Blayne Edwards (17 page)

Caine had evidently felt her body begin to grip and spasm and his fingers drove deeper inside her and then flexed together and pulled downward, somehow without hurting her at all with his actions. Chloe arched her back and the motion brought her up off of his lap. One of Caine’s hands shifted and the heel of his palm pressed against her clit. Grinding into her, even though she didn’t need any more stimulation and quite honestly thought she might explode if she received anything else from him.

“Caine…” Chloe gasped before she could finish her plea for him to cease what he was doing to her. “Caine, stop…”

But he didn’t stop. He pressed into her and pulled and dragged newly touched parts of her body at the same time and bit down softly on nipple and then neck and the man demanded that she come until
he
said that she was finished.

She had thought that he would take this for himself first. As his brother had. Chloe had felt sure that Damon Caine would be a wonderful but brutish lover. But she had only been right about the first part of her theory.

Chloe dug her nails into the skin of his back, even through his shirt. To make sure she didn’t feel that as well. She had to inflict some pain upon him that she couldn’t feel. She had to have something to remind her that she was still human and sane and a separate being from the man controlling her entire body even with so little of himself inside her. Caine was relentless and demanding in ways that no man had ever been before with her body. His lovemaking was something she knew constituted the bulk of most women’s dreams. It was selfless.

Chloe continued to gasp for air as her body refused to stop convulsing and quivering from the orgasm that had resulted from this man. A man she hadn’t known a day earlier except through his work. Chloe had read what Caine had imagined a man could be with a woman, for a woman, were that man allowed to be the beast he embodied and she had often felt her body and soul grow swollen with desire for such a man. For this man, she had often wanted to believe.

“I can’t take anymore,” she begged as his fingers finally began to show mercy on her.

The climax that slowed but throbbed for several moments even after she had regained the use of her lungs had happened because he had triggered, in addition to physical stimulation of her, fantasies that Chloe had held inside herself for many years. She supposed that Caine had been getting her ready for him for years with his work. Although neither of them could have been aware of that fact.

Talk about unintentional foreplay.

For the moment, however, Chloe couldn’t talk about much of anything. But she could feel. And she could smell and see and taste.

All of it spoke to her of Caine.

She clung to his neck as he gently removed his fingers from her. His arms, wrapping around her waist and pulling her even closer, were just as crushing as she’d suspected they would be were he to have a reason to hold her like this. His heartbeat thumped against her bare breasts through the front of his shirt and the soft, tender skin just below his ear rubbed her cheek as she let her head lay on his shoulder.

“That was wonderful,” she whispered to him as she felt his grip on her tighten even more.

There was no reason for her to feel so drained emotionally. Physically, she could understand. But she hadn’t known Caine long enough to hurt with emotional happiness. Not nearly long enough for her to feel what was going through her mind as she sat wrapped around his body, feeling his heat and pulse and grip on her.

It was over. He had aroused and stimulated and then dragged a most delicious orgasm from her and now it was time for her to lean back and smile at him, thank him profusely as manners would dictate, and then politely get the hell off of him.

She didn’t. And it wasn’t just because he hadn’t let go, although she suspected that had she owned the Jaws of Life she couldn’t have loosened the bear hug he had on her. Chloe didn’t let go of him or move to indicate that she was ready for him to let go of her because she didn’t want to.

Ever.

Nothing had ever scared her this badly in her life.

Fear and sex. And this one man was both. He scared her and excited her in equal proportions. And with amazing skills in both areas. She had known him for years through his writings and she had become aroused and frightened by his mind for years because he had written the very fantasies that she wanted to live.

And now, it would seem, the connoisseur of animal urges was demonstrating a working knowledge of his talents.

At least some of them.

But the ones he was managing to give her had been worth the wait, she had to admit that much. Chloe started to release him and finally let the poor man have some circulation in his legs, but something stopped her.

At the time, she didn’t know what it was called.

She suspected that neither of them did.

* * * * *

This is not happening again.

Caine sat with a woman wrapped around and pulled so closely to him that he could no longer tell which body heat or heartbeat was his own. A woman the beast in him would have raped if it had to in order to impregnate her. A woman his brother would have also forced himself on had Caine let this happen at his den.

Chloe hadn’t yet managed to steady herself enough to release him and Caine wasn’t about to let go of her. He hadn’t brought her to orgasm when he’d made love to her earlier that night and the thought of leaving her without release had made him foul with himself. But now she was happy. And so he could be, too. What made him even happier was the fact that the woman had come with such a crushing intensity that Caine had felt his fingers being squeezed and released and then squeezed even tighter with pressure. It was a pressure that he longed to feel on his cock when he drove into her hot, slick cunt and ordered that she come even harder for him.

But she’d already come twice in twenty-four hours for him. Caine resituated his hands so that he could run his fingers through some of that long, red hair and thought about how perfectly he seemed to innately recognize her body and needs and desires.

Nothing Caine had ever done with his brother helping or when Caine had been alone with a woman had felt like this. His cock was still hard and still demanding that he mount the now well-lubricated and aroused bitch in his arms, but his heart and mind were even more aroused than his cock. The feel and taste and smell of this woman had reached into him and probed him as demandingly as he had her.

Fortunately, Chloe couldn’t know what her own intrusion into him had done.

And she wasn’t going to know, either. Not for a while at least.

