Desire—pure, undiluted—pooled in my core, making me feel too sensitive to his touch, too aware of his closeness, the potential of his body and mine.
“I, ah, that’s fuzzy,” I lied as I tried not to whimper at the sensation as his fingers kept giving me exactly what I liked.
“Fuzzy,” he repeated as his other hand raised, and both hands started to massage my scalp. “That’s… unfortunate,” he told me as his fingers pressed in just a little bit more, making my body sway into him, my chin falling down to give him more access. That he didn’t need since he was so much taller than I was.
“Maribelle?” his voice purred, and I was so close that I felt the sound vibrate through his chest.
“Mmm?” I answered back, suddenly becoming aware that I felt the sounds he was making because my forehead was pressed to his chest.
Somehow, without being fully aware of it, I’d closed my eyes and leaned into him and almost drifted off to sleep.
“I don’t think you have a serious head injury,” he said.
And, suddenly, I managed to fully snap out of it.
If I thought I’d been blushing before, it was ten times worse right then as I yanked away from him, moving out of his arm’s length because I almost felt, I don’t know, entranced by the stranger.
Why else would I have let him rub my head?
“I, ah, I’m actually, you know, not so sure,” I said, backing up more. “I’m going to go home now.”
“To your lineman boyfriend?”
“What? Oh, yes. Yes, to my lineman boyfriend. He, ah, he must be wondering where I am,” I babbled backing up more, then turning fully.
“Nice seeing you again, Maribelle,” he called. And I went ahead and pretended that I didn’t feel a little internal shiver at the way he said my name.
Instead, I just raised a hand in a half-hearted wave, and damn near ran back to the house, making sure I locked all the doors and windows before sitting down on the bed.
Even with some distance from him, that strange tug seemed to pull at me, and all my mind could think of was the way his hands had weaved magic, how he’d made me somehow made me feel completely safe and comforted by a complete stranger.
Not only that, but, well, he’d turned me on entirely. With such chaste, gentle contact.
Even the brush of my barely-there nightgown over my heated skin was enough to make a pained whimper escape me.
There was no way I was going to get any sort of rest with the unmet desire blazing through my system.
On a sigh, I rested back against the pillows on the bed, letting my hand drift up under my skirt, then moving between my thighs, finding myself already wet and needy.
Closing my eyes, I drifted back to the woods, melding both the fantasy and the reality together.
His hands in my hair, then his body over mine, and, finally, his face between my thighs.
That was how I knew it was pure fantasy.
What man had a willing woman and didn’t slip inside her, didn’t find his own release when she was more than happy to have him?
I let those thoughts slip away though, getting lost in the fantasies, in the ways my body was driving upward.
As I got higher and higher, I felt that strange tug, the same as before, but stronger. Almost, I don’t know, closer.
But that was crazy.
Somehow, though, it made the sensations feel more acute until I was reaching that apex, then crashing down from the cliff.
I cried out at the intensity of the orgasm as it crashed and crashed through me in a seemingly never-ending wave, leaving me weak and exhausted afterward.
You’d think, after a rest like that, that I would sleep peacefully.
But I tossed and turned, waking up with fevered dreams full of howling wolves and soft fur and piercing brown eyes with flecks of yellow.
I woke up tired and frazzled, going around my morning tasks with a distracted mind and weirdly heated body, even with the cool autumn chill coming through the windows.
Frustrated, feeling like I was getting a bit of cabin fever, I moved out onto the front deck.
That was where I saw something that I was reasonably sure hadn’t been there before.
Something sitting on the ledge of the bedroom window.
Curious, I made my way in that direction, finding some sort of rough gemstone sitting there. It was white but had some sort of iridescence when it caught the light.
I knew it.
A moonstone.
But where had it come from?
CHAPTER FOUR
Waylon
Moonstone was naturally occurring in parts of Virginia.
There were flashier crystals around. The bright purple amethyst. The striking blue-green amanzonite. Hell, you could even find some garnet and topaz if you looked hard enough.
But there had always been something about moonstone for me. There was something poetic about it with our pack, with our connection to the moon.