Wilding (2 page)

H
e came upon her first thing the
next morning, as she stood beside the river as unprepared for his advance as a
doe consumed with a leaf just beyond her reach. Despite the fact that she was
looking straight at him, she did not understand what she saw, or surely she
would have run. There was only a moment when he thought she might, when her
gaze slid down the human body even he had not been certain he could reclaim and
focused on the stiffened cock jutting threatening toward her. This body was
hungry for hers, to tie up with his mate and ride her ’til she howled and took his
seed to overflowing in her yielding sex. Yes, that was what this form demanded,
the impetus and payment for shifting wolf to man.

But it wasn’t going to be so quick, he
realized as soon as he overwhelmed the woman and took hold of her by the soft
flesh of her arms where the short sleeves of her shirt left them bare and
enticingly available. As soon as her breasts brushed even lightly against his
chest, the curve of her full thighs against his legs, his dick along her belly,
the sense of her hit him, really hit him.

Her shivering, her wide-eyed fear, the
heady scent of pheromones flooding her body and warm juices wetting her pussy,
these were like the taste of hot, fresh blood to his wolf. He drove her
backward with his naked body, with the force of his hunger, until he had his
lush little prey pressed panting with trembling anxiety and excitement against
the rough trunk of a tree. It was all he could do to hold back the beast inside
him when it reared up too ready to feast. His wolf wanted her bared, clothing
ripped away, soft thighs pulled wide apart, her most tender pink flesh laid
open, defenseless and primed.

It was her smell that he held
to—focused on—to calm and restrain himself. To remind himself she
was human, purely, not another shifter or even a wolfkin who had yet to turn.
His best effort was just enough to avoid taking her immediately and far too
savagely, hurting her, this little female. His ripe, voluptuous little mate.

Sweet and salty, he thought again as he
leaned in against her and let himself revel in the bliss of burying his face in
the wavy hair at her temple. The green cap she wore had fallen away unnoticed
as he had advanced on her. Now he pulled the band to free her long, loose
curls. She whimpered in sharp pain as he snapped the elastic in his haste, as
his need to explore every part of her made him careless of his strength. His
hot breath against her scalp made her sigh, though, a release he felt from deep
in her solar plexus. She went pliant against him, and his thick erection throbbed
against her stomach in anticipation.

She tensed again and squirmed and wedged
her bent arms up between their bodies. He could only guess that her instincts
had flared, warning her that she was about to be claimed, that this huge beast
of a male was going to drive his rigid cock to her core, penetrate her, invade
her. It was going to hurt when she stretched to take him. It was going to burn
and ache and break her every defense, until she dissolved in the pleasure of
surrender to her fated mate.

The part of him that was human, that was
riding the beast, both reining his wolf and directing it, rose to the fore
enough that he was able to give a thought to her struggle. Was she truly
pushing him away? The sensation of her small hands closing around his biceps told
him no. She was fighting her fear, resisting her own lust, doubting her own
instinctive reaction to his possessive sexual aggression. When he willed
himself to be still and slow his breathing, she automatically did the same. Yet
it was anything but calming. Pupils dilated. Skin flushed. Sexual hormones
flowed through the blood, senses unhindered by panic. An overwhelming feeling
of intimacy, so strong it even made the shifter himself waver on his feet and
sway against his mate, collapsed his senses into hers and vice versa.

Will
…. Yes, he had a name he
remembered now, a human name. Will let his weight settle more heavily against
the woman—his woman—and savored the feeling of her curves molding
to his hard angles and muscular contours. Releasing his hold on her upper arms,
his hands closed over her full breasts and weighed and kneaded her flesh
through the thin uniform shirt she wore. She shuddered raggedly, and her
nipples peaked hard in telltale points against the rough lace of her bra under
her top. Gods but she was soft and round and lush, pink-skinned and warm,
everything the man and the wolf wanted in their mate.

