Undertow: Building Sanctuary, Book Two (10 page)

Simone rolled to her stomach and propped up on both elbows, her tangled hair falling over her brow. “Living the rustic lifestyle, or the fact that it’s just the two of us?”

His fingers itched to touch her hair, to smooth it into place—or muss it further. “The company certainly helps, but yes. I expected to miss the city more. Cars and electricity and telephones and the radio. I thought Seamus and Guy were mad when they proposed we hide on an island.”

She smiled. “Those trappings of civilization turned out to be pretty empty, did they?”

“I wanted them all when I was young and poor and they were new and exciting.” He gave in and brushed her hair back. “Now I just want a quiet life. A woman. Peace.”

Simone’s smile gentled, and she kissed his shoulder. “I think that sounds lovely.”

So stay with me.
Words he didn’t dare speak. “Did you imagine you’d grow up and move to a near-deserted island in the Penobscot Bay?”

“Never.” She laid her cheek on his chest. “I always imagined I’d grow up to be my mother. Marry a rich industrialist who was mostly content to leave me to my life while he led his own, and have several children I could mostly ignore, unless they happened to be making my life difficult.”

As strong as his wolf had taken to her, he barely knew the first thing about her. “I guess I knew you’d grown up rich. Didn’t think much about it. You’re not as…” he searched for a polite word and settled for a less offensive one, “…prickly as Joan.”

“Perhaps it’s because I’m older,” she suggested, lifting her head. “Or because I dislike you far less.”

“Good to know.” He coaxed her cheek back to his chest and let himself stroke her hair. “How old were you when you became a wolf?”

“I had just turned twenty-one.” She laughed again, almost solemnly this time. “A very misguided twenty-one, easily seduced by pretty words of devotion, regardless of their veracity.”

Fucking Edwin Lancaster. “He must have had his share of pretty words. None of them should have been pretty enough to keep his alpha from kicking him into place.”

“If it had just been Edwin, it never would have happened. He wasn’t my first lover, Victor. Far from it.” Simone sighed and sat up. “My parents sent me to college because they couldn’t marry me off, not with my reputation, and they’d grown tired of trying. They figured I would graduate and go on to marry some rich but low-born man who needed the legitimacy of the Cabot name but couldn’t afford to be too choosy.”

Edwin would have fit the bill, since the Lancaster fortune was only a generation old. “So you found Edwin?”

“My parents did, yes. And by the time any of us figured out he didn’t plan to marry me at all…” She shrugged. “It was easier for them to wash their hands of me. And I—” For the first time during her explanation, she looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go. So I stayed and became his mistress.”

“I’m sorry.” Inadequate words, but the best he had to offer. “It shouldn’t have happened the way it did. Once you were a wolf, the alpha should have protected you. You should have had a place to go.”

She shook her head. “It’s in the past. It brought me here, and that’s the only reason it even matters anymore.”

It would always matter to him. The pack he’d grown up in had been small—a ranch and a farm and the workers and kin who made their living on both—but the rules had been beaten into him as a boy by his uncle. Dominants protected. It didn’t matter who the weaker wolf was, or who they should belong to. Humans ruled the world with their rage and fear, and wolves needed to help each other survive.

Like you’re doing now.
Breckenridge Island was a dream, the dream of safety. Sanctuary. “Nothing like that will happen to you again.”

Her gaze softened even as it heated, and she stroked her hand over his cheek. “I know that.”

Nothing soothed him like her trust. Not even her touch, sweet though it was. “Good. Just like I’ve been saying all along, darling. You’re safe.”

“I feel safe here, with you.” She teased one hand through the hair on his chest. “Tell me about your family.”

It had been years since he’d seen them, but memories still came easily enough. “There were a lot of us. That can happen, when both partners are wolves. I was one of the oldest, but my ma was still having babies when I was damn near thirty.”

She bit her lip. “I saw a picture in your box of things. I was… I suppose I was snooping.”

He found himself oddly pleased that she’d been interested enough to snoop. “The one of all of us together? Ma had the second set of twins after that was taken, but that was the lot of us, otherwise. More hands to work, but more mouths to feed when things went bad.”

