Boarlander Silverback (Boarlander Bears Book 3) (9 page)

“Yeah, that was crazy,” he muttered through a baiting grin. “I have to admit, though, I liked seeing you all riled up over me.” He pushed her damp hair from her forehead and murmured, “Possessive little Ally Cat.”

She clamped her teeth onto his rib cage and grinned. “Mine, mine, mine. Now stop pushing me away. I don’t like chasing you.”

“Do that again,” he whispered, his eyes sparking with desire.

Her heart banged against her chest at how hungry he looked. Slowly, deliberately, she bit the skin over his ribs again, harder this time. Kirk groaned and rocked his body toward her as if he couldn’t help himself. She’d left a circle of indentations where her teeth had almost broken his skin, and suddenly, she couldn’t remember exactly what the new law stated. Did it include humans biting shifters? She thought not. And even if so, she was having a really hard time caring right now. Those law changes were fucked up anyway. She knew the people here better now. Kirk wasn’t just trying to procreate. None of them were. They were just looking for ways to feel like they belonged to the people they loved. And she loved him. Loved him.

Her breath hitched as she climbed onto his lap, and she gasped at how hard his erection was as she straddled him. The waves lapped at her ribs. She gripped the back of his hair with one hand, then ran her fingernails lightly down the scar on his shoulder—the one she’d given him. It was unfinished. His admission that it wasn’t a claiming mark said as much.

Alison rocked her hips forward, stroking her sex against his hard cock. Kirk gripped her waist and pulled her closer. She sipped at his lips, bit his bottom lip, then moved to his neck, where she teased him there with her teeth, too. This was his warning, and if he didn’t want this, she would stop the instant he told her to. But Kirk bucked against her, and as if he could read her mind, guided her head down his neck toward his bullet scar.

His muscles were taut, bulging, flexed just under the mark, like he was ready. Prepared. Wanting. “Do it,” he whispered, brushing his hand up her spine, then gripping the back of her neck.

Don’t think.

Alison bit him. Hard. Harder.

“More,” he gritted out. “Make it count.”

She tasted iron but still she clamped down until her jaw wouldn’t tighten any further. This moment was huge. It was sluffing off any remaining fear and diving in, heart first. There was no taking back her feelings after this. No taking back how devoted she already was. She pulled away and stared at the mark she’d made. A perfect circle around the bullet hole. It looked like an eclipse.

But her face fell, along with her heart, because it still didn’t feel finished. Stupid law. It wasn’t right. Wasn’t fair.

“You aren’t like the bear shifters. Your bite won’t Turn me,” she whispered, trying to understand why anyone would take this away from Kirk. From his people.

“No,” he said, his Adam’s apple dipping into his muscular throat with his hard swallow.

Not fair. Not right.

His gaze dipped to the mark she’d made, then to her tattoos. He traced the script in her half-sleeve of ink.
Remember
. Her reminder to never give into the darkness like Mom had. Eventually, she would tell him the story of every one of the tattoos, because he deserved to know all of her. That was the biggest gift she had to offer, and no one had come close to it before.

Kirk blinked slowly, then lifted an inhuman gold gaze to hers. “Turn around,” he murmured.

The sound of his deep timbre brushed up her spine and gave her a delicious shiver. Slowly, she gave him her back, arching it so she could feel his erection against her sex. Resting her hands on his knees, she looked back over her shoulder so she could watch his face when he saw all of her ink for the first time.

He dragged that sexy gaze down every inch of her tattooed back, then lifted her by the waist to take in the rest that curved around her hips and down one leg. And when he was through, he sighed and settled her entrance right above the head of his cock. She’d never had sex like this, backward and on a lap, but she trembled with the excitement of being with him again.

Positioned over him, she lowered down and took half of his length, then eased off with a moan. Kirk tensed under her and let off a soft, rumbling noise from his chest. He brushed his hand over the outer edge of her tattoos, then gripped her waist hard again and pushed her back over his dick. With his knees, he spread hers wider and slid into her again, deeper.

“Oh, my gosh,” she whispered at the intense sensation. Nothing had ever felt like this before.

Kirk set the pace with one hand, dragging her waist against him as he moved inside of her, and with his other brushed up her ribs and cupped her breast. With a gasp, she closed her eyes and bowed against his touch. Slowly, he pulled her back against his chest, and clamped his teeth over her shoulder, hard enough to burn but not break the skin.

Against the law…

Fuck a law that would strip rights…

Want to be with him…

Only him…

Teeth, teeth, teeth, gentle kiss…

Tease…

“Kirk,” she gasped out breathlessly as he moved within her, pushing her closer to climax with every stroke.

