Redemption: Reckless Desires (Blue Moon Saloon Book 3) (15 page)

Her hips pushed against his, and she wrapped a leg around his calf.

“Mmm,” he murmured in a
Hungry already?
kind of way.

Of course, she was hungry for him. They had a hell of a lot of lost loving to make up for.

“Mmm,” she mumbled, nodding through the next kiss.

They lay side by side, and a shockingly calculating part of her mind raced ahead to their options. They’d just done her-on-top, and she’d been breathless knowing it was a rare instance of Soren surrendering control of anything to anyone. But the cat-in-heat urge building in her demanded something hotter. Harder.

“This way,” she whispered, turning her back to him.

Soren sucked in a quick breath, like he’d been waiting for just that chance. He pulled her tighter, keeping her back to his chest. They were still on their sides, now both facing the window.

His breath tickled her ear, and he looped an arm over her side. He dropped kisses on her shoulder and stroked her ribs, then the underside of her breasts.

“Mmm. Nice.” She exhaled, arching into him.

“Nice,” he agreed, teasing her nipples into tight peaks.

“Nice,” she mumbled, pushing her rear back into his groin.

The hard length of him jutted up against her tailbone, and her body practically cried for satisfaction.

Once Soren had the reins, though, the ride was all his, and he wasn’t quite ready to let her gallop away.

“Patience,” he growled in her ear. His hand slipped lower, gently guiding her legs apart.

“Patience?” she panted as he teased her folds.

A
just-watch-this
grunt came from over her shoulder as he circled her clit, then rubbed her entrance with the flat of his palm. His big, broad hand teased her, driving her wild.

She moaned, and he kissed her shoulder, telling her he liked that, so she let herself do it again. Not enough to alert the whole neighborhood, but enough to let him know how she felt.

“God, Soren. How am I supposed to be patient when you— Oh!” she cried out as two thick fingers warmed her inside.

She couldn’t help but rock against his hand, relishing the feel of his arousal against her body. She tilted her head back, desperate for his nipping kisses.

“Here,” he whispered, guiding her hand to her nipple and rolling it together with her. His fingers were slippery from touching her inside, and once he got her going at her own breast, he drew a line down her side and went right back to toying with her sex. He scissored his fingers inside her then circled and pumped.

“God, Soren…” she whimpered over and over, about to come undone.

He wasn’t that far off, either, judging by the tension building behind her. When he finally whispered in her ear, she was all too happy to oblige.

“Like this,” he said, helping her get to all fours.

Yes, yes, yes!
her body cried, feeling him come up behind her.

One callused hand toyed with her swaying breasts, then dragged her hips back against his, and when he thrust forward—

“Yes!” she cried.

He withdrew, then rammed back, and her whole body pitched forward.

“Too hard?” he asked through clenched teeth.

She panted, ramming back against him. “I want hard.”

He withdrew far enough to nearly break contact, then pushed back in.

“Harder,” she breathed, dropping her head.

He pulled out, waited just long enough to torture her, then burst back in with a grunt.

“Harder,” she cried.

The deeper he reached, the more she craved him, and her cries grew more and more desperate. He drove her higher and higher. Physically higher, too, working her up the mattress in heated spurts that made her crazy with desire.

“So good,” she croaked as his steady rhythm tipped over into a frenzy. Anchoring her elbows on the bed, she pushed back against him, countering each thrust until they were both panting and groaning and urging each other on.

He took hold of her left hip to help her push back, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the beautiful friction building inside.

“Yes…yes…”

She
yesed
him through four more thrusts and the long, shuddering high that overcame both of them a second later.

“Yes.” Even Soren succumbed to the need to moan something at the peak of the ride. He held her tight against his body as he came inside her.

“So good,” she whispered a second later.

Panting into a pillow with her ass in the air shouldn’t qualify as the most glorious high of her life, but she was pretty sure it was. They’d had sex so many times in the past, but this was different. It was raw and a little rough. Possessive, and though she hated to admit it, she needed that. God, she needed that.

“Sarah,” he whispered in a way that suggested he still couldn’t believe it was her.

Then she was melting again, and it was all she could do to slide around and clean up with a corner of the sheet — a mess she’d feel guilty about later. Right now, all she wanted was Soren.

He scooped her against the curve of his chest, and there they were, back where they’d started. They kept their hands wrapped around each other, and their chests rose and fell in perfect time.

She stared hazily across the dim room. The crescent moon was higher now, a sliver of light in the upper corner of the window that smiled at her.

“Goodnight,” she whispered, more to the moon than to Soren.

“Goodnight,” he echoed, kissing her skin.

Two days passed, and in that time, Soren went from a soaring high to the lowest low.

“You really need to tell her,” Janna nagged as they got ready to open the saloon.

It was one of those warm spring afternoons in high-altitude Arizona where the shade felt just right and a cold drink even better. Warm without being overly hot; dry without being painful on the skin. Peaceful, in a way, because the town slowed down just like flies did when they’d had too much sun.

“Come on, Soren. When are you going to tell her?”

He thumped down a crate of beer. The longer he waited, the harder it would be to tell her, and the more he was being dishonest to Sarah. But Jesus, how do you tell a woman her unborn baby was a bear shifter? How?

He could just see it now.

Sarah, your baby is a shifter.

A what?

A bear shifter. But it’ll be really cute, I promise.

He swore out loud. He’d have to explain that he was a bear, too.

Oh, and by the way, everyone else in the apartment is a shifter, too. You’ve been surrounded by bears and wolves all this time. Sorry I never bothered to tell you.

He blew out a long puff of air.

“That’s not going to help,” Simon murmured as he walked by.

