Idler (Norseton Wolves Book 3) (7 page)

His coiled muscles relaxed one by one and his lungs expended all the air he’d been holding. “Just three,” he said, his voice groggy. “Unless you count Junior as a name.”

“I won’t call you Junior. I knew a guy in my old pack we called that. He had about as much common sense as a goldfish, and was always getting himself into the kind of trouble no one wants to admit to have witnessed. I’ll call you Colt.” She leaned forward, pressed her hands to his shoulders, and squeezed all the tension out of them. Her nipples danced over his skin as she leaned and straightened, leaned and straightened. He kept his eyes closed and imagined what the view must have been like, her riding him like a…

“It’s short for Colton,” he said. “Not like a horse, though I’ve had certain parts of me compared to one.”

She gave the back of his head a little pluck and laughed. “I figured the lechery would come back eventually.”

“I am what I am. I guess you’re stuck with it and me—unless you leave.”

He hoped she wouldn’t. He didn’t want to do this again. The woman scared the hell out of him in a way Alpha couldn’t even come close to, and in entirely different ways. He found himself changing, for better or for worse. At first, he wasn’t sure he liked it. He was working and working some more, just so he could distract himself and stay out of her orbit, but then he’d come to relish the results.

Maybe before he hadn’t thought he had much of a future—every day was the same. He had nothing to aspire to. He
still
didn’t know what he was aspiring to, but he looked forward to that idea at the back of his brain to finish congealing—the image of what he could have and what he was working toward.

Lisa didn’t respond to his unasked question, but skimmed her fingertips along his jaw and across his lips. Both gentle and rough, she always seemed to have a knack for picking the perfect pressure for what he needed.

She lay atop him and gave his earlobe a nip before whispering, “All work and no play makes Colton a dull boy.”

He chuckled. “I’m definitely not dull. If that’s what you heard, you’ve been hanging around with the wrong folks.”

“You haven’t played with
me
, though. Don’t you want to?”

He opened his eyes to find her dark gaze very near his face and her lips pulled up into a sexy grin that both made his nuts draw up and also struck fear into his heart. “You look like you want to hurt me.”

“You’re a big boy. I think you can take it.”

He nodded slowly and swallowed. “Do I want to take it?”

“Only if you trust me.”

“I—I do.”

“Can I touch you wherever I’d like?”

“Hell yeah.” He didn’t even have time to slam his verbal filter down over the words. He wouldn’t take them back, though.

“Hmm.” She pushed up and kneaded his back some more, then straightened up to gave his ass a smack hard enough to make him gasp.

“Fuck,” he whispered as his muscles relaxed from the startling impact. His cock throbbed painfully beneath him, and his skin tingled with anticipation.

She rubbed the flesh, squeezing his ass where she’d struck and made another
hmm
sound. “No? Yes?”

“More. Give me all you want, and I’ll give you what I’ve got.”

And he’d certainly try to do the same outside of the bedroom, too. He just needed her to tell him what to do. Lisa could be
his
little alpha. He just hoped she wouldn’t be the kind who would cast him out of their pack of two.

Lisa had called him
wolf
because that was what she called every male wolf in her peer group, but she knew that words sometimes had connotations that she couldn’t predict. She could also be hurtful without meaning to. Some people might have thought Colt deserved to get his feelings hurt on occasion, but Lisa had never been intentionally cruel. There was a fine line between hurting someone who needed it and tearing them down. She didn’t want to tear him down. She had to live with the man, and he was a man with so much potential. She’d been wrong when she’d arrived and was paired with him. He was nothing like that first wolf the Maine alpha had tried to pawn on her. Colt may have lacked ambition, but he wasn’t lazy. He’d just been…aimless. Any wolf with his background would have been.

She could help him find an aim.
Their
aim.

She settled onto the backs of his legs and kneaded his ass, like a cat settling down for a nap.

“I don’t think anyone in my life has ever paid that much attention to my rear end,” he said.

“It’s nice.” She gave him another swat to his right cheek that made him hiss. “I’m a bit put off by the full-body tan, though.”

“I’m a werewolf.”

“One who spends most of his time dressed.”

“Is that what you think, or what you know?”

She gave a hard smack to the top of his left thigh that made him chuckle.

She growled. Chuckling was
so
not the response she wanted. “Just who’s been seeing you naked?”

“You jealous?”

She smacked him again, and the other thigh along with it. No chuckle that time, just a long escape of breath. His cheeks clenched and then released enticingly, so of course he had to jiggle them.

“I think you’ve got a fetish,” he said.

“I have a few. And I think you have a mouth that’s going to get you into trouble.”

“Are you just now figuring that out? Tell me more about those fetishes.”

“Nah. This isn’t about me. This is about you.” She reached back and spanked him again and again, making an imaginary patchwork of angry red handprints on his ass until his back arched and he gasped.

She gripped his hips and bent to drag her tongue along the dimples, to kiss the red, tease his seam.

“Whoa.” He pushed up.

