Werewolf Wedding (12 page)

A vase broke in the other room, which made Barney wince.

“That was a Ming,” he said. “The table is from Haverty’s though.”

“
Really
?” I asked. “But it looks so fancy.”

“Yes. Well, after you break three or four priceless antiquities from old palaces, you dial it down a little.”

Almost on cue, a massing crash from the other room once again had Barney wincing. “Besides, priceless antiquities don’t come with no-questions-asked warranties.”

I nodded in agreement as something smashed into something else, and Barney just rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Someday they’ll stop honoring it, but then again, they haven’t yet, so perhaps not.”

He sipped at some tea that I hadn’t noticed him making. Someone hit a wall, shaking the entire house. Jake shouted something incoherent and Dane shouted something I also couldn’t understand but the tone of his voice and the way Jake hissed gave away the context.

“What was he talking about the challenge?” I asked.

Barney shrugged and shook his head.

We’d noticed the dining room had fallen silent and stayed that way for a long moment. “Should we...?”

Barney nodded. The motorcycle on the table was on fire, but just a little. As predicted, the beautiful, six-foot vase which had been on the shelves, was lying on the ground in a heap of shards, some of them with a bit of blood coloring the clay. Jake was cut up, bruised, battered, and mostly back to human, but some remnants of his transformation remained. The muscles of his back and his arms were still swollen to their lupine size, and he was nursing a broken lip, but he seemed otherwise fine.

“Where did Dane go?” I asked as I cradled his head against my chest and dabbed at the lip with a cloth Barney handed me. “And I guess you weren’t kidding about the werewolf business.”

He winced and then snarled when Barney returned with some hydrogen peroxide. He handed me the bottle. “Less likely to bite you,” he said with a sly grin. I dabbed the stuff onto his cuts, and he did wince, and flinch just a bit, but I was safe from being bitten.

“I made a deal with him. He leaves you alone, and he gets the pack.”

Barney and I both exchanged a glance, but by the time I looked back down, Jake had picked himself up and shrugged me off. “I don’t want this life anyway,” he said. “All I want is you.”

“Uh, Master Somerset?” Barney entreated, “I think you’re forgetting any number of reasons for that to be a wretchedly bad idea.”

“No,” Jake said. “What I’m forgetting – what I’ve always forgotten – is that I have a life too. I have needs and desires, and none of them involve fighting with my brother for the rest of my natural existence, or running a company from a penthouse office with a goddamn golf green in it. This isn’t
me
Barney, you know that.”

He spun on his heel and strode out of the dining room.

I have never heard a door slam
quite
that hard.

––––––––

T
he ride back to my house was bumpy, silent and awkward, but as soon as we stepped in the front door, I needed answers.

I took a deep, impatient breath and pursed my lips before exhaling sharply. “What the hell was all
that
?”

Jake was all surly and stormy. He very obviously wasn’t in the mood to deal with me questioning him, but after what just happened, I wasn’t in the frame of mind to go on like everything was copacetic, so I kept prodding.

“Okay, let me get this straight. You live in a mansion, and your family has farmland of... thirty acres? Forty? How many did you say?”

“Hundred and ten,” he said, grumbling. “Little more.”

“And we’re going to
my
tiny house? Would you care to explain why that might be? For right now let’s just look past the whole ‘forsaking your duty’ thing and look at logistics. You live in a
goddamn mansion
and we’re back at my two bedroom, one bath split level? Really?”

He shot me a dark look. “I needed to get away. I needed to feel secure. And that meant getting away from the house. It might be stupid, but I needed time to think.”

I took another deep breath, fairly proud of myself for how reserved I was being. “Then you need to come clean, and
now
.”

“You don’t tell me what to do,” Jake growled.

Those eyes, those steel, beautiful eyes, put that same squiggle in my belly that I felt last time we were together.

“Or what?” I asked, slightly breathless. “You gonna punish me?”

The corner of his mouth twitched in what could easily be either a grin or a grimace. “You want to find out?”

I took another deep breath, trying to steel myself against his admittedly incredible charm. “No,” I said at first, “I want answers, not orgasms.”