“The crops. I remember.”

“I was already gone. I’d been gone a couple decades.” Considering what she knew of his bootlegging days, it shouldn’t have been so hard to admit the truth. But smuggling liquor was a far cry from murder. “I’d had trouble with the law.”

She must have felt his tension, because she made a soft noise and rubbed her cheek over his skin. “You don’t have to tell me.”

He didn’t, but it might explain some things. “There are some sweet-talking wizards too. Local preacher was one. We mostly left him alone, until I found out he’d sweet-talked my baby sister into all manner of unnatural things.”

She slid her arm around him suddenly and hugged him tight. “What did you do?”

“Shot him. Three times.” In broad daylight, because rage had wiggled its way under his skin so fast and hard he couldn’t choke it back. “She was barely more than a kid, and he’d twisted her up with dark magic. Took ten years before she’d venture outside without one of our brothers at her side.”

“That’s horrible,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

He held her closer, because the press of her skin made it easier to deal with the unpleasant memories. “My family hid me. Got me out under the nose of the law. They didn’t turn their backs on me until later.”

“Until you started working with Seamus?”

“That’s the way I was raised. Killing to protect your pack—that’s justice. Breaking human laws for money is evil.”

She touched his face, her fingers trailing over his stubbled jaw. “Even if it’s a stupid human law, I suppose.”

He summoned a smile for her. “My mother’s thoughts on liquor fall more in line with Joan’s than mine.”

Simone clucked her tongue. “Liquor doesn’t give men the capacity for evil. It doesn’t have to.”

A fact his mother should have known—but he supposed everyone had prejudices. Even werewolves. “Ain’t that the truth. Maybe I’ll bring you out there sometime and let you set her straight.”

She laughed and punched him lightly in the shoulder. “Don’t tease.”

He hadn’t been. It was so easy to imagine a time after life on the island had settled, when he could bring her ashore and take her to the plains. Easy—and dangerous. For all he knew, she still wanted to go to Europe in the spring.

He’d ask her, if he wasn’t so much of a damn coward.

She hummed softly and climbed over him, touching her tongue to his chest and then his shoulder. “I’m not the sort of woman you take home to your family.”

It was so contrary to the path of his own thoughts that it shocked him into a laugh. “Oh, honey, you’re the sort of woman I’d take anywhere you damn well pleased.”

“Really?”

“Truly.” And because it hurt to think such a promise could surprise her, he dragged her down into a long, languid kiss, determined to banish conversation with the sweet pleasure of making love to her.

On the tenth night, Simone dreamed of James.

He stood across a wide, dark chasm, calling her name, and her first instinct was to hide. She wasn’t ready to face him or anyone else on Breckenridge Island, not when she still had so much to say…

The world spun, shaking beneath her feet, and she almost fell. Strong, sure hands closed around her shoulders, holding her up, but it wasn’t Victor.

“James.”

“
Finally
.” His voice echoed around them as he dragged her close. “I worried you were dead.”

“No, I—” It wasn’t a guilty dream at all.
Magic,
she thought fuzzily. “I’m fine. I’m all right.”

“I couldn’t reach you, but I’m not good at this. I’m not a dream—” His voice faded, though his lips continued to move. A second later sound returned. “—where you are?”

She should have asked Victor to draw a map of some sort to show her, or at least explain it to her. “I don’t know. We had to sail off course because of the storm.”

His fingers tightened on her shoulders, heat radiating through her clothes to her skin. “You’re on one of the islands?”

He shouldn’t have been touching her, but she didn’t know how to tell him, or even if she should. “An island, yes. There are two summer cabins and a boathouse, if Guy recognizes that.”

“How large is it?”

She’d run it from end to end, but always distracted by the call of the waning moon or the thrill of the hunt. The thrill of being chased by her mate. “I don’t know. Smaller than Breckenridge, but larger than others.”

“I can’t—” His body faded, though the heat of his hands on her shoulders burned now. He came back stronger. “I can follow the magic back. I’ll come with Guy, we’ll find you. I promise we’ll find you.”

“Even if you can’t, we’ll be fine. Tell Joan, and Seamus.”

