Page 25 of Crave

I swayed under the addictive link of the bond, feeling Dallas’s body responding in time with mine. The scent of his release filled the room. He growled, eyes blazing a heated gold. My breathing instantly slaved to his, our hearts thrumming as one through the link of the bond. I threw my head back, shivering as another wave of dark pleasure rolled through my hips.

This wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening. After nine years of dancing around us, Dallas Caldwell was stripping away my last defenses. And I wasn’t certain, but I was pretty sure something about that terrified me.

He lowered his eyelids fractionally, the wolf coming out as he stared up at me in the dark room, all power, raw lust, and dominant command.

Tearing open a condom, he sheathed himself and turned me away from him, pressing my hands against the countertop. Like this, locked in the hard cage of his arms and chest, there was no denying the call of our darker, feral sides.

Shuddering, I nuzzled the hot skin of his throat, giving permission. Bracing himself, he entered me from behind. Time slowed. I lost myself in the musk of our swirling scents, in the hypnotic twist of pleasure and pain as he trailed soft kisses and bites up my throat.

“Mark me,” he growled, voice husky.

Our tongues met in a hot, needy kiss over my shoulder.

He gripped my wrists, teeth scraping the unbruised side of my neck. “Do it.”

It was the wolf talking, raw, wild animal need. His wolf had always wanted to claim me. That savage unleashed power, that need to possess what had drawn us together from the start. He was no longer being gentle, our pace wild, frantic. I arched back against him, wrists locked in his grip, the cage he had me in one I had no desire to escape. Twisting just before I fell, I sank my teeth into his bicep.

Dallas threw his head back, teeth gritted, the roar he released one of ecstasy and savage pain. I felt it all, unable to hide from him. Not any more. And then we were falling, falling—

Sometime after midnight, I got up for a glass of water. I stared out at the backyard, watching gauzy moonlight playing out across the lawn through the trees and trying to ignore the way my heart had started to race. What had just happened had felt like anything but one and done. I should have known better. I had known better.

Dallas and I had gone down this roadonce before, and left countless lives scattered in our wake. My mother couldn’t see us together, couldn’t know we were in contact at all without terrible consequences. And even if the Caldwells had once supported me out of a sense of obligation or guilt, it was pretty clear if they’d wanted a future for me and their son, they wouldn’t have shipped him off to the Canadian wilderness.

Much as I might have once wanted things to be different, Dallas Caldwell and I couldn’t be together. And the sooner I got used to that idea, the better.

5

Dallas

A POST-IT. I GOT UP at 4 a.m. to make Lacey Blair her favorite banana macadamia nut pancakes only to find out via the office supply breakup method used by douchey guys everywhere that she’d snuck out on me like I was a cheap one-night stand.

Never mind that I couldn’t stop replaying the memory of marking every last inch of her skin with my hands, mouth and tongue. Never mind that my dick ached like it had that entire summer before high school when I’d first figured out being a shifter meant you could go half a dozen rounds before you started getting sloppy. We definitely wouldn’t be talking about the fact that there were probably still grooves in my back left by her nails. Or that for a male shifter, waking up in a bed that smelled like the female who’d just marked you only to find her gone pretty much dialed the possessive Alpha-wolf freak out mode thing up to an eleven. As in eleven thousand. And, wow. Cold shower.

An hour later, I was up at The Spoke, sorting through the previous day’s paperwork. I grazed a finger across the faint crescent moon arc of the scar Lacey had left on the top of my biceps, feeling it pulse in time with her heartbeat. Her note stared up at me.

GOTTA GO. TALK LATER.

Growling, I pulled out my phone.

Me: Okay, so the part where Brody said someone could be after you, so don’t go off anywhere alone?

Three blinking dots appeared.

BabyGotBake: Which is the sort of order, btw, that never gets handed down to Ethan or Cal.

She wasn’t entirely wrong, but I wasn’t about to ride my oldest brother’s ass on that one. A year and a half ago, our dad had been abducted on a rural county road in broad daylight. We’d all heard the scream through the pack bond. Brody had been the one to find his abandoned police cruiser. From what we were able to piece together, Dad had been secretly meeting with contacts from a pack up in north Texas. Two weeks after his disappearance, that same pack was obliterated by vampires.

Maybe he thought he’d been protecting us. Maybe in the end, my dad knew exactly what he was doing. Maybe if we’d known the full extent of what was going on, we’d be as dead as the North Texas pack. But after all that went down, it was hard to call Brody paranoid whenever he made us upgrade security, call in periodically while out patrolling pack territory, or assign a guard when things got tense.

Me: Like we both don’t know you’re a badass…

BabyGotBake: Wait for it.

Me: …who asks me to get her special-blend alpaca socks for Christmas every year for her freakishly cold toes.

BabyGotBake: Which you’re totally getting me again, btw.

Me: Well, duh.