Reluctant Mates - 21 Paranormal Romance Stories (Werewolf, Vampire, Minotaur and Monster collection) (41 page)

Time seems to melt away into a pinprick of a moment. The fullness I feel, the near savage wildness of the beasts, and the strange security I can’t explain all come together in that instant – in that blissed, beautiful instant. Claws dig deep into my hips. I start to scream out my agonized pleasure again, but find that instead of a yelp, a deep, sweet moan comes from my parted lips.

I whisper Sebastien’s name into the cave. He grabs my wrists, wrenching my hands away from my lovers and pulling them straight behind me. With one hand grasping each, he stretches my shoulders leans back slightly, and drills up and in me.

Hard, harder, harder, he rams into my sex, driving himself so deep that in my heightened state, in my ecstasy, it’s hard to tell the difference between us.

“Jasmine!” He shouts, pushing against me, “don’t look at the light! Keep your eyes closed!”

Bouncing, jutting forward and falling back with each stroke, I do as he commands. I clamp my eyes closed at the same time as the muscles in the backs of my legs start to pinch up and relax with a climax I know is coming.

“I can still see it,” I say, “I can still see the rosy light even when my eyes are closed.”

The two wolves in front of me erupt at once, groaning, sighing and then collapsing. The same strange thing happens to my image of both of them – they turn to men as they come, but I know when I open my eyes again, they’ll still be beasts. They collapse, spent, with chests rising and falling.

“Don’t...look!”

I lower my chin to my chest and feel white hotness explode in my sex, fill me up and drip down my walls as I lose myself as well. My vision flares, brightness burning my eyes as Sebastien makes me his.

I squeeze myself around him, try to catch my breath, and milk him dry. He squeezes me one last time, and then falls against my back before dragging me over, deeper in the cave, and collapsing. His love fills me, and his heart pounds so hard that I can feel it in my chest.

“It’s true,” he says. His voice is ragged and tired and pained. He touches my shoulder and then the back of my neck. “It’s really true.”

“What is? What
are
you?”

“I think you’ve figured that out by now.”

“But I mean, what just happened? One thing I knew I was running from some animals in a bayou and the next thing, I’m in a cave...with...”

“Look at me, Jasmine.”

I hesitate. I know what I’m going to find. It’s going to terrify me. I just know it.

“Why? You’re a monster. A monster that chased me through the forest and kidnapped me to some cave.”

“That much is true.” He has a deep Cajun accent, but it’s an old one. It doesn’t sound like anything you’d hear these days. “But for everything that happens, there’s a reason. If you won’t look at me, at least look at them.”

I finally open my eyes, but my senses are still burning too hot to see.

“All I can see is the sun,” I say, squinting. “Too bright.”

“I’m not a monster, Jaz, I’m your destiny.”

“What on earth are you on about?”

Then I realize, as he strokes my stomach, that there aren’t any claws on his hands.

“Destiny wh-”

He grabs my shoulders and turns me over.

The coal-red eyes are gone. Instead, I see slate grey. Sharp cheekbones, long, silver hair, and a beautiful, naked body.

“It isn’t gonna last forever, but at least I know you’re real. I know there’s hope.”

“Hope of what, Sebastien?”

“Hope that you – that your powers – can save us from ourselves. Until then, you’re not going anywhere. Not until I have answers.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that until I can save my pack, you belong to me.”

T
wo – Under a Breeding Moon

His breath creeps down the back of my neck and I feel his hard, wiry fur, warm scratch my flesh. Wordlessly, he drags his long, terribly sharp teeth along my shoulders. One, then the other. I draw a breath as he pushes me hard against the spongy, soft, and curiously warm forest floor.

“I told you once. Don’t try to run away.” He snarls against the back of one of my ears. His voice is a mixture of wolf and man as it swells inside my mind. Since he first claimed me, Sebastien has been in my head constantly, reading my thoughts, talking to me without words.

“I...I’m sorry,” I gulp. “I won’t try it again. I promise.”

“There’s no point to it,” he said. “As you can see.”

His tongue drags along the back of my head. At any moment, I know he could snap shut those jaws. Considering this I shudder, and then feel him shove my knees apart with his shoulders.

