Authors: J. Rose Allister
Her arms went around Connor’s neck and she pressed her lips to his, reveling in his spicy, alcohol taste while she pounded her ass harder against him. She was vaguely aware of his bad leg, but he made no protest about her rough lovemaking. So, she fucked him harder, faster, rocking and bucking until she felt herself begin to unhinge.
Connor pulled back and held her gaze with his own red-tinged gleam. “I recognized you as my bond-mate the moment I saw you on the road,” he said through shaky breaths. “Do you accept me, an alpha to a werewolf pack, as yours?”
Her heart somersaulted. “Yes.”
“Then take me, Terra. Take my bond and my mark. Submit.”
She wasn’t sure what to do, and impending orgasm made thinking all the more difficult. Nash made the next move clear by reaching up to thread his tethered hands through her hair, then yank her head back to expose her bare throat to Connor. She moaned at the harsh pull, at the pain that morphed instantly into climax-spiking pleasure. His moment of domination felt so damned good that she didn’t bother rebuking him for touching her.
Connor’s growl rumbled with something feral and inhuman, and Terra saw his jaw begin to elongate. She shut her eyes and reached instinctively for Nash, raking her nails over his hard chest. Just as the first sparks of orgasm sent her to the peak, sharp points sank into her shoulder. Hot agony dissolved in an instant and became wild pleasure. She grabbed for the hard cock in Nash’s pants, and it jerked wildly at her touch. All three of them cried out in ecstasy. Warm fluid gushed inside of her pussy while she continued to glide up and down on Connor, and the heady sensation of possession snaked through every inch of her while Nash’s cock pulsed rhythmically as he came in his jeans.
Her senses were still soaring over some other plane of existence when a light switch snapped on inside the garage.
“What’s going on out here?”
Three heads whipped around to see Terra’s mother standing in the doorway to the house, gaping at what must be the incriminating sight of a lifetime. “Terra?” she asked. “My God, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Terra jerked off Connor’s lap in a heartbeat, and she grabbed her nightshirt to hold it in front of her. Connor was already tugging up his briefs, for all the good that it did. The woman stood frozen with her eyes moving wildly back and forth between the two partially naked men, one wearing a makeshift tourniquet and the other bound and gagged, and Terra, who was completely naked and bleeding from a bite on the shoulder. Holy shit, the absolute worst thing Terra had ever
considered
doing had just been outdone a hundred times over.
Lilith’s hand flew up over her mouth as she stared with wide, terrified eyes that had already glassed over with tears. Terra clutched the nightshirt to her and climbed over Nash to get out of the car. “Mom, please. I can explain.”
Her mother’s head shook back and forth, the tears spilling from the haunted expression. “Who are these men?”
“Nobody,” Terra said.
Her mother came down the single step. “Nobody? Considering what you were just doing with them, they sure as hell better be somebody!”
Nash got out behind Terra, wriggling his tethered hands out from the belt. “We’re very sorry, ma’am. We didn’t mean no disrespect.”
The tears glittered with a new edge of anger. “Respect?” Spittle flew from her lips at the word. She stalked over and jabbed a finger out at Terra’s shoulder. “Does
that
look like respect to you?” She furrowed her brow at him. “You were bound up like a perverted criminal. And what’s wrong with your eyes? What have you all been smoking?”
Nash shut his gold-tinged eyes and turned away.
“Jesus, Mom, we weren’t smoking anything,” Terra said. “I don’t do that!”
“Is that alcohol I smell on your breath?”
Terra froze. Shit. With all the other incriminating evidence, she’d forgotten the open container of Jack Daniel’s.
“We didn’t—”
The slap came out of nowhere, right across her face. Terra’s cheek flamed with the burning sting, the first strike her mother had ever laid on her.
Nash stiffened, and the low, warning rumble in his throat made the woman flinch back.
“Nash,” Connor said in a harsh snap from behind them. He’d managed to get his pants back on and unfolded his bulk gingerly from the car. The pants did little to render a better impression, however. Her mother’s eyes went straight to the bloody hole in the thigh.
“I don’t know
what
you have brought into this house,” her mother said to her, “but I’m going to let the police sort it out.”
“Police?” Terra rubbed at her stinging cheek. “Mom, no. I’m twenty-one. We weren’t doing anything illegal.”
“Jack?” her mother yelled. “Jack!”
The two men glanced at each other, then at Terra. “That’s my dad,” she said. “You’d better leave.”
Nash looked inclined to argue, but after her eyes met Connor’s, he gave a quick nod. “Sorry for all this, Terra.” He glanced at her mother. “And to you, ma’am. Terrible sorry.”
Terra leaned into her car and pressed the button on her remote opener, and the garage door began to lift with a heavy, metallic whine. “Just go.”
“Until later, then,” Nash said.
“Like hell,” her mother said. “She will not see either of you again, and if I do see you on my property, I’ll report you for trespassing.”
Nash barely managed to grab his hat and the two men disappeared into the night, Connor still limping but walking under his own power, at least. Terra watched them go, feeling a steel band of pain clench around her heart. Her mother was pulling the booze bottle out of the car when her dad poked his head into the doorway. Terra’s stomach tightened. The long, torturous nights she’d been having lately were going to look like a picnic compared to this one.