He sucked hard on her skin, and she could feel them now. Sharp teeth. Too sharp. Elongating. Kirk dragged them against her skin, and now the light was too bright, the sound of the waterfall was too loud, the sound of her pounding heartbeat deafening. She clutched onto his hand as he massaged her breast, desperate to keep him tight against her because she was falling. Her stomach dipped into the water, and she arched her neck back and cried out as her ecstasy intensified. “Please,” she whimpered, her skin lifting in chills under his teasing bite. “Claim me.”

The pain was instant, warring with the first pulse of an orgasm that seized her entire body. Deep throbbing pulses of pleasure drummed against resonating fire that sparked at the nerve endings in her shoulder. His teeth drove into her easily, so sharp, four puncture wounds that drew a wince from her.

Kirk released her skin and pulled her against him so hard it left her breathless. He bucked into her fast, and his body was hard as stone. He rested his forehead against the back of her neck and gritted out her name as his dick throbbed inside of her. Warm, so warm. Kirk grunted a sexy, out of control sound as he rammed into her again and shot more heat into her. Powerful legs, abs going rock hard against her back, arm so tight around her, like he never wanted to let go.
A
nd now he didn’t have to.

She was claimed.

As her orgasm pulsed on, encouraged by his own release, she smiled in potent relief.

Fuck what she’d been through and where she came from. Fuck all her mistakes. This right here was the moment she would be better, because now she had a reason. Kirk deserved a mate who was whole and strong, not broken and feeble. And what an empowering experience to be picked by a man like him. Strong, capable, dominant silverback shifter who could’ve had anyone in the world. And for whatever reason, he’d sifted through her rough edges and found her good parts. He’d seen his future in her.

Kirk made her feel normal, cared for, and safe.

Safe.

That word had meant nothing to her before she’d met him, and now she understood. It was warmth, security, and confidence. It was walking through the flames of loneliness and being shielded from the burn by the man she adored. It was relaxing into the idea that the other shoe wasn’t going to drop. That the bad was over and done. That she’d paid her dues and now she was bathing in the reward. That if she fell asleep against him, she would wake up whole and shielded from the grit of the outside world.

Caring for the injury he’d caused her, Kirk ran his tongue over the four puncture wounds on her shoulder. It was an animalistic need to take care of her, and she loved it. He hadn’t said it yet, but Kirk loved her too.

Now, neither of them had to be scared because they were bound.

Let the law try to take this away from them.

She would bring hell to earth to protect what she and Kirk had found.

Alison came out of the river waves on legs that were so wobbly they didn’t want to hold her upright anymore.

Claimed. She was Kirk’s claim. A wave of joy and excitement washed over her.

Kirk turned in front of her, tall as an oak, strong and steadfast as a mountain. Every muscle rippled on his body as he lifted his hand toward her. And his eyes…yellow flames, glowing from the pupils out.

“You never hide him from me,” she murmured, feeling numb.

“Never felt the need to with you.”

She slid her hand against his palm and allowed him to help her slog through the sand to her clothes. As she dressed, he watched her with a slight frown marring his dark brows.

“What are you thinking?”

Kirk shook his head like he would shut down again, but when he reached for his jeans, he said, “I never knew how Kong did it.”

“Did what?”

His lips ticked up, then fell too fast for the smile to reach his eyes. Gaze averted, he said, “I lived with him, Layla, and Josephine for a while. I had to. Kong needed his family group close. I could see it was good for him. He talks...” Kirk ghosted a glance up to Alison and tried again. “He talks easy. Much easier than me, and I would just watch him with Layla. He was open, and it was good for her. It made her happy. She knows everything about him.”

“I don’t understand,” Alison murmured, tugging the hem of her shirt into place.

Kirk strangled his sandy T-shirt and straightened his spine, then leveled her with that blazing gaze of his. “I should’ve waited to mark you. I should’ve waited until you knew everything.”

Her heart stuttered and ached in her chest cavity. “You regret claiming me?”

“No.” He huffed and shook his head. “But you will.”

Feeling like someone had just socked her in the stomach, she gritted out, “I’m pretty sure I won’t.”

“I’m not a good person—”

“Neither am I, Kirk!” Stupid tears burned her eyes, but she blinked them away.

Lightning flashed in the distance behind him as he watched her with an utterly baffled expression on his face, but hang it all, he was ruining this. And hang her if she let him see her cry. “I can’t even believe you’re doing this.” Alison strode for the woods, dashing her knuckles under her eyes just to make sure those fuckin’ tears stayed in place as anger, hurt, and sorrow pulsed through her veins.

“What am I doing wrong now?”

“Shutting down on me. Again! It’s what you do, right?” Alison tripped on a root and went down hard, but an instant before she hit the ground, Kirk was there, his arm wrapped around her waist. He set her upright. She shoved off him and screamed a furious sound. She didn’t want to be saved right now. “You push and pull and push again. And you tease me with these beautiful moments, and then retract them an instant later.”

