Wolf Born

A Were with a black pelt? Had he seen that out there?

Absurd.

Why should he remember that, when there were no true black-pelted Weres? Dark brown, yes, but not black. The color itself denoted unfathomable darkness. Even black-haired Weres in human form shifted to a different color.

“Yes,” she, whoever she was, coaxed. “I’m here. If you open your eyes, you’ll see me.”

The voice struck a distant chord. It was filled with submerged emotion and as demanding as it was inviting. This voice was the human equivalent of the howl of invitation a she-wulf had issued to him in that blasted park.

It’s her.

You.

Wanting nothing more than to see who was near, Colton struggled to do as she asked. His eyes hadn’t been open, after all. He opened them, sorry that he had when a glare of hurtful light hit him.

“Wait. I’ll dim the lamp,” she said. “It’s just one lamp, by your bed.”

Absorbing the ache that followed so much time spent in darkness, Colton forced himself to focus. His vision took a while to get into working order, and then he found himself gazing into a pair of large green eyes, very near to his.

His insides stirred restlessly.

There was something about those eyes. Not exactly familiar, but...

A surge of heat broke through his numbness. Again, he heard a howl, far away now, but there, all the same. He saw a dark-pelted wulf charge in to help him, and join in the fight.

His nerves began to simmer, then fry, which in turn caused feeling where there had been nothing but a wasteland.

The fire spread.

Hunger came upon him, heated, and with a ravenous need for the She with that mesmerizing voice.

His biceps tensed. His toes curled. He heard the crack of his spine straightening as whatever power those green eyes held hurled him toward full consciousness.

The flames tearing through him called up his beast. His wulf unfurled as fluidly and easily as if he’d merely spread his arms, the shift silent and uncommonly fast. It came on in a wave, similar to a smooth ruffle of air between two breaths. No extra pain. No forethought. No moon necessary.

Left panting from a transition that had no right to have happened in the first place, Colton, in werewolf form, squatted on a soft blue cloudlike surface, trembling and in shock. All he saw was the brilliance of the green eyes across from his that had not wavered in intensity or retreated by so much as an inch.

This female wasn’t afraid of him.

I know you, he thought again.

His growl was the sum total of his strange new feelings of hunger and longing, and lingered in the space around him.

“I knew it,” the green-eyed woman beside him said. “You’re still in there.”

* * *

Rosalind felt the throb of this werewolf’s blood in her veins. The erratic rhythm of his heart spoke of the depth of his inexplicable need for her.

There was no second-guessing what this need was. It came across as primitive, hotly sexual, and was, Rosalind would have known without the rapid acceleration of her own pulse, very much reciprocated.

She wanted to be with him. Be like him. She wanted to meet him wulf to wulf. Wanted everything this male had to offer.

Exerting pressure to control herself, Rosalind knew that she had been right. They had imprinted not long ago, without their eyes meeting, a fact as unusual as this wulf’s snowy-white pelt. Their hunger was mutual, no matter what shape he was in.

Rosalind was glad she had locked the door. As she stared into his eyes, she could barely keep her hands off the wulf on the bed. Her beast was starved for his beast. She craved his touch, and was left trembling.

“Yes,” she whispered. “We have bonded.”

Tremors rocked her. Similar tremors moved through the white wulf beside her. He was sharing the effects of their bond. He felt what she felt.

“I don’t understand why they would separate us,” she said, tilting her head, trying to speak slowly. “You’ll need details of what happened, some of which you probably already know.”

Rosalind swallowed her beast’s needs down and lowered her voice. “You’ve been badly hurt, attacked by bloodsuckers in the park. The same suckers that killed your family, I suppose. We’ve taken care of those fiends, got rid of them. My father and the judge brought you to Landau’s house. Judge Landau’s wife has been treating you.”

Placing a hand on her chest, as if that would slow her racing heartbeat, she continued. “These vampires were savages. The Landaus say you’ve knocked on Death’s door and stepped across the threshold, only to be pulled back by the strength of your will.”

It was impossible for her to slow down. A deep breath didn’t help.