Chapter Nine
The closest Terra had ever come to seriously considering escaping out her second-floor bedroom was after her parents ordered her upstairs to put on something “decent.” She had eyeballed the open window while tugging on fresh pajamas and decided it was too suicidal for a non-supernatural, post-coma patient to shimmy down the drainpipe. But as she sat in the kitchen while her parents argued over the decision not to involve police, she wondered whether she’d have been better off risking her neck.
Her interrogation had only been delayed because her mother had been so freaked out by the smears of blood on Terra’s nightshirt. Some were Connor’s, the rest her own. Her shoulder wound looked worse than it felt. She’d cleaned it off and inspected Connor’s mark in the mirror. It was tender, definitely, but not what she assumed an animal bite would feel like. Blood-red tooth marks circled from just above her collarbone around to her upper rear shoulder. It looked alarming, to her mother especially, but the sensations it had injected into her were far more complex and multiplying palpably.
She belonged to Connor now, claimed both sexually and animally in every sense. Surely no vows exchanged before a preacher could evoke the act of possession so thoroughly. Yet the moment they’d been bonded, they were torn apart again by the simple fact that her life was no more normal than Connor’s. She should be on her own by now. Maybe it would only be a tiny apartment or a college dorm, but she’d be living her future nonetheless. Instead, her parents were stuck in the past. That was painfully clear as she slumped in her chair across the kitchen table from the people who were staring at her as though she were a complete stranger.
Her father, James Benson the third, scratched at his graying sideburns as he eyed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s sitting on the table. His eyes were sunken into darker sockets than usual, sockets that had become far more deeply wrinkled during the time she’d been in the coma.
“I just don’t understand this,” he began. “Not any of it. Is this what you pulled yourself back from the brink of death to do? Destroy your life all over again?”
The question was rhetorical, so she didn’t try to answer. Her mother, who looked more frail than ever, jumped on the silence. “How long has this been going on?” Her words were tinged with a high-pitched note of alarm. “Since you came home from the hospital? Before the accident?”
“I told you, I’ve never done anything like this before. Not any of it.”
Her mother’s brown eyes flashed. “I don’t accept that. Am I supposed to believe you never drank before?”
“Never once.”
“So I just happened to catch you the first and only time? How convenient.”
Terra stifled a sigh. “What do you want me to say? I’m twenty-one now, which makes me old enough to legally drink. But that doesn’t mean I have.”
“Don’t take that tone with me,” her mother snapped. “I can’t believe we failed so horribly and miserably with you. We made all the sacrifices parents make, lived in hell while you wasted away in the hospital, and held your hand during the long months of rehab. All of it blind to how wrong things had really gone for you.”
Tears spilled from the woman’s eyes, and Terra felt a flash of guilt. “Mom, don’t cry. You didn’t fail me. I swear, this has never, ever happened before.”
“I thought you were still a virgin,” her mother said in a taut whisper. “I thought I hadn’t missed that part of your life, at least.”
Terra’s eyes widened. “You didn’t miss it. You walked right in on the middle of it.”
“Don’t lie to me! I walked in on the sort of sick perversion that could not possibly be any girl’s first time.”
“Where were you the other night?” her father interjected. “When you claimed you were at some motel in the mountains.”
Terra’s stomach curdled. “I
was
at a motel in the mountains.”
“Really?” His gray eyes flinched when they met hers, as though it was physically painful for him to look at her. “You realize tonight calls a lot of our trust into question. A lot of your life into question.”
She cast her eyes at the liquor bottle. “I know it does. But I was there, like I said.”
“Alone?”
She fell silent, her mouth clamping into a tight line.
“You weren’t alone, were you? You were with them.” The anger in his eyes she could take. The thick cloud of disappointment, on the other hand, brought a sting of tears.
Terra nodded. “But nothing happened.”
“Oh, please,” her mother said. “You stayed in a motel all night with a couple perverted cowboys who treat women like animals, and you expect us to believe they were perfect gentlemen?”
“How long have you known these men?” her father asked. “Where did you meet them?”
Terra chewed on her tongue. Confessing to the hitchhiker and injured werewolf portion of the story would definitely not help matters. “I met them that day in the mountains,” she said. “I was having a hard time driving in the bad weather, and they helped me. They were the ones who told me where to find the motel.”
“I’m sure they did.” Her father shook his head. “You’ve always had such a good head on your shoulders. As painful as it was to hear, I was so damned proud of you the day Tommy came to us and confessed what really happened the night of the accident.”
Terra’s mouth fell agape, and she shifted straighter in her seat. “You never told me he did that. What did he say?”
“His initial story was that he’d swerved to avoid hitting a deer,” her mother said. Her eyes and voice had softened into something akin to pity. “He came to us later to admit there was no deer. You two had been arguing on the way to your party. He’d wanted you to celebrate your birthday by sleeping with him, but you refused.”
Terra folded her arms. “He felt I should give him the gift of my virginity. I told him I wasn’t ready, and he got angry.”
“Boys started chasing you the minute you started middle school,” her father said. “Most of them were older. Tommy was the first one we’d trusted, and look what happened.”