“No one else smells like you, Missy,” he murmured, cupping his hand around the nape of her neck. “No one else ever has, and no one else ever could. You smell of honey and vanilla, and warm, sexy woman.”
He saw the softness in her eyes, felt the tension sap out of her muscles until her arms uncrossed and her body melted closer to his. His hands closed on her, tight and possessive, and he drew a deep breath to drink in her scent.
“You smell damp and delicious and like I could devour every drop of you and still not be satisfied.” He licked her lips, a slow, lapping taste that drew more of her scent into him and made hunger knot heavily in his stomach. “You smell like my mate.” He reached out to draw her closer, but the movement must have startled her because she slipped away at the last minute and put the width of the coffee table between them.
“Okay, maybe you’re right,” she said, eying him warily. “Maybe the mate concept
is
a werewolf thing that I wouldn’t understand, but I understand that this hunt of yours is a glorified excuse for rape, so forgive me if I decide to call this one a miss and stay in tonight.”
Shit! Could a Lupine die of frustration? Because if it hadn’t happened before, Graham felt pretty sure it would in a few minutes if she didn’t let him get his hands on her. Never mind that his hands—and other assorted parts—had been on and in her for most of the last twelve hours. He still wanted more, and not getting it felt like the purest form of torture. He couldn’t look at Missy without wanting her, and the pain of it made him cranky.
“Like I said, you don’t really have a choice,” he snapped. “You’re going to the hunt, and I’m going to hunt you, and when I catch you, I’ll change back to human form and fuck you until you’re too goddamned tired to tease me any more. Then we’ll be declared mates, and we’ll come back here so I can fuck you some more. Understand?”
“Don’t take that tone with me, Graham Winters.” Anger shot sparks from her normally placid brown eyes and nearly caught him on fire. “I don’t take orders from you, no matter what delusions you happen to be sporting, so don’t think you can tell me what I can and can’t do.”
“Jesus Christ, Melissa!” He bellowed his frustration until it bounced off the walls in a vibrating echo. “What the fuck do you want me to do? Hunt someone else? You want me to go to the Park without you, chase down some faceless Lupine and fuck her instead? Would that make you happy?”
Christine Warren
Fur Factor
79
He stalked over to her until they stood toe-to-toe and could glare at each other up close and personal. Apparently unsatisfied with the positioning, Missy scrambled up to stand on the coffee table, which brought her more or less eye-level with him.
“No! No, it would not make me happy, but damn it, Graham, what do you want from me? I’m out of my league here, and I can feel absolutely everything around me spinning totally out of my control. Did you want me to do a little cheer and take off my clothes
before
we get to the park? Just so I can make
your
life that much easier? Give me a break here! I’m scared!”
The words popped out of her mouth like a cork from a champagne bottle, and all the bluster fizzed out of her like pale foam. She seemed to shrink as he watched until she once more looked like the shy and vulnerable woman he’d picked up in Dmitri’s garden. He wrapped his arms around her and cuddled her close.
“Aw, baby. I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I know you’re scared, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you unhappy. I swear. Shh…. It’s okay. I promise, it’ll be okay.” She stood rigid in his arms for all of two and a half seconds before she melted into him like sweet, vanilla cream. Her arms wrapped around his neck, and she held him close, burying her face in his shoulder and trembling.
“I’m scared,” Missy repeated, her voice whisper soft now and choked with emotion, but at least half of that sounded like anger to him. “In twelve hours you’ve managed to turn my entire world upside down.” She raised her head until he could see her expression, and the frustration and anxiety there made him want to kick his own ass for upsetting her. “Yesterday, I taught a room full of five-year-olds how to tie their shoes, and today you’re telling me I’m going to have to run for my virtue through Central Park tonight, pursued by a pack of werewolves, one of who thinks I’m his mate. I feel like I just got sucked into an alternate reality, and can’t decide if it’s based on dreams or nightmares.”