“You’re alive, but changed. I don’t know how, exactly. I’m not sure what your white pelt means. They won’t tell me everything. They never have.”

The creature her father had called a ghost remained almost motionless, though his white fur rippled with the force of his pulse.

“I’m Rosalind Kirk,” she said. “My father is Jared Kirk. You’ll need to know those things in order to find me.”

The white wulf stared at her soundlessly.

She fell silent for a minute, maybe two, noting how the room at the top of the Landaus’ house that posed as a one-bed makeshift hospital ward smelled of clean laundry and antiseptic. It was sparsely furnished, with a large bed, one soft chair and two bedside tables. The window in the wall opposite the bed was open. The curtains moved in a faint breeze.

Rosalind had no idea what kind of care they had given this Were, or what those treatments entailed, but he had pulled through. Her actions in the park hadn’t killed him.

She blinked slowly to take that in.

On the surface, most of the stink of the vampires had been wiped clean from this wulf, and from the room housing him. Underscoring the room’s aura of calm, however, Rosalind still perceived hints of vampire. Black glittering molecules, as shiny and sharp as polished shards of glass, seemed a part of every breath she took.

Wary of this, and mindful of the fact that she had sneaked upstairs when the judge’s wife had gone for food, Rosalind went on.

“You’re at the Landau estate at the edge of the park. Since you’re a cop and a Were, I’m guessing you know Judge Landau and about some of the secrets kept in this place.”

The white wulf growled softly, as if trying out his voice through a throat the bloodsuckers had ripped open several times over. It seemed to Rosalind that she might have made a similar sound without realizing it, because her own throat felt raw.

The eyes looking at her were intent, piercing and the palest green. They were ringed by deep purple circles, leftovers indicative of how badly his face and body had been injured.

She didn’t want to think of how he had looked when her father and the others had come to the rescue. All that blood. And she had seen glimpses of bone beneath his torn and mangled flesh.

At the time, it seemed that a true miracle would be necessary in order for him to survive. “You look better,” she said, hoping this might calm him.

And that was true. He did look better. Already, after just two days, new skin covered bone and sinew, though several patches of fur and flesh were missing from his neck and shoulders, leaving lines of raw, reddened flesh. Red welts lined his face like the stripes of a tiger, but they were no longer oozing blood.

His moon mark, an indication of his superior place within their species, showed through the colorless fur of his left upper arm. It was riddled with tiny puncture holes, as though the vampires had purposefully gone for it with gusto, hoping to tear the mark clean off.

For a Were, removal of a moon mark was a blasphemy. For this big male, it would have been a forced emasculation. But the filthy blood drinkers hadn’t tackled this Lycan easily. He’d fought hard before succumbing to the sheer number of attackers. Burned into her mind was the image of the brown Were feverishly taking on the monsters.

“Brown or white, Were or ghost, you are the most beautiful, the most courageous being I have ever encountered,” she said.

And I have nearly caused your death.

“I’m to be taken away,” she repeated. “They will separate us, and it will hurt, when you’ve already been hurt so badly.”

Another growl came from him, noticeably stronger, and meaning for her to go on. Coming from this formidable creature who had looked Death in the eye, the sound seemed strangely exotic, and took her breath away.

“I come from the bayou country. I’m seldom allowed out from under my father’s strict supervision and rules. We have no modern forms of communication there. No computer, no television, no phones. Only a radio,” she said, pausing as the absurdity of these facts registered. “I learn about the world through that radio.”

They had, in fact, been living like they were deprived backwoods folk. Compared to the Landaus, they were decades behind the times. Backwoods cousins.

“This is the first occasion the Landaus have hosted us as guests, and I think this was due to an important meeting between Lycan elders. For me, it’s a quick visit here, and then back.”

They had so little time. She could hear it ticking away.

“Landau’s son and some of his pack aren’t here, though I’ve heard them talked about. I’ve seen no one my age, and only briefly have met Landau and his wife. I don’t think I’ll be allowed here again after this.”

She waited out a span of several shallow, rapid breaths before continuing, needing to get all this out in the open.

