Bite of the Moon: Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance Boxed Set (55 page)

Tabitha felt like a child getting the once-over from her grandparent after a trip and fall. The sensation was made doubly odd by the fact that she’d never known her grandparents so far as she could recall. Disarmed in both a comforting but fatiguing way, Tabitha just shook her head no to insist she was okay. It seemed like speaking or even taking a deep breath would have chanced too much, would have tempted a well of emotions too deep and too murky just then.

“All right, young lady. Off with you, then, but keep an eye on yourself down here. A person can’t be too careful these days even in nice places.”

Nodding, Tabitha summoned up the effort to reply, “Yes, sir. Thomas.”

Then she had to hurry up the steps to the street above and the courtyard amid high-end shops and offices, to make it look like she’d been rushing toward an appointment instead of fleeing strange men. No sign of them now. Warded away by the possibility of witnesses, she supposed. On another day, Tabitha might have felt intimidated by the area, knowing she couldn’t afford the price of a coffee—correction,
a latte
—in a place like that. On that day, for a minute, it was just good to stand quiet and mostly ignored among trimmed trees and clean paving stones, with no trash skipping along the gutter in a flurry that stank of the kinds of things people did in dirty alleys. She watched for the three strangely aggressive figures, but they never emerged from the parking structure.

When the sensation finally dissipated, Tabitha shook her head and wondered what the hell she was thinking wandering around window-shopping when Mick had told her to stay with the bike. In fact, Lebeau was stalking through the underground lot obviously searching when she hurried back down the steps.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to disappear, but there were these—.”

Mick cut Tabitha’s explanation short with the back of his hand across her cheek so suddenly and so hard that she crumbled to the cold concrete floor on her butt in a daze.

CHAPTER SIX

Walking into a silent, empty house was the perfect illustration of why Finn didn’t want Tabitha Vallins in tow in his life anymore. The dull dread of not wanting to see her, not wanting to deal with the burning down low in his gut all night as he fought his attraction to her lush curves, turned to the dread of finding her gone. Then he caught the familiar growl of a Harley out front, and he knew.

Finn flung open his front door to find Tabitha shuffling up the front walk in the fading afternoon light. The purple cast over one cheek wasn’t shadow. Behind her, out at the curb, Mick smiled over one shoulder as he revved the motorcycle’s engine and watched Finn’s reaction. The scout feigned annoyance and jerked the girl inside by her arm with a grip much rougher than necessary.

With the door slammed shut behind him and the thunder of Lebeau’s bike receding down the street, Finn took hold of Tabitha’s face with both hands and made her turn her head to show him the bruise.

“What the fuck were you doing with Lebeau?”

“Well, it wasn’t my idea of a joyride,” she assured him caustically as she tried unsuccessfully to pull away from Finn.

It wasn’t lost on the shifter that Tabitha’s resistance sent a surge of possessiveness through him no matter how much he didn’t want her there. With his hands on her cheeks, thumbs curled under her defiantly raised chin, he drew her slowly but steadily closer. Finn growled low at her.

“Behave, Tabitha,” he said, his face angled over hers, an inch away. The heat of shared breath thickened into the languor of desire. The girl’s effect on him had always been intoxicating, even more so now that actual alcohol did so little for him.

Once Tabitha had stopped struggling, and when it was almost too much effort resisting the temptation to take her hot, sweet mouth with his, Finn let go of her face. He dragged her by the hand through the bedroom to the bathroom and made her lean back against the sink so he could get better light on her cheek. Above the bruise, by her left eye, a scrape had left dried blood and raw skin. Finn shook his head and cursed under his breath as he turned Tabitha’s head this way and that again to examine the injury. The shifter’s abs and arms ached with the tension of his anger, all while his groin burned at Tabitha’s nearness, her smell. She exuded the earthy sensuality of an unclaimed but ready lupa. The sensation was even worse—even better—than it had been four years ago.

