Bite of the Moon: Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance Boxed Set (56 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

She felt so fucking good, her pussy clenched around Finn’s cock as she came for him, her hot skin against his, her breath. She tasted so fucking good. Her skin was salty sweet with sweat and the vanilla honey sugar scrub she still showered with every day. And just beneath that… the suggestion of warm, coppery blood pulsing through her veins with a doe’s heartbeat.

Sinking his teeth into Tabitha would have been so easy. His fangs ached at the root to pierce that perfect skin. That was the way of it when wolves tied up, as well, for the male to bite the female and pin her in those final moments, to keep her still. Some of that was the primal pleasure associated with having that raw physical power over his lover. And some of it was for her safety, while the beast had its way, blinded and mindless with hunger.

The agony of pulling back his wolf and his teeth at just the moment both were about to taste Tabitha’s blood turned to aggression and outright anger. Finn used this to fuel his sudden movement, twisting to put the girl on her back on the couch, laid out for him to fuck with the full force of his frustration.
Years
of frustration, aggravation,
denial
. Years of guilt over losing control that night with Tabitha and hurting her, nearly biting her right then. Years of struggling to find another place that felt as much like home as her arms had. Finn pounded himself ruthlessly into Tabitha’s yielding body with the weight and fury of all that history behind every thrust.

She swooned as he came, her eyelids fluttering momentarily before her eyes rolled back and her head lolled against the cushion beneath her. As Finn’s body released its seed, its fury, and all that distress into her softness and warmth, the shifter went from restraining Tabitha to cradling her. From ravaging her to embracing her.

“Tabitha.” He panted and then sighed against her temple, trying to draw her back to him from her haze of ecstasy. “It’s okay, baby girl. We can do this. I can fix this.” This mess, this trap that had ensnared them and threatened to bind Tabitha to the SoF. “I’ve got you.”

Finn was kissing her cheek and her neck gently, with almost loving caresses of his lips against her skin.
I’ve got you
, he vowed to her again inside his head.
I won’t let them make me kill you
. His kisses down Tabitha’s neck turned passionate, as though his determination had renewed his hunger even so soon after coming inside her. She moaned lightly, rousing at the feeling of his tongue as he laved kisses along her collarbone to the graceful curve of her shoulder.
Come back, baby girl
, he thought to himself as he teased her with a nip.

Tabitha jumped and cried out when Finn bit into her. His fangs went in clean. In nature, predator to prey, it would have made for a good kill. The wolf would have held the doe immobile and waited for her to stop struggling, for her life to ebb away.

Finn hadn’t suspected in the least that his wolf would rise and turn on him like this or that the taste of Tabitha’s blood in his mouth would tell him things. Things he didn’t want to know. He fought, he fought his wolf
so hard
, to make the beast let her go. The shifter reared back to kneel above Tabitha, and his gut tightened at the sight of red streaks along her shoulder where he had torn her skin.

Four years
. Four years he’d been running away from Tabitha and from that night, and it had all been for nothing. He’d bitten her anyway. And worse, now she belonged to the Sons.

So calmly, as though she was in shock, Tabitha touched her shoulder and then held her hand up to study the smear of red across her fingertips. It took her a second to even realize what it was, that she’d been bitten—that Finn had done exactly what he had sworn up and down he’d never do. She wasn’t angry or even scared. If anything, a wash of calm and relief settled in her chest, where there had only been the ache of knowing Finn didn’t love her anymore.

He’d wanted her to think that, to push her away from him, but how could she ever truly have believed he could just turn from her and stop caring and….?

And fuck if Finn should have known any of that. He shouldn’t have thought or felt what Tabitha was thinking or feeling even in the vaguest sort of way, but he did. It wasn’t just empathy between old lovers, either. Feeling his wolf reveling beneath the skin, and hating that fucking animal just then the same way he hated Mick Lebeau, Finn climbed off the couch and fastened his jeans while his gaze scanned the room for where his t-shirt had gone.

