That would have been unthinkable. Even as dateless and horny as Chloe had found herself over the last few months, that was not something she would ever consider having turned her on. Not even with the way he was looking at her. Seductively, had she not known better. Flirting with her with his gaze.
Making her even wetter.
Chloe blew out a breath at the horrific feelings going through her body and tried to shift her legs to ease him away from her thighs. The alpha never budged an inch, even at her most insistent pulls of the sheet. She settled back and reconsidered what she should do about the situation.
He seemed very sure about his own plans.
His eyes stayed on her. His look never strayed from her gaze. And the blue of his eyes appeared to twinkle almost playfully as he stared at her. Even when he lowered his muzzle again and buried his nose even more deeply into her than he had just seconds earlier.
And gently nipped at her clit.
Her breathing stopped. Her pulse soon followed. Nothing in Chloe’s body was working as it should. With the exception of the tiny nub of flesh between her legs that his remarkably restrained teeth had just managed to excite and make very hard and painfully sensitive.
Chloe had a PhD in zoological studies. And a double undergraduate degree in biology and environmental science. And thousands of hours of field work with wolves and wolf pups from Alaska to Russia. She was fully aware of how intelligent these animals were. Chloe had watched animals in heat hump and grind themselves against some very strange partners and even inanimate objects when the drive became too intense for them to handle. But still, she had never witnessed even the smartest or the most aroused of them doing what this one had just done.
And never had one stared at her as this one did.
It was an unnerving stare. Hypnotic, almost. A deep and thoughtful stare, especially coming from an animal. It looked intentional and even a bit playfully menacing. And for a brief second, it looked astoundingly…
…human.
Chloe looked away from that gaze and felt anger rising up for his audacity. What he had just done to her angered her because of the way he was making her feel. She was an intelligent woman, for God’s sake! A very well educated professor and scientist, not to mention a moral and upstanding woman as well. Dr. Chloe Evans was not a teenager prone to losing her panties because of simple sexual arousal. Especially when the male responsible for her arousal was one who walked on four legs.
But because she was so educated in the workings of the bodies of animals, Chloe knew that her own physical reactions to what was happening to her were at least comparable to what the alpha was feeling in the midst of his mating season. She was at the verge of her sexual prime. And being unmarried and having not had a lover in her life for quite some time now, she knew that it was only natural that her body ready itself so quickly to such a bizarre and imaginative invasion.
For a guilty minute, Chloe considered simply enjoying what was happening to her instead of fighting her body’s reaction. But then she looked up into the eyes of the animal on top of her and felt her breathing begin to increase at the way he was surveying the look of arousal on her face and the way her body had begun to unconsciously squirm in frustration underneath him.
It angered Chloe even more that he seemed to be enjoying what he’d done to her. The look on the alpha’s face was the same one she’d seen on the faces of lovers who had brought her to orgasm before they took their own pleasure. It was smug, almost. The look of pride over a job well done.
The gorgeous, cocky boast of male ego.
Nonsense. Her anger and assumptions were suicidal, she decided. It was ridiculous anger over an action that wasn’t a real offense. The alpha hadn’t nudged her or aroused her on purpose. Either time. She knew that. And he wasn’t being cocky or smug with her. He was inspecting his surroundings and determining whether or not she was a threat to him or his territory.
Chloe knew her interpretation of his look was simply her fear causing her to hope that she might have some control over the situation. As if she could rationalize her way out of being eaten by a pack of wolves. And the result of a long, dry sexual spell. One she now knew she had to satisfy as soon as the next suitable
human
male came along.
She quietly drew in a deep, cleansing breath. Calming nerves. Settling stomach. And then another faster, deeper one. Giving her a slight oxygen buzz so that the two-inch long incisors framing his mouth wouldn’t feel as sharp when he sank them into her neck.
The second breath caused the wolf to tilt his head to the side and stare at her in a different way. Chloe studied the look as the wolf leaned over and looked more deeply into her eyes.
What was he trying to convey to her with those beautiful blue eyes?
Compassion for her in her uncomfortable situation?
No way.
Chloe let out another frustrated breath and tried to concentrate on what she had studied about the animals. What was scientific and proven. She tried to think about how to work her way out of the situation by using what she knew about their habits and defenses and territorial systems. Not what the late hour and the moonlight and the fairy tales from her childhood were making her think. She tried to concentrate on her education. Her experience. And she tried not to look up into those eyes and think about the men she had dreamed about ever since she had been old enough to recognize the taste of a fantasy as it danced through her adolescent mind.
Her fantasies had been of mesmerizing wolf men who hunted food and mates at night. Men who seduced women with a skill and passion that no human man could match. Took those women as their wives and bred with those women. Stayed with those women, as wolves do with their mates. And men who had tried for years to live among the mountain people too frightened by what the men became at night to accept them during the light and normalcy of day.
Chloe tried not to think about the men who had reportedly been seen by very credible members of the community in the very first part of the twentieth century in the very town where she had lived her entire life. The men who were the descendants of a wolf pack that had reportedly saved their species from extinction by breeding their way into the human race. Men from a pack and crossbred species that had never been scientifically confirmed as having existed.
Men like the one that Chloe’s great-grandmother had sworn was the only man she had ever really loved.
Maw had been dead for nearly twenty years and still Chloe could remember the tale she had told her when Chloe couldn’t have been older than eight or nine. Chloe could remember the story word for word. The romance and the passion in Maw’s eyes as she had told it were the very things that Chloe was sure had ruined her own love life. She supposed she had always been looking for a mate like the one she had been told about as a child. And the closest thing she had ever found to such a man was the wolves she studied and cared for and tried to protect.
Her great-grandmother had spoken of a lover who was more beast than man. And a man who reportedly had held the same animal intensity in him that Chloe imagined she could see in the alpha that had slowly begun to inch and crawl his way up her trembling body.
Chloe closed her eyes as the alpha lowered himself even more to press and drag his belly against her clit as he moved up her. She tried to force her mind to the memories and stories of her great-grandmother and away from the throbbing that had begun low in her body.
Maw and her love were never able to be together. According to Maw, before they could marry, his family and the rest of his kind had been forced into seclusion in the mountains by frightened and bigoted townspeople and Maw had reluctantly married Chloe’s great-grandfather instead. After that no one in the mountain town had reported seeing any of the men or the pack again. Not in Chloe’s lifetime, at least. Not even in her mother’s or her grandmother’s lifetimes, in fact.
Their existence had faded into the history of a small Appalachian town. And now, only the very oldest of the old timers remembered even hearing of such things. And no one alive had any first hand memories of the men now. Only handed down tales and fabricated memories. And even they were being forgotten faster than Chloe could seek them out.
But Chloe did remember the tales. And hardly a day went by that she didn’t think back to what Maw had told her about the blue-eyed, raven-haired young man who came to her papa’s cabin every night for months in hopes that Maw would leave with him on one of those nights. Maw had told Chloe that on some nights he had come to her as a man and on other nights he stole into her room as a wolf. A beautiful black wolf with red markings and intense blue eyes similar to the ones that were looking down at Chloe that very moment.
These were the fairy tales that she had loved. The stories she wanted so badly to hear more of and make known if only to record some very intriguing Southern folklore. And the stories that still had the ability to cause her to flutter with excitement when she was alone and had a moment for herself to imagine what such a man would be like. What kind of beast he might be in bed. What kind of animal passion a man such as that might show when he made love to a woman. And what the combination of man and beast might make him do to protect and keep the woman and children he loved. These were the only stories that had ever managed to strike a romantic chord in Chloe.
But then, there was the truth.
And the truth was that there was no such thing as men who were animals by nature as opposed to by choice. And there had never been men who became wolves at night or men who crept into the bedrooms of women in the middle of their unmarried nights and made love to them with an unbridled fervor before luring them back to their family homes and making them their wives. The truth was that these creatures were completely fictitious. Legends. Fantasies of a woman burdened with an unfeeling husband who had killed her spirit with his lack of passion for life or for her.
And the real truth was that Maw had suffered from Alzheimer’s for years before anyone knew that something was wrong.
Chloe was also quite sure of the fact that there would be no compassion in the grip the alpha male of this wolf pack used to suffocate her before he ate his fill of her flesh. There would be no thoughtful looks other than the one that would decide which subordinate male got to finish off the meat scraps and bone fragments after he was done feeding from her.
And the only romantic thing about the entire situation would be the moonlight shining down on her uncle’s bloodied hardwood floor.
Any remaining fantasies or sexual excitement Chloe had inside her took an indefinite leave of absence as the wolf bent his front legs and lowered his mouth closer to her face. Chloe tightened her eyelids and whimpered without meaning to as she tried to keep tears from squeezing out from her eyes. Had the animal not weighed what he did and had he not been using that weight to press down onto her, she was sure that the trembling of her body would have been visible to the entire pack.
Panting, hot, wet breath came down on her skin. Dangerously close to her eyelids. Her cheeks.
And on the side of her throat.
A small sob escaped her mouth when she felt the brush of canine whiskers and wet nose on her neck. Her hands gripped the sheet covering her and she scolded herself for the tiny animal noises her impending outburst of sobs was creating. They would surely serve to tempt him and make him think she was injured prey in need of death. And tempting this boy wasn’t something Chloe wanted to do.
Unless the fairy tales were true, of course.
With her eyes closed, she noticed he was still. And quiet. The alpha had moved to wedge his body between her legs and had pressed his belly firmly against the swollen lips of her sex. Chloe couldn’t remember moving and adjusting her legs so that he could get this close to her, but she did notice it when she felt his warm breath on her neck and the steady motion of his body as he inhaled and exhaled while lying on top of her.
The motions and rhythms of the alpha’s body felt like that of a lover. After the act, perhaps. Like one of her imaginary lovers. And like the ones Maw had fabricated to make her horrid life tolerable.
Fantasy, Chloe had savored. She had often imagined having the man of her great-grandmother’s diseased rantings come to her and make her as desperate for him as Maw had seemed to be for her lost love.
But this fantasy was brutally real and because it was tinged with the fear that now invaded her mind, it became an animal of a completely different flavor.
And it was delicious.
She felt her bottom lip begin to quiver, telling her that control of her emotions was soon to cease. Chloe wanted to hate the helpless feeling she was experiencing but found herself too much in love with the rush it was giving her. Fear had always been a bit of an aphrodisiac to her. And she knew that the physical reactions to fear and the signs of sexual arousal were sometimes very similar. To combine them both and feel the benefits of such a coupling was something she had often wondered about but had never known exactly how to go about making such a fantasy come true.
Certainly, because of the stories she’d heard, this sensation was very close to what she had imagined. But as she lay there underneath the creature who was managing to frighten her so intensely, she couldn’t help but wonder how such a strong sexual arousal in her body was coming from a situation that couldn’t possibly be real.