Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 87848 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87848 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
I shall have to do what humans do. I shall have to choose to love her regardless of what has come before, and what might yet come.
“I am your mate,” I tell her, sliding my fingers gently down her neck and wrapping them lightly around her throat. I feel her tremble as excitement courses through her. It is not so long since she was in her animal form, and then even less time since she writhed to climax on my fingers. Her body is craving my cock. That is simple instinct, and it will not be denied. She is as receptive as she is likely to be, and it is time to impress on her that she has a place with me.
“I am the one you will submit to for the rest of your life. I am the one who will own you. I am the one who will love you. I am the one who will take you and care for you and sometimes…” I hold back from saying the filthier, darker things: claim you, use you, breed you.
She is looking at me with a sort of feral innocence that makes saying such things far too inappropriate.
I want her to trust me.
But that might be almost impossible. She has been out of place all her life, and I know too well that those who have been out of place are vulnerable to exploitation. They are betrayed over and over by those they go to in the hopes of connection.
“Sometimes what?”
“Sometimes engage in intimacy with you,” I tell her, letting my thumb rub over her lower lip again. “Have you done that before?”
She draws back, bites her lower lip, and I see her expression go closed. My stomach sinks as I realize that likely means she has done something before. There is some experience lurking in her past. Her innocence has been taken, over and over.
“There is nothing you cannot tell me.”
That was the wrong thing to say. Her eyes go blank in a way that tells me she is locking herself away. Her secrets, for the moment, remain hers.
“You’ll learn to trust, in time.”
She draws away from me, as if using the word trust was more of a betrayal than bringing her down with my pack in a field. I have in my hands someone who would rather be beaten than understood.
I do not know if she is a virgin. I do not know if she gave herself willingly, or was violated. I know nothing. The urge to interrogate is supreme, but I know it will do more harm than good.
I could force the truth from her…
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Do you understand your position, your place with me?”
Beatrix
I don’t know that I’ll ever understand my place with him. I spent my life half-imagining, half-remembering that I was a wolf, joined in my dreams by packs of beasts who comforted me when I felt scared or alone.
I quickly learned not to talk all about it. When I did, people mocked me or sometimes punished me. This man is trying to get me to talk, but I don’t know him nearly well enough to trust him with the details of my life, in so far as I remember them.
I don’t think he really cares about the answers anyway. I think he’s full of desire for me. I think he wants to fuck me. The girls at the orphanage knew all about that, anticipated sex with great glee. We told each other stories about what we thought it was like. None of us ever had it, of course. We were locked away from boys, not allowed out at all unsupervised.
Of course, I had a reputation for sneaking out and about. There were questions about what I did, and rumors, too. My attempts at escape were scandalous for many reasons, but mostly because I was impossible to control.
“You’re a wolf,” I say. “Like me.”
“Yes,” he smiles. “We’re all like you.”
This man is handsome, charming, and obviously rich and powerful. When he looks at me with those silver-gray eyes, when he gives me all his attention and all his desire, I feel myself melt between my thighs. But it’s the memory of last night that really turns me on.
Last night was the first time I caught the scent of my kind on the wind.
I took my wolf form last night because that’s the easiest way to run, and most of the time nobody suspects the animal running at a distance is the girl they’re looking for—but he knew it instantly.
He came after me, a full-blooded animal hunting me with inexorable intensity. I was never going to escape, no matter how far I fled. I felt that in the wind.
I never knew how much I wanted to be chased down by a male and pounced upon. I never understood how much I needed to be shown thoroughly what an alpha can do. Lying in the mud last night with him atop me, naked and furious and so afraid for some reason, as if he thought he’d already lost me—that was the most intimate moment of my life, and it is that moment that makes me want him now.