ed me from the bottom of my spine to the top of my head.
“I caught you,” he murmured into my sweat-dampened shoulder.
I dug my fingers into his hair, letting him support me against the moss-covered trunk of the oak. Instead of rough, the tree felt soft on my bare skin. “What are you going to do with me?”
His teeth grazed my neck where his tongue had just been, and he cupped my chin with one big hand, holding me up easily with one arm. His strength was staggering. Lucas angled my face upwards with a gentle push then dragged his hand slowly down my throat. I let him, knowing that by exposing the most vulnerable part of myself to him I was showing him I trusted him completely.
He bit me again, and I moaned.
My clever panties met a dramatic end, ripped off with one hand.
“I liked those,” I teased.
“I don’t care.” He pushed his hips against me—hard—and the only thing holding me up now was his pelvis. I wrapped my legs around his waist, my heels anchoring into the place where his back curved into his toned ass. When his hands cupped my breasts, I arched my hips against him, trying to find a way to will his hardness inside me while both our hands were otherwise occupied. He growled again while I continued to rock myself against his erection.
“What do you want?” he whispered, his teeth nipping my earlobe, making my scalp tingle.
“I want you to fuck me,” I rasped. “Now.”
I opened my eyes and was staring into the pupils of an animal. The blue eyes I knew so well had vanished, replaced by the amber-green eyes of a wolf.
“Are you afraid?”
“No.” My fangs couldn’t hide anymore. Passion and hunger rode a fine line for vampires, and he was testing the limits of my control. I grinned and showed him my razor-sharp canines. “Are you?”
He ground his pelvis into me. “No.”
“Then shut up.”
He lifted me, both hands on my bare ass, and I reached between us, pulling his hard cock free from his boxers. In one motion he lowered me onto him while he thrust hard. I tensed around him, intensifying the friction, and he made a noise somewhere between a moan and a growl. His fingers dug into my hips while he buried himself so deep inside me I rode the line from pleasure to pain and back again.
Faster and faster he thrust, and each time our skin smacked together in a rough, desperate frenzy, I lost a little more of the hold I kept on my control. When his teeth bit down on my nipple and he drove into me so fiercely I thought I might end up inside the tree, I buried my fingers into his hair and jerked his neck to the side.
He didn’t stop biting me, not even when my fangs pierced his artery.
His blood filled my mouth, and every time he pumped into me, more of that precious liquid spilled over my tongue. I drank deep while he fucked me, and then it came. The moment that brings vampire blood donors back for more. The stinging pain of the bite changed, and the pleasure rode him. He cried out, fingers digging so hard into my skin I would be bruised, and his rhythm became more vigorous as the ecstasy of the bite mingled with the cresting orgasm from our wild coupling. I pulled back, licking the wound to seal it, and gasped as his thumb circled my core while he drove into me, pushing us both over the edge.
We collapsed onto the forest floor, too exhausted and bleary-eyed to move or speak for a long, long time. When we finally disentangled our sweaty limbs, he looked at me with astonishment. “I don’t know what to say.”
I smiled at him, one eye half-open. “You can start with thank you.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Ceremony night.
I was a bouquet of raw nerves.
Considering everything that could possibly have gone wrong on this trip had gone wrong, I was certain a disaster of Titanic proportions was waiting for us at the ceremony site. Lucas was so positive it would run smoothly he wasn’t willing to accept that anything bad might happen.
I wasn’t willing to listen when he said it would all be fine.
How could it be fine?
The closest I’d come to shifting since I was a baby had been in a do-or-die moment, and I hadn’t a clue as to how I’d shifted my hand then. How was I supposed to turn myself into a wolf when I’d spent my adult life burying the ability as deep inside of me as I could?
We’d been given black robes to wear for the ritual. I guess the wolves didn’t see much point in dressing up when they would be getting naked again to change forms. When Lucas and I left our cabin, there was a trail of lit tiki torches lining the way into the woods. Although no proper path existed, after years of wolves trekking the same way into the woods, a groove had long ago been worn into the forest.
We followed the queue of black-cloaked wolves as they made their way to the site. Some chatted casually, like this was nothing out of the ordinary. Others bowed their heads in quiet contemplation, clearly viewing their shift as a kind of religious experience.