The Alpha's Mate (4 page)

They moved even faster, Max groaning and moaning against her mouth. His hips didn't stop moving, following each stroke of their hands. For a moment all of his muscles tensed, and with a shout he came, gasping and cursing against her mouth. He pulled back, panting and rested his forehead against hers. Their eyes met and he smiled.

He made no move to start the car back up, instead cleaning himself up with the bottom of his shirt. The consummate gentleman, he wiped her hand off with the same garment. "I feel like I'm sixteen again."

He leaned forward and kissed her once more. Kelly met him eagerly, smiling all the while. He pulled at her shirt, she helped him by raising her arms as he pulled it over her head. Then came her bra, with considerable skill he undid the hooks and she shimmied out of it. Her breasts hung free in the cool air of the car, her nipples still puckered from pleasure.

He pulled back from the kiss. His eyes roamed over her topless form. That yellowy glint back in them. Slowly, his head dipped to her chest and he took a hardened peak into his mouth. Kelly gasped from the pleasure of it, falling back into her seat. Max came with her, his free hand working at the waistband of her jeans.

His finger brushed over the hardened nub at the juncture of her thighs and she nearly jumped off the seat. She was so wet for him already.

He pulled back and met her eyes. "I am going to eat you up." But he only used his hand, first sticking one finger inside her slick folds and using his thumb to keep that excruciatingly pleasurable contact on her clit.

She moaned and he took his time, playing with her, listening to each little sound, gasps, moans, groans, curses. He smiled when she hissed out a studied chain of blasphemy and captured her lips with his own.

A second finger joined the first, and then a third. But when she reached for his cock, wanting to take this to the next level he stopped her. "Just hands for now." She would be satisfied, if only for the promise of more in time.

He pulled his fingers in and out, brushing against that nerve cluster with each movement. Sweat beaded and her hips bucked. But each time she stood at the edge of her pleasure he slowed down, prolonging the foreplay, holding back her climax.

Finally unable to handle it any longer she took his hand in her own and showed him how she pleasured herself. Circling and circling her clit until pleasure burst forth and she shuddered against him, drunk from the heat of it.

Kelly smiled, "I didn't have nearly this much fun when I was sixteen."

"Oh yeah? What did you do instead?"

"Total nerd," she admitted, her smile breaking into a grin. "I was that weirdo who stayed up all night watching specials on Animal Planet." She leaned her head against his shoulder, completely comfortable with being as close to him as she could. "Hand jobs in the car were a mainstay of your teen years?"

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, "I was just a normal kid, then." Wistfulness laced his tone.

"What?"

Max looked into the forest on the side of the road. He shook himself and let go of her, putting the car back into gear and pulling out onto the road. "We're not far from my place."

Kelly hadn't realized how far they had gone. The city lay miles behind them, the lights blinking in the distance. Here they were surrounded by trees, the mountains still visible in the distance. The sexual haze fading for the moment, a dash of worry wiggled through her. Perhaps she should have followed behind him. But she pushed it aside. There was no use worrying about that now when there was nothing to be done. Worst case scenario she would bash him over the head and steal his car. The thought made her smile, perhaps not the best response. But she had never handled danger properly.

"What are you smiling about?" Max asked, glancing over.

Kelly laughed, the sound reverberating through the car. "It's a hell of a Friday night," she finally said once she calmed down.

Max smiled.

Kelly kept her eyes out the window. For a moment she thought she glimpsed an animal running beside them in the forest. But they were driving far too fast for that to be possible. She shook her head.

This was shaping up to be one weird ass night.

Max lead Kelly through the front door of a large wooden house. He left his car parked outside and she could not see an attached garage. She was supposed to just be picking up her license, but given the progress of the night so far...She suppressed a shiver and felt a thrill of heat stab through her. But he made no move to touch her, simply gesturing for her to sit in the kitchen while he walked further into the house. She looked around.

Despite the rustic lodge feel she got from the outside, the interior boasted none of the traits she would have expected. The walls were flat and covered in drywall rather than exposed wood, the paint a subtle yellow just slightly too bright to be considered beige. The kitchen flowed into the living room in an open floor plan. A hall off the kitchen met a staircase and she thought she saw two doors beyond it. A large print of wolves howling hung on the wall over the couch. And opposite that sat a humongous TV and an impressive collection of movies.

A large island sat in the middle of the kitchen. Or rather, the chef's fantasy come to life. Kelly could boil noodles and heat up sauce with the best of them, but nearly a decade of grad school had provided her with ingenuity with her ingredients, not her technique.

Max walked back into the room wearing a different tight black t-shirt and sat opposite her at the large rectangular table.

This was a lot of house for one man. She hoped he didn't have a wife and kids hiding somewhere. That would make this whole thing super awkward.

"There's something I need to tell you," he said, staring at her face but not meeting her eyes. Kelly knew it, he had a whole family and they were about to walk in. He was a serial adulterer and got off on getting caught. Or his wife got off on catching him. Something like that.

That was the scary tone of voice, the kind a doctor used right before delivering a bad prognosis. "Listen," Kelly said, "It's been fun, but I understand that this is totally casual, you know."

He set his hand on the table with a bang and started at the sound. "Cas--No, never mind, we'll talk about that later." He balled up his fist and remained silent, opening his mouth to talk twice before closing it again. Kelly sat there awkwardly. After rapping his knuckles against the wood of the table he finally said, "I'm a werewolf."

Kelly laughed. What other response could she give? "Really? I thought you were a vampire," she replied. But her smile faded when she saw that he wasn't laughing, wasn't even amused. Instead his face was shrouded with a seriousness so dire a worried shiver snaked its way down her spine.