“Down.”

He settled into his rest position again, but clenched his ass, as if to keep her roving tongue far away.

“Afraid you’ll like it?”

He didn’t answer, so she kneaded some more and reached a hand beneath his body to tickle his sac.

He hissed and his body tensed between her legs.

She worked her knees between his thighs and pushed them farther apart to improve her access to his crotch. “You know, we female wolves are discouraged from being sexually provocative because it’s supposed to be our men’s jobs to set the tone and pace of sex.”

He scoffed. “I’ll take your word for it. You’re the first wolf I’ve fucked, and that’s not a topic that’s come up in the decade or so I’ve been in this pack.”

“Your first wolf, huh?” She gave him a hard slap on each ass cheek in case he’d forgotten why she was there.

The corner of his lips pulled up, and when she confirmed it was a grin, not a grimace, she did it again and licked the heated flesh some more.

“Would you let me do that to you?” he asked.

“What, spank me?”

“No. Lick you.”

“I could talk you through it.”

“Don’t trust me to figure it out on my own?”

“I’m just bossy that way. Turns me on to be the one leading the dance. See?” She straddled one of his large thighs and lowered her slick crotch to it, spreading her arousal against his skin.

“
Mmm
, I see.”

“I’m an aberration. Do you understand that? I’m not supposed to be like this. It’s not becoming of a female wolf.”

“I guess I’m an aberration, too. For liking it.”

“Do you?”

“
Mm-hmm
.”

“Roll over for me. I know something else you might like.” She eased off his legs, and he carefully rolled. His long, thick shaft curled enticingly against his belly, and she took it into her fist. “I don’t know what happened to you before you ended up in Norseton—”

He blew out a breath and rolled his gaze to the ceiling.

“But it’s in the past now, right?”

“Some things leave scars you can’t see. You only feel the pain when someone pokes at them.”

“And I poked at them.”

He shrugged.

“Don’t shrug. Tell me, so I don’t detonate another land mine. That’s why you’ve been avoiding me, right? Because I poked one of your scars?”

She unhanded his cock to let him answer unimpeded.

His Adam’s apple bobbed noticeably as he swallowed again and again, and he pressed his lips into a hard, flat line, as if the taste in his mouth had suddenly gone sour and it took all the willpower he had to keep down the reflux.

She could tell him that it was okay, and not to worry about it, but it wasn’t okay. She was used to slowly pushing the limits of her partners in and out of the bedroom, and knew that at some point, there was a place that they both had to break through, whether it be his pain, or some secret confession. She could push Colt further and further to test his tolerance for extremes, but when it came to talking about important things, he was a novice. She’d have to lead by example.

She lay atop him and propped her chin on his chest, looking down at his face.

He slung his arm across her back—tentatively, it seemed. He likely didn’t understand what was going on, but he shouldn’t have. There was no real rhyme or reason to it—a far less structured situation than Lisa would have liked, but that seemed to be their norm. Him less focused, her more direct, but both capable of getting things done.

“A few months ago, I had resigned myself to never having kids or a family of my own, because I didn’t want to perpetuate this wolf shit. I’ve been cynical about it for a long time, but I got to a point where I thought,
fuck it
.”

“But you answered the mate call. Did you do that just for your sisters?”

“Yes.”

“Last-ditch effort?”

“I guess it was, and that wasn’t fair for either of us. I came in here assuming that it’d be like everywhere else, and that Alpha wouldn’t know what he was doing—that he wouldn’t be a good enough emissary of the goddess, and wouldn’t know how to make a good match. He knows, though. Adam’s a damn good alpha—a
true
alpha.”

“He is.”

“Once I accepted that, it was easier for me to put my hesitations aside.”

“About what?”

“About being someone’s mate. About…making a family within the pack, and not just bringing my own family here.”

“You want a family?”

“Do
you
?”

“I haven’t given it much thought. I’d guess that none of the guys had. I don’t think we made an automatic mental leap from mate to children.”

“You were just thinking about the convenient sex.”

His bark of laughter nearly vibrated her right off his chest. “Sex, and maybe some help around the house. We’re a bit hopeless, if you haven’t noticed.”

“I noticed,” she muttered.

“But that makes us about even, right? You didn’t want a mate so much as someplace to better to go. Is that a fair assessment?”

“It is, but that’s how so many of these wolf pairings are. No better than arranged marriages, really, and sometimes the couple never really clicks. I want a little more than that if I have to do it.”

He drummed his fingers along her side, tickling her ribs and starting her squirming atop him. “Seriously? A hard-ass like you is ticklish?”

She swatted his hand away. “I’m sure you have ticklish spots. Make sure I never find them, or I’ll make your life hell.”

“You’ve already gotten off to a good start doing that.”

She slapped a hand over his mouth and narrowed her eyes at him. “Quit distracting me. You have something you wanted to tell me. About your scars.” She raised the edge of her hand a bit to let him talk.

His long, ragged exhalation heated the backs of her fingers.

She set down her hand.