Finn’s glance caressed the angles of Tabitha’s full face and pale, tender throat until his attention snagged on the reddish brown droplets of dried blood along the neckline of her t-shirt. In a huff, he tugged on the top. “Take this thing off,” he told the girl and peeled the shirt over her head before she could think to protest. He’d had practice undressing her, of course. And it was still Tabitha’s first instinct to lift her arms to help him.

Wadding the shirt into a ball and hurling it into a corner, Finn snarled. “That was Mick, wasn’t it? He’s not acting right about you. Something is going on with him. Why’d he hit you?”

“Why do they ever?” she responded with such a lack of concern. “I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, or I didn’t do it right, or I wasn’t happy about it.”

Unexpected heat, even greater than his anger, flashed over Finn’s own face. Years had passed with he and Tabitha bouncing around the foster care system, and years had passed since they’d aged out. Yet he still recalled every bruise and scrape and gash she’d ever suffered—from the other kids in the group homes, from this or that jealous girl who wanted Tabitha’s jacket, from the boys who wanted something else, from drunken foster mothers or kids at school who didn’t think anyone would care if they beat up an orphan. After hitting the system at six and all the fights Finn had been in, his whole life was just a blur of blood and dirt. There was nothing memorable about a street kid living moment to moment, fight to fight.

A life that made no sound and left no mark. Tabitha had said that once, to describe the lives they were leading as foster kids. The idea had made Finn sick then. It made him sick now, looking down at Tabitha’s bruised cheek. This whole sorry mess she’d gotten herself into was the only way she saw to break out of that life and make herself a new one. Could he really blame her?

Finn took swabs and alcohol from the medicine cabinet and made cleaning up Tabitha’s face as painful and unpleasant as possible. Yes, he could blame her for this mess; they were both neck-deep in it now. He was going to have to blame her and keep blaming her if he was going to keep himself from doing something fatally stupid to rescue her.

Tabitha tried to lean away from Finn and slapped his hand as he kept dabbing at her cheek with the alcohol. “Stop it. Ow, that hurts. You’re not taking care of me anymore, remember?”

“Hold still so I can clean you up. I don’t want blood in my bed.”

The girl snorted. “Like it’d be the first time.”

A Son was a Son. Finn wasn’t going to apologize for fighting or fucking like the Fenris Wolf he was. They weren’t the perfect pack, not like the damn Odin Wolves, but at least… at least it wasn’t a life that made no sound and left no mark. And he didn’t owe Tabitha any sort of fidelity. They weren’t a teenaged couple in love anymore.

“Why?” she whispered abruptly. “Why did you take care of me all those years? It’s obvious you don’t want to now.”

Tabitha didn’t look him in the face as she said this. She stared off at nothing, so melancholy. It was as though his mood and thoughts had bled and blended into hers. The possibility that such a thing could happen between them was disturbing for reasons he wasn’t going to discuss with her, ever.

“You were never looking for an angle or a handout.” Tabitha blinked at Finn’s response, her breath pausing as she seemed to turn the statement over in her head. He didn’t owe her any explanations, but she still deserved… something. She still deserved to know that over all those years someone had seen her.

“You know what I mean,” he told her. “Most of the others in the homes and in the system got to playing games. Playing on sympathies. You were never one of those girls who went in for being the damsel in distress to keep from pulling her weight. And you never tried to flirt or fuck your way into getting something more or something better than what everyone else had.”

Tabitha squinted at Finn as she followed his reasoning back over all those memories to a conclusion. “You took care of me because….”

“Because you were just going it alone, so strong no matter how small and weak you were.” Finn knew that was a contradiction, and he knew Tabitha would understand it anyway.

He wasn’t prepared for her nod solemnly and then fucking turn that all back on him as she said, “Going it alone. We all have to sometime. That’s why I’m doing this. That’s why you have to bite me.”

Gritting his teeth, the shifter flung the alcohol swab into the trash and stalked out of the bathroom, leaving Tabitha behind. “I’m not biting you,” he called back in a snarl from the bedroom. She followed him, so he marched out into the living room. “Why do you think I’ve been out on the road these last few days?”

