By the time I was about halfway through my coffee, Tara had finished her breakfast and, with the casual disregard of a woman who knows the sheets are being cleaned by somebody else, prowled towards me, leaving bloody fingerprints all over the bedclothes which turned out not to be a major problem since they were soon covered over by the remains of the French press. I had just about enough time to put my cup down before she was on top of me—sexy wolf ladies were all well and good but there was no sense in wasting perfectly drinkable Jamaica Blue Mountain.
“I thought you had duties to attend to.” Not that I was complaining.
She arched her body so that her face was millimetres from mine. I could practically taste the blood on her mouth already. “There’s still time. I get up early for a reason.”
I tried to kiss her, but she brought a hand to my neck and pinned me down. Her eyes flashed yellow and lupine. I struggled hard enough to make it worth her while. Something sharp grazed my throat—a claw tracing the pulse-line of my carotid artery. Okay, maybe I was kind of into the literal wolf thing as well, as long as she stayed closer to claws-and-fangs and well away from wet-nose-and-tail.
She brought her lips next to my ear. Her breath was hotter than it had any right to be, and her skin brushing against mine was the enjoyable flavour of torture. “You know what I want,” she whispered, nipping at me with her strong, sharp teeth.
I did. I’d known since day one. Tara Vane-Tempest never gave up a chase and never lost a battle. She’d hold on no matter what until she had it all. “Please,” I whispered back. “Please.”
That was all it took, and she gave me everything at once. Pinning me down with all the passion and urgency that, there and then, I needed so very badly to be a part of. She overwhelmed me, her mouth sometimes soft sometimes savage, her hands here gentle, there clawing. Her skin tasted of dark, wild places and she smelled of blood, sweat, and soil. She made me forget, and forgetting was what I was here for.
The knock at the door came at the worst possible moment. Tara stopped dead, sat bolt upright and whipped her head around. She hadn’t been expecting an interruption, and she responded swiftly and decisively to the unexpected. “What?” she demanded.
“Put the girl down and get dressed.” Henry’s voice came through the door. He was one of the nicer werewolves and had personally saved my life on more than one occasion, but right about then I’d have cheerfully sent a couple of silver bullets in his direction. “We need you.”
Tara was off me way faster than was flattering. I got that her pack came first but—well, that was sort of the problem. “We’re in the middle of something,” I yelled.
“You’ll live,” replied Henry with what I had to admit was more patience than I’d have shown to somebody asking me to put my sacred duty on hold while she fucked my cousin. “This is urgent. There have been developments.”
Tara was already dressed which, given the bewildering size of her wardrobe, I thought must have been some kind of top-secret side effect of werewolf powers. For somebody who’d been on top of me less than ninety seconds ago she was looking almost offensively put together in a sheer black gown and killer heels that pushed her stature from tall to towering. She opened the door. “Here. What is it?”
“Tuffy. She didn’t come back from the borderlands. Neither did anybody who went with her.”
If I was a better person, I’d have felt bad. I’d met Tuffy and Smudge a couple of times and, admittedly, a lot of those times they’d been very much not on my side, but I didn’t want either of them to disappear or get ripped apart. But I wasn’t a better person, so I was still resentful about being left only partially laid. “Fuck, I’m sorry.” I tried to sound sincere and I think I mostly managed it. “Go do your pack thing. I’ll be here when you get back.”
Tara cast me a haughty look over her shoulder. She was in full alpha mode, which I found unhelpfully sexy given the circumstances. “This will take some time. I advise you not to wait for me.”
I curled up in the breakfast-stained ruin of the bedsheets. “Oh I won’t be waiting for you. I just have very little going on in my life right now.”
To my mild surprise, she took a step back inside the room, closed the door on Henry, and turned to face me. “I have been indulgent, Kate Kane…” okay Kate, she’s angry, stop finding it hot “…and perhaps I have been short-sighted. If my pack is in danger, then I will need a warrior, not a self-pitying drunk.”
That was unfair. Not inaccurate, exactly, but unfair. “You weren’t complaining last night. Or the night before. Or five fucking minutes ago.”
She was standing over me. Christ, wolves could move fast when they wanted to—not as fast as vampires, who could do the whole bamf-I-am-the-darkness thing—but still much quicker that I was comfortable with for something that might be trying to kill me. “Do not test me,” she growled. “For years I have been warned against associating with you. I have ignored those warnings because I know you can be better.”
“Oh spare me the I believe in you more than you do yourself bullshit. You’re a horny wolf-domme and whatever you may tell yourself, you like your women on their knees.”
She cupped a hand around my jaw. Her eyes faded to yellow again. I wasn’t sure if it was meant as a threat. “True. But I prefer it if they can get back up when they have to. There’s no sport if there’s no chase, and there’s no chase in someone who won’t fight back. You used to fight back, Kate Kane.”
I slapped her hand away. “What can I say, I guess you beat me.”
“But you didn’t have to stay beaten.” She leaned very close, gazing into my eyes like she was looking for some bullshit spark of self-respect or whatever.
I grabbed her by the hair and kissed her aggressively. Honestly, I was a bit surprised that she kissed me back, but she did—at least for a moment. “If you’re going to make that into some big put-your-past-behind-you moment,” I told her, “I’m going to fucking punch you.”
She smiled. “You’re your own woman,” she said. “I might need you soon. Whether you meet that need is up to you.” And with that, she left me to go do important werewolf stuff. Why did I always wind up with women who had actual things going on in their lives?
I fell back onto the bed which, despite everything it had been through in the last half hour, was still absurdly comfy in the way only something designed for the very rich could be. Tara hadn’t been entirely wrong. I was wallowing. But I felt I had legitimate cause to wallow what with all the many, many deaths that were following me around. Sighing, I tried to at least finish what Tara had started before she got distracted by something she genuinely cared about.
Aaaand it wasn’t happening. Great. Probably a good sign you needed to get your life in order right the fuck now was when you couldn’t even get up the energy to wank properly.
2
Buses & Contacts
For a handful of minutes, I tried to make myself comfortable in the wreckage of the bed. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I wondered what was going on with the werewolves. If this had been a normal house I’d probably have been able to hear whatever they were talking about, because posh people talk loud and I have pretty good hearing on account of my mother being a primal spirit of the hunt. But this wasn’t a normal house. It was the kind of house that had wings, and whatever secret discussions Tara was having were probably going on across the border into a different county.