* * * * *
Chloe felt as though she had sand in her eyes. After a night like she’d had, it was no wonder, she told herself as she rose up on her elbows and rubbed her eyes.
Wicked, wicked dreams.
Caine.
Hands, mouth, sexy male attitude and all.
And that was only half the fun in this naughty little fantasy.
Chloe smiled and rolled over, still thinking about what fun both brothers could be were one of them not so angry with himself. And had she not already fallen in love.
The wolf in bed beside her never even stirred.
Chapter Thirteen
“You know what I need, boy?”
Caine turned his long hairy face to look at Chloe without thinking. She laughed at the action and patted his head.
“I need a man like you.”
He hoped his looking at her now resembled a companion’s adoration for its master.
Because it was.
Caine sat beside Chloe in the passenger seat of her SUV and listened to every word she said to him. Every wish she was expressing out loud. Every fantasy that she would never have had the nerve to tell even one of her closest girlfriends.
Every detail concerning the way she felt about the man she hadn’t been able to make love to the night before and every word about what she’d like for him to do to her, but could never admit to him.
Caine was glad that wolves couldn’t blush.
“Damon Caine is pretty damned close to the kind of man I need.” She smiled and nodded as she stopped at the intersection for a moment longer than was necessary. The car that thought she’d given him the right of way honked noisily as she almost rammed it when she finally decided to go. “I don’t think I’ve been that horny in years,” she giggled. “Well, except with his brother,” she mused. “But he managed to ruin that for me.” He watched her pull her bottom lip into her mouth and then spit it back out before grinning over at him. “And the night I met you, you little devil.”
Caine watched her blush modestly and cover her eyes with the hands she took completely off of the wheel.
“You’d better not ever do anything like that again.” She pointed to him and shook her finger as she thankfully looked back to the road.
Caine licked the finger when she wasn’t looking.
“Stop that.”
He saw her grin. She couldn’t help it. But neither could he.
“God, there was something about Caine that just seemed like it wanted to go…”
Caine’s ears perked forward as she sped up almost into the back of the car in front of them and he felt his wolfish heart beat in anticipation…
…of death by car accident.
“…wild.”
But of course.
“I’ve never met anyone like him before.”
Caine heard her sigh and tried not to smile or get a hard on at the sound he wanted to hear after he’d showed her just how correct the lady was in her suspicions.
Neither worked very successfully.
Thank God for an undercoat on my belly.
“He made me think of things I hadn’t thought about in years. Fantasies, you know? Dirty little fantasies that I’d like to ask him if he has, too. Fantasies I’d almost forgotten about until just being with him, well almost with him at least…”
Caine waited for her to finish her thought. He watched her face grow more serious before she did.
“He reminded me of things that I shouldn’t think about,” she said quietly.
Caine wondered if he should remind her of the car that had just switched lanes without signaling. Like he could remind her if he wanted to. She jerked the wheel to barely avoid hitting the car and then flipped the other driver off without so much as a tiny blush this time.
Damn.
“Bastard should watch where the fuck he’s going.”
And once again.
“Sorry,” she smiled over at Caine and he tried not to think about the fact that she’d just shown him her ability to out curse a drunken man on shore leave. And he ignored the fact that she’d just apologized to a wild animal. Caine didn’t even think about the fact that she’d strapped that same wild animal tightly into the front seat of her car so he wouldn’t get hurt were she to make good on a driving behavior that so far was proving more primitive than anything Caine had ever been witness to.
And the fact that she’d used a feather from her pillow and tickled the nose of a vicious, dangerous, alpha wolf in order to wake him that morning never even crossed his mind.
Dog people are indeed a special breed.
But Caine adored this dog person. Dog woman. Bitch.
Wife.
Whatever.
All the same to him. The female part of himself. His other half. The creature that was going to kill them both by running red lights and tailgating before Caine reached his thirtieth birthday.
Of course that was two hundred and ten in dog years, so who was he to complain?
“What do I do, boy?”
Bend over?
“I mean, I really want to see him again. I need to know more about him, you know?” He listened to her sigh again and he smiled before she could see it. “I need to know if he knows what happened between his brother and me. And I need to know just how far his imagination goes. I need to find out just how much the man honestly believes when it comes to those crazy stories he writes.”
Caine felt his stomach ball up and his insides twist.
Just like all the others…
She was quiet for a long minute and Caine watched her face as she let her own words work through her head. She’d said them. Strongly, in fact. But the strength had been tainted with another voice that wasn’t conviction.
He wouldn’t even let himself hear what that other voice had said. As for her own sweet voice, Caine could listen to it for years.