Other than to keep himself from softening to Tabitha’s demands. To keep himself from that soft body and making her his as savagely and completely as a Fenris Wolf would. Last time he’d nearly killed her. Again she followed him, her arms folded and lip puffed out. Was she fucking doing that on purpose, looking that adorably impertinent? ‘Cause she was good enough at it that he couldn’t tell if he was being manipulated or she was just that fucking endearing. And delectable. Finn’s groin tightened, cock hardening and balls swelling heavy, straining at his jeans.

“I have been across our territory and up and down this whole fucking state looking for another way. Yet again, I’m trying to get you out of trouble, so you could at least cooperate and stop demanding I—.” Tabitha interrupted Finn’s pacing by planting herself in his path, arms still folded under her breasts. And she still hadn’t put on a shirt. “What?”

“So how’d that work for you?” she asked. “You find a way out of biting me?”

“No.” Man, that bristled, having to admit he’d found absolutely nothing. No one knew of a way to trigger a Fenris Wolf change without a bite, and Finn would not—
could not
—be the one to bite Tabitha on the full moon. Even worse, it was clear that Mick had formed some kind of odd, possessive fixation on her. Getting her out of town without Lebeau hearing about it and tracking her was looking doubtful, especially after whatever happened today. Mick taking Tabitha out on a ride? The MC president Finn knew would never have done that.

“Then you’re going to have to bite me and get it over with.”

“Over with?” Snarling, Finn grabbed Tabitha by her soft, bare arms and shook just enough to make her eyes flare. He tried to ignore the surge of lust he felt when her hands flew to his chest and her nails dug into his tensed pecs through his t-shirt. “Biting you and making you a Fenris wolf doesn’t make this over, Tabitha. Nothing is over once you’re one of them.”
One of us
, he corrected himself mentally. “The only thing that would be over is your life if the bite doesn’t trigger your change.”

She should have recoiled at the thought or regarded him with horror for the monsters they
and he
were. Or she should have torn herself away from him and run to hide and pout in the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

Instead, Tabitha stepped up flush with Finn, lace and tits to his chest, warm inner thighs fitted perfectly to the ridge of the hard-on in his jeans. She brought her face and hot breath right up to his, making his skin burn and tingle. “I’m one of you, and you know it.”

That was it. That was enough from her.

Finn shifted his hold on Tabitha to grip her by the hair at her nape again. The other hand squeezed one lush breast roughly. The feel of her flesh, the weight and fullness and suppleness all at once, roused not just Finn’s cock but his beast. His hold on Tabitha grew rougher as Finn’s hold on his wolf slipped.

“Do you understand at all, little girl?” he demanded through clenched teeth, his lips brushing the full apple of her cheek. “Do you understand even a little what you’re doing?”

And he didn’t just mean trying to get in with the SoF long enough for them to turn her. He was so close to taking her the way a Son, a Fenris Wolf, took a woman. Pulling hard on her hair, Finn made Tabitha cry out and crook her head back as far as she could. The position opened her beautiful, full lips in a distressed moan. It bared the column of her throat.

“Is this what you want? To be an animal? To live like a beast? To be mated and taken by wolves every night?”

Because if she kept tempting Finn, it wasn’t going to be like it had when they were teenagers. He wasn’t going to be as sweet or gentle. His wolf had devoured that part of him, as Finn had discovered to his own shock that last night he’d been with Tabitha, the night the Sons had turned him in a brutal gang attack that would have horrified and broken this girl.

Finn’s hold on Tabitha tightened. He had to be hurting her. And it felt too goddamn good to him. “Is it, Tabitha? Is this the way you want it?”

She groaned, eyes glassy, and didn’t respond for a moment. Then she rasped, from deep in her chest as she breathed harder and harder. “Yes.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The unfamiliar hunger was like a prickling itch creeping over Tabitha’s skin. The only thing that stopped it was the burning ache of need now throbbing between her legs and at the points of her painfully rigid nipples as Finn pinched and abused her flushed breasts. And she fucking liked it. How could she?