Wet heat drips out between my legs. I can’t believe how badly I want to turn over and see his monstrously beautiful face, but I know that trying that would be a terrible mistake.

Sebastien growls deep in his chest and nips my inner thighs one after the other. Back and forth between them, he gets closer and closer to the sex between them. I hear him inhale deeply and another expectant trickle slides down my lips.

“Relax, Jaz,” his voice opens into my mind. “You’re mine. Never again do you have to wish for pleasure you can’t have. At least until...”

Until my pack is saved
is what he doesn’t say. And for a moment, a shudder creeps through my mind. Is that all I am to him? Some kind of curse has been put on his pack of shifters that keeps them from returning to their human forms except when they force themselves upon me. Savagely beautiful, impossibly feral, and somehow able to awake in me a desire I’ve never felt before. Is that all I am to him? A way out of a curse? Certainly not, I think, there must be more to it, or else why would his lovemaking be so urgent and ecstatic?

Kicking backwards at him, trying to fend him off for a moment, regardless of my all-consuming desire to be taken I can’t keep my concern inside.

“Why? Why me?” I kick again, my heel finds the crown of his skull and he yelps, then snaps his jaws so close to me that I feel the impact.

“My feelings don’t matter. I’m a leader, Jaz, and these are my men. Would you have me abandon them? Do you want me to leave them under Desmelyna’s spell for eternity just so you can have your
feelings
catered to?” The way his leather voice hangs on the word ‘feelings’ makes his disdain obvious.

Saying nothing, I chew my lip. That name, Desmelyna, sticks in my mind. I’d never heard it before. I wonder if the spell to which he refers was part of the prophecy that he’d spoken of earlier. He told me that among his people – the wolves, there was a prophecy that someone would come from outside, from another world, and that person was fated to be their salvation. Thinking about the name, though, it makes me uncomfortable. It sounds...witchy.

I open my mouth, intending to ask him to expand, or at least pretend to protest his intensity, but the only thing that escapes my lips is a soft, muffled moan as he pushes himself inside, stretching me around his girth. My whisper of pleasure quickly turns into an urgent series of almost-pained groans as the monster between my legs claims me all over again.

His paws, heavy and clawed, come to rest on my back as he grinds himself deep and as hard as he can. Sebastien’s cock seems to swell as he shoves against me, fur-covered haunches feeling smoother and more human as time goes on. This is how it works, I know – when he feels my love,
something
lets him revert to human form for a short sliver of time. 

“Don’t fight, don’t run,” his voice pounds inside my mind. “Accept that you’re my property – property of my pack. Just accept it.”

Property, he says. Am I property, or his mate? Why can’t I make sense of it?
I ask myself knowing full well he can listen to everything that goes through my mind.

“It will make sense in time. Or it won’t!” He is getting wilder, more powerful, stronger and heavier. Where there were clawed paws, slowly I feel fingers spread out. Big, powerful fingers attached to hands that cover most of my back. Even as his body becomes more man than beast, Sebastien can’t fully escape his nature. His cock fills me, holding me in place, restricting his movement to small shoves as he works himself deeper, stretching me deliciously around that strange, wonderful bulge right below his tip.

I let out a soft, pleading moan. I want him to take me, to make me his and never let me go.

One of his hands moves off my back and Sebastien grabs a fistful of hair, twisting until my scalp seems to burn with the same desire that I feel between my legs. Pinned underneath him, helpless, completely at his mercy, I cry out for him to stop. Before I do, I know he won’t. I count on that.

Flat teeth scrape where my shoulders and neck come together. He bites, gently and then harder. I can’t help myself but to let out a gasp and then a groan.

“Let it all go,” he whispers in my ear, so faint it could have been a dream.

A dream. Is this a dream? Has it all been a dream? Am I going to wake up alone in bed in Baton Rouge?

“Only if you can turn back time.” He says. Sebastien’s voice caresses my ear like velvet wrapped around a chain.

The other hand leaves my back. Where it was, I still feel the heat from his fingers prickling my skin. As he pushes it around my side, trickles it down to my belly and then lifts me effortlessly off the ground and slides it up, cupping the swell of my breast, I take another breath, amazed at his strength.