“What….?” Tabitha started to ask as she sat partway up and curled onto her side like some masterpiece an artist would have painted hundreds of years before. “Finn, what are you doing?” Urgency crept into her voice as he neared the door.

“I can’t be here right now. I’ve got….”
You’ve got to do what, Finn
? Figure out how to solve twice as many problems now as he had before he’d lost control and
fucked
and
bitten
Tabitha?

The languor of their mating dissipated, and Tabitha’s expression darkened as she drew her knees up on the couch and tried to hug them, tried to hide behind them. “I don’t get you, Finn, at all. I don’t understand why you would….” She shrugged and stared again at her fingers. “And then freak out and just leave. You’re not making sense.”

“Give it time,” he said with a caustic snort. “You’ll get me better than you ever wanted to, like it or not.” It was almost instant for Finn, that psychic and emotional connection to Tabitha. But she was latent—sort of. And now sort of not. It would probably take a couple of days before she realized half those thoughts floating around her head weren’t hers.

“So what is supposed to happen now? You bit me. Am I going to turn? We didn’t wait for the full moon.”

Finn paused at the front door, cut and keys in hand, to look over his shoulder at Tabitha. Goddamn if she didn’t remind him of all the stupid things he was sure he was going to do in the world when he was seventeen, eighteen, all those things he would never do. He was one of the Sons now. He was a Fenris Wolf.

And she wasn’t.

The shifter shook his head and shrugged at Tabitha. Callous as that seemed, it was as truthful as he could have been with her. “Just stay here, Tabitha. Keep the door locked, and don’t answer your phone unless it’s me.”

Fucker
. That was what she was thinking about him—at him—as he walked out. Finn didn’t want to think about why he knew that.

As much as Finn didn’t want to deal with the Sons just then, their house was the one place he had left to go and the one place he needed to be. The ‘clubhouse’ wasn’t what most people would have suspected. Rather than a dive in a bad part of town, it was a sprawling if faded villa in Summerside, a part of the city that used to be old money. Now it was just old, with the movers and shakers preferring new and ever more pretentious developments on the north side. The mature trees lining Summerside’s residential streets, coupled with the high walls surrounding each house, made for the kind of privacy that came in handy for bikers and werewolves alike. An automatic gate at the end of the drive opened smoothly as Finn approached, without him stopping to punch in the code. That meant one of his pack brothers was watching the security cams and saw him coming.

The circular brick fountain that on party nights doubled as an ice-filled cooler now sat quiet in the middle of the circular drive. Most of the handful of guys who were there were just getting their shit together, chasing the previous night’s hangover with a bottle of whatever they hadn’t already killed. A couple of girls were still passed out naked on the pool table and another on the couch. There would have been a half-dozen more out cold in various bedrooms.

Finn had made it through the living room and into the hall, headed toward the back of the house, before an unwelcome voice hit him.

“There’s my boy,” Lebeau drawled. Finn, knowing he should have just kept walking and probably could have gotten away with doing just that, stopped and looked into the library that had come with the house. Mick kept it despite the Sons’ decided lack of bookishness. It appealed to his sense of irony and superiority. Whenever Mick was in a mood, as he likely was just then, he’d slump in the oversized leather chair with his feet up on the huge wooden desk and drink the cheapest, nastiest booze he could lay hands on. Such was the scene when Finn peered into the room.

“Dad,” Finn responded in his best Wally Cleaver voice.

“How’s our girl doing?”

This was it, the moment when Mick expected Finn to tell the alpha that Tabitha wasn’t their girl and not Lebeau’s girl for damn sure. As much as the MC president obviously wanted Tabitha for himself, Finn knew he’d have been damn near as happy to learn that Finn had a weakness for her. It was something to hold over the scout’s head, the way Mick tried to play on what he suspected was Garik’s weakness for a little Odin’s Wolf lupa from a rival pack they often tangled with these days. Mick would have given a lot to know how far that had gone—further than he’d have thought, and Finn knew that for a fact. Garik had killed for her—killed
other Sons
for her, men Finn wasn’t sorry to see dead.

