The Beast Within (2 page)

L
iv had been dreaming again.

In the dream the bride sat in her snug house deep in the woods, fearfully watching out the window at the encroaching night.

Her hands twitched as the moon rose, and she gripped the armrests of her chair desperately, before reaching down and yanking off her boots with a sob of defeat. Immediately the delicate youthful skin of those shaking anxious hands changed, growing a thick fur pelt. The bride’s jaw cracked audibly, shifting outward, her teeth sharpening. As the full moon lit up the small room, she fell out of the chair onto the floor and all fours, her body morphing into that of an animal…a wolf.

They hadn’t eaten the bride.

They had made her one of them.

A werewolf.

Liv tore her eyes open to escape the image of the gray wolf howling in despair.

Only to find herself face-to-face with a wolf in her room, pacing in front of her window.

She wanted to scream, but no sound came out of her mouth, only a frantic exhalation of air, like a strangled gasp. She hated these stupid windows without screens. She had told Scarborough that something was going to climb in, but she’d been thinking about serial killers and raccoons, not wolves.

Only there it was, a pacing wolf in her bedroom, and she had no idea what to do other than watch it, frozen in fear.

It cocked its head at her, and she realized it had one blue eye, and one green.

Like Sebastian.

God, she was still dreaming…though she didn’t understand why it was always wolves. Every night, wolves…

No wolf in real life was that big, so she was definitely still asleep, but it didn’t make her fear quiet at all. Staring down the length of her body at it, fingers clutching the top of her sheet, she waited for something, anything.

It backed up, its back legs crouching down, and she realized that it was going to spring right onto her bed and rip her heart out and her face off. The scream she’d been struggling to unleash finally hurtled out as she closed her eyes and waited for the impact of its heavy, lithe body, the pain of its teeth in her flesh.

“Shh, Liv, it’s okay.”

Her eyes flew open.

Now she knew she was dreaming. There was no longer a wolf in her room.

The form on the bottom of her bed, moving up toward her on all fours, was Sebastian. His mismatched eyes were filled with tenderness, compassion, lust. His shoulders were muscular and tanned, drawing closer to her, one side bearing a scar she knew her former lover didn’t have.

And he was naked.

Fully, one hundred percent, gloriously naked.

The hard planes of his chest flexed as he slowly crawled up the length of her body, his thighs settling firmly on either side of her.

His thick impressive erection hovered over the apex of her legs.

Liv lost her ability to speak again, and for an entirely different reason this time. She hadn’t forgotten how gorgeous Sebastian was, not really, but she had shoved aside the memories of what it felt like to have him invading her space, moving his body, his smell, his deep expressive gaze into her presence.

Desire kicked at her from the inside out, knocking against her womb, firming her nipples, flooding her inner thighs with a rush of warm lubrication. She could hear the sound of her own short, excited, and frightened pants of breath, feel the heat of his body over her, smell the earthy musk of his skin that was foreign and familiar all at once. It was Sebastian’s scent, with an overlay of something new…something woodsy and primal.

A dull throb between her legs began as he stared down at her silently, her body so long unsatisfied, and so very aware of how close his erection was to her, nothing but a thin sheet and a couple of inches between them. She’d gone to sleep with a shirt on, but this was a dream, and it was bunched at her waist already.

All he needed to do was yank the sheet down and slide into her….

He reached out with a finger and drew it across her bottom lip, slowly, painstakingly, from one corner to the other.

The soft whisper of a touch was maddening and Liv whispered, “Please.”

“Please what?” His voice was gruff, his face so close to hers she could see the shadow of a beard on his chin. His finger continued to move, over her jaw, her cheek, her nose, cascading down over her neck, pausing at the edge of the sheet before heading north again.

Under different circumstances she would have appreciated the tender touch, the study of her features, the careful exploration of her, the woman, not just her, a female body. But now it was only stirring that deep ache into a painful swollen throb, a frustrating reminder of how passionate sex with him had been and how empty her life felt now.

“Please what?” he repeated.

She didn’t know how to say what she wanted, how to tell him to make love to her, to fill her body and her soul in a way only he had been able to.

If she were awake, she’d have to slap him, throw him out, tell him precisely what she thought of him in cold and calm terms.

But she wasn’t, and she was so lonely, so starved for touch. His touch. So that when words failed she simply shoved the sheet to the side, exposing her body, breasts still covered by her shirt, but her bottom half blissfully bare.

His eyes darkened. “You want me to make love to you? You want me inside you?”

“Yes,” she said, then gasped when immediately his mouth dropped onto her nipple and lathered it with his tongue.

He moved in tight little circles around her nipple, over and over, then flicking the bud, then enclosing his mouth over it and sucking hard. The tingling and the tugging spiraled throughout her body, echoing between her legs.

Six months was too long. She moved restlessly, grabbing onto those hard, powerful shoulders, and trying to urge his head away from her breast.

Lifting his head, he said, “Patience.” But it wasn’t a gentle reassuring voice. It was edgy and gravelly, darker in tone than anything she’d ever known from Sebastian, and she knew it was her misery, her frustration, her anger and bitterness spawning a darker tone in him in her dream.

The last six months had been hell in real life, and he was responsible for that agony, but here, in the misty fog of sleep, she could forget and just remember the pleasure.

Sebastian sucked her other nipple at great length, before blowing gently on the moist, firm peak, causing her to shiver. She was on the verge of asking again, demanding more, but before the mumbled words could leave her lips his head shifted, his thumbs skimming over her tummy and her thighs as he settled between her legs.

Every muscle in her body tensed in anticipation, knowing that he could do amazing things with his tongue, knowing that in seconds she would probably orgasm from both the length of her celibacy and the skill of his touch.

He hovered over her, his nose tickling her, his warm breath teasing her clitoris. A hot desperate rush of fluid greeted him, so much that in reality she might have been embarrassed, but here, now, it didn’t matter. In fact, it empowered her. She wanted sex, hard and pounding sex, and he was going to give it to her.

“Lick me,” she demanded, lifting her hips slightly to bump her clitoris against his mouth.

Giving a tiny little flick over her clitoris, he breathed deeply, his eyes drifting closed. “I can smell you, smell how much you want me. That’s what brought me in. It’s a delicious scent.”

His tongue moved then, sliding up and down between her folds, swirling around her clitoris, with just the right speed, just the right pressure. Liv moaned, eyes fluttering closed, the pleasure acute and tense. Her legs moved apart, wanting to be as open for him as possible, her fingers sliding into his short dark hair.

She came as predicted, fast and tight and immediately, her throat shutting off, forgetting to breathe for that sharp, quick release of her body at his touch. When she sucked back in a lungful of air, he was already flicking his tongue over her again, setting off an uncomfortable jolt from the oversensitive bud.

“It’s too much,” she told him, trying to push his head away.

It had been too tight, too swollen.

But he ignored her and continued to lick and suck at her, the pleasure mixing with an odd sharp pain.

“I can’t, don’t. It’s too sensitive.” Liv shifted, trying to get away from him.

“I haven’t had enough,” he said, the words mumbled against her folds as he pulled them apart. First his tongue plunged in, then he replaced it with his finger.

“Sebastian,” Liv moaned. This was a different, more demanding man than she remembered, and the paradox struck her even in her hazy, endorphin-filled sleep state.

Now he groaned and raised his head, his lips shiny from her dampness, his jaw set, eyes dark, finger pumping in and out of her as he stