Wolf Hills (7 page)

“Are you absolutely certain?” He tried one more time for the earnest look, but she wasn’t buying it.

“Sorry.” She shook her head in the negative. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

“Oh, I can do better. Question is, can you handle it?”

He moved closer to her, dropping the helmets on the soft grass beneath their feet. Suddenly she felt like she was being stalked by a wild predator. A thrill ran down her spine as she thought about avenues of escape. Did she want to run? It might be fun to lead him on a short chase, though ultimately, she really wanted to be caught.

Giving in to temptation, she stood her ground as he reached her. It wouldn’t be right to start this relationship by playing games. She decided she would meet him as an equal or not at all.

Wordlessly, he reached out, one hand just barely touching the sensitive skin of her cheek. When she didn’t move away, he deepened the contact, cupping her cheek in his warm, rough palm. Her pulse rate leapt higher as he moved even closer, right into her personal space.

His head dipped toward hers. She closed the space between them, stretching upward to meet his kiss. And then she was lost.

The kiss the night before was nothing compared to the full, intimate heat of him. His tongue invaded, plundered, staked his claim, and she loved every second of it. She met his challenge and returned it, reaching up to drag him downward, moving her body into his, daring him to take it further.

He didn’t disappoint. His hands roamed her back, sliding downward to cup her ass and lift her into full contact. She could feel the hard rod of his excitement against her belly and it made her want more. More of his kiss. More of him.

She didn’t know how long the kiss lasted. She only knew that when he drew away from her, she tried to follow. She was firmly under his spell and didn’t want to stop. Not for anything.

Somehow—and it shamed her to realize she’d been so far gone—Jason pulled back and cooled things down. His forehead rested against hers, his breathing harsh. That was some consolation, at least. She could feel the trembling of his upper thighs against hers. She knew a little of what it cost him to stop. She felt it too.

“Why?” The word escaped before she could stop it.

“Too fast,” he replied through ragged breaths. “You’re human.” He let her go and stepped back as if forcing himself to do so. “Mostly human, at any rate. Were mating can be…kind of rough on the uninitiated. I’m trying not to scare you off.” He shot her a rueful expression, his grin catching her off guard, but charming her just the same. “Is it working?”

“Why don’t you come back over here and find out?” she challenged.

He stepped back another pace. “Later,” he promised. “First, I want to show you something.” He held one hand out to his side, inviting her to take it.

Like teenagers on a first date, she held his hand as they walked together toward the small waterfall. He stopped for a moment beside it and she listened to the trickling water, appreciating its peaceful bounty as the cool, moist air helped bank the fire he had started within her.

“My mother used to come up here all the time when we were kids. We used to bring a picnic lunch and she’d let us play in the water and in the woods nearby. It was our special place.”

Touched by his words, Sally looked up at him. “She sounds like a special lady.”

“She was.” Sally sensed a wealth of pain in his simple words. “The year I became Alpha, she was killed in the violence. There was a bit of a clan war brewing until I stepped forward to claim leadership and broker peace. It was her death that finally turned me into the Alpha I am today. It was a harsh way to discover my own inner strength, but our world is like that sometimes. You should know this before you get in any deeper.” He turned to her, his expression earnest. “Right now, you’re on the periphery. Your friends are fully in our world, but you might get away with simply being watched by one of the vamp enforcers for the rest of your life. You could go on with your normal, totally human life. Only you would know what really goes on in the dark. And it wouldn’t affect you much, other than having to swear yourself to secrecy about your friends. Those ladies and their mates are powerful enough to allow you that freedom.”

“Carly mentioned something like that last night.”

“Or…” he went on, “…you could choose to fully embrace the small part of you that has always been different. Like your friends, you could become part of the bigger world—the world where shifters and bloodletters and even magic users share the Earth with regular folk. The world where we live in secret among them. You could join my world, Sally. You could join with your wolf.”

His words were so stirring, she felt in that moment, almost anything was possible. For a split second, she was ready to throw caution to the wind. She wanted to be with him, to embrace all that he was, and all that she could be. Then sanity interrupted.

“I’m not sure.”

Sally thought about her life to this point. Her hard-won career was waiting for her back home, along with a beautiful apartment she had spent the last three years decorating until she got it just so. Her life was somewhat empty, now that all her friends were married and they saw each other less frequently, but it was still her life. The one she had created for herself.

“It’s okay.” Jason dropped her hand and tucked both of his into his jeans pockets. His shoulders hunched a bit as he began walking toward the woods. She followed. “You don’t have to make any decisions today. You’re on vacation, right? We’ll just see where things lead. But I figured I should draw your attention to the facts at least once before we do some serious sightseeing.”

His smile was easy, but she could feel the undercurrent of tension in his voice. Her response mattered to him more than he was letting on, for some reason. She liked that he wasn’t pushing her too hard. She had things to think over and she needed to learn more about Carly’s new existence. She needed to learn a lot more about shapeshifters too, for that matter. This world was completely new to her, though not as unsettling as she would’ve expected. Somehow, she had always suspected there was something more to the odd things that happened to her as a cop.

She’d felt the pull of the full moon and chalked it up to coincidence, or perhaps superstition. She’d always been able to hear things others couldn’t and see things in greater detail than her colleagues. She had gained a reputation as a sort of super cop among her peers and enjoyed the way they treated her with increasing respect as she rose through the ranks.

Hers was a sometimes violent job. It could be rewarding as well. Catching bad guys before they could harm anyone else had been her passion for a long time, though lately she had found herself more than once simply going through the motions. She hadn’t felt the same elation that she had when she was younger. Justice had become her goal in both work and life, and sometimes, it was hard to achieve. She’d become disillusioned with the system over the years and now that she was away from home for the first time in a long time, she realized she was at a crossroads. She could either continue the way she was going, or choose a new path.