“I guess I could just happen to just drop in to check on that cute little Lee, couldn’t I? I’d have to see Luke probably, but at least I could see Caine again.” She smiled and stared forward as she nodded to herself. “That Lee is a gorgeous little thing, isn’t he?”
He’s a cutie, that baby brother of mine.
“He’d be a sexy little thing if he was a person, you know? That face is so adorable. And he’d be right about the perfect age for some fun. Especially to a woman my age.”
He jacks off all the time. You should see him. It’s disgusting. He’ll be blind soon.
“That’s weird, isn’t it?”
No, masturbation is actually quite normal, especially in the human male. In fact even other animals use their…
“Shit!”
Caine felt his body being slung from one side of the seatbelt to the other and wished to God he had thumbs. But not to hang on by.
He’d have hitchhiked back to the mountains if he’d had them.
“Did you see that guy?”
Yes, honey, he was just pulling away from a perfectly green light when you almost killed all three of us and an old lady with a walker by running another red light. How dare he?
“Son of a bitch.”
Actually, my mother is human. As my children’s mother will be.
“What was I talking about?”
Me.
“Oh yeah, Barklee.”
Son of a bitch.
“Anyway, I’m afraid he’s eaten something he shouldn’t have. It’s just not normal for a wolf of his age to have a fever like that. And he was fine just the day before.”
But Playboy comes in the mail on Wednesdays. Coincidence? I think not.
“I just don’t know…”
Caine watched her tug at her lip and wished he had clothes so he could magically appear as soon as they stopped for gas and then he could give her a fever of her own. Or an injection of his own. Caine was sure he could find something of his for the lady to come down with.
Or go down on.
He glanced to the back of the SUV to see how much room they’d have back there were he to find some human duds and then he looked back to her dimple.
“What are you looking at?”
Something I never knew I needed.
“You’re a little flirt, aren’t you?”
No. I’m just one stupid son of a bitch.
Man.
Husband.
Whatever.
Caine felt her rub his ears and then watched her reach down to pat the patch of white on his belly.
“I need a man just like you, don’t I, boy?”
Caine grinned. And guiltily let her rub him where he knew it was soooo wrong.
* * * * *
“What is it?”
Caine sat silently on the floor beside Chloe’s feet. The man she had given Lee’s blood sample to had now touched her seventeen times.
And Caine without his rabies booster.
“Cannabis.”
“What?”
What!?
“Pot?” The man nodded and “accidentally” brushed Chloe’s breast with his hand as he reached for the lab report on the desk. “The wolf had marijuana in his bloodstream.”
I’m going to kill him.
“And it reacted with the tranquilizer you used on him.”
I’m going to kill Lee, too.
“How would he have pot in his bloodstream?”
The man shrugged and had to lay the file back down in the exact spot where he’d picked it up. Caine watched Chloe try to move and avoid the man’s obviously unwanted advances.
“I have no idea unless they’re growing it or it’s growing wild out there and the wolf ingested some of it.” He shrugged again and leaned back against the table next to Chloe. Caine watched her move to the side and then saw the man scoot closer again. “Or, a teenager in the house gave it to him.”
Caine stood up and wedged his way in between Chloe and the man who hadn’t seen a full head of hair or a blow job since eleventh grade.
“Well, you’re a nosy fellow, aren’t you?”
Caine felt his side being pushed by the toe of a shoe.
“C’mon now, move back over there pup…”
Touch me with your foot again and you’re limping home, asshole.
“Chloe, whose dog
is
this?”
Caine watched the man move to stand on the other side of Chloe.
“He’s a little protective over you, isn’t he?”
Caine moved again to wedge his way between the balding, celibate asshole and Chloe.
Chloe shrugged and reached down to rub Caine’s neck. “I believe he thinks I’m his master.”
Thinks?
“Well, why don’t we leash him outside while we go over this lab report?”
He watched the man’s hands come closer to his face but could just barely hear Chloe warn the hairless asshole before Caine felt fingers on the nape of his neck.
I am a fucking wolf.
And you are obviously a dumbass.
“Sidney, I wouldn’t do that if I were…”
The man reached up…
…Caine had to close his eyes and breathe before he even finished his thought.
The hairless, masturbating, soon to be dead asshole reached up…
…and put his hand over Chloe’s mouth.
And there’s only so much a man or a wolf will tolerate when it comes to the mistreatment, harassment, or fondling of his mate.
Luke, the cop in Luke, at least, would have been proud.
“Sidney” didn’t lose the entire hand. In fact, if the paramedics could have found the ends of the two fingers that Caine did bite off, he might have lived to jerk off normally for another day.
