her uneasy. A noise makes her ears prick up, it sounds like a wolf’s howl. She hurries back inside, closing the door firmly behind her, as she wonders what she’s got herself into.

Regardless of what they’d shared that night, Sofie knew that there’s something he’s holding back, something that he isn’t telling her. She’d had enough of secrets and lies as a kid.
What do I really know about him?
she asks herself. Apart from the few facts that she has at her disposal, where he works and what she witnessed in the woods, there’s not a huge amount else. She wasn’t lying when she said that she wants to know everything about him.
But am I willing to do the same and tell him everything about me?
She had made a point of not sharing her sad little story with many people. She felt like it made her seem weaker, like she needed looking after, and that’s not the kind of girl she wanted to be.

Sofie wanders back to the couch and sits down heavily, trying to push her past out of her mind. It was something that Finn had always said to her, that she can’t hide from her past. No, she would reply, but she can sure run away from it pretty fast.

She rubs her eyes knowing that there’s no way she’s going to be able to get back to sleep, at least not until Ashton reappears from wherever he ran off to in such a hurry. The opposite wall is lined with books, rows and rows of them. If she’d had to guess, she wouldn’t have thought that Ashton was a big reader, turns out that was something else she was wrong about. Not that he comes across as slow or anything like that, quite the opposite, he seems wise beyond his years. But there’s something about the way he moves, like a coiled spring that she can’t imagine him sitting still for long enough to read a book.

Sofie traces her fingers over the spines. A lot of them look to be pretty valuable, not just the run-of-the-mill airport paperbacks. One in particular catches her attention; it looks older than the others, much older. The title has rubbed off of the spine, so she pulls it off of the shelf, but the front cover is blank too. The binding is old leather, cracked in some places, but still strong.

She opens it with interest. On the inside there’s no publisher listed, no details of the year of publication, nothing, like it had just appeared out of thin air. She knew that was impossible, even as a little girl she had always looked for—and usually discovered—how magicians did their tricks. She was the kid at parties that pointed out how obvious it was that there was no such thing as magic. She shakes her head when she thinks about what a pain-in-the-ass the other kids must have thought she was.

She turns the page and almost drops the book in shock when she comes face to face with an illustration. It’s a hand drawn picture of a wolf, but not just any wolf. It was huge, similar in size to the one that she could have sworn she’d seen in the darkness, ripping that man to shreds. But this book wasn’t a scientific journal, it was a fairy tale, a children’s story. She settles herself on the couch, reading quickly, stumbling over some of the more archaic uses of language; but, she is pulled into the story almost instantly nonetheless.

She reads about a young hunter named Lupo, living in the shadow of a mountain.

One night Lupo had a dream. It was a dream in which all of his village, his family, his friends, everyone died hungry and alone in the cold.

He told people of his dream and tried to persuade the Elders to gather more food during the summer to take them through the winter. But he was just a young man, and his advice was dismissed. But sure enough, when winter came, he and his village were starving. There wasn’t enough food to go around, and people were beginning to get sick. Even now that what he had foreseen had come to pass, the other villagers were too afraid of him to listen to what he had to say. Some said that he had brought this misfortune onto them, that he had dreamed this terrible fate for them all.

It was decided that he was the reason for their suffering and so, they believed, if he was no longer with them then all of their problems would be solved. So, they exiled him. They sent him out into the cold night with nothing but a thin fur and his bow and arrow. His mother had cried when he left, but he had not shed one tear. He knew that the Elders were condemning his people to die. He at least was getting the chance to survive.

Lupo walked through the snow for days. Days turned to weeks. He survived on the small animals, rabbits, and birds that he managed to catch. He was a skilled hunter, the best that his village had ever seen, but he hadn’t been able to find what he was looking for, the herd of bison that would be enough to save his people from certain death.