“I’m trying to tell you I don’t talk easy, but I want to with you!”

She crossed her arms and winced at the pain on her shoulder.

He was to her in a flash, pulling at her shirt, exposing the puncture wounds he’d made. “You hurt different than me.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means I’m used to pain, and I hate seeing you hurt. I did that to you.”

Her shoulders sagged, and she sucked air through her tightening vocal cords. “Kirk, can’t you see? This,” she struggled to say as she gestured to her claiming mark, “felt like the best thing that ever happened to me. You telling me I’ll regret being bound to you hurts worse than any torn skin ever could. I wanted you to let me keep that feeling.”

Kirk shifted his weight from side to side, backing away from her slowly. “What feeling?”

“Happy. Safe. Loved. Chosen despite my faults. All of it. You are ice, Kirk.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can hold you in my hand and I think I’m keeping you. I
feel
you. But all the while you are melting and slipping through my fingers.”

He swallowed hard and looked sick. Eyes on the woods, he hooked his hands on his hips and shook his head for a long time. His nostrils flared slightly in the moment before he spoke. “I don’t want to be ice. Not anymore. Not with you. Bash told me once I need to pick a person to let in.” Kirk dragged his gaze to hers. “I always thought if I did that—if I let someone see all of me—they would run.”

“I’m not running.”

“But what if—”

“Kirk.” Alison stepped over the pine needle covered forest floor and pulled his hands from his hips, gripped them hard. “I’m. Not. Running.”

“I panicked a little,” he admitted low.

“Yeah, it sucked.”

Kirk ran his hands through his damp hair and linked his fingers behind his head. Chin held high, he looked down at her with a calculating look. “You want to see me?”

“Yes,” she said, void of hesitation. “No more hot and cold.” She twitched her head toward her right shoulder where her seeping claiming mark burned on. “I’m yours now. You picked me as your person when you bit me. Now let me the fuck in.”

His inhumanly bright eyes crinkled at the corners with his smile. “Okay,” he said, as if he’d just accepted a dare. Kirk shocked her when he threw her over his shoulder like a sack of mulch. “You asked for it.”

She yelped as he smacked her ass. “Kirk Slater, I’m not just some cavewoman you can drag anywhere you want. We’re having a fight. There are rules.”

“Don’t care much for rules. Admission one,” he said as he stomped onto the beach and toward the thin trail up the side of the falls. “When I was seven, I stole all of my half-brother, Aaron’s, baseball cards, because he was a huge douchebag, and I blamed it on my other half-brother, Byron, who was also a douchebag. And then they got in this huge, bloody fight on the front lawn of my house, and my dad got involved, and I still don’t feel guilty.”

“On account of them being douchebags?”

“Yep. Age ten I met a human girl in town while my mom was shopping, and when she asked where I was from, I told her Lowland Gap. She told me it was a commune for a cult, and I called her a titty-witch. I didn’t know what a commune or a cult was, so I snuck into my dad’s office when we got back to the house and researched it on the computer. It sounded pretty damn familiar, so I ran away from home.”

“How far did you make it?”

“Well, since I only packed three pair of underwear and five beef jerky sticks, not far, and my dad tanned my hide when he found me.”

“None of this makes me want to leave.”

“Give it time. Age eleven, the blackback in me started wanting to fight. So I did. I fought everyone, all the damned time. I even went after my dad, a fully mature silverback, a time or two.”

Alison let her arms go limp as they bumped and bounced across Kirk’s bare, flexing, sexy as hell back. “What’s a blackback?”

“A young male gorilla. I started fighting early and pissed off everyone in my cult.”

“Don’t call it that.”

“A cult is what it was, Ally. You should know that. Accept it. I wasn’t raised like you, or the Boarlanders, or even Kong. His mom took him away from their family group. She raised him in regular schools with humans. I only knew my family for the first half of my life.”

They were really high up now, so Alison closed her eyes against the dizzying height. “My mom used to get high before we went grocery shopping. She would be leaning against buildings as we walked there, and I’d have to hold her upright and make sure she kept up with her purse. I was in charge of getting groceries while she would be sagging against the shopping cart.”

“How old when it started?”

“I don’t know. I remember being really young when I started being embarrassed of her in public. Six maybe?”

“Jesus.” Kirk crested the top of the steep incline and settled her on her feet.

“My point is your unconventional upbringing isn’t a deal-breaker for me. Now tell me more confessions. I like this.”

Squaring up to her, he tucked her short hair behind her ear. “You like what?”

“Knowing you. It makes you feel more like home.”

Kirk huffed a disbelieving laugh and searched her eyes. He gritted his teeth, then said, “That’s because I haven’t told you the bad stuff yet.”