Jake lifted his hands to my face, his thumbs lying along the line of my jaw. “That’s not what your body is saying.”

I was half-consciously moving my hips against one of his massively muscled legs. Just the heat of his skin through his torn slacks, between my legs, was enough to have me almost aching to feel more. Before I knew I was doing it, my head was tilted backwards, and looking up at Jake’s beautiful face. “If you’re going to punish me,” I said in between desperate, sucking kisses, “you better do more than just kiss me and then make me come again.”

Giggling, despite myself, I tried to chase a kiss, but he pulled back. “You will,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “But so will I. Probably not as many times as you, but...”

“Oh he’s cocky, too,” I said, biting my bottom lip to quiet my second round of inadvertent giggling. “Well, teach me a lesson then, you big werewolf. Wait,” I said, “tell me one more thing. Do you really howl?”

“That,” Jake said, with a growl that shook me to my very core, “is up to you.”

“If I do,” I asked, my hands trembling as I unbuttoned his jeans, “will the neighbors hear?”

His only answer was to moan as I slid my hand under the denim and around the bulge in his underwear. Soft, cotton boxer-briefs were the only barricade between my fingertips and the thing in the world that I wanted most right then. I squeezed, feeling him move under the palm of my hand, his softest skin burning to the touch.

“How are you so hot?” I asked.

“Wolf thing.”

“You’re serious about all this?” I felt him harden and thicken underneath that damn underwear that was starting to constrict around my wrist.

“Find out,” was all he answered before I freed his hardness from the cotton that squeezed him. Better my hand than a bunch of heartless fabric. Jake took a sharp breath, and let it trickle slowly out of his nose. “Your smell,” he said between clenched teeth. “It’s doing it again, it’s making me feel like I’m losing... control...”

Flattening my other hand against Jake’s muscled chest, I got a hint of what he was talking about. The smell of hard manliness, earth, the outdoors, sweat, it stung my nostrils for a second and then warmed me all the way to my bones. I felt a shiver creep through me, and from the sweat popping up on my forehead, figured it wasn’t the heat.

Well, it was
some
kinda heat.

I kissed his chest, and let my lips and tongue trail down his body until I heard him groan and felt him shudder. The trail down his chest continued down his length. I held him tight in both hands, pulling, tugging, twisting gently, and then felt a hand on the side of my face. I looked up into those silver-gray eyes, and when he smiled at me, there was a pull in my chest, then a flush of warmth.

The closest I can get to explaining the sensation that filled my soul right then is that it’s the same general tingling I get when I’m about to eat a chimichanga that has
way
too much queso sauce on top. Well, except the feeling Jake gave me was about a million times more intense.

As I took him into my mouth, his groaning became thicker, huskier, more urgent. The hand on my face stiffened along with the rest of him. Circling my tongue around his tip, the taste of Jake mixed with the scent of his hard, rough masculinity had my knees weak and my inhibitions weaker.

I’m not exactly pent-up and I’m not exactly wild when it comes to how I act in the throes of passion, so when I reached up and dragged my nails down Jake’s chest without even thinking about it, I was just as surprised as he was.

His huffing groans sharpened again. He hissed, first with either surprise or pain and then immediately afterward with pleasure. He moaned my name, and tried to pull me to my feet, but the instant I slid the tip of my tongue along the most sensitive little point underneath his tip, I knew that I, little Delilah Coltrane had somehow tamed a big, bad wolf.

Jake grabbed my hair, desperately clinging to me like he was holding on to life itself.

“Bite me,” he hissed.

I did, but I guess not quite like what he had in mind.

“Harder, harder, drag your teeth down... oh... yes!”

He had me nibbling, then biting, at the underside of his tip, running my teeth up and down his shaft so hard that I have no idea how it didn’t hurt like hell, but from how he was carrying on, I knew it didn’t. Or, at least if it did, he was
really
into pain.