“There are other secrets hidden here. I don’t pretend to understand what’s really going on, only that some of those secrets pertain to me. I can sense being the focus of this meeting, and believe those secrets are why I’ve been kept away from other Weres, and ultimately why I’ll be kept from you. There is, I think, something wrong with me.”

Do you want me to go on?

The wulf continued to study her intently. He hadn’t moved.

“I understand the pain of loss.” Her voice was beseeching. “My mother was killed by hunters. Not vampires, but monsters in their own right.”

The white wulf blinked slowly, as if he was riding out a wave of pain.

“My father says that your fur has turned white due to the intensity of the injuries you have sustained. It might also be a physical manifestation of devastation and loss.”

She cleared her throat. “I wish I could take away the anguish of that.”

It had taken more than a dozen vampires to gain hold of him. This Were had fought like he was the right hand of Death, when even death, as vampires proved, didn’t have to be the end.

“I feel your pain. And I am so very sorry.”

She was hurting for herself, and for him. In sharing his heartache, she had to let him know how sorry she was that he’d been injured so badly. As much as she could bring herself to confess. When their imprinting was complete, he’d find out her secrets by easily reading her. They would eventually share thoughts.

“I didn’t help you enough out there,” she said, noting the alertness in this ghost’s eyes.

She couldn’t go on, was unable to utter the words that might have freed her from the terrible, plaguing guilt. If she spoke the truth in its entirety, if she confessed what she had or hadn’t done now, her white wulf wouldn’t want her. There was no way he’d come after her, find her, mate with her, when she wanted those things so desperately.

“I—” She paused when the green eyes across from her began to recede, and the white wulf shape-shifted in a slick, soundless, reversal.

“I couldn’t leave you to face them alone,” Rosalind whispered as the man from the park, who was now just as captivating with his white hair framing his wounded, angular face, reached for her.

* * *

Colton jumped to his feet. With both of his hands on Rosalind Kirk’s shoulders, he backed her into a corner so quickly that her breath escaped in a startled hiss of surprise.

He gave her no opportunity for further sound or protest. His mouth covered hers as if her breath alone could make him whole again. As if the beating of her heart against his bare chest could jump-start his, and prove finally, absolutely, that he was alive.

His need was all-consuming. His body was on fire.

He drank her in as if his survival counted on those things.

The fragrance of her breath seemed familiar.

Rosalind Kirk was a young, black-haired, oval-faced vision, and slight to the point of an ethereal thinness. Although her mouth was momentarily motionless beneath his, Colton sensed with every instinct he possessed how much she wanted to respond.

There was a possibility, he realized, that she didn’t know how.

Her lips were warm, supple, tender, sweet and not in the least bit rigid. In her stillness came a reminder of what she had told him. She had been kept from others. She’d been sheltered from actions like this by an overprotective Lycan father. She had no family or friends. This might, in fact, have been her first real kiss.

He wanted her in that moment as much as his beast had desired her in the park. Every inch of him yearned for her, now that he’d been awakened, and had captured her in his arms.

Had this slight, ebony-haired creature truly fought beside him, placing herself in jeopardy in order to help? Was she the one who had come to aid him in a time of trouble?

“You,” he whispered with his mouth on hers. “It really was you.”

Ignoring shaky limbs that refused to behave properly, and his heart’s offbeat rhythm, Colton leaned into her. Licking gingerly at her lips, nipping lightly at the corners of her mouth before again sealing his lips to hers, he took her breath into his lungs, and felt that breath warm him. One word resonated in his mind, on its own loop, playing over and over.

Mine.

He wasn’t dead. This moment was real. Where there was feeling, there was hope, and he desperately needed some.

He kissed her, and the kiss drew a gasp. The raspy sound of Rosalind’s breathlessness shuddered through him as the pleasure of being close to her far outweighed the nagging internal pain he harbored.

His captive wore a black shirt he hardly noticed, except that it felt cool and silky against his bare chest. His current impulse was to tear the shirt from her and get down to it, chest to chest, groin to groin. This was his animal side taking over. His beast voted for that.

