hidden talents (27 page)

Adam"s growl was indistinguishable from an actual wolf.

Too damned turned on not to, Ari came with a wail.

Adam gave her thirty seconds of crazed pumping, then yanked out and

flipped her onto her back. She couldn"t have stopped him moving her if she"d tried. His strength and coordination were just too great. His speed was as well.

She barely had time to miss him being inside her before he plunged in again.

She was lucky she was limber. He bent her knees to her shoulders, using the bulge of his biceps to trap them there. His eyes were glowing, his lips peeled back. She hadn"t noticed his lower set of fangs before, but she saw them now. He flinched when he saw her see them.

“I love them,” she panted. “I love ... everything about you.”

She hadn"t known he could, but he went faster. His eyes squeezed shut, his handsome face straining as he concentrated on the sensation of pumping his cock into her. He pushed up on his hands to give his hips a freer range of motion. His penetrations lengthened, though each drive was just as swift. Ari hovered on the edge again. She couldn"t help tightening on him.

He cursed, veins bulging on his brow and neck. His cock got harder, his hips moving desperately now. He wasn"t trying to hold off; he was racing for the gold.

Ari grabbed his glistening arm muscles and slung herself up him.

He gasped and a glow burst from his tightly shut eyelids. He slammed into her and went.

She went with him, his pleasure the match for her climactic gunpowder. He"d reared back from his waist for the first kick of ejaculation. As she came, he moaned and lowered again, his arms gathering her to him. He wasn"t thrusting so much then, more jamming deep inside her. His cock, by contrast, jerked like a spawning fish. The extra gland at his base pulsed wildly.

To her amazement, she actually felt the condom filling as he came. That couldn"t be right. Was it part of the Tiger! enchantment? More and more poured from him until his body simply shuddered in her embrace.

“Oh God,” he sighed, sagging down on her at last.

He continued to spasm a little.

She soothed her hands up his sweating, still writhing spine.

“Wow,” she said and kissed his shoulder.

He held the worst of his weight off her on his elbows. “Sorry. Should have warned you. The closer to the moon we get, the bigger our orgasms.”

Ari hugged his butt with her calves. “Not complaining,” she said.

He opened his eyes slowly. They looked at each other for a long, quiet time.

They"d faced life and death together, but somehow that didn"t feel as important as what they were facing now. The green glow in Adam"s irises faded but never quite went out.

“I
really
want you to stay with me,” he said.

Ari stroked one beautiful lean cheekbone, his whisker bristles prickling under her fingertips. “I have to check on my friends. I have to tell them the Eunuch"s dead.”

“I could ... come with you.”

For one aching second she wanted exactly that. “I have to be apart from you for a bit. We"ve known each other such a short time, and you"re asking me to make some pretty big changes in my life. I"m not sure I can live up to your expectations.”

He hadn"t officially asked her to marry him, but he didn"t contradict her words, as some men might have to spare their ego. He petted her hair back from her forehead. “I think you can live up to them. I also think -” He stopped to compose his thoughts. “You could never disappoint me so much that I wouldn"t count myself lucky to share the rest of my life with you.”

He struck her speechless. She wasn"t sure he realized she was silent because she found what he said so extraordinarily generous. He pulled gently back from her hold and out of her body, reaching down to secure the condom as he

withdrew.

She watched him roll away from her to the side of the mattress, watched his long arm flex as he removed the rubber. The shifting of the muscles in his gorgeous back was a work of art she wanted to memorize. His silky tanned skin gleamed with drying sweat. The intimate tasks were those any man might

perform. The fact that he did them made them miraculous to her. Wishing she knew how to put into words what he meant to her, Ari laid her hand where his waist narrowed. Adam reached back to rub it.

“Sleep,” he said. “I know you need it.”

This was advice she couldn"t resist, though part of her wanted to. Adam left the bed, and she curled up around his pillow, which smelled wonderfully of him.

Her limbs grew heavier. She heard noises in the bathroom, then the kitchen. She was so tired she felt like she"d been drugged. She literally didn"t have the strength to move. Adam came back. The mattress dipped and creaked behind her. A glass of water clicked down on the nightstand in front of her. The lamp that sat on it was switched off. Adam squirmed down and spooned her, his arm a warm hard weight over her.

The sense of safety and comfort that enveloped her could have been a dream.

Her second to last conscious thought was that she should never leave this man"s side. Her last was that life was rarely that simple.

For the first time in his life, Adam had zero interest in going in to work. He went anyway, of course. He wasn"t irresponsible. He was just incredibly surly.

After a week of being back with no word from Ari, his commander called

him into his office and told him to go on leave. “Get your head on straight,” he"d said. “You"re making your team miserable.”

Adam didn"t argue. He cleared out his locker and went home. Two days later, he found the special delivery Ari had told him about on the night of their ill-fated victory party. He didn"t wear a lot of clothes that required hanging up, and he hadn"t opened the closet until then. When he saw what the cartons held, he nearly put his fist through the wall.

Nothing could have driven her absence home harder. He"d known giving Ari time to sort out her feelings was bound to be difficult. He hadn"t known he"d miss her enough to hurt.

Every male friend he had asked him out for beers, but Adam turned them

down. What if Ari came back and he wasn"t there? That she would come back he was sure. She just didn"t believe she could have a normal happy life full of friends and family, couldn"t trust that Adam"s love wouldn"t go away. That"s why she was afraid to give him her heart. Adam understood that. He wanted her to be certain. He knew she did love him.

Just in case she didn"t, he started sleeping in the guest room, where his apartment smelled most like her.

She"d been gone more than three weeks when Maria sent Ethan over to visit for the day. That went fine until the time arrived for the three-year-old to leave.

Then Adam had to sit down and cry a bit.

“Unca Adam!” Ethan had wailed, pelting back to him. He"d scrambled

recklessly into Adam"s lap, his little sneakers nearly emasculating him. “I"ll stay!

Pwease don"t cwy anymore.”

Adam had laughed through his tears and hugged him. He thought he could

live without his own kids if he had to. He wasn"t sure he could live without Ari.

The story of his little meltdown must have traveled through the wolf

grapevine. Two nights later, Rick, Tony and Nate barged into his kitchen with a supply of alcohol.

“You"re being pathetic,” Nate said, twisting open a bottle of faerie stout and sticking it in his hand. “She"s your damned twin flame. You have to go after her.”

“Seriously,” Rick said. “These guys do not like having me in charge.”

“You"re not so bad,” Tony said, probably throwing his big brother into shock.

“But Nate is right.” He turned the chair next to Adam"s backwards, sitting on it with his arms and chin draped over the top rung. “There"s a time to be

understanding, and there"s a time to go after what you want.”

Adam took a long swallow of cold dark beer. “She"ll come back when she"s ready.”

“Make her ready,” Tony said. “I can"t believe I"m saying this, but you need to butch up, cuz.”

Adam looked from one of his packmembers to the other. All of them were

nodding.

“You can"t teach her to trust you when she"s there and you"re here,” Rick pointed out. “All you"re doing is letting her run around the hamster worry-wheel in her head.”

This struck Adam as surprisingly insightful. Sometimes he forgot his second had more than one side to him.

“Okay,” he said, his stomach clenching with nervousness. “I guess I"m

butching up.”

The full moon floated above the glittering towers of Manhattan like the starless sky was a sea. A month had passed since Adam had walked Ari to the suburban train"s Resurrection stop to say goodbye to her. During that time, Ari had sprung Maxwell from the hospital, got back her hostess job at Mikos, and helped Max track Sarah to her parents" house on Long Island. Sarah had run to them when Blackwater"s goons threatened her.

Because Ari and Max had been under the impression that Sarah"s parents

were dead, this was not the first place they"d looked.

As it turned out, Sarah"s family had big bucks. Although their free-spirited daughter clearly confounded them, they weren"t the monsters Max"s abusive folks had been, nor had they kicked her to the curb like Ari"s. Whey they"d initially met as street kids, Sarah had been too embarrassed to admit she"d run away simply because they"d been stifling her. By the time Maxwell and Ari found her, Sarah was ready to leave ... but on better terms. Her parents might be the same as before, but she"d grown up in how she coped with them.

Growing up hadn"t stopped her from bursting into tears of shame the moment she laid eyes on Max. She thought she shouldn"t have let the Eunuch"s enforcers scare her out of the city when he"d been in trouble. Ari shared her opinion a tiny bit, though - to be fair - Sarah might have gotten herself killed if she"d tried to stick by him. It also occurred to her that Sarah could have run home at any time.

Instead, she"d shared Ari and Maxwell"s deprivations, working just as hard as them to make sure they all got through them.

Everyone had their own way of being brave, she guessed.

As near as they could figure, the locks of hair Blackwater used to frighten Ari had been culled from brushes left behind in their old apartment, which his sorcerers could have tidied up magically. Neither Maxwell nor Sarah saw his men again after Ari left New York. Possibly, they"d all gone to Resurrection with him.

With luck, the RPD had tossed them in jail by now.

Aside from sparing her friends some TMI regarding Adam, Ari told them all about her experiences in Faerie. Maxwell seemed to believe her. Sarah pretended to, but Ari had a feeling her friend was humoring her. Ari could live with that.

Though Sarah was accustomed to Ari"s gift, gargoyles and werewolves and faeries were a big package to swallow.

What she found more difficult to adjust to was the change in Sarah and

Max"s relationship. A week after they"d rented a new apartment together across the bridge in Brooklyn, Maxwell had moved into the big bedroom with Sarah and handed his off to her. Ari knew he was over-the-moon happy. For years he"d been in love with Sarah, and finally she loved him the same way. They disappeared for long walks nearly every evening and came back starry eyed.

Ari would have envied them if she hadn"t known everything they enjoyed

was hers for the asking. All she had to do was trust herself to face the things that scared her. Considering she"d gone toe-to-toe with an energy-sucking demon, it should have been easy.

Tonight, Maxwell had his art stuff set up on the table in their combined living room-kitchen. He"d had a burst of creativity once Ari finished healing the broken bones in his arms and hands. The process had taken almost as long as finding Sarah, but Ari was proud to say she hadn"t overloaded a single time. Max was good as new - better than, he said. He was working on his own graphic novel, which he hoped to someday make a living at, rather than the more prosaic wall painting that paid the bills.

He was calling his story
Evelyn’s Adventures in Elfland
, his heroine being a six-foot tall Amazonian elf-vampire beauty who shot lightning bolts out of her fingers. As her day job, when she wasn"t saving the world from demons, she was a wisecracking hairdresser who was being courted by a proud faerie. Sarah insisted the superheroine ought to style people"s hair with her lightning bolts.

Maxwell claimed to be thinking that over.

Ari smiled to herself from her perch in their miniscule window seat

overlooking the fire escape. Sarah sat behind Maxwell now, gently rubbing his shoulders while he sketched ideas. Her presence should have been distracting, but he seemed perfectly content. They both did. All the entertainment they needed was each other.

They still love you
, Ari told herself. Neither of them had left her in any doubt of that. Besides which, feeling like a third wheel wasn"t any reason to run back to a man. How did people make up their minds about being in love anyway? How did they know when they were ready?

She sighed and leaned her temple against the cool window glass. The dark sky outside was clouding over, the glowing moon turning sinister. Ari truly couldn"t believe she"d been away from Adam longer than she"d been with him.

He felt like the single most important person she"d ever met. Some nights she missed him so badly every bone in her body ached.

“Do you want some wine?” Sarah asked, having gotten up when Ari wasn"t

paying attention.

“I"m fine,” she said vaguely.

A dog bayed in the little park at the end of their street. The sound repeated, then rose and sank in a howl. The quintessentially lonely song dragged a wash of goose bumps along her arms.

Maxwell looked up from his sketchpad. “That sounds like the same dog I

heard last night.”

Ari opened her mouth but nothing came out.

“What?” Max said, catching her expression. His dark hair was tousled from Sarah running her hands through it. In the brightness of his task lamp, the sprinkling of freckles on his slanted cheekbones stood out. When Sarah looked into his eyes, she saw her beloved ... at least she did today. Before, had she just seen eyes?