RawHeat

Raw Heat

Charlotte Stein

Serena has spent her entire life in the underground, hiding
with the rest of humanity from the werewolf plague above. Then she begins
taking care of Connor—a werewolf the humans have captured to experiment on, in
the hopes of uncovering a cure—and finds her entire belief system shaken.

Connor isn’t a vicious animal, hell-bent on the destruction
of the human race. He’s kind, thoughtful, and above all—absolutely delicious.
The feelings he’s starting to inspire are sending Serena out of control…lewd,
filthy, glorious feelings, which could cost her job as a nurse. Not to mention
her life.

Lust and love between a wolf and a human are strictly
forbidden. But for Connor, Serena may be willing to break all the rules…

Chapter One

She knew something was wrong before she’d even worked her
way down his body to the tented place beneath the sheet. She could tell by his
face—all taut with tension—and the way he was holding himself. Usually he
watched her run the soapy cloth over his chest and shoulders and…other parts of
him, but this time he’d turned his gaze away, and his shoulders seemed stiff.

It didn’t take her long to figure out what he was doing.
He’d pinched the sheet in with both of his arms so she couldn’t get beneath it.
It was stupid of him, of course it was, but he’d done it anyway and now she had
to either wrestle with him or act as though half a job was enough.

She knew it wouldn’t be. Whatever they’d done to him this
time—it had covered him in great streaks of brownish, crusted blood. And though
the wounds that had leaked said blood were now completely gone, she had to get
the remains of it off him. She had to. Werewolf healing didn’t make you
magically clean and comfortable.

And that was the real kicker. The thought of him being
uncomfortable, of him festering in his bed all covered in the evidence of what
they’d done, each wound like a push pin sticking into his skin with a note
attached—
Here’s where they hit me with a crowbar so hard it split the skin.
Here’s where they made me roll in broken glass, then laughed to see my eyes
blaze colorless, and my teeth bared like razorblades.

Of course, he didn’t go over completely, when they did all
of those things. But she’d seen the tapes and knew he got the eyes, the teeth,
the stripe of fur and strange new cartilage down the length of his spine, like
something out of a dinosaur’s graveyard.

She’d seen him turn and stare up at the camera, that pale
gaze searching and searching as though some part of his mind still understood,
and could feel her watching him.

It made her shiver. It made it hard to believe this man in
front of her was the same creature. Even now, with something wrong burning down
deep between them and his face turned away, she could see the great, gray
stillness of his eyes, like pebbles at the bottom of a river. He’d pulled his
lower lip almost completely into his mouth, too, which meant the razorblades
weren’t there. If they had been, they’d have sliced that thing clean off.

So why was her breath catching in her chest? Why could she
hear her heart hammering and hammering in some impossible place, like her throat
or behind her eyes or right out of her body and halfway down the hall? She kept
making the slow circles, everything getting soapier and soapier, nothing any
different than usual, not really, and yet the atmosphere kept getting heavier.

She could almost feel it now, pressing down on her bent
back. Something in her made her keep glancing at the door, though she couldn’t
say why. They weren’t doing anything wrong. She was his pseudo-nurse and he was
her pseudo-patient, and every day they did this very same thing. It didn’t
matter if the ward now seemed dim and strange and empty, with him being the
last Class One left and all the beds like markers, reminding them of the others
who’d escaped or gone mad or worse. It didn’t matter if he’d called her Serena
the other day instead of Nurse Kent or nothing at all.

And it definitely didn’t matter that she’d called him
Connor. Other nurses did it, she knew they did. Even the horrible one who liked
sticking pins in wolves until they snarled and bucked against restraints that
Conn never had to have—she called her patients by their names as though they
were still human. It was just easier to say,
Conn, can you turn over
?

Even though she knew the others never asked.

Was that it? Was it the fact she’d asked instead of ordered
him? And she hadn’t even gone with the usual thing she called him either. She’d
said Connor instead, as though he really was still Connor Grayson somehow, a
man with a human life and a family in some bunker or fortress somewhere, just
waiting for him to return without that livid scar all over his shoulder.