Injuries be damned! This Were female had a name that rolled easily on his tongue. Rosalind. A name as creamy as the sexual act itself.

Her black hair, worn long and straight, spilled over her shoulders in a gleaming cascade. Her face, with its prominent, sharp-edged bones, would suit few people, but somehow suited him. She had a small, tapered nose. Perfectly arched eyebrows looked like dark smudges of paint on ivory skin decorated by huge, penetrating green eyes.

Her shoulders were narrow, her hip bones like blades. Lycan females never had overindulgent curves or ponderous shapes due to their super-revved metabolisms and the frequent nighttime sprints, and Rosalind didn’t break that mold.

Small, firm breasts, perfectly proportioned to the trimness of her body, pressed against him through her shirt, begging to be touched, licked, suckled, by someone who would understand what she needed in a mate.

She was no mere pretty young thing. This was a category of female he had never expected: unique, sensual, animal and almost supernaturally beautiful.

Mine.

Colton’s wulf roared, possessive and protective of Rosalind Kirk in spite of the fact that she had been a freaking lightning-quick fighting machine in that park.

Couldn’t have been her, his mind still argued. The female in his arms had a trembling, succulent mouth. The Were in the park had been lethal, black-pelted and incredibly fast.

Thoughts fled as her lips parted and her tongue, extremely hot and seductively moist, tentatively met his. The action cued something in Colton’s body that had long lain dormant. It was a real need for her, having nothing whatsoever to do with the concept of superficial. He longed for closeness and connection. He wanted to hold in his hands something fine and special and long-term. In the face of those needs, self-control was not an option.

The heat of her presence pushed his pain aside. Colton had a sensation of his strength returning by bounds, as if she were the one pulling it back, inch by agonizing inch, and as if the kiss connecting them was drawing his better parts out.

Her arms encircled his neck. Their hips ground lusciously together. Through the silky cloth of her shirt Rosalind continued to radiate the kind of enticement that he imagined would be similar to getting too close to the sun. Pure, radiant fire.

He groaned when her hands touched the nape of his neck, and he repeated the sound when her fingers moved upward into his hair. She grabbed hold of a handful of strands and tugged, trying to pull him closer. But the only way they could have been closer was for him to be inside her. And there was no way to describe how much he wanted that.

His body responded to hers as if he hadn’t been hurt. His erection was proof that a Were’s ability to heal was indeed nothing short of magical.

Rosalind’s touch made illness seem distant and irrelevant. The swift return of his libido told him that if his body wasn’t fully recovered, he was well enough to oblige the desire to claim her, and to enter the blistering heat he knew would be waiting for him if he did.

“Ties that bind. You and I, Rosalind,” he whispered to her, allowing her only a very small breath.

It seemed to him that the female whose tongue now swept boldly across his had somehow created an energy flux that encompassed them both. Maybe it was only a male-female attraction that had made him get up from that bed, because hell, he didn’t know how he could be standing up when he had only opened his eyes a short time ago. He wasn’t entirely sure what had happened to him out there in the dark.

Nevertheless, there was healing in her fingertips. Her breath rammed a steady stream of energy into him as she willed him to take her, and urged him to hurry.

She was a fast learner, an apt pupil. Already she kissed him back with enough fervor to melt away the doubts.

Oh, yes. One of his dreams lay within his grasp. All he had to do was what came naturally to them both.

But, his mind nagged, they are going to take her away. Away from him. This seemed a ridiculous impossibility, now that he had found her.

Dampness broke out on his forehead. Rationality warned that they were guests in someone else’s house, and that the door might open any minute. Rosalind had mentioned the name Landau.

Still, Rosalind’s fingers moved like little bolts of lightning across his upper back, scorching his tender skin, making him wince from the sheer intensity of the pleasure. She was exploring him, as well as the other way around, and she liked what she found.

He seemed to hear her whispering to him, though his mouth on hers left her no ability to do so. “Now,” she was thinking. “Seal our fate.”