But that was a stupid question, she realized. This wasn’t some rough frat boy threatening date rape, and she wasn’t a virgin in distress. She was a wolf shifter as much as Finn was, or near as much as she could be until she could finally convince him to bite her.

He almost killed you once
, a small voice reminded the girl from far back in her head. That night four years ago, when he had bared his fangs in the final throes of orgasm and only stopped himself from tearing into her throat by wrapping his fingers around her neck. But then he couldn’t stop himself from squeezing, strangling, from wanting to kill what he could not possess.

He hadn’t, though. Finn had torn himself away and fled Tabitha’s life, leaving her bruised and heartbroken, shocked and confused, but alive. And
now
… now she had learned that a bite was the vector for the transformation. Had Finn’s instinct to turn a latent she-wolf simply overcome him that night, when he hadn’t understood what was happening? Did he still not understand he had to do this? He had to bite Tabitha. He had to take her like a male wolf took his she-wolf and bite her.

Was Finn just trying to scare Tabitha when he forcibly put her face first over the arm of the couch? He used his hold on the base of her neck to push her cheek into the cushion. The shifter—the biker in him—made her stay that way, face down and ass up, as he kneaded her butt roughly and ground his massive erection against her. Hearing him snarl and growl low in his throat, hearing his breath catch when he thrust his hips a little harder and it got good for them both, had Tabitha biting back little mews of pleasure. Even to her own ears, she sounded far too much like a prey animal. Truthfully… she liked the way if felt deep in her belly, in her pussy, how shameful and guilty and
good
.

Tabitha heard Finn draw in a calming breath, and she wasn’t having it. Twisting her head just a little more, she saw the gorgeous wolf shifter had closed his eyes and set his jaw and had the intense look of concentration of a man trying to regain control of his beast.
Oh, no you don’t
. She spread her legs and arched her back to raise her ass, like she was presenting. Hell, that was exactly what she was doing, and she knew she’d made her point when Finn’s pretty green eyes flew open to glare down at her.

After wrestling swiftly out of his t-shirt, the Fenris Wolf jerked the button at the top of his jeans open. The material gaped as his cock jutted up in his black briefs. Whining lightly, Tabitha planted her hands on the cushion to help fight his control and grind back against him. God but she’d never seen anything as primal and exciting as how hard Finn’s muscles tensed when she rubbed herself against him. His sculpted shoulders, biceps, pecs all contracted and then bulged, the lines of definition between muscles deepening to pronounced furrows. His abs rippled like a bed of river rocks. Tabitha could imagine all those muscles flexing and rolling sensually, savagely, as he fucked her from behind. But she didn’t want to just imagine.

The girl gasped and grunted at how quickly Finn moved when he yanked her up from her bent position and spun her to face him. He kept her off balance, with the back of her legs angled over the arm of the sofa. She had to use one hand to grip the back of the couch, to steady herself, making her that much less able to resist when her jerked the straps of her bra down her shoulders to bare her breasts.

“Finn.” She couldn’t help keening his name when his lips fastened hard on one of her throbbing nipples and he began to suck hard at the nib and threaten it with the periodic pressure of his teeth. He made the rigid bud pulse in time with her pounding heartbeat. The other nipple he pinched and twisted between one crooked finger and the calloused pad of his thumb, making it almost hurt, start to hurt, before relenting and letting pleasure wash over her again.

Looking every bit the rough and ready biker, Finn released his mouth’s hold on Tabitha’s tit and raised his face to glare panting down into hers. The bright green eyes peered hard into hers as he slapped her flushed breast and made her jump not so much in pain as in surprise and in strangely exciting irritation. It was like being pinched or tickled or prodded and not liking it—but sort of kind of liking it and wanting more.

Finn slapped her breast again. “You like that?” he demanded in a husky breath. “You like being handled any way I want? Used for any pleasure I decide?” For once, Finn didn’t look like the roughed-up pretty boy. With his high, broad cheeks taut and hallowed and warming with lust and with his brow set low and serious, he was every bit the bad boy biker, the wolf, the predator.