Finn leaned in the library doorway and played it cool, making Mick wait for a response while the scout brushed back his hair and then folded his arms. “Taking up space at my place and making everything smell like girl,” Finn quipped, affecting mild irritation but otherwise unconcerned. “What’d she do this morning to get that shiner from you?”

And if you do it again, I’ll kill you. Might anyway, Mick, ol’ buddy
.

Mick smiled. “She doesn’t know when to be afraid, does she?” he asked, like Finn would know. Like he knew Finn would know.

But the scout just shrugged. “Obviously not if she’s walking into Skin and just announcing she’s a latent.”

“Ah, yes, T minus four days and counting ‘til we see how that shakes out.”

Finn huffed out his breath dismissively. In truth, he was using every ounce of control he had to discipline any more telling reaction from his expression. If Mick found out Finn had already bitten Tabitha, what the bite had done, what it had
not
done, and what Finn suspected that meant, Tabitha would either be dead or locked up someplace never to be seen again. And Finn would be wearing a collar he’d never be able to take off with his leash in Lebeau’s hand for as long as the alpha wanted it that way.

Lebeau’s suspicion went unfed, so he just shook his head and chuckled. “Took her on rounds with me yesterday to see if she’s got the stomach for this. Already know she’s got the curves. Went to see a man about a horse, as they say, in Riverwood Park, and the girl didn’t know enough to do what she was told when I ordered her to stay with the bike.”

Of all that information—that Lebeau had shown the Sons’ seedier activities to Tabitha and surely without mentioning that Finn and several others weren’t all in agreement over being involved in that shit, that Mick still had his eye on the girl’s ass as a mama or worse, that he’d put her in harm’s way and then hit her—it was the location of that meeting that Finn had to pretend the hardest not to notice.

Down the hall a few minutes later, in the control room for all the security gates and cam, Finn sat down heavily next to Garik. “I think Mick is talking to Thomas Poulsen or someone who can get to Poulsen,” the scout told the club enforcer, also known as the pack’s second-in-command. This drew Hagen’s attention from the bank of television screens scanning the grounds. Finn would have bet Garik wasn’t actually looking for anything, just keeping watch while he thought, while he plotted and calculated the best time and best way to move on Mick and those loyal to the MC president—Finn not included.

“What do you know?” Garik asked, arms folded nonchalantly but eyes sharpening.

“Mick had business today in Riverwood Park.”

“Poulsen’s office.”

Finn nodded, having been the one to track the antiquities dealer down after the pack got word he was trading in very old Norse artifacts and weapons. “I don’t know if Mick’s still trying to find out who the buyer was for the Dainsleif sword or not, but….”

“Probably,” Garik agreed, his jaw stiffening at the mention of the mythic sword. That was still a sore subject, with the enforcer believing Lebeau wanted to get his hands on the supernatural weapon to use on Garik and anyone else who challenged him for SoF leadership. “But?”

“He took Tabitha with him, and that doesn’t make sense. She’s not a sworn member or even a turned wolf.”

The darker man frowned down thoughtfully on that bit of intel. “Mick is definitely unusually interested in your girl.”

“My girl?” Finn asked, taken aback.

“I don’t shit you about Rachel.” The Odin’s Wolf scout for the Central Coast Pack. “Don’t fucking lying to me about Tabitha. You two are practically wearing matching half-heart necklaces.”

“For chrissake, shut up before one of the others hears you. Fuck you, Garik.”

“Fuck you right back, pretty boy. Are we done pissing here?”

“No.”

Garik raised a black brow. “No?”

“I need a favor, and it’s big.” Finn paused, not to give the enforcer the opportunity to ply him with questions, which wasn’t in Garik’s nature anyway. Hagen was a watcher, the kind who stayed at a distance until he’d scoped the situation out; then he’d pounce. No, Finn needed a second to swallow down the distaste in his mouth. “Tabitha’s an Odin’s Wolf.”