Winter Howl (Sanctuary) (18 page)

“I’ll tell them the truth.” He stepped under the spray with her, bringing in a rough washcloth for her to use. “I’ll tell them that we rolled around like dogs and that we did it with your knife to my neck. And balls.”

“They won’t believe you,” Renee replied.

“No, they won’t. But you’ll tell them that it’s true.”

“I will?”

“If they’re going to rip me to pieces, it better be because of something I really did,” Grant said, as he poured the gel onto the washcloth and rubbed it into lather. “Your conscience will keep you from lying to them. You’d sacrifice yourself for me before you would lie.”

He moved the washcloth from her shoulder blades to her waist to the curve of her buttocks. Then between, stroking her and washing away the scent from where she was sure it was most concentrated. He pressed her against him to get a better angle.

“This isn’t helping,” she muttered. But even though she knew she should push away, she kissed along the line of his shoulder. She found the place where she had bitten him—the skin was raised and slightly bruised. There was a scab where she had bitten through the skin. She traced the raises and ridges with her tongue. The knowledge that she had hurt him in some way, and that he had let her, made her squeeze her thighs around his hand.

“If your little bitch were here, too, we could really get things…clean,” Grant whispered. He circled one erect nipple with his short fingernail, and bent it back and forth before flicking it. She was sensitive enough there that the action was a little uncomfortable, but she somehow still enjoyed the sensation. Like the way her thighs ached from the night’s activities, but every time she used the muscles, she was reminded of
why
they ached. Like there were bite marks on her breasts and bruises on her hips and arms. But she had marked him as much as she had been marked by him. And she had held the poisonous knife too close to his skin.

An image of Britt had surfaced in her mind when he’d mentioned her, and though Renee knew that she would never come near Grant, she imagined for a second that Britt was behind her, that she was the one with the washcloth.

She thought sex would be just as good with Britt, and she let Grant kiss her as she imagined it. It helped that she had some practical experience to draw from—she had not known how much of a difference that made.

His cock was half-hard against her hip, and she took it in hand as she kissed him. The wildness was coming back. She thought she could drain him dry and still want more. She canted her hips with the movement of his hand, rubbing her clit against his slick thigh. She was too sensitive, and the orgasm came with more pain than pleasure, but it was release nonetheless. She clenched her fingers around his cock as the orgasm wrenched from her. He gave a muffled shout when she squeezed too tightly, but he reached down and covered her hand with his, pumping himself over her fingers with the same too-tight grip. His breathing was harsh in her ear, and he came onto her stomach. A few small spurts hit her breasts. He looked at her as if she were breakfast, bent down to taste himself on her, his teeth drawing blood to the surface and his moans humming through her body.

When she turned around to let the water wash the cum off her breasts, another dose of morning-after reality hit her like a fist in the stomach—perhaps a little lower.

“Shit,” she whispered. She went rigid when Grant ran a hand gently down her spine.

“It’s going to get awfully old if you regret what you do with me every time,” Grant said. She could practically hear his grin. “For you. Do you really think you’ll be able to stay away?”

“That’s not it,” she said. Although she thought she could manage regret after every encounter, no matter how tiring it would be, because she was
supposed
to feel guilty about this. She was
supposed
to feel guilty about not being able to say no to him, about going behind Britt’s back to have sex with someone she hated. “It’s just that I didn’t think…”

“That was the point,” Grant murmured, his growl trembling over her skin.

“About protection.”

She felt his mocking smile against her shoulder. “There are many things you need to fear from me, Red, but that ain’t one of them. The only way we reproduce, the only—let’s call it ‘disease’, like the bitch said, though I hardly think so—the only disease I spread is lycanthropy.”

He curled his arm around her, pulling her to him and spreading his fingers over her stomach possessively. He flicked his tongue against her ear. “No regrets,” he whispered before taking the lobe of her ear between his teeth. “It feels good, doesn’t it?”

Renee finally pushed him away. So she had one regret she could cross off her list, but there were still a slew of others left twisting inside her, and his touch wasn’t doing anything to make them disappear. Nor were either of them doing anything to make her clean.

“You need to go,” Renee said. “Run in the woods through the snow.”

“Put my energies into something other than making you scream, then?” Grant asked.

“Get my scent off in the air,” Renee replied.

Grant hesitated, looking almost angry. But he smoothed his expression out, removed traces of annoyance or attraction. “Sounds practical,” he said. “But I won’t be your dirty little secret for long, love. Can’t keep secrets in a place like this.”

Renee held her shoulders, crossing her arms over her breasts. Shielding herself from him, creating a barrier.

“Fine.” He reached for a towel and stepped out of the shower, drying off as he went.

* * * *

She did not know whether he did what she had told him to do. She only knew that he was not there when she finally got out, after scrubbing herself hard. Her skin was an angry pink in the places to which Grant had paid the most attention. She wrapped a towel around herself and considered her clothes on the floor. She could just walk out in the towel—the odds were that none of her shapeshifters would be in the house at this hour. But they
could
be, and a towel would be suspicious, to say the least. The clothes, though, might give them a clue as to where she had been, which they were probably wondering about anyway.

In the end, she chose to get dressed and hurry out and up into the loft.

Britt came in after her a few minutes after she got in, catching her changing between her old clothes and new, clean clothes.

“Where were you last night?”

The question was innocuous, Britt’s face innocent. She was not even thinking of anything near what Renee had actually been doing. Maybe she did not smell Grant on her because she wasn’t trying to smell him.

“In my room,” Renee said, caught in the headlights of a direct question.

Britt nodded. “Needed a little alone time? I can understand that. Things have been a little stressful for you lately.”

And, like that, Renee’s indiscretion was buried under Britt’s trust.

* * * *

The snow storms came in, blustered and calmed down. Getting to and from any of the buildings became a chore in itself, but the shapeshifters who gave their time and effort to keep the sanctuary running provided their invaluable services by shovelling paths. Fortunately, the house was the farthest building—once you reached the barns, it was easier to manoeuvre between them all.

Another full moon passed—the dogs were somewhat agitated, and Renee and Jake made sure to keep everyone locked in tight. She stayed all night with them without complaint, calming the dogs and sleeping intermittently on one of the couches. Jake was with her in his golden retriever skin, his alpha presence as calm as possible to help soothe the rest of them.

In general, Grant kept away from her these days, and Renee thought that was that. He’d had his taste and now he was finished with her, despite him talking about more. She was not too disappointed, although it would be a lie to say that she wasn’t at all—if anything, though, she was relieved. It meant no more sneaking around, no more pushing herself outside what she knew, no more impulsiveness she knew could not last.

But the morning after the full moon, when the circles were deep under her eyes, he came to her outside the dog barn in a tattered pair of corduroy pants that he must not have been able to remove in time before he’d turned. Before she could even close the door behind her, he crushed her against it, slamming it shut with their bodies. The snow pressed in from all sides, except the partially obscured walkway that had been dug the day before. She thought she would be cold until she again felt the heat of his skin under her fingertips.

He did not seem to care that she’d just woken up from a bad few hours of sleep, or that her hair was messy, or that she smelt like dogs and was covered in dog hair. From the way he pressed against her, all he cared about was feeling her. His hands were rough, rougher than she remembered them, and she wondered whether what he did in wolf form affected his human form—it was different for the shapeshifters, although their dog forms aged proportionally with their human skins.

He found his way under her three layers of shirts to squeeze one breast hard enough to make her yelp. Then he thrust his hand into her sweatpants and under her panties to start fingering her with more finesse than the previous roughness would have suggested. As he did, he thrust his hips against her thigh, using her for friction and nothing more. Renee twisted her hand in his hair for leverage, and she thought she felt some of it come out, but he only bit her lip, almost too hard, before taking control of her mouth.

It was all fast. Rough. Hot. Wild. If Renee had been more awake, she might have initially protested before finally giving in, but he had caught her by surprise, just at the right time, when she was too emotionally raw to even think of protesting. All she could do was feel, from the deliberate painful reminders to the steady climbing of pleasure and the pressure of his fingers playing her clit.

“Do you know why I’m here?” he asked against her mouth. Her gasps blew frosted breath between them, and he tasted it with a curl of his tongue. “Do you know why I came here? Why I come to you?”

She pressed her nails into him as the swirl of orgasm rose.

“I want you,” Grant murmured. “So much. I want to bite you.”

She knew she drew blood when she came, thrusting her leg up against his hardness to try and make him rise with her. He rutted against her madly, but his voice was still soft, still intent, intense.

“A wolf has to have his pack,” he said. He marked her mouth, her chin, her neck, anywhere he could find skin. And it hurt, but then he was jerking in short, tight movements. Then he was still, and she looked down at him from where he pressed her against the door.

“I could run for a hundred years from this place, and I would still want your flesh in my mouth,” Grant said. He let her down slowly until her feet touched the ground, but he did not release her.

She wanted to whisper at him to let her go. There wasn’t love or anything approaching it in his eyes. There was desire, yes, but also a need that went beyond hunger. Whatever it was, it was not insatiable—it had an end. It was as though he wanted her to burn without being consumed. With his body still tightly against hers and Jake just on the other side of the door—
Did he hear anything?
—she already felt consumed. She felt high, her head six inches above where it usually was, as though she was dosed on medication or had a particularly bad fever.

“Say something,” Grant said.

That was the trouble. When she did not know what to say, she did not know how to fill the silence. She drifted her fingers, then her lips, over his neck, waiting for something to latch on to.

“Do you want me?” he asked, muscles bunching under her hands as he drew her closer.

“Yes,” she said. She tasted the affirmative with a little bitterness.

“I can turn you,” Grant hissed into her ear.

She did not jerk away, but she paused, pulled back slightly so that the icy air swept in where her mouth had been, cold on her lips.

“You can have this. All the time. The heat, the intensity. They can never give you this. You can’t be domesticated, Renee. You’re either broken or you’re free.”

“Like you?” she said. “Were you broken?”

“Your skin cages you,” he replied. “I didn’t know I was broken until I was freed. You
know
that you’re broken, and no matter how much they try to put you back together, the only answer is magic. And their magic is weak.”

She pressed her hand against his chest. Not pushing him fully away, but enough that there was space between them. She could only imagine the sight she was after sleeping with the dogs, then fucking a werewolf.

“I don’t believe in magic,” she said. Each word was enunciated without being angry or insulting. Just matter-of-fact.

Grant paused. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No.” She pulled her jacket up from where he had pushed it down her arms and began making her way down the snowed-over path.

“You run a sanctuary for shapeshifters who turn into dogs,” Grant said. “You’re harbouring a werewolf.”

“None of this convinces me of the supernatural—at least, supernatural the way most people mean when they talk about it,” Renee said. “Only that there is natural that is yet undiscovered or unexplained. They change into dogs. But that’s all they do. Their families have conferences and wear suits and ties and go to work. They grow old with their dog skins, and they die. The dog skin and the human skin are unimpressive, except that one can turn into the other. And even that seems to be genetic. There’s no fancy light show. They can’t pass it on to me or anyone else.” She finally reached the cabin and pulled herself onto the porch.