Too late, too late
, she thought, because it was. One
bite and you were gone forever, lost to the seething masses who now ruled the
world above. Of course the doctors claimed it wasn’t true, that the world still
belonged to humans and a cure was imminent, just around the corner—why, they
made progress with the wolves every day, didn’t they?

But then the ceiling groaned above their heads and a new
breach took another hundred lives and who could believe they were telling the
truth? She hardly saw anyone now, on her travels around the endless underground
corridors. Really it was no wonder she’d started talking to Conn, actually
talking to him about meaningless things like books he’d once read and places he
remembered. His memory was just so vast and full of the time before and the
world above, and if she was truly honest, his voice did weird things to her
insides.

It was like molten metal, pouring all over her. And it
sounded that way now, when he told her she should stop in a tone so tight it
practically hummed.

Of course she knew she should obey him. If he was telling
her do something, it had to be important. Wolves didn’t get to tell humans what
to do, down here. Wolves did as they were told or else they got beaten, or
drugged, or restrained. Sometimes they got all three just because it suited the
doctors and their tests, so him speaking to her that way had to mean something.

She wished she didn’t know what. She wished she hadn’t said
to him,
Oh Connor,
the day before. It had sounded too warm, too full of
the ache that had gone through her on seeing his broken body, and then he’d
looked at her with something other than complete stillness.

His eyes had blazed, briefly, and when she’d gone to give
him the shot she’d stolen—just for the pain, didn’t he deserve something for
this terrible, terrible pain?—he’d actually grabbed her wrist. Told her she’d
be in trouble, that she shouldn’t, that he’d heal soon, he would, he just
needed a bit of time.

He just needed food, which she’d brought him. It had meant
she’d gone hungry today, but what did it matter? What did it matter when she
could count his ribs sometimes through the thick meat of his immense body, all
six-foot-five of him just melting away right before her eyes? What did it
matter when they’d lost the war—human beings had lost the war so who gave a
fuck anymore.
Who gave a fuck?

She pulled the sheet away from him and he didn’t resist. He
kept his gaze on nothing and clenched his jaw and breathed too hard, but he
didn’t try to stop her. He just let her soak the cloth in the hot water again,
then run it down over his heavy thighs as though really he didn’t have anything
like an erection. No, no, no, nothing like that ever happened. Wolves didn’t
have sex thoughts. Hell, humans barely had sex thoughts anymore either, and
certainly not about their half-animal patients.

Why, she’d not had a whole, complete sex thought in over a
year—ever since the guy in the laundry room, spurting between her greedy
fingers with his mouth on her neck and her head filled with weird thoughts.
Weird thoughts like,
If you were a wolf, you’d bite me now
.

Though she’d long since stopped thinking things like that.
Since Connor had been assigned to her, she’d stopped thinking about a lot of
things. She’d stopped thinking about how wet she sometimes felt between her
legs, after she’d spent the day sliding a soapy cloth over his naked body.
She’d stopped thinking about running through a forest with a wolf after her,
because too often it was Connor and he didn’t bite her when he caught her.

He moaned in her ear with that liquid-metal voice of his
instead. He rocked between her legs and asked her if she still thought he was a
man, if she still found him attractive even though she knew what he was underneath.

She could never remember what she’d answered, in these
dreams. But she knew what she’d say now if he asked. God yes. Yes, yes, a
million times yes. It didn’t matter that he was a wolf—he made the guy in the
laundry room look like a mutant. She knew he did. Before all of this he must
have had girls falling all over him, girls prettier and sexier than her, girls
with pouting lips and fine, straight hair, all ready to devour his perfect,
lush mouth and his stormy eyes and that look about him, that hungry,
ready-to-fuck look.

It was on him now, that look. She got to the bottom of his
legs without glancing at his face, but once there she made the mistake of
flicking her gaze up.

And he was burning at her, just burning. He’d clenched his
hands into fists at his side, which should have been threatening but wasn’t
somehow. None of this was threatening, even though she could see his cock
clearly, jutting up over his belly like a…like a…

Jesus, she didn’t even know. Of course she’d known how big
he was, there—she’d seen it often enough, thick and slumberous between his
thighs—but close up like this and so stiff and swollen and ready to just do
whatever it was he wanted to do…

It felt very, very different.