“Do you, Tabitha?” he asked again, slapping the swell of her flesh again, sending bristling ripples of pain-pleasure washing over her chest and down her tensed stomach. “You like being used like a biker’s dirty little fuck? Do you?”

“Yes.”

The shifter looked like he was the one who’d just been slapped. “What?” He obviously hadn’t meant to ask; the stunned word had just fallen from his sensual, gaping lips.

“Yes, I like being touched by a dirty biker,” she told him, twisting his words, but still. “Yes, I like being your dirty fuck.”

In fact, something deep in the pit of Tabitha’s belly, something like a hungry she-wolf, loved it. Loved being grabbed and squeezed. Loved her skin being slapped until it was pink and tingling. Loved hearing that rough male voice talking to her like a bad boy, forcing her to acknowledge her barefaced desire to be dominated and possessed body and soul by an alpha male.

There was that moment when Tabitha realized she was winning the battle of wills between herself and Finn—when he shoved her down to her knees and stood with his groin right at her face. He still had one hand holding her by the head, by her now mussed and tangled ponytail. With Finn’s hips angled forward and his cock ready to push up past the waist of his briefs, Tabitha knew what he wanted. She reached with trembling fingers for his zipper.

“No, Tabitha. With your teeth. Use your mouth.”

The task required more concentration than the woman would have thought, but that was in part because of how distracted she was by her own body. Knees weak and thighs trembling from how hard and how long she’d kept them tensed without even realizing it, Tabitha steadied herself with her hands on Finn’s legs. Even through his jeans, she could feel the firm bands of muscle in his thighs and imagine too well the power they would lend to the furious thrusts of his cock when it came time to take her pussy. The thought added to the already feverish warmth that had heated her skin to a flaming pink, blood pulsing in her veins, nerves dancing.

Carefully, skillfully, Tabitha caught the metal tab of Finn’s zipper in her teeth and drew it downward. The musk of his sex was at once gut-wrenchingly familiar and unexpectedly foreign. There had been other men after Finn but not many and none like him, not even a little. Finn had always smelled and tasted uniquely earthy and natural and fresh. Now, however, there was something more musky and spicy about his scent. Was it the wolf in him? His transformation had changed his body and even heightened his animal temperament, so why not also his smell?

“Take it out,” Finn told her, jarring Tabitha from her concentration on his musk and earth and amber scent.
Take it out
. The order held such an ominous tone of promise and of threat.

Tabitha pulled Finn’s briefs down enough to free his jutting cock, thick and smooth and as tanned as the rest of him. The shifter watched her closely with his lust-glazed green eyes, peeking from beneath that tousled fall of brown hair veiling his brow and one side of his face. She watched him, too, studying the increasing intensity and anticipation of his expression as she leaned in to drag her tongue along his dick from base to tip.

Finn obviously fought with himself to keep from making a sound, but Tabitha still saw the rise in his chest and the tension in his cheeks as soon as her mouth and tongue and hot breath touched his cock. She knew there must have been a lot of other women in the last four years, women who drew their entire worth from their sexual skill, but Tabitha was going to remind Finn right now that he would only ever have one first love. No other woman’s touch was ever going to feel like hers.

And she started by reminding Finn what it felt like when she sucked the broad tip of his cock into her mouth while she swirled her tongue around and around the head. He couldn’t help abruptly sucking his breath in through his teeth, and Tabitha couldn’t help smiling with her eyes and with her lips around him.

Chastising, Finn tightening his grip on Tabitha’s hair until she winced, just as he pushed his hips forward. “You’ve got more to take, little girl. What you can’t get into your mouth you’re not going to get in your pussy.”

That was the only threat Tabitha took seriously, as badly as she needed to feel Finn driving every inch up into her as deep as he could reach. She licked and sucked his cock in earnest, all while looking up at his gorgeous face. Pleasure so good that it looked like it hurt to resist it played over his lips and brow.