Graham reached up and tucked a soft strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m sorry. I should have realized how hard I was pushing. It’s not fair to you. I know.” She looked up at him with those big brown eyes, her lush, completely kissable lips trembling, and he cursed himself again, because as much as he regretted frightening her, there wasn’t much he could do to make the fear go away. He had as little choice in the hunt as she did, and he’d be damned if he’d give her up in addition to his place in the pack. Those were two things he had no intention of living without.
He brushed a kiss across her forehead and cradled her head in his hand, massaging her scalp with his fingertips.
“Shh…” he soothed, stroking his other hand in gentle circles over her back. “It’ll be okay. I promise.”
She lifted her head and pulled back—the whole three or four inches he allowed her—to meet his gaze with a scowl. “Damn it, would you stop being all perfect for just a few minutes?”
Graham blinked. “Huh?”
Christine Warren
Fur Factor
80
“You’re doing a knight in shining armor routine, but its effectiveness is somewhat marred by the fact that you’re vowing to rescue me from a situation
you
got me into. It’s like stealing my car and then offering to help me file the insurance claim.” The woman could change her moods so fast, she left him dizzy, Graham decided as the first squeezing knots of a headache began to form behind his eyes. Shit. She was actually causing him mental anguish! And this was his mate?
“First of all,” he growled. Sighing, he took a deep breath and started again in a normal tone of voice. “First of all, I did not get you into any situation—“
“Yeah? Then what do you call this matehunt thing?”
“—because I have as little control over any of this as you do,” he continued as if she hadn’t interrupted. Only louder. It was safer than giving into the urge to shake her. “
I
didn’t call the matehunt.
I
didn’t start the tradition that says I have to take a mate to be alpha of my own damned pack.
I
didn’t pick me up at a party, tease me half out of my mind, invite myself back to my house and then try to sneak out in the morning without even saying goodbye and thanks for the multiple orgasms. Those would all be you, Missy. Not me.”
She screwed up her face like she’d eaten something sour. “You’re the one who had to go and be a werewolf.”
He gave a short bark of laughter. “Yeah, because God knows I did that just to piss you off.”
She at least blushed at that. “You know that’s not what I meant. You’re just making everything so darned…complicated.”
“Welcome to real life.”
The words caught her with her mouth open and her lungs full, probably because she was preparing to bellow at him some more. Instead, her jaw clicked shut, and she pushed herself off the coffee table so she could pace over to the front window. He didn’t particularly like that she felt the need to put distance between them, but he didn’t push it. Not when he would have to push her so far and so hard later that night.
Still, he could hear her exhausted sigh from across the room.
“If you have to screw someone tonight, I rather it were me than some other woman, I guess,” she said. “Not that I wouldn’t rather forget this whole insane tradition of yours even existed, but that didn’t sound like one of the options.” She looked back over her shoulder, and he searched her expression for some sort of clue as to what the hell he should do next. In the end, he settled for being honest. “It’s not.”
“Yeah. That’s pretty much what I thought.” She turned to stare out the window at the street outside, which annoyed Graham. He wanted to see her face, and it seemed like she was hiding it from him. “So I guess I’m going to get to see a real-live Lupine matehunt. Even if it kills me.”
“I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
Christine Warren
Fur Factor
81
He could barely hear her answer, she spoke so softly. “I know.” Christine Warren
Fur Factor
82
Missy stared at the wall like a lobotomized inpatient and let the conversation drone on around her. Half a minute ago, Graham had dumped her in this room full of women she didn’t know, with the exception of his secretary, and deserted her. Never mind that she’d been too dazed to protest, she still planned to blame everything on him.
She felt Samantha’s hand tugging at her elbow and looked up at the other woman who had rushed over to greet her, the second Graham had left her at the door.
“Luna,” the brunette murmured, urging her to face the crowd that had gathered around them. “Everyone’s been waiting to meet you. Can I introduce them to you?” There she went with that “Luna” thing again, even though Missy still didn’t understand how she could be the alpha female when she wasn’t even Lupine. Shouldn’t they have rules about this kind of thing?
“Sure,” she agreed, since she couldn’t think of a way to
dis
agree, and let Samantha lead her over to a large, almost throne-like chair and urge her to sit. The symbolism was not lost on her. She looked up at the Lupine who stood at her side like a sentinel and sighed. What the heck had she gotten herself into?