Lupo was becoming weak. The cold and the lack of shelter were starting to take their toll on him, but he kept on moving, sure that he would be able to withstand whatever Mother Nature threw at him. Eventually, he came to a natural spring, water flowed out of the ground there, the only fresh water that still flowed amongst all the ice. Lupo drank from the spring, and it was the sweetest water he had ever tasted. He fell asleep, and when he awoke in the middle of the night, he was no longer alone. From the light of the moon, he saw a white wolf staring at him. Out of habit, Lupo lifted his bow and arrow, but one look at the animal told him that he wouldn’t kill it.

He opened his hand and the wolf padded over to him without hesitation. The wolf stared into Lupo’s eyes, man met beast and, as if the wolf was telling him what to do, Lupo extended his arm to the animal. Without pause, the wolf sank his teeth into Lupo’s forearm, crunching the bone underneath. Lupo cried out in pain and blacked out in shock. The wolf stayed by his side for hours, until the fingers of dawn spread through the sky and Lupo awoke.

When the young hunter opened his eyes, he remembered the pain in his arm. He looked down, but the skin was unbroken. He held his arm out in front of him, there was no wound, no blood, nothing. It was as if he had never been bitten. Had it all been a dream? Before Lupo had time to come to his senses the white wolf had already turned around and disappeared. Lupo stayed by the spring all day, but the wolf did not return. It was only when night started to fall that the wolf returned, and this time he wasn’t alone. There was a pack with him, their fur ranging from light gray to blackest night.

Lupo sprang to his feet, getting ready to fight, although he knew in his heart that he was never going to be able to fight off all of them. But instead of launching at him as he had expected them to, they surrounded him in a circle and waited. When the full moon reached its height in the sky, the white wolf raised its head to the sky and started to howl. He was joined by each wolf in turn around the circle until the noise was almost deafening.

That’s when the change occurred. As the rays of the moon reached Lupo, he fell to the floor, writhing in pain. He felt his body change, as if it were being pulled in many different directions. He screamed and screamed, as his nails grew and his hands and feet became paws. He screamed as the bones in his face crunched, morphing his nose into a snout. He screamed as his joints cracked, throwing him down onto all fours. He screamed until his voice was lost and his scream turned into a howl.

When the transformation was complete, the other wolves bowed down before him. He was the first—half man, half wolf. Lupo could hear their thoughts as clearly as his own. He could feel the emotions of the pack around him. They asked him to run with them, told him it was time to hunt. He ran with them and hunted with them for days, days that turned into weeks, weeks that turned into months. Lupo learned how to shift between man and wolf and back again. He was no longer ruled by the moon.

It was only when the winter had given way to spring and spring to summer and the snow was again on the ground that Lupo had another dream, a dream showing him what was to come. It took him weeks to cover the ground to find the place of his dream, but he was too late. There was no one left. The massacre that he had foreseen had already occurred. The villagers had been attacked by another tribe. They had all perished. Lupo howled at the moon, and his voice was joined by the others of the pack. They mourned for the people that they could not save.

That night, the white wolf came to him again. He told Lupo that he was the one that had sent him the dream. Lupo was the one that they had been searching for. He was the only one that could survive the change. He and his offspring would have a heavy duty to bear. They would live in the world of men, to protect them, but they would also live in the world of the wolf, to protect all that he saw around them.

The white wolf was older than anything else in the land, and he had witnessed how the ways of man had changed. Man no longer lived in harmony with the world around him, but in discord. The white wolf knew that Mother Nature would need a champion, someone to protect her from the greed of man and that man would need protection from himself. Lupo was the first of those champions and he would bring forth many more. He had been given all the powers of the wolf—heightened senses, incomparable strength, speed, and agility to fulfill his fate. He and his children and his children’s children would be the bridge between man and nature. They would return the Earth to the Eden that it had been.

Sofie closes the book and lets her exhaustion overtake her, turning and twisting in a nightmare of men and wolves—a nightmare where rivers of oil turned into rivers of blood.