Lost (Shifter Island Book 1) (5 page)

And you’ve done that.

Would Luca have? he wondered. Or any of the others? No, they wouldn’t have left her in the woods, but would they have fed her? Given her their bed to sleep in? Worse yet, crawled into bed
with
her?

He could imagine their outrage when they found out what he’d done.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Abby said.

That jerked his attention back to her. She seemed as relaxed as she had early this morning, when she’d drifted awake to find him looking at her. All the distress of the day before seemed to be long gone.

“I’m not sure—what does that mean?” he asked.

“It means I wonder what you’re thinking.”

They’d come together near this very spot, under the moonlight last night. He remembered the warmth of her, her eagerness to welcome him, the way she’d clutched and pulled at him, urging him deeper, closer. The way she’d come out of the cabin in search of him, her scent rich and strong. As if…

As if…

But no, that couldn’t be true.

A bond? Was that possible?

He had no experience with what a mating bond felt like, but he was sure that couldn’t have been it. That had simply been the urge to couple, something that was very natural for a male his age—particularly for one who hadn’t had release for a long time. Natural for her too, he supposed.

He flared his nostrils slightly and drew in her scent. He didn’t move his head or his hands, and hoped she wouldn’t know what he was doing.

He wanted her again. Badly.

“I really acted kind of crazy yesterday,” she said quietly, looking at the blanket. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s no need to apologize.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t do the sensible thing. I overreacted. See, there was this guy. I thought I liked him, but it seems like I keep doing the same thing. I pick people who tell me what to do. People like my father.”

Aaron picked up a mushroom from her plate and popped it into his mouth. “Fathers are supposed to give advice and instruction,” he murmured as he chewed it. He licked his lips after he’d swallowed it.

“Not in a way that makes you feel like you’re stupid.”

He took a deep breath, thinking of the criticism he’d received during his youth, not only from his father, but from the elders and even his brother. He’d always tried to tell himself that it was an unavoidable part of growing to maturity, but that hadn’t made the criticism any easier to bear.

“Enduring makes you strong,” he muttered.

She reached out to touch his hand, which was drifting back toward her plate. “Then I don’t want to be that kind of strong.”

There was hurt in her eyes, something that went deep and seemed to have been there for a long time.

“Nor do I,” Aaron admitted.

“My mother died when I was eight,” she said. “I guess it—I don’t know. I guess my father was so hurt by losing her that he went kind of crazy. He got really harsh after that. Criticizing every little thing. He didn’t like my friends, especially not my boyfriends, or the college I wanted to go to, or the clothes I wore. He always had a better idea. And my brothers got to be just like him. When I got out of college, I moved away so I didn’t have to listen to them any more. But”—her voice caught—“somehow, I keep picking people who are just like him. They want to tell me what to wear, how to do my hair, what music to listen to. What I should think. They say you pick what you’re used to, and I never used to believe that, but I guess it’s true.”

Why she was telling him all this, he wasn’t sure. Maybe she felt comfortable opening her heart to a stranger. He was aware that humans sometimes did that, and had experienced it a couple of times on the mainland.

Maybe he looked compassionate.

Either way, she had begun to look lonely and sad. With a mournful feeling deep in his chest he moved across the blanket and gathered her into his arms. She settled into his embrace quickly, wrapping an arm around him and tucking her head into the curve of his neck and shoulder.

“Don’t be sad,” he told her.

Whether it was truly the call of the bond or simply a desire to couple, within minutes they had come together again. She hadn’t put on any underwear, he saw as she pulled up her skirt and lay back, something that both amused and surprised him. He had to shove the plates off onto the dirt of the clearing to give them room on the blanket, then leaned down and began to tease her warm, wet folds with his tongue. She groaned, a long sound that was almost like music, and gripped the blanket in her fists as he poked the tip of his tongue inside her. The taste of her was wonderful, both salty and sweet, and he lapped at it eagerly, sliding his hands underneath the full curves of her ass so he could grip them.

Her noises turned to a steady “ah-ah-ah” as he licked and stroked, rising in pitch, then falling. Her hips came up off the ground, seeking more contact, urging him to go deeper, to bring her to the edge.