Chapter 6

Reluctantly, Colton pulled his lips from hers to gaze at her flushed face. How far would she go? How far would she let him go? The she-wulf was looking back at him. Their gazes met, held.

He had a sensation of falling, though he was on his feet. His body imploded with the desire to have all of her; every last bit. Wrapped in her heat, he could almost forget the vampires and what they had done. He stood a chance of sidelining his need for vengeance.

When he tore at her jeans, neither of them spoke or moved apart to make access easier. Rosalind’s palms were like burning coals when she placed them on his chest.

With ease, he lifted her from the ground, turned and threw her on the bed where he’d been tended. Rosalind was, he noticed, barefoot, her feet delicate, her toenails unpainted.

Her jeans were discarded in seconds. The blue underwear beneath them was destroyed in less time than that. She lay half-naked on the bed, her hair and her silk shirt glistening in the light from the bedside lamp. Her eyes told him that she anticipated what might come next.

Colton crawled up to arch over her on his hands and knees, so that the only thing between them, below the hem of her shirt, was his thrumming cock—the dusty, unused body part of a werewolf who had been too long without.

“Mate,” she said huskily through pink, swollen lips, her eyes wide and as brilliant as emeralds.

“Yes,” he growled.

Her hips rose to meet him when he slid both hands beneath her slick, bare buttocks, buttocks that were as sleek as her shirt. Her legs were endlessly long, and stretched out beneath him. Her thighs were shaped with lengths of strong, lean muscle.

“Some other time and place,” he told her, “this would take much longer and move much slower. Hours. Days. Weeks.”

“Find me. Promise,” was all she said in return.

Somehow, Colton knew there was no time for foreplay and that the needs driving them ruled out any effort at further restraint. With trembling fingers, he explored the spot he needed for entering her body. Although she might have been kept from this in the past, Rosalind was more than willing. Between her thighs, behind a wedge of dark fur, she had dampened. With his fingers pressed against her, she growled low in her throat.

When her legs opened for him, he forgot everything else. Time, and all that had gone on before, seemed to slip away.

Easing the tip of his cock inside her, Colton closed his eyes. He didn’t want to move, wanted to linger and soak up this wicked heat, but he had to continue. His body demanded satisfaction.

With an agonizing slowness, he began to make tender stroking motions, moving his hips, dipping in and out of her meagerly at first, amazed that he could exert this much will over himself when what he longed for was a singular thrust hard enough to fill her completely.

He shook with the intensity of that desire.

He and this stranger had imprinted. And this sealed the deal. That’s the way this went: eyes, thoughts, body, then soul. They had bonded, and all he knew about her was her name, and that she had pulled him up from unconsciousness, and how extremely hot she was.

Inside, she was tight and beautifully lush. He stroked her gently until that tightness began to relax and a rush of cream surrounded his erection. Even in man form, he nearly howled.

As he pressed himself farther inside her, Rosalind made more encouraging noises in her throat. When he stopped moving, she seemed to stop breathing altogether.

“I will find you,” he said with a pledge that seemed to have been dragged from his heart.

Though she gasped, Rosalind didn’t open her eyes.

“You understand what this means?” he asked gruffly, because her body, and what she was allowing him to do with it, had stolen his own breath away.

Her eyelids fluttered, the long, midnight-hued lashes dark against her flawless ivory skin. As he studied her face, her chin moved up and down once. She understood perfectly.

“All right,” he whispered to her. “God. Okay.”

His plunge into her rich depths brought another, louder, sound from her throat. It was a purr of encouragement. A nod to pleasure.

Colton withdrew, then sank his length into her again and again, building a rhythm that took him deeper and deeper, trying not to burst with the pleasure this gave him. He hung on to his sanity by a thread.

When waiting was no longer an option, he lowered himself to her body and drove himself into her with a force that rocked his body and hers.

Unparalleled gratification careened through him that was as violent as live wires crossing. And when Rosalind bent her knees, grabbed his buttocks with her hands and invited him to partake of the last remaining barrier, he felt the rise of an oncoming orgasm that would truly weld them together for life.