A mew escaped her bowed lips when he
trailed his hands and his breath down her body. Will crouched before his woman,
his cheek against her inner thigh, face nuzzled just lower than the juncture of
her plump thighs. His hands freely explored and appreciated the shape of her
legs, the curve of her round ass. Then his mouth was at her mons, his low growl
hot against his own face as his teeth nipped at the inseam of her shorts. His
senses filled with the intoxicating musk of her arousal. She was ready for him,
as ready as she could be to discover werewolves really did exist, that she was
destined to be mated to one, possessed by him, protected by him, pleasured and
bred by him.

With a snarl of impatience at the base of
his throat, the were reached for the waistband of his woman’s clothing. Even he
wasn’t sure if he could undress her, whether his beast would rip through his
control and the thin fabric barrier to sexually devour her as surely as it
devoured food prey. Neither the man nor the wolf, neither Will nor his mate,
had the chance to find out.

The growl that drowned out the lovers’
racing heartbeats shattered the moment. Even before the werewolf, the Odin’s
Wolf, the
alpha
shot to his feet with every muscle taut and drawn to
strike, he knew what he was facing. His mate yelped and stared wide-eyed as
Will spun to meet the hulking bear that had come up on them in the distraction
of their desire.

Bear or berserkr? That was the question
that forced its way up through the fog of Will’s hazy memory. He
knew—remembered—in that instant that just as there were beasts like
him, man and wolf in one, there were men who were also bears. Some allied with
Will’s kind. Some fought against him. His inhumanly developed sense of smell
told him this was a bear—just a bear, but that was all it needed to be to
kill a frail human, to challenge even a powerful shifter.

Taller than Will by far when it reared, the
black bear was five hundred pounds of fur and claws and appetite. It had
obviously fed off the food and fear of campers long enough to grow to like it,
to aggressively seek out humans. And it was focused on Will’s mate more than it
was on the were. She was the easy prey, or would have been. The Odin’s Wolf
bristled with rage at the thought of his mate in danger. The heavy bands of
muscle along his shoulders, arms, chest all flexed and rose like a wild beast’s
hackles. Fur rippled just under his skin, ready to erupt.

The were’s body remembered what his mind
did not have time to grasp—that there was a form that rivaled the size
and strength of the bear. Will shook his head, his shoulders, and snarled as he
took half-form and launched himself at the great black bear. In one step, the
were went from man to mythical beast, half-animal, seven feet tall, a wolfen
head on a hulking body covered in dark gray fur. He rippled with power and
fury.

Werewolf and bear roared at one another as
they clashed. Black lips curled back from dagger sharp teeth in snarling
mouths. The animal knocked away Will’s swiping blow of deadly claws. Despite an
eruption of pain in his shoulder, the werewolf dodged the same strike from the
bear. Both bellowing, the males collided then. They threw their weight against
each other, huffing, grunting, frothing, growling. Too close a match in size
and strength, neither took the other off his feet.

Retreating one step each, panting heavy and
hard, the werewolf and bear eyed one another. In this form, Will found himself
as eager and hungry for battle as the huge animal was to feed. Yet there was
the shifter’s mate to think of. If he grappled and engaged the bear any
further, the were risked injury too grave to protect the woman. He knew it was
wiser to stand against the animal and force it to back away. Though the idea
offended the wolf and the warrior within him, Will planted himself in a wide
stance before his female and howled in wrath, muscles flexing in a deliberate
display of strength.

With all his breath, with all the power
inherent in his supernatural form and all the urgency of keeping his woman
safe, the werewolf growled and snapped and clawed at the soil with his feet.
Glowering at the bear, Will did the one thing the animal could not have
anticipated. At the top of his booming voice, he snarled, “Go.”

The effect was obvious and instantaneous.
To this unnatural command, at this human voice issuing from a beast, the bear
reared and shuffled back a step, and then another.

“Go,” Will roared again, commanding all the
force of presence of not just an alpha wolf but an alpha shifter. He wielded
the primal authority of a warrior bound to a mythic form, of the ulfhednar wolf
soldiers trained to fight for a god of war, none other than Odin the All-Father
himself.

When the bear, surely having realized by
then that there were easier meals to be had, lowered himself to retreat on four
legs, it did so having drawn no blood—neither werewolf nor human. It had
tasted neither Will nor his mate.