Jake pushed his hips against me, gasping and moaning and throwing his head from side to side as he called my name over and over. I slid one of my hands down his leg and then back up to squeeze his base. Pausing to take a breath, I tasted a drop of him with the tip of my tongue and felt another wave of heat, then cool, then heat again, pulse through me.

“I can’t stop,” he said. “You got me, you really got me. I’m...”

I felt his body tense, his muscles contract. He went completely rigid and then all at once, the tension and tightness relaxed all at once. He hissed my name, he held me tight as he pulsed, and then he howled.

Oh my God did he ever howl.

––––––––

“Y
ou weren’t kidding,” I said with a chuckle as my snoring fiancée finally opened his eyes when the sun was right outside the window.

“What are you talking about?”

He smiled, even though the sun was obviously blinding him. His squinting made the laugh lines in the corners of Jake’s eyes stand out, and a split second later, I was back in bed with my arms around his muscular neck, and my legs on either side of him.

The heat in his body warmed me through and through. I reached down and felt him harden at just the first brush of my fingertips. He made a sort of clucking sound when I touched him to the place between my legs, the place I wanted him more than anything in the world.

I bit my lip, almost trembling with anticipation, but he clicked the tongue against the roof of his mouth again, and flipped me over so that I felt him, big and heavy, against my clit.

“Unless you want a cub right here and now, we better hold off for a while.”

“What do you mean? Oh,” I blushed. “Wait, how do you know I’m ovulating?”

He laughed a little. “It’s a wolf thing.”

I gave him a playful scratch. His hot, bronze skin warmed my fingers. “I mean, there’s always condoms. Kinda what I was intending anyway.”

His laugh turned into a snort. “No can do,” he said with a wistful sigh. “Have to use special ones. Latex isn’t made for... er, well it isn’t strong enough. You ever heard that old phrase ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’?”

“Er, I’m pretty sure that refers to Little Red Riding Hood, not how werewolf sperm can only be contained by the power of a sheep’s intestine.”

Jake looked thoughtful for a moment. “Never thought of that. And honestly I don’t know if the sheepskin would work anyway.”

“Okay,” I said, taking a breath. “Assuming I believe you about the werewolf thing, how the hell do you people have sex without getting a million babies or ending up with all those diseases that my teacher terrified me with in freshman biology?”

“It’s a—”

“Wolf thing,” I cut him off, “right.”

Before we could go any further, and holy
shit
did I want to go further, the phone in his jeans, which were thrown into a corner of my bedroom right beside the bean bag chair I’d had since I was fourteen, started buzzing. Jake grunted and looked very irritated for a few seconds. He waited until the phone started ringing for the fourth round before he got up. “Hoping they’d give up,” he explained, and then werewolf-sped over to the corner.

By the time he managed to free his phone from his shredded slacks, he had missed the call. With a grin and a cute shrug, he was about to throw it back on the ground, when it started up again. That time, the grunt was a sneer.

“It’s Barney,” he said, muffling the phone against his chest.

“Oh come on, Jake,” I said. “You can’t be mad at him for calling. After your brother and you had that Hulk-a-thon at the mansion last night, he’s probably worried to death about you.”

“I guess,” Jake said with a sigh. “Hey Barney, what’s up?”

There was a long tirade of chatter from the other end of the line that I couldn’t understand, but watching Jake’s face contort in all sorts of grimaces, frowns, pursed lips, and finally, open-mouthed horror was entertaining enough without hearing the lines that went with the cinematography.

“Now hold on,” he said. “Dane is... wait, Barney, hold on, let me ask a question for clarity. Barney, I—”

Jake fell silent again under the power of another tidal wave of cultured accent. I watched him take a deep breath, his massive chest swelling as he held the air and then sinking when he finally exhaled. He opened his mouth to say something else, but somehow Barney psychically realized it from ten miles away, and cut him off again. Poor Jake was getting flustered enough that he’d run his hand through his hair so many times he’d given himself a cowlick.

“Right,” he finally said. “Okay, yeah. I... Barney! I said I’d be there in fifteen minutes and I will. Okay, bye.”

“Fifteen minutes is plenty,” I offered, demurely.