Caine belched on his way to Chloe’s car.
And then smiled when she leaned over and patted his head.
“Good dog.”
Chapter Fourteen
Chloe watched the wolf take off at a run as soon as she unbuckled the seatbelt around him, lifted the bags of groceries from the back of the car and then used her foot to elbow open the cabin door. She was pissed beyond reason with Caine or Luke or whoever had allowed little Barklee to get the substance into his bloodstream. But she was also nervous about confronting either of the men about the illegal substance.
Not to mention nervous about being around both of them again.
The confusion that Chloe felt was rampant and disturbing. So disturbing, in fact, that she hadn’t even been able to bring herself to admit her frustration to herself until the wolf who had shown up in her bed again the night before had proven a very good listener and companion. Despite his being a bit skittish during car rides.
She smiled as she thought about him. So intelligent. So virile and beautiful.
Now if
he’d
been a man…
But he wasn’t. And the two men who seemed just as capable of arousing Chloe were even more frightening than the four-legged beast that had spent the night with her again.
Luke reeked of an inability to control his anger. Chloe had already seen that the man had trouble dealing with his other impulses as well.
Caine seemed very talented at forcing Chloe to relate to his brother’s weaknesses.
She wanted to see him again. She wanted to taste him again. More of him this time. And she wanted him to taste all of her.
And she wanted that man inside her.
Chloe had never wanted a particular man this badly before. She’d been horny before and she’d lusted after plenty of men, both real and imagined. Even Luke had stirred something almost uncontrollable in her. But she couldn’t determine what it was about Caine that made her so sensitive to the simple thought of his eyes or his hands or the smell that identified him not only as man, but as one particular man.
Hers.
His heart was the thing that had really sealed the deal, though.
That was nuts. She’d known the man a total of what? Twenty-four hours? That wasn’t long enough to know he was hers. Or that he had a heart the size of the mountain range.
Animals
can recognize
a future mate
within
minutes
of their first examination of each other
.
Wild animals, though. Not thinking, rational animals. Human animals had to consider things like the logistics of dating and the problems associated with family and career when they collided and humans had to consider such pertinent issues as race and religion when choosing mates.
The researcher and the preservationist in Chloe both cringed as she thought about how much harder the task of reinstating the wolves would be for her and every other researcher and biologist were the wolves they worked with discriminating about the color of a mate’s coat.
Poor, dumb animals.
Chloe pitied such ignorant animals. But the only thing ignorant about the animals Chloe worked with was the fact that they sometimes were helpless to let their innocence to man’s ability to be stupid and unthinking destroy them. A situation she could only suspect Barklee had fallen into.
She put her groceries away and made her way into the bedroom to change and try to gather a little more courage to confront Caine about that particular matter. And to try and make her body do as she needed it to and not get quite so worked up over the possibility of seeing him again.
Neither happened right away. Chloe instead began to pick up around the room. Hanging up clothes, making the bed. Piddling, Maw had always called it. Chloe always did it when she was trying to avoid doing or thinking about something else.
The bloody footprints just outside the glass doors forced her to stop her piddling.
Wolf tracks. Big ones.
The alpha’s?
She hadn’t noticed him limping or acting as though he was injured. Chloe jerked the covers back on the bed and examined the spot where he had lain the night before.
It was clean.
She stared down at the crisp, white sheet for a moment before going back to the glass doors and pushing one of them open. The way in which the door easily swung open answered the question as to how the wolf had gotten back into the house the night before.
But the footprints were another matter. Chloe followed them across the deck and down the steps. They disappeared in the grass.
She stood with her hands on her hips and surveyed the yard for signs of anything else that could tell her what the hell was going on. A dead animal. Another wolf the alpha had killed the night before. Possibly he thought this was his territory now and he was protecting it. She looked for something that would tell her why the wolf who had visited her had clean feet, despite the tracks she suspected were his.
Scar?
She hadn’t seen him the night before. Nor had she seen Barklee after she’d returned home. Only the alpha when she’d awakened to find him in her bed again. And he hadn’t tracked any blood into the house.
She didn’t know. And it would seem that she might never know.
But the moment she spotted the torn and bloodied piece of white fabric at the edge of the woods, she did know that she was less worried about a wolf or any make believe man now. And despite all of the things that humans had to consider when they chose mates, Chloe realized that her expertise in the realm of human animal biology wasn’t quite as thorough as she’d once thought.
Twenty-four hours. Twenty-four years. What the hell did it matter how long it had been?
Wolves couldn’t tell time.
And her heart had known which one of them was her mate the minute she had met him.