The shifter waited until the animal had
turned and its considerable girth had disappeared through the trees and over
the nearest hill and then the next. Only then, only when his female was safe,
did the were slowly call back his wolf, recalling himself from his half-shifted
form. Fully human again, at least in body, Will turned to the shocked and
trembling woman… and collapsed weak and sweating to his knees.

“T
ell me your name,” he said in a
low grumble of a voice that made Kim snap to attention from her place slumped
and dozing in the chair beside the bed.

After having half-dragged the barely
conscious hulk of a man back to her 4x4, then into her cabin, and having spent
the whole day and night in the lumpy floral armchair that was far prettier than
it was comfortable, Kim felt a spasm of pain shoot down her spine. She ignored
it, except maybe to feel grateful for the physical reassurance that this wasn’t
a dream. This man was real and here in her bedroom, in her bed. Crouching on
the creaky mattress, she leaned over his massive body to check on him.

Man A217 seized Kim suddenly with both
hands on her face and pulled her down over him for an open-mouthed kiss. He
swallowed her gasp of surprise as he feasted and sucked so thoroughly, so
unrelentingly, on her lips. His tongue wouldn’t let hers escape as it slid warm
and sure and demanding into her mouth. The man was salt and earth and sex,
lapping along the inside of her trembling and flushed cheeks.

When her lungs began to burn for lack of
air—with other parts of her burning for other kinds of
sustenance—Kim flattened her hands against the man’s wide bare chest to
push herself away, give herself some space. Unwilling to release her, he made
her use all her strength, made her really struggle to resist him. His
forcefulness and raw sexuality had her trembling head to toe, an unsettling
vibration of a sensation so strong that it bordered on pain.

Kim gulped in a breath and blinked rapidly
several times, lashed fluttering to clear the lust-fogged gaze that had her
seeing everything in soft focus. And still she looked down into a broad face so
handsome that it surpassed even her
fantasies
of Wolf… of
Man
A217.
His dark brown hair was just as long and wavy as she had imagined but so much
silkier, as she found when her fingers slid into the sable strands
almost
unbidden. And those eyes…. They were a deep mica green that played off the
slight gold tinge of his deeply tanned skin. All that skin….

He was naked. In her bed. There was a
two-hundred-pound, six-foot-two, nude wolf man splayed on Kim’s wrinkled plaid
comforter. As much as her body was throbbing to writhe against his, she
couldn’t help obsessing over how much she regretted not having made her bed the
previous morning.

“Tell me your name, mate,” he said again in
a gruff whisper that conveyed both physical roughness and affectionate
tenderness. And not even a hint of an Aussie accent, so….

“Mate?” she asked. The word held her as
surely as the man still held her face in his large, calloused hands.

He took another quick kiss from her
tingling, well-sucked, almost
battered
lips. “Name, woman. Don’t tease
me. Say your name.”

“Kim,” she sighed against his mouth. He
tasted earthy-spicy, like what heat and comfort and belonging would have tasted
like. “Do you….?” She felt ridiculous asking the question. “Do you have a
name?”

The catch in his breath, though so soft and
slight as to be nearly undetectable, hinted at a flurry of thoughts behind
those dark green eyes. “William. Will. It’s a name I haven’t needed in longer
than I can tell you. I’m not even sure how long.”

Kim was afraid of all the questions that
crowded in on her mind. As real as this man felt to her, solid and warm as he
was holding her against his chest, she had to wonder if this was a spell she
was about to break. She took a bracing breath of him—forest and
musk—before she asked, “What are you?”

Again, a faraway sadness lit his eyes from
behind, making her want to kiss and soothe his brow. “I’m still remembering
that, mate,” he told her, then corrected himself to say, “Kim.”

Her response sounded insane in her head. “I
think you’re a werewolf.”

“We usually say we’re shifters, but that’s
not just us. The word includes the bears, big cats, horses.”

Kim leaned back to sit up, and Will reluctantly
allowed it, his hold on her sliding from the sides of her face to her thick,
plush waist. “There are more of you?” she said in a chirp so high that she
instantly blushed at herself. “More like you? Wolves? And other kinds of
animals?”