So much so that her nipples had stiffened underneath the
cotton of her stupid too-thin uniform, and she knew how slick her sex was.
She’d soaked through the material of her panties, at the very least, and when
she moved, things glided.

It was mortifying. Not least of which because she knew one
thing for certain—he’d be able to tell. He didn’t completely turn into a wolf,
not ever, but he definitely had all of the senses. He was always sat up waiting
for her, before she’d even opened the door and walked into the ward. He knew
when she’d stopped washing her hair with the meager supply of shampoo and
started in on the scrappy soap.

He’d know this. He’d be able to smell it, hear it, feel it
most likely. It was probably the reason for his immense erection—he’d gotten
the scent of her ridiculous arousal and it had forced a completely unwanted
reaction on him.

She almost wanted to apologize, but it would just mean
acknowledging what was going on. And that seemed like a bad, bad idea. Better
just to keep soaping him until he started breathing in a completely unsettling
and too rapid way, body minutely squirming and rocking against the bed,
everything so hot and stifling and awful.

When she dared to look at him again, he’d closed his eyes.
He’d turned his head to one side, against the pillow, and it seemed for all the
world as though he’d found himself in the middle of a troubling dream.

His gleaming, parted lips aside, of course. They just looked
like something she needed to touch, immediately. She couldn’t even see the
sharp hint of his teeth, so it didn’t seem like too great a hardship to imagine
sliding a finger inside or maybe…maybe she could just lean down and—

She shook herself hard and kept on with it, teeth gritted,
arms now soaped all the way up to the elbows. Everything would be okay if she
just pretended all of this was normal, if she just continued washing him and
studiously ignored his stiff cock. In a minute she could tell him she was done
and he could clean that place himself.

Hell, he could do other things to it, if he wanted.

She would just turn her back and think of other things
distant and far away, and he could stroke himself to orgasm while her sanity
held on to itself by a thread. Something like that.

Something that was not her running the back of her hand over
the thick length of him, just to see him jerk and shiver.

He didn’t move away though. He didn’t grab her wrist the way
he’d done before, and he didn’t tell her to stop or anything like that. And
when she did it again, firmer this time and with more intent, he opened his
eyes.

Looked right at her, almost feral but not quite, his entire
body rippling with the tense breaths she could see him drawing in.

She hardly dared move. Did he want her to? God, she didn’t
even know what the
want
was, in that equation. She thought, blindly, of
the guy in the laundry room and her hand on him, but it hardly seemed adequate
in the face of Connor’s swollen cock and the arousal thrumming through her and
fuck it, just fuck it.

On the next pass over his body she tossed the cloth aside,
halfway down. Then just let her bare, slick hand slide up, over the solid
length of him, until he bucked and put a fist to his mouth and oh God that was
a sweet sight.

She could nearly hear the moan he’d pushed right into his
clenched hand, and when she slid her tentative grip back down—almost like
cleaning but not quite—she actually did hear him. He was loud, really loud—far
louder than she’d ever expected in thoughts she absolutely hadn’t had.

And he pushed into it too. He rocked his hips and came close
to fucking her hand before she’d even gotten up a good stroke, but that was
fine. That was okay. If they were doing this then she sure needed the help,
because her brain had short-circuited five minutes ago and he felt like a
liquid dream in her hand—so solid and thick and slippery.

A pearl of pre-come had welled in the slit at the tip, and
when she swiped her thumb over it he produced more—a fine trickle over her
pumping fist. It was almost too much to bear, too much to take in, knowing he
was going to climax so soon with her hand on him and her body over his and God,
God.

She squeezed her thighs together around the sweet ache
there, but it only made things worse. Her clit felt immense, swollen, and every
little movement chafed her uniform against her nipples. If he hadn’t been able
to tell how aroused she was before, he’d definitely be able to detect it now,
and the thought spurred her on, made her jerk at him quicker, harder.

A groan escaped from between his lips, though she could
hardly blame him. He looked dazed and lust-choked, mouth open and so
slick-looking, head back, spine arched almost clear off the bed. She’d had no
idea she could do this to someone—make them feel this abandoned, amidst the
pain and the horror and everything pressing on them all of the time—but it
couldn’t be denied.