Tabitha was a rag doll for the man as he jerked her to her feet before she could drive him over the edge of orgasm. Unrelieved, his cock remained fully engorged, rock-hard, jutting high as Finn dragged Tabitha out in front of the couch. He sat down hard, knees spread and feet planted, with his jeans nudged down enough to keep his erection free.

Finn narrowed his eyes at Tabitha where she stood between his legs. “Take your jeans off,” he ordered. When she reached first for the hooks at the back of her lace bra, he shook his head. “No, leave it on. Just the jeans and the panties. Get them off. Now.”

The woman could practically feel that last word, that commanding alpha tone, reverberating along the tightening walls of her sex like the prelude to a climax. It felt dirty and oddly, unnaturally thrilling to strip off everything but her bra.

“Come here,” Finn told her then and directed her to straddle his hips. As soon as Tabitha began settling onto his lap, she felt the wide head of his cock pushing between the flushed and sensitive lips of her sex. She clamped her mouth down over a whimper. With a rougher voice, he said, “Put it in. Show me you’re a biker’s bitch and fuck yourself on my cock.”

Tabitha’s moan as she did so wasn’t just from the thrill of how dirty Finn was talking to her. Or from they naught fantasy of doing everything this rough, sexy biker demanded. She had gone a few months without anyone in her bed or inside her, so the head of Finn’s cock flared the tight ring of her entrance with pain—a sudden, aching, burning pain that felt so damn good.

He breathed through it with deliberate concentration, that first inch, that first little thrust up into Tabitha’s pussy. She rode him carefully at the start, until he closed his hands over her full breasts and squeezed and kneaded and pulled, making her move the way he wanted her to. And he wanted her bouncing on his cock in short, fast, hard strokes that each ended with a little cry breaking from her throat.

“That’s it,” he groaned in approval. “That’s it, yeah. Take it deeper. Stretch for it.” He took a quick, wild, nipping kiss from Tabitha before telling her, “If you want to be a Sons of Fenris bitch, you’re going to take this cock every night and all the way.”

Tabitha nipped Finn back, pulling briefly on the plump pad of his bottom lip with her teeth. “I’m not going to be the biker gang mama. I’ll be one of you. A Fenris Wolf.
You
can be
my
bitch, if you want.”

And she meant it; Tabitha wasn’t going to be the club slut. But the statement was also a challenge, and one that Finn rose to when he started to thrust his hips up under her and pound his cock up into her pussy with increasing force and speed.

“Fucking little lupa,” Finn swore, shaking his head like he knew she was deliberately goading him into the ruthless, passionate fuck they both wanted. His reasoning for making Tabitha keep her bra on became clear when he pulled the straps taught behind her back, binding her and making her arch.

Arms bound, impaled on the biker’s pumping cock, Tabitha panting and then openly, freely whimpered through the hard fucking she’d asked for. She strained forward even as Finn made her arch her spine deeper and deeper. He let her get a breath’s distance from his lips, from a kiss, before pulling the straps taut again and tugging her backward. Finn smiled like the sexy goddamn bastard he was when Tabitha began to cry out in a nearly constant chorus of mews and gasps, delight and frustration.

When her climax overcame her as abruptly and ferociously as a beast pouncing on her, Tabitha’s whole body tensed, then writhed and shook. She bucked and squirmed and then slumped weak, her orgasm convulsing inside her. Then it pulsed again, throbbing in her clit, and she reared and rolled her head and then went limp again. Finally, Finn let her rest forward against his chest, her head lolling on his shoulder. She sighed at her slowly subsiding orgasm contrasted to the scratchiness of his stubbled face as he traced passionate kisses up and down her neck. His satiny lips, his warm tongue, his teeth….

Everything stilled for Tabitha in that moment she felt Finn’s canines rise and press into her naked shoulder. She held her breath. Had he lost control of himself in the passion of the moment? Were his instincts in control now? He said he’d never bite her, but….