Will nodded slowly, solemnly, and peered at
her with hard, steady attention, as though gauging her reaction. “Everything is
real, little one.” Which drew up Kim’s brow so fast and so high that she felt
it. Only a man as large as A217, her werewolf, Will, could have called her
little with a straight face. Inside she thrilled, struggling for a moment to
focus as he went on. “We hide, though, and there aren’t many of us left. We
kill each other. Most governments view us as a threat to humans and hunt us.
And some of us we lose.” There was a catch in his throat as he said, “We lose
them to the wilding.”

“Wilding?”

“Not all species of shifters suffer it, but
most. All the wolves, all different kinds of wolves, do. Embracing our shifter
side—our beast—loosens our hold on our human side until we lose our
grip. The beast becomes all we know. The beast becomes us, instead of the other
way around. One day, at the height of our power, we shift, and there’s no
coming back. A werewolf is a wolf forever then unless….” Will’s distant gaze
locked on Kim’s again, as though physically gripping her. “Unless we have a
mate to anchor us in our human bodies. That staves off the wilding, or it can.
This is the first time, though, that I’ve ever heard of a mate bringing her
shifter back from the wilding.”

"This?" Kim whispered. It hurt to
breathe, because her chest was so tight. She wanted him to be saying what she
thought he was saying, that the strange connection she had felt for Wolf A217
had been real and magical and meaningful when nothing else in her life seemed
to mean anything. That was all the more reason to resist the temptation to
believe.

The man came up from his repose to lean on
his bent elbows. God, he was big. That broad chest.... The muscles bulged in
his arms at the slightest movement. "I've been a wolf for longer than I
can say. It was only a few months ago something more began to speak to me, at
an instinctive level. I followed it here. It didn't drive me on after that, so
my wolf knew this was where he was meant to find what his instincts were
calling him to hunt. You, Kim. My mate."

A sane woman would have argued, she thought,
if not that werewolves didn't exist then that fated mates didn't. That they,
Will and Kim, didn't know one another. That it was so utterly ridiculous for nature
to pair a hulking, gorgeous man like Will with a chubby little introvert who
thought watching animals in the woods and scribbling field notes about what
they had for lunch was actually useful to the world.

"So you had a life before being a wolf,
right? That's what you're saying?" she asked instead.

He nodded. "A human life and a pack and
responsibility as a warrior to Odin." Kim tilted her head at that, as
though the mention of a mythical Norse god was any more incredible than
anything else she'd seen or heard over the last twenty-four hours. "We’re
just one kind of werewolf," he explained. "Odin Wolves. We have the
wolf in our blood, but we only turn because of rituals in the service to Odin.
In myth, his wolf warriors were called the
ulfhedinn
. It was—it
is—our job to protect people from the Fenris-blooded wolves who descend
from the great wolf himself." Then Will wavered and fell back against the
pillow heavily. He looked suddenly flushed, almost feverish.

"Are you okay?" Kim asked,
hovering over him again. "Is this like what happened after you kind of
half-turned to chase away that bear?"

"No," Will sighed, groaning
slightly. "That was the weakness that always happens after a werewolf
turns and then shifts back. It's worse the more complete the shift and the
longer we stay out of human form. Now I'm just...."

Kim wiped Will's furrowed forehead with the
palms of her hands, and he slid his fingers up along hers, as though reveling
in her touch.

"It's a lot to remember all at
once," he said. "I'm starting to realize what a danger I pose here,
only half-remembering who my allies and enemies are." It hung in the air
between them, the unspoken truth that he barely recalled who he was. "If
I'm going to protect us, we have to go back to my pack, if they still exist.
What I cannot recall, they can fill in for me."

"Protect us?" Kim asked, and this
time Will sat up with her when she leaned back from him. "We have t-to go?
It sounds like you mean you want me to go with you."

"You're my mate. Of course I intend to take
you with me." Then Will snorted and shook his head. "I guess that's a
little backwards. I have no clothes or money, no identification or
transportation. It will be you taking me, really. Once we're back in New
England, the pack will have everything we need."