“I will. You can—”

He vanished, leaving only the ghostly burn of phantom hands.

She jerked awake, panting, her bare skin so painfully warm she expected to see blisters, or at the very least an angry red imprint of James’s fingers.

Instead she found Victor, half sitting up and one hand extended as if to touch her. “Simone?”

It took her a moment to speak. “They found us. James came to me.”

“I know.” The words were edged with darkness, rough and unsteady. “I can feel him.”

James had marked her with magic, the kind that would grate against Victor’s instincts under normal circumstances, without his personal experiences complicating the situation. “He did it so they could find us.”

His fingers touched her shoulder, and he hissed out a breath. “It’s twisted all around you. Is it hurting you?”

She shook her head. “No, it’s— They’ll find the island. They’ll come here.”

He snatched his hand away and rolled onto his back, glaring up at the ceiling. “I shouldn’t hate it. But I do.”

“Victor.” She caught herself before reaching for him. “It’s a means to an end, that’s all. I still—” Her voice broke. “I still belong to you.”

In a flash he was stretched out over her, pressing her back against the bed. “Say it again.”

Need had tightened his voice, and Simone fed that need readily. Eagerly. “I belong to you. Always, remember?”

Victor pulled back and gripped her hips, urging her over to her stomach with a rough growl. “Again,” he whispered, a moment before his teeth closed on her shoulder.

The caress filled her with instinctive satisfaction, the purest sense of belonging tangled up with the desire of a woman for a man. “Yours.”

“Mine.” Agreement. Confirmation. His fingers tickled against her skin as he gathered her hair, twisting it around his hand until her nape was bare.

Then he bit her again.

She tried to say his name, but her voice failed, turning the sound into a low, helpless moan.

“Do you want this?” He sat back and stroked his hands down her back until they curved around the flare of her hips. “Do you need it?”

“
You
, Victor.” She pushed her hands against mattress, arching her body back toward his. “With every breath.”

This wasn’t the man who had seduced her with single-minded intensity over long nights. That man had never lost control, not even with instinct driving him. Now, his control seemed to shatter as he urged her hips up, then slid one hand between her thighs. “Prove it. Let me feel it.”

She trembled but managed to stay on her knees. His touch stoked a fire in her, one that stole her breath and threatened to shake her apart already. “I’d give you anything.”

“Anything?” He slicked his fingers against her, then inside, thrusting deep, using everything he’d learned of her body.

Pleasure built quickly as he coaxed her toward orgasm. Her head began to spin, and she clutched at the blankets until they tore. Her voice rose, hoarse pleas that she barely recognized as her own because nothing mattered, nothing beyond the way he fucked her with his fingers.

He pushed her harder, pushed her until she came, shrieking his name, then thrust home while she still trembled. His hands hit the bed on either side of hers, his chest hot against her back, his breath against her ear. “I can feel you, clenching around my cock. Coming for me.”

Simone gasped and shuddered, alight not only with lingering pleasure but with contentment at the yearning in his voice. “It’s so much better than anything else, knowing how you want me.”

“Under me.” He caught her hands and pinned them to the bed before rocking into her again. “Around me. Screaming for me.”

She was helpless to escape, completely at his mercy. It should have scared her. Instead, it catapulted her beyond thought.

Beyond sanity.

She turned her head, growled and bit his jaw. “Harder.
Make
me scream.”

Teeth closed on her shoulder. Her neck. He marked her again and again, growling each time, thrusting deeper until his hips inched hers up the bed with every powerful movement.

This
was claiming, and she never wanted it to end. But nothing could hold release at bay, not with the way Victor moved, every thrust rubbing his cock against a perfect spot inside her.

She came again, screaming this time, and he followed her with a satisfied snarl, driving her hips down to the bed with the force of his final thrust. His head dropped against her shoulder, his body trembling over hers, and one word fell from his lips, low and rasping. “Simone.”

She touched his hair, curved her palm to his cheek.
My love.
Would he believe her? And would it matter if he didn’t?

After a quiet moment he eased to the side and collapsed, his arm still slung across her back. “Are you all right?”

“Mmm.” She could barely move, but she opened her eyes and smiled at him. “Never more right.”