“When you called me
wolf
, it reminded me of when I got cast out of my pack. That’s what the new alpha called me. What he called everyone he thought was beneath him, really.”

“Also all the wolves he thought would be a threat.”

“I guess I never thought about it that way, but the semantics don’t change the way we were treated—like we were garbage. He didn’t care if we lived or died. This was a guy whose own kids grew up with a lot of the ones he pitched out. Their friends.”

“Where are his children now, though?”

“I—” Colt pressed his lips together on the thought and furrowed his brow. He’d apparently not given it any thought before that moment. “I imagine the two girls are still there. The boys, though…” He let the words trail off, as if to think.

“Gone, like you?”

“I bet one got sent away. He was eight or nine years younger than me when I left. He was never going to be an alpha—didn’t have the right energy for it, or the build—but even back then, he was a kid who questioned everything. Intelligent, but not so strong. I’d bet good money he grew up to be a pain in his father’s ass.”

“Hmm.”
And maybe just the right age for one of my sisters
.

“I bet I could find him. If there’s any wolf who’d try to integrate into human society, I think it’d be him.”

“Would he come here?”

“I don’t see the harm in trying to convince him. I will, if you want. He might be skeptical hearing from me after all this time, though.”

“But you’d do it?”

“If it’d make your wolf less angry at my wolf, then yes.”

Lisa poked out her chin. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He let out another bark of laughter, and without the smarmy, conceitedness she’d encountered in him at first, it was a sound that sent a shiver of awareness down her spine and made her sex clench. Not every wolf could be alpha, but it was hard to deny that Colt had the makings of one. He commanded attention just by walking into a room, as did all the male wolves in Norseton. She understood why an insecure leader would feel threatened by the likes of them.

“I really don’t,” she said.

He shook his head and laced his fingers behind it. “Weird gift of mine, I guess. Most wolf men who
could
be alpha can sense how strong another werewolf is, but I can sometimes connect with that wolf part of people and suss them out. Usually, the wolf and person are in sync. I’ve got to know the person for a while to be sure of that, though.”

“You think my wolf is angry?”

“I think your wolf is a lot like her person.”

“So you think
I’m
angry, then.”

“Not at the moment. Right now, your inner wolf is…
content
.”

She checked in with herself.
Am I content?

Well, she definitely wasn’t afraid or anxious. She was worried about her family, sure, but she thought she had a good plan for handling that—or at least a start to one. She was probably a lot less anxious now than she’d been in a very long time. And in her, anxiety almost always morphed into anger. People without options knew that all too well.

“I’m definitely making my way toward content. I’ll concede that.” She pushed up onto her hands and knees and bent, skimming her lips across his.

He grinned as her tongue traced the seam of his mouth.

“Don’t move a muscle, or this stops,” she said.

“Can I move my lips?”

“Only when I tell you to.”

“Okay.”

She crawled slowly to the head of the bed and, knelt beside him. She stared down at him, teasing him with her grin and tugging her aching nipples between her fingers.

A low, strangled noise rattled from his throat, but he didn’t move.

“Good boy.” She inched one hand down her belly and dragged her tongue over her lips. When she parted her lower lips between two fingers, he made that noise again.

“Am I wet? You can talk.”

“Gods, yes.”

“And what should I do about it?”

He opened his mouth and formed his lips into the shape of some word, but closed them before pushing it out.

“Changed your mind?”

“You should do what whatever you like.”

“I like that answer.” It probably wasn’t the first one that came to mind. His cock was hard and dripping with his arousal, so the obvious first response would have been something in the realm of, “fuck me.”

And she would.

Just not yet.

“I’ll tell you what I’d like to do. First, I’d like to find some good, strong rope that even a wolf like you couldn’t break through. I’m good at knots. I’d tie you to that column in the living room with your hands behind your back and your feet spread far, and then I’ll tease you until you think you’ll die from it. How’s that sound?”

He opened his mouth, but she slipped the fingers she’d used to reveal herself to him between his lips. He sucked them clean. She didn’t really want an answer.

“I bet you’d get so hard while I whipped you. You’d be begging for the lashes and I’d be so pleased with you that I’d get on my knees in front of you and suck you off. How’s that sound?”

Again, she didn’t really want an answer. Before he could formulate one, she straddled his head backward and eased down onto his face. “Move your lips, Colton. You have my permission.”

He started unlacing his hands from behind his head but seemed to think better of it at the last second. He was obviously a fast learner. He molded his lips around her clit and gave it a tentative tug.

“You can use the rest of your mouth, too.”

“
Mmm
.” Lips, teeth, tongue. He used them all to gently probe and taste, working his tongue between her folds and spearing her as she rose slightly and descended onto his mouth again and again.

She pressed her hands to his belly and eased herself down to rest atop him, bringing his cock to her lips.

“
Fuck
,” he murmured, before resuming his task.

She wrapped her fingers tightly around his shaft and licked everything that wasn’t in her fist before giving his cock a few teasing tugs.