"Vampires aren't real." Of course he would say that. "Okay, I said this wrong, can I start again?"

In this moment Kelly was abjectly aware that her car sat in a parking lot miles away and she had no way home other than this man sitting in front of her. This man who very possibly thought it was completely normal to howl at the moon. "Sure," she choked out.

"Werewolves are real," he plowed along.

"And you are one?" She tried to keep most of the sarcasm out. It didn't work. "If you didn't want to see me again, you could have just mailed the license to me. You don't need to feed me some crazy story."

Max pushed his chair back from the table and stood. The chair teetered precariously on two feet before righting itself. He took three deep breaths, closed his eyes, and hunched over. The air seemed to shimmer around his shoulders and something under his skin rippled. Kelly leaned forward, fascinated. This wasn't some twinge of a muscle. The human body simply couldn't do what Max's body did. The light seemed to contract around him until he disappeared for half a second and in his place appeared a huge wolf.

An impossibly large wolf of at least 200 pounds if she had to guess.

Kelly stayed as still as she could. She had gone crazy, clearly. There was no way in hell that a 200 pound gray wolf stood across the table from her in the middle of some guy's kitchen. That was impossible.

She sucked in a breath, but her lungs wouldn't fill up. She breathed and breathed, but her vision grew hazy and her hands shook. This wasn't real, this couldn't be real. Max had not just turned into a freaking wolf right in front of her.

She needed to get out of here, but that was a wolf. Wolves chased their pray if it ran. And she wouldn't be safe outside, that was it's natural hunting ground. "Nice, doggy," she whispered, nearly crying. She should have never come here. Not to Max's house, not to Idaho, she should have never left home if it meant that she was going to end up eaten by some impossible creature.

No.

She refused.

She sucked in a breath, slowly this time. Counting out out three seconds before she let herself exhale. And then another breath, and another. Her hands stopped shaking, her heartbeat returned to somewhere under 200 beats per minute. She knew wolves, they were her thing. And they didn't hunt people. Not usually.

Though she had no experience with werewolves.

Her heartbeat shot up once more, but she pushed the thought aside. Just talk to him, she ordered herself. If it's Max, he can hear you. "Max..." What were you supposed to say when the guy you were with turned into a giant freaking wolf. "Can you be normal again, please?" It was worth a shot.

The wolf whined a little and let out a huff. He laid down and the air shimmered once more, fur rippling like his skin had just moments ago. The wolf disappeared and in his place lay Max, panting, sweating, but fully clothed, and fully human. He stood and met her eyes.

"So," Kelly said. "You're a werewolf."

Max nodded. "And so are you."

Kelly flipped. Max eased himself into a chair as she sputtered across from him. Changing like that exhausted him, and he would love nothing more than to curl up in his bed for the next week. But he owed it to her to let her know what had happened. The full moon would be in less than a week and he needed to know she would be safe.

"You're crazy," she was saying. "That's not possible. How on Earth would it even be? I've never turned into a wolf in my life."

Max reached across the table and grabbed her hand. He could feel her pulse stutter and slow. Her breathing calmed and she paused, looking at him. "It's my fault," he admitted, but he didn't let go of her hand. Even with the confession, she didn't pull away.

She covered his hand with her own, tracing circles around one of his knuckles. "How? I'm not saying I believe you, but how?"

Max had no idea how to play this. He had never heard of a person being turned like this, and usually anyone who was turned ended up finding a pack after their first full moon. So he decided to simply tell the truth. "From when I bit you. It was completely on accident," he added the last quickly. "I think there's something about you." He couldn't tell her about the mating urge. That would be too much. "You felt something too, right?"

Her hand convulsed around his. "A bit like being hit by a freight train? Is that part of this werewolf thing?"

She seemed to take it better than he could have expected. Though part of that had to be the contact. Whatever this thing was between them, he would thank it for now. "You were sick the last couple of days." It wasn't a question, but she nodded. "It's like an infection, it passes through a bite, though usually when we're in our wolf forms. And then the person who was bitten gets a fever, they fall into a coma-like sleep, and a day or so later awake like nothing happened."

"So the flu turned me into a werewolf?" Sarcasm dripped.

"When someone's attacked, they don't usually know anything went wrong. Or that they're no longer uncu--no longer a normal human. Until the full moon."

"Let me guess," she said, "Then they go furry and eat the family dog?"

But Max didn't smile. The full moon defined everything of a werewolf's existence. Life revolved around it, if only to mitigate the damage. "It's actually the only night we can't change." Kelly didn't say anything so he kept talking. "The short version is: a long time ago the first werewolves were cursed to act like beasts under the full moon. They only figured out that they could turn into actual beasts some time later. Then they figured out they could pass the curse on to others. And so now, thousands of years later, you have people like me...And you."

"Like beasts?"

"Fighting, fucking, the fun stuff. It's like being drunk almost." Though it had been so long since Max had actually been drunk he wasn't sure of the comparison. But it seemed to be the way anyone else would explain it.

"And it's going to happen to me?" Kelly let go of his hand and he could feel her pulse speed up once more. "I have a new life here. I can't be a freaking werewolf. I study wolves, I'm not one!" She paced along her side of the table, tracing a hand along the back of each chair.

"Your life doesn't have to change," he said. "Well, not that much." She seemed to start believing she was a werewolf, so he pressed forward. "You'll need to protect yourself on the night of the full moon, assimilate yourself to the pack..."

"...And bow before some dude who has fashioned himself an alpha due to a poor understanding of how wolf society actually functions?" She snapped, eyes flashing.