No, it wasn’t, but what the hell would he say? When? How?

Simon knew that he’d started sleeping with Sarah again. Hell, everyone knew, because the scent of sex was unmistakable — not to mention that he’d gone and marked her thoroughly by scrubbing his own scent into her skin with his chin each time. He might not be able to mark her with a mating bite—

Yet,
his bear filled in.

—but he sure as hell couldn’t hold back from nuzzling her half into giggles each night.

He smiled, thinking about it. Hearing Sarah laugh, seeing her smile… Another light in the darkness of his soul turned on every time she showed her joy. It was like someone had finally bought the dilapidated old house at the end of town that everyone said was haunted and started renovating it, one room at a time.

So, yeah, everyone knew, and everyone nagged him to tell Sarah, though none of them had any bright ideas on how. And why should they? Simon’s mate was a born shifter, so he never had to explain to Jess. A wound had already started Cole down the road to turning shifter when Janna fell in love with him, so it wasn’t as if he had a choice. None of them faced what Soren had to do now.

And shit, Sarah didn’t have much choice either, did she? The baby was coming. Soon.

So he wasn’t exactly in a good mood to begin with, and it only got worse when Ty Hawthorne, alpha of Twin Moon pack, pulled into the saloon’s back lot. Lana, Ty’s mate, was there, too, along with about fifteen other rough, tough shifters in five or six vehicles that parked not very discreetly down the alley.

Something was going down. He could feel it in the air. These were shifters on the move. Shifters with a mission.

“We’ve got word Whyte and the Blue Bloods are heading south,” Ty said. Quietly, so no one else would hear. “We’re going after him.”

Soren’s first reaction was,
Great, let me tell the others, and I’ll be right out.

But Ty stuck a hand on his chest and fixed him with that laser glare. “You’re staying.”

For a minute, he couldn’t even answer. Couldn’t speak. Anger welled up in him and roared in his ears.

“The hell I’m staying.”

Ty shook his head. “You’re staying.”

A growl built in his chest and filled in the hard edges around his words. “The Blue Bloods killed my clan. My clan!” His voice cracked when he barked the words, damn it. How dare Ty suggest he stay home?

You’re staying,
the alpha’s dark eyes ordered one more time.

Two words — a death sentence for his soul. Going after the Blue Bloods was his right. His responsibility. He and his brother had tracked and taken out dozens of guilty rogues in the wake of the massacre in Montana, but they’d never managed to get their hands on Whyte, the one who’d ordered the attack.

“Whyte is mine,” he growled.

Simon appeared at his side. The minute he heard the news, hair popped out all over his arms as his fury brought him close to shifting.

“What the hell do you mean, we’re not coming?”

Ty kept up that unwavering gaze. “We need to keep level heads when we move in. Take out the leaders but figure out who deserves to live.”

“My family deserved to live!” Soren practically yelled, right in the face of the most powerful shifter in the Four Corners area.

Everyone he’d ever loved and lost might as well have marched down the street just then — one sorely missed friend and relative after another. The faces, the quirks of each of them felt that real, the loss that gutting. He’d shoved the memories into the farthest reaches of his mental closet for all these months. Never really given himself the chance to mourn or remember good times along with the bad. But now they jumped out at him, all those mournful faces asking him why he hadn’t been there to fight for them.

“They didn’t kill your mother. Your father,” he hissed at Ty. “They didn’t take each and every person in your family and burn them aliv—”

It was Simon who dragged him back and forced him to get his shit together. And it was Lana, Ty’s mate, who stepped forward and put a hand on his arm.

“Soren, I know it’s hard. But if you were Ty and he were you, what decision would you make? Who would you bring?”

I’d take me
, he wanted to scream, but he knew she was right. He’d leave anyone whose emotions might get in the way at a critical moment. The important thing was to wipe out Whyte before he spread his ugly gospel through more of the shifter world, not who did the dirty work.

But damn did he want to be the one to rip that asshole limb from limb.

He bared his teeth and grunted — not at Ty or Lana, but at fate. Fate, coming to deal him yet another blow.

He could hear a voice laughing on the wind.
Ha! Got you again.

“Cut it out,” his brother told him, reading his mind. Then he turned to Ty. “Get those bastards. Get every one.”

As the wolves drove off, Soren hung his head and spit the bitterness out of his mouth. Tried to, anyway. Christ, he’d never find peace. Never. Not like this. They really expected him to sit around at home while they did his dirty work?

He stared at his feet. Yep. They did.

“Fuck.” He kicked at the asphalt.

Simon left him and got back to work. And Soren… Well, what choice did he have?

Sarah was napping upstairs, and he itched to go lie down next to her and tank up on some of the soothing energy he got just from being close to her. But he couldn’t go bug her with rage and frustration seeping off him like a bad smell. She needed to rest. The two of them had been staying up much too late at night, and she’d been waking up early to open the café, though she always did it with a smile. Always with a smile.

So the least he could do was paste on something less than a frown and get to work, right?

But then Janna started on him again, and the last little bit of his self-control blew.

“I’ll tell Sarah about shifters if you don’t,” she said, flipping the last of the upturned chairs to the floor, ready for opening time.

Of course, Janna didn’t know what had just happened in the back lot. Janna didn’t know how short his fuse was just then. But he exploded all the same.

“Enough!” he roared so loudly, the glasses behind the bar shook. “I will not tell you again. Enough!”

If Simon hadn’t yanked the bottle of whiskey out of his hand, he’d have flung it through the window to punctuate his point.

Janna turned white, then red, then glared at him, but she kept her mouth shut. Everyone went silent until the only sound was his ragged breath and the quiet whir of the ceiling fan.