The man in him wanted to think that she might understand him. Accept him. But of course she would be able to understand and accept that part of him that was man.

It was his other half he had to worry about.

The woman unconsciously emitted a desire to believe what he wrote was true. And she seemed frustratingly eager to allow Caine to do things that he knew could bring the woman pleasure like she’d never had, yet afraid to completely surrender to such urges. Chloe wanted to make love to Caine but something was not going to allow it. She either wasn’t willing or able to accept a part of herself.

Chloe seemed eager for wonderful sexual pleasure but she didn’t seem to have embraced something so beautiful and right that it should never even be questioned or judged. Her own sexual desires. Free of restrictions that told her that she should be sexual only when it was considered right as opposed to when her body and mind wanted it. It was her own human nature that she was having trouble accepting. Something that Caine was well aware that many human women never embrace or accept.

Having a woman like her accept Caine’s nature would be a truly unbelievable ending to his most recent family saga.

Caine finally leaned back and tilted her face up to look at him. She was flushed and her eyes were wild with excitement and exhaustion. Appreciation for what he had done to and for her dotted her forehead but the minute amount of energy Caine had left her with didn’t seem to be enough to allow her to voice any questions or comments.

Her lips, however, found some strength.

Caine pressed himself into her one more time. Felt her breath against his cheek as he kissed her more tenderly than he would have ever thought possible with his plans having been what they were. The predator in him wanted to bite down on her and force her into sexual submission. It was willing to scar and damage to have what it needed. That part of Caine that knew it had to breed had voiced its resentment of his softness toward this woman since he’d decided that she would not be forced into anything tonight. And it still fought for him to listen to its pleas.

But Caine could already smell his young in this woman’s body. Regardless of her reluctance and disbelief, he could very distinctly hear his children’s laughter in the beating of her heart. And he could taste something coming from her soul, infecting him already, that he knew could truly mean the difference between the life and death of him and his kind and the true happiness of him and his kind. Caine knew how it felt to be loved. And he knew how it felt to love another. It was something he wanted desperately to feel once again, both for himself and for his descendants.

Compassion
won’t
fill the belly of a predator.

Any more than a man can live without hope.

Caine looked down into the eyes of the last women he would ever allow himself to feel hope for. Backing the animal in him down. And telling it that just this once, it would have to wait its turn.

* * * * *

He was gone.

Chloe stepped out onto the deck at the back of the cabin and wrapped a blanket around herself against the wind. The woods were bright from the very early morning moon that still hung just over the tops of the red maples and hickories and yellow pines. Chloe imagined she could see and hear and think for miles.

She could have asked him to stay. She could have made love to him just as furiously as his touch had told her he would have made love to her. But he had taken her refusal of his affections and gone.

The man who had just left her alone and cold and confused without an argument or a single request that she fulfill his needs could have made his way into her bed. Into her body. Her life.

Something in him had seemed so familiar to Chloe that she had been afraid to listen to the thought when it had crossed her mind.

Her ears detected a sound that had come to her as the wind picked up again and she shivered at the call. Faint. A mile away, maybe more, from where she stood. She heard it, but knew now that it wasn’t for her. The comfort in that was painful.

She still wanted the man in her dreams. The man capable of crushing her heart, her spirit and her will to live but who would kill his own spirit or will rather than cause her even the most minor intentional, unwanted pain. She still wanted a man who could defend her against anything. One who was helpless against no situation or event or other living thing.

Except himself.

Men such as these didn’t exist. Chloe had always known this. The little girl in her even knew this. But some other small, irrational part of her being had long held on to the fantasies.

She was angry with herself for feeling so ungrateful for what she seemed to have found in this man. Any other woman would have been overjoyed to be touched as Chloe had just been touched. And any other sane, rational woman would have been turning back handsprings at the magnitude of his selflessness. His ability to ignore his own desires and simply please her.

His talent for self-control.

The very thing that she had never wanted in her man.

She comforted herself with the belief that Caine was at least half of that man who would not leave her dreams. He was at least half of what Chloe had childishly dared to imagine she could someday find for a mate. And as no other man, not even his brother, had ever come this close to satisfying her dream, it forced some hope into her soul that half of her dream wasn’t as far fetched and unobtainable as she’d imagined.

But it also forced Chloe to be reasonable with her dreams and her fairy tales. Damon Caine was brilliant and although Chloe knew he was creative to a fault, she also knew that he likely wasn’t going to fall in love with a woman who once dreamed of having a werewolf for a mate. And he damned sure wasn’t going to fall in love with a little girl who still wanted very much to believe.

She suspected that it wasn’t such a terrible compromise that she give up only half of the dream to have a man who seemed to so perfectly personify the other half.

Had they really existed, had Caine been what she wanted to believe in, she wouldn’t have stood a chance when she’d told him no. He would have taken what he’d wanted, even if it had been wrong for him to do so. Just as his brother had taken her a mere few hours before.

But he hadn’t. And he wasn’t going to. Caine was too civilized and humane to be completely like the beasts he wrote about. She knew this just as the beasts she loved knew each other’s voices from miles away. They knew their family members and the members of other packs. They marked their territory and announced the deaths of their prey and the births of their young with their calls.

They called to, flirted with, and mourned their mates with their howls.

Chloe closed her eyes and let the sound of the howl’s maker growing closer remind her of the stories Maw had told her.

And wished now, more than ever, that she could truly understand the words.