Jason had just laid a tantalizing new possibility before her. The question was, did she dare pursue it?

“Jason…” She trailed off, uncertain how to ask all the questions in her mind.

He turned toward her. They stood facing each other in the whispering woods. Suddenly the tension was back. The yearning. The need.

“I had such good intentions.” His hand rose to touch her hair, tucking a loose strand behind her ear. His eyes honed in on her lips, parted…ready…willing. “I think I know how Adam must’ve felt in the Garden of Eden. You are temptation itself, my Eve.”

“Sally,” she reminded him playfully, though she was touched by his words beyond bearing. No man had ever given her such verbal tribute. And no man had ever looked at her like Jason did. As if she were special, though that was too mild a word. As if she held his world in the palm of her hands.

She knew she was being fanciful, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was Jason and this moment—and how much she’d wanted him from almost the first time she’d seen him. There would be time to worry about everything else later. Right now, all she wanted was him.

His head dipped, and his lips found hers. She had a sensation of weightlessness and then she felt the cool grass beneath her back, tickling her neck as Jason pressed her into the thick green mat. A fresh scent rose from the crushed fronds, enveloping her in its delicious aroma. Never before had anything felt so right.

Jason’s hard body bracketed her, his long, jeans-clad legs slipping between hers as if they belonged there. The only problem was, they were wearing too much fabric. Skin on skin would feel so much better.

As if her thought conjured his action, Sally felt her jacket slide down her shoulders. Jason paused, breaking the kiss as he encountered the shoulder holster for her service revolver. He gazed down at her, one eyebrow raised in question, a faint smile on his lips.

“I keep forgetting you’re a cop.”

“That’s the nicest thing a guy has ever said to me,” she joked, shrugging out of the holster as he made room between them. He took the firearm from her, placing it delicately at her side, within reach, but safely away from where they lay entangled together. Her jacket went on top of it, hiding it from view.

He resumed the kiss, bringing her back to the sharp edged excitement only Jason had ever shown her. She felt the hem of her T-shirt rise, Jason’s strong hands skimming it over her heated skin as their kiss went on and on. She wriggled under him, helping his progress, wanting the fabric gone. She wanted to feel the tickling grass beneath her bare back and Jason’s skin above.

And most of all, she wanted to feel what it would be like to have him inside her, as close as two beings could be. She wanted to know how he looked when he came and how he made her feel when he sent her over the edge into a bliss she could only imagine.

Everything felt new and oh-so-right with Jason. She was sure being with him would be very different from her past experiences with men. Not just because he wasn’t entirely human. Mostly it was because she sensed something in him that called out to a hidden part of her own soul that she hadn’t known existed—until she met Jason.

When those two sparks met, she wondered if either one of them would survive the explosion. Wanting more than anything to know, she pushed at his clothing, trying to touch skin. She wanted to feel him, touch him,
know
him.

Wordlessly, he ended their soul-shattering kiss and helped. His shirt and hers flew away somewhere. She didn’t care where. All that mattered was his warm skin, the slightly hairy chest, and the massive size of him that made her feel small and feminine for the first time in her life.

His lips returned to her skin, skimming down her neck and into the curve where her shoulder began. His teeth nipped at one bra strap, sliding it down her arm while his hand slid the other away, pulling the triangles of stretchy fabric down as well, effectively imprisoning her inside the fastened garment, but baring the important bits.

The bits that craved his touch, his tongue, his teasing. Jason obliged without being asked, lowering his mouth to her breasts, teasing the nipples with his hands and lips, making her writhe on the cool grass in heightened pleasure.

“Jason,” she whispered, feeling things no other man had made her feel from such simple contact.

He didn’t answer, but seemed to take her exclamation as permission to go farther. He rolled to her side, giving himself room to maneuver. One of his hands lowered to the waistband of her jeans and something inside her rejoiced. She wanted more. So much more.

Sally toed off her shoes while Jason expertly unclasped and unzipped her jeans. She lifted her hips, helping as he stripped them down her legs, taking her panties with them. The grass tickled the backs of her knees, adding new sensations to the overload of pleasure. She’d never lain naked in the grass before. Only this man and this moment could have made her do so, and she momentarily regretted having never felt these delicious sensations before. The leaves sang a song of joy through the surrounding forest. The soft murmur of the waterfall added a counter harmony to the magical tune nature played in this secluded glen. Sunshine dripped through the leafy canopy to tickle her skin where it wasn’t covered by the deliciously warm and hard man above her. The scent of grass and leaves, flowing water and clean earth mixed with the heady aroma of aroused male.

The combination made her head spin in the most delicious way. Lying naked in a patch of grass in the middle of a forest with a half naked man poised above her was something she’d never imagined. Yet it was perfect in every way.

It only became more perfect when one of Jason’s large hands slid between her bare thighs, spreading them, making way for his possession. Thick fingers slid through the arousal she couldn’t hide, seeking entrance. She not only allowed it, she encouraged him, spreading her knees wide and pushing up into his hand.

One thick finger found its way inside, making her gasp. He was a little rough, but she found she liked the way he handled her body. As if he owned it. As if he knew just how much she could take. He pushed her to her limits and a little beyond, until she was swimming in a sea of pleasure that only Jason could bring her.

A second finger joined the first. This time she cried out his name, bucking her hips as he took control of her body, her pleasure…her soul. Or at least, that’s what it felt like.