Instead, he drew back and sat up.

“Noooo,” she moaned, reaching for him.

Smiling, he unfastened his jeans and pushed them down over his hips. His cock popped out eagerly, and he slipped it inside her welcoming heat with a grunt of pleasure. Abby grabbed him with both hands and pulled him down to kiss him fervently, clinging to fistfuls of his t-shirt and groaning again as she used her heels to push him deeper and deeper.

As he thrust, he let his wolf slip free a little. He felt it howl and flex, anxious to break through, to take control, but he pushed it back.

Not yet.

Again, the beast howled and bayed. It didn’t struggle any further; for now, it had what it wanted.

“Aaron,” Abby moaned. “God, Aaron…”

He began to thrust harder, faster, Abby’s fingers digging deep into his shoulders. There was a desperate expression on her face, a deep, demanding need, and she tightened her legs around him like a vise. Off in the distance, he heard a chorus of howling, something that sounded like the entire pack had come together, but it only lasted for a moment. Abby didn’t seem to hear it at all.

Then she matched the cry. Her head arched back and she let out a low, reverberating scream and clenched his cock, the whole core of her throbbing and pulsing in her orgasm. He reached his climax only a moment later, spilling deep inside her, breathing in big, starving gulps.

Both of them were gasping when he withdrew.

They lay there for a long time, completely spent, staring up at the sky.

He didn’t venture toward the settlement that day, or the next. Abby said nothing more about a boat, about rescue.

Instead, they talked about their lives.

She told him about her childhood, the time when her mother had been alive, when she’d felt loved and cherished, free to do and be whatever she chose. Back then, she’d thought about being an explorer, someone who traveled from state to state, country to country, simply to see what was there. She and her mother had taken drives sometimes for hundreds of miles, no destination in mind, the car windows rolled down so the wind would sweep through the car, music blaring from the radio.

“That sounds very nice,” he told her. In truth, he didn’t think much of cars as a way to get from one place to another; he preferred to run. But he didn’t tell her that. He simply listened, and agreed.

“It was,” she said.

“What sort of music?”

“Sixties rock. Girl groups.”

Aaron had no idea what that was. He understood that “rock” meant a type of music he’d heard bits of, but… “sixties”? And “girl groups”? Groups of females who sang, he supposed—and that made him think of his mother and the other females singing softly around the fire on warm nights, and the way females in their wolf forms would sometimes gather together to croon. Those were pleasant, alluring sounds, and he found himself becoming curious about these “girl groups” Abby enjoyed.

“That sounds good,” he said.

“It was.”

Then her expression turned wistful, and he let her return to talking about the things she’d seen. The Grand Canyon. Disneyland. The world’s largest ball of string. All of it mysterious and puzzling.

In between their conversations, they gathered food and prepared meals together. She found other kinds of berries and collected them happily, then found a different type of mushroom that she said tasted much better.

He told her bits and pieces about his family and the other residents of the settlement. What it was like to live on an island where needs were simple, where their food supply depended on rainfall and sunlight, where a bitter cold winter could mean life or death.

She didn’t ask why they didn’t move to the mainland.

On impulse, she cut small pieces from two of his potatoes—the parts where eyes had sprouted—and planted them near the cabin. She’d done that as a child, she said, and had been thrilled when new potatoes actually grew.

“I can’t plant a garden where I live,” she told him. “I miss doing it. My mom and I always had a garden.”

“Perhaps you should live somewhere else,” he suggested.

“I wish—” she started.

“Do you like to wish, Abby?”

She’d said it a number of times: “I wish.” It made him create a wish of his own, that he could have the ability to give her whatever she wanted. A garden. Loud music that she could sing along with.

That he could bring her mother back from the world of the dead.

But she shook her head. “It’s fine,” she said firmly. “Everything’s good. Don’t listen to me being silly.”