Kim was aware that she was just sitting
there blinking dumbly at him, but she couldn't seem to get her brain to shift
out of idle while it processed one too many totally improbable events. Like a
gorgeous werewolf sweeping into the life of a simple forest ranger to save her
from all the meaningless tedium and her mean-spirited supervisor, off across
the country to join Will's wolf pack. She had called in sick that morning, much
to Northrup's dismay, to watch over Will until he woke up. It didn't sound like
her sick and vacation hours were going to cover this kind of life change.

"Don't, Kim," Will said suddenly.
"Don't overthink this. I know this would be asking a lot of you under
normal circumstances. This isn't normal." He snorted again, this time self-deprecating.
"It's paranormal. It's bigger than normal." The shifter took Kim's
head in his hands again. "This is bigger. Us."

Before Kim could analyze that statement, try
to rationalize her way around her gut instinct that everything Will was saying was
completely true, the man twisted to roll his body over hers. In an instant he
had his curvy mate pinned beneath him to the bed with his hips wedging her
thighs so wide apart that she felt her muscles burn. When he raised up, just a
bit, it was only so he could yank away the quilt she had tossed over his naked
body to stave off the terrible temptation to molest the poor werewolf in his
sleep.

Poor werewolf. Kim snickered to herself at
the idea in the split-second before she felt the long, firm ridge of his erect
cock pressing insistently at her inseam. Everything in her—her blood
pressure, her tongue, his fingertips and the end of toes, her clitoris and the
slicked sheath of her sex—throbbed at once, hard.

With another man, Kim would have panicked at
the realization she was being undressed. He was going to see her chubby thighs
and fat ass. She had been meaning to work on toning her arms, and she wasn't so
much an hourglass as a pear, and.... And it just didn't matter, when she felt
the chill air stirred by the ceiling fan, as it wafted over her bared skin. She
bristled. She prickled. She trembled. Luckily for her, her werewolf mate was
strong and quick and frighteningly deft at stripping her totally naked and
utterly defenseless. Kim didn't know what to react to first—his hot mouth
latching onto one of her tender nipples or two of his long, thick fingers
sinking deep into her wetness.

"Relax for me, mate," Will rasped
in a deep voice, his lips moving against the flushed skin of her breast. He
pulsed his fingers in her aching pussy, and Kim whimpered at the sharp pain of
the invasion, at the dull pleasure of being gradually worked open for him, for
Will, for his cock. "I’ll try to be gentle, baby," he said, but even
his tone had taken on a guttural growl of a beast ready to rut. "It won't
last, though, I know. The wolf has to have you, and he'll take you hard, rough.
You have to open up and let go for me. You have to trust me."

The snarl that crept into Will’s voice
should have made that impossible for Kim. Instead it lulled her, hypnotized
her. It paralyzed her with lust. She let Will raise himself over her and pin
her wrists above her head with just one of his broad hands. Watching him suck
the taste of her from the fingers of his other hand, while his green eyes
gleamed savagely at her, left her breathless.

One stroke had Kim keening like a plus-sized
porn star, as the wide head of Will's smooth, ruddy cock drove deep into her
pussy. It wasn't so much like getting hit by a charging beast as that dizzying
moment after impact when the pain subsided to the tingling wash of endorphins.
And he had only sunk half his length inside her. She still had at least four
inches to take.

Kim’s view of herself, her body, taking the
shifter's cock into her soft sheath disappeared behind his head of wavy hair as
he buried his face in the swell of her breasts. It was a surreal
counterpoint—the sensation his hot velvet lips and tongue laving and
sucking at her breasts and nipples—to the persistent burning ache of his
manhood driving up into her willing but tight core.

"Don't fight it, Kim," Will
growled, though she wouldn't have said she was resisting, pinned under him,
arms above her head, thighs spread wide while his bullish cock opened her a
little more with each increasingly urgent, bestial thrust. Her eyes closed as
she fought the urge to squirm against Will, away from him, both. "No,
don't close your eyes. Look at me." He groaned against her chest, her
heart, his hips pounding harder against hers with only her soft flesh to cushion
the impact. Even then, the power of his thrusts jarred her bone-deep.
"Look at your mate, Kim. Open your eyes for me."