Alison slid her arms around his waist and hugged him tight. “You won’t scare me off.”

“No,” he rumbled. Kirk kissed the top of her head and murmured, “I can’t imagine much scares you anymore.” He turned her slowly in his hands and gripped her uninjured shoulder as he faced her toward the storm.

For miles Alison could see rolling mountains covered in a blur of green and brown, and in the distance, the storm clouds created a wall of dark gray. The deep rumble of thunder echoed across Damon’s mountains, and she leaned her back against Kirk’s chest as she took in the beauty of the place.

“This is part of me,” he murmured low, his cheek resting against her temple.

Her shoulder hurt with him pressed against her, but she maintained a straight face and didn’t grimace away from his touch because this was an important moment.

“I come up here when my head gets messed up. And when Clinton is pissin’ me off and I want to murder him. This is where I come when the guilt gets too bad and I can’t control my Changes.”

“Why guilt?” she whispered, her heart breaking with his admission.

“I signed a contract. One that said I wouldn’t have sex with women, just in case Fiona called me up to head a family group. I didn’t want to sign it, not because I wanted to have sex, but because she was a new leader and had been killing off her opposition. I’d already slept with a couple women and didn’t like signing away something that belonged to me. I wanted to choose my family group and have them choose me, too. I denied her, and at the time, I was working in town, away from my family group because I was getting too dominant to stay in the same place as my dad. She had me taken and beaten until I signed it.”

“Oh, my gosh. How long did it take?”

“Three days.” He sighed. “I was to guard Kong with another silverback named Rhett. He didn’t have to be broken. He signed it willingly. I don’t know why. Maybe he thought he would be assigned a family group later or something, but I could see what was happening for what it was. We were being broken, like she’d done to her personal guards. I was there when they brought Kong in. She made me watch because he was going to be mine to keep in line. He was tortured for three weeks, and I was chained in the corner because I tried to stop it. Fiona thought it would be good for me to watch. She thought it would desensitize me. Rhett helped them break him, and then he helped bring in Kong’s mom, Josephine, and Kong finally gave in.” Kirk swallowed hard. “In those three weeks, something went hollow in my middle. All I smelled was blood, sweat, and pain. Something died inside of me, or got erased, I don’t know. I stopped feeling. I was telling Kong to just sign the contract so we could both escape that place, but he had been raised outside of our people, and he wanted a single mate. He wanted to keep his old life. And by the end, I was hoping he would stop breathing because…shit.” Kirk slipped away from her and stood five feet back, out of reach, like he didn’t want her touching him when he told her what he’d been through. “I was hoping he would stop breathing because I could see both of our futures, and they were empty. He would be saved for a massive family group. He would fuck them mindlessly when they went into heat, give all of himself to provide for them, and he would never connect with another living creature. Not really. And I would help keep his life dark. He’d known freedom. He’d been away from our people, and his mom had raised him in a loving environment. I only knew a half-life, and to get him back to accepting our fucked-up peoples’ ways, he would have to be dead inside, just like me. And I thought maybe if he just stopped living, it would be the easy way out. But he didn’t, and for the next several years, I limped along beside him, watching him wither, watching him pine for Layla, watching Rhett make his life a living hell. I was part of the torture, Ally.”

A soft, heartbroken sound eked from her throat. He looked wary of touch still, and his eyes were a light gold color now, so she sat and faced the storm clouds and waited. After a couple of minutes, Kirk sat beside her.

“When did you stop working for Fiona?”

Kirk drew his knees up and draped his arms over them as he stared at the lightning in the distance. “The day she told me and Rhett we needed to kill Layla’s guardian, Mac. He was old. In hospice care. And Fiona was pissed over the information Rhett had been feeding her about Kong sneaking off to be with Layla. Fiona wanted to hurt Kong by hurting his mate. And nothing could’ve hurt Layla more than the death of Mac. I couldn’t do it, though. I’d had enough. My survival instinct had been strong until then, but when we got to that point, I couldn’t hurt Kong. I couldn’t hurt Layla. When I told Fiona I was going rogue, she said she was going to kill me, and I believed her. With every cell in my body, I knew my days were numbered.”

“What happened to Layla’s guardian?”

Kirk’s lips pressed into a thin line, and he leveled her a vacant look.

“Rhett killed him, didn’t he?” she asked in a horrified whisper.

Kirk’s Adam’s apple dipped low as his gaze dropped to the ground. “I went to his funeral. Layla and Kong forgive me for it all. They’re good like that, but I still go put flowers on Mac’s grave. He was a good man, and my people ended his life just to hurt someone else. Gorilla shifters, they don’t care about human life like they should. Fiona trained them not to. She convinced them they’re a superior species who should just take what they want.”