“This is Lucy Fallon,” Samantha introduced, as a tall, black haired woman who looked capable of taking on Xena in a fair fight stepped up before the chair and looked down on Missy with an expression of obvious disapproval. “She’s a police officer in Alphabet City.”
Ah. That explained it. She probably worked the late, late shift, too. The one when all the bodies tended to be found.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Missy lied. She felt horrendously awkward, unsure if she should be shaking hands or nodding her head or letting people kiss her ring—not that she was wearing one. Instead, she just smiled and hoped this wouldn’t take too long.
Lucy stared at her until Missy saw Samantha frown. When the silence stretched for another few seconds, Samantha started to growl, and Missy looked at her in shock. She got an even bigger shock when she saw the secretary’s lips twist and bare her teeth in a snarl.
“I just introduced you to your Luna,” Samantha snapped, her voice sounding a handful of octaves lower than it had just a few seconds ago. “Be careful you don’t offend her with your bad manners.”
Lucy narrowed her cop’s eyes, dark, flat and vaguely unsettling, and bared her own teeth in a sneer.
Christine Warren
Fur Factor
83
“My manners are fine for meeting a human,” she hissed without looking away from Missy’s face. “It takes more than you calling her by the title to make her my Luna. She’s
human
. The fact that Graham is fucking her does not make her my alpha.” The woman turned her back on Missy and began to stalk away, and it didn’t take a Lupine Emily Post to make the reluctant alpha realize she’d just been insulted. Big time.
It didn’t matter that she’d never asked to be anyone’s Luna. She still wasn’t the type to stand back and let herself be insulted.
“You may be right. Sleeping with Graham probably doesn’t make me alpha,” she agreed, raising her voice so it echoed clearly among the quiet crowd that had gathered to watch the interplay. She waited until Lucy turned back to face her before she finished her statement. “After all, it obviously didn’t do much for you.” She knew she’d scored a hit when she saw Lucy’s face alternately pale and then fill with bright color. Great. Not only was the woman a cop with an attitude, she had to be a jealous, scorned lover, too? That might just make Missy’s day. Still, she’d made her stand, and she couldn’t back down now.
Casually, she crossed one leg over the other and smoothed an invisible wrinkle in her ill-fitting jeans as if she wore yards of fine-woven silk. “But there’s a difference between you and me, Lucy. Graham may have fucked you once upon a time.” She flicked her eyes up and down over the woman’s tall frame, clearly insinuating that she couldn’t understand that piece of Graham’s past folly. “But I’m the one he made his mate.”
“Bitch!”
If the woman had sprung first and cast aspersions later, she might have been able to knock Missy into another dimension entirely, but as it was, all she managed to do was hit the back of the chair and send it tumbling ass-over-end with herself on top of it.
Missy had slid out of the seat before the “b” sound had fully formed on Lucy’s lips and by the time the Lupine realized her prey had escaped, Samantha and another woman had stepped between the would-be combatants and faced Lucy with their teeth bared.
“Back off!” Samantha snarled, and Missy had to blink twice before she convinced herself she was looking at the same brunette she’d accused of being timid earlier that morning. Funny how a little violence could change her opinion about someone.
Climbing to her feet, she dusted her hands off on her butt and peered out from behind two Lupine shoulders, which meant she really couldn’t see a darned thing.
Wedging her hands between her self-appointed bodyguards, she pried them apart and stepped forward until she could look her attacker in the eye.
“Be careful whom you call a bitch, Lucy,” she warned, meeting the other woman’s furious gaze with a level one of her own. So what if her knees were knocking on the inside? In this case, appearances were all that mattered. “Only one of us gets furry once a month, and believe me when I say, it ain’t me.” Lucy growled and shifted her weight forward. The women standing just behind Missy started to step forward, but Missy held them back with upraised hands. If by Christine Warren
Fur Factor
84
some weird twist of fate, she really
was
Graham’s mate, she did not plan to spend the rest of her life letting someone else fight her battles and defend her from the big, bad she-wolf.