Whenever the urge struck them, they kissed and caressed, pulled off their clothes and stood naked in the sunlight and the moonlight, and on the afternoon of Abby’s third day on the island, in the rain. Stroking water off each other was a new experience, feeling warm skin under cool liquid; the stroking turned to licking, and Abby laughed as she sank to her knees and drew his throbbing cock into her mouth. That was another new experience, having rain cascade down over his body as Abby sucked and licked him and ran her hands up and down the backs of his legs and caressed his sac. He challenged himself to remain standing… and lost. The rain had turned the dirt of the clearing to mud, and by the time they had finished with each other, they were both nearly covered with sticky muck.

Rather than run off to clean herself, Abby began to dance in the rain, toes digging into the mud, arms swooping through the air. She looked like a happy child, Aaron thought, maybe happier than she had been in years.

He loved her, he realized.

Somehow, during a time of deprivation, the gods had brought him something rare and wonderful, something he’d never even imagined. He watched her dance with a heart so full it felt like it would explode out of his chest, so full he could barely breathe.

It happened sometimes, he’d been told: a connection this sudden and complete. Sometimes the bonding took months, or years; with other couples the bond was cemented within a matter of days. Aaron couldn’t remember that having happened during his lifetime, and supposed that was because most of the members of the pack had known each other from the day they were born. But it
had
happened.

It was happening now.

With every step he took, every breath he pulled into his lungs, he was more and more sure that he and Abby were meant to become a pair. Why else would she have come here? Why else would he have been the one to find her?

Coincidence
, common sense told him.
An accident.

But this felt like no accident.

He brought a towel out from the cabin and, when she had finally slowed down her dancing, used it to sponge the mud off her skin. She closed her eyes a little as he did it and looked as content as a baby in her mother’s arms, drowsy and sated. When the mud was gone he gave her the towel and purred softly deep down inside as she bathed him. Then they left the rain and went inside, and he put together a small fire in the fireplace so they could sit on the blanket and get warm.

They dozed there for a while, woke and made love again, slowly and gently.

They ate what little food was in the house, crawled into bed and slept in each other’s arms. When they woke again the rain had slowed to a barely audible shower, something that sounded like a constant whisper against the roof.

The next day dawned bright and clear, and grew warmer as the morning went on. As they puttered around the cabin, and Abby spent time rearranging the mysterious collection of things in her gigantic yellow bag, Aaron felt an overwhelming urge to show her more of the island, to introduce her to more and more of the things he enjoyed. The place he had in mind was one of his favorites, and because it was so far from the settlement, it didn’t generally attract the rest of the pack. That made it perfect, especially on such a sunny day.

“Come with me,” he told her.

Fifteen minutes of walking took them to the stream that spilled down out of the hills. The spot he’d chosen was a wide, deep pool that sat in the sunlight most of the day and was usually warmer than anywhere else. Certainly warm enough for her to bathe in, at this time of year, and it was a beautiful place, surrounded by wildflowers and long grass. He’d come here a couple of times in the days since his Separation period had begun, to do exactly what he was meant to do: think about his life, his future, the future of the pack.

You couldn’t sit here for any length of time, he thought, and still be tempted by anything available on the mainland.

Stop
, the voice of good sense warned him.

Stop? He couldn’t stop. He’d already had visions, long, detailed daydreams of Abby choosing to live here, with him. Of their making a home together.

There was a faint breeze blowing, enough to catch Abby’s long hair and send it floating around her shoulders. Even in her rumpled dress, wrinkled from being wadded up inside her bag, she was lovely, lush and pink. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do more than watch her bathe.

She looked at the water for a while, then tipped her head back and let the sunlight fall on her face and throat.

“The water is warm,” he told her.

“Is it?”

She was playing at being skeptical, teasing him with her voice and her eyes. He’d brought the blanket with him, thinking they could put it to the same use that they had back at the cabin. He put it down on a rock and went to her, gathered her close to him and kissed her tenderly.

In the part of him that was both here and in another place entirely, his wolf danced and spun, howling with joy. He couldn’t remember that part of him ever having been so full of delight, not even after a successful hunt and a full belly. This was something new, something precious. Smiling, he caressed the back of her neck, wound the soft silk of her hair around his fingers, pressed his body to hers.

She seemed a little hesitant at first (though whether it was of shedding her clothes here in a place that was more exposed, or bathing in what might actually be cold water, or both, he couldn’t decide) but then stripped off her dress and undergarments and tossed them aside. She strode quickly into the water, obviously believing that it was cold despite what he’d told her; then, when she discovered it was warm, kept going until she reached the middle of the pool, where she crouched down and began to scoop water up over her shoulders.

“It feels so good!” she called to him.

“I told you it would.”

“Are you coming in?”

“In a minute.”

“But it feels so good. Come in. Come on!”

He thought of her on the day he’d found her, huddled sobbing in his arms. He’d thought that day that she would rest for a little while, then insist on being taken back to the mainland immediately—even if it meant he had to conjure a fully fueled and seaworthy boat out of thin air—rather than remain here on the island. Instead, she was free-spirited, laughing, content.

Could this last?

Even if it was the bond he was feeling, could this possibly last? Would she turn her back on her home, her fellow humans, her entire life?

Feeling more hesitant than he had since he’d found her, he reached down to unfasten his jeans and shirt. He took them off quickly, then strode into the water until he was arm’s reach from Abby.

When he crouched down, she splashed him.

He was startled at first, but wasted no time in splashing her back. The pool was large enough for them to scramble around, trying to evade each other while trying to deliver the biggest splash, both of them laughing and stumbling and falling more than once, losing their footing in the soft, slippery silt at the bottom. When they were finally out of breath they collapsed into the water, still laughing. Abby’s hair was soaked and plastered to her head in a comical way, and Aaron thought he’d like nothing more than to comb it out with his fingers, strand by strand, while the water lapped up against her bare skin.

“Thank you for this,” she said after a minute.

“I’m afraid I can’t take credit. This has been here since long before I was born.”

She shook her head. “For bringing me here. For… being here. The other day–” She cut herself off and shook her head again. “It was an awful day. I really acted stupid when I got here. I never should have gone off alone to begin with, and then I didn’t know where I was going. I’m like the stereotypical ditz.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Aaron said.

“A fool.”

“I don’t think you’re a fool.”

“I made some pretty bad choices. I should have… I was running. Trying to get away from someone. I let that override my common sense.”

“But it brought you here.”

She looked around, serious and thoughtful, then reached up to smooth some of her hair back off her forehead to stop it from trailing water down her face. “I don’t know what to think about all of this. It’s nothing I normally do. I mean, there are people who go on vacation just so they can hook up with somebody. No strings, you know? Just have fun for a few days and then forget it ever happened. But that’s not me. At least, it didn’t used to be me.”

“Are you going to forget this ever happened?”

Even asking the question made Aaron’s heart ache. The thought of losing her created a pain unlike anything he’d ever experienced.

She took so long to reply that he thought his heart would shrivel and die.

“I don’t want to,” she murmured.

He moved her so that she was straddling him, her legs wrapped around his hips, and held her close to his chest. She circled her arms around him, head resting on his shoulder, her skin both warm and cool where it touched his. Her tangled hair was cool against his cheek, and acting on impulse he touched his tongue to it—then thought of licking all the water from her body, bathing her that way, the way he had in the rain.

Like a wolf. Like the wild part of him.

“You should take your bath,” he said abruptly, and slipped away from her, trying not to notice the look of disappointment on her face.

“What’s wrong?” she asked with a tremor in her voice.

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you moving away?”

He had no good answer for that. Of course, the answer he did have was the right one, the sensible one, but it was also the most painful one—and judging by the look on her face, it was one she wouldn’t like very much.

“I want to watch you bathe,” he said.

“But–”

Even before she had spoken, he’d begun to understand that she saw this as an escape from her real life, the life that had made her so unhappy. She was thinking of this as a paradise, one that involved nothing more complicated than puttering around the cabin and repeated bouts of lovemaking. She had no real idea what she was committing herself to by being with him, and he had no idea how to tell her. He was sure she was partially blinded by the strength of the bond, if that was what this was, and would likely agree to anything he proposed—but he couldn’t do that to her, regardless of how strongly he felt about her.