“How does it still surprise me when you can do things like that?”

“You’ll get used to it.” I can detect a little bit of a smile in his voice. His smiles are rare, but they’re honest. That counts more than quantity as far as I’m concerned.

His fingers, smooth and dry against my body, squeeze me, and wrap around my nipple. As soon as I feel that first pinch, my nib pebbles up, puckers, waiting for him to play and twist and tug. Shocks run down my belly, right along the path his hand took up it, and settle between my legs right before he pushes his swollen cock deeper.

My sex contracts on him, grips him like an iron fist, milking waves move up and down his thick, delicious shaft as he seems to swell even more. My lips tremble, my teeth chatter against one another in a slow, measured pace that matches up with the clenching between my legs.

Sebastien releases his grip on my hair after another tug that jerks my head upright and makes me stare straight ahead. He moves it underneath and eagerly grabs my other aching, sweetly-sore breast. My wolf lover crushes both of them to my chest with a kneading, massaging motion that sends chills creeping up my scalp.

“Whatever you do,” he says, haltingly, between hisses of air, “whatever happens, don’t forget me. I’ll always come for you. And don’t be afraid. You’re destined for great things, Jaz. But great things nearly always come with danger. Just believe in yourself, and in us.”

Not knowing what he was talking about, but relishing the idea of not only being this creature’s property, but his ward, I give up control completely to him. My body physically relaxes in his grip, and my mind lets him fill it as he wills – however he wants.

“Oh-okay,” I said as my head falls forward again, drooping down low enough for me to see his hands squeezing my breasts and past, between my legs where he pushes his hips against me, and my sex drips down his muscled thighs. Heat spills onto the spongy ground beneath my knees.

I feel myself grasp him, pull him deeper, my walls squeezing his balled-up cock and refusing to let him go. Sebastien lets out a soft moan and then a louder one, and finally throws his head back, lets my tits fall from his hands, and drags his human fingernails slowly down my back.

Thrills shoot out of the scratching passion, wrap around my sides, prickle my skin and draw a breath so deep that it leaves a void in my chest. I hear him roar and slam his hips forward, slapping so fiercely against my flesh that I am pushed forward and my face grinds to the floor.

Another scratch. Fire crawls up my throat.

I can’t help but take another breath that sticks in my chest. I can barely keep my eyes open.

His hands go to my hips, grip me to him, so hard I can’t move.

I don’t want to move.

I don’t want to run.

For the first time since arriving in this weird stretch of forest, I feel like I’m home.

All I want is for Sebastien’s promise to be real, to never have to be without him.

Outside the cave, somewhere in the distance, his subordinates howl, their voices piercing the night. Looking back, first at where his cock enters me, then at his face, I see that the pack’s sound brings him comfort.

“When you wake up,” he says as sweat that looks like quicksilver runs down his chest, “you’ll be alone. Don’t be afraid. I’ll never leave you. But there’s something we have to do.”

Before I say anything, my body clenches around him in a climax that threatens to take my consciousness, or wake me from sleep if this is a dream – I still can’t tell – and his hands curl around me, squeezing so hard I feel bruises.

Sebastien’s desperate, urgent moan goes further and further down his throat. He surges and erupts inside me as both our climaxes take us.

His moan turns to a howl.

“Don’t forget what I told you.” He whispers as a green twinge appears around the edges of my vision. “Don’t forget.”

He takes a breath.

I feel his kiss on the back of my neck, then behind my ear.

“Don’t forget.” His whisper fades into the night. A moment later, all I can sense is what’s left of his sweat on my skin, and his scent lingering in the air.

***

“S
ebastien?”

I open my eyes, and then quickly shut them again. I’m sore, and tired, but the biggest fear I have is that when I look around, everything that happened the night before with Sebastien and Leroux and the rest of the pack will turn out to be just a fading fantasy. I’m still wrapped in a fur and there’s a pile of hay underneath me.

A shiver courses through me as I shift my weight and feel stone under my leg.

Cold. Cold, hard stone.

Okay Jaz, you’re still in a cave. That’s a start, at least, a promise that the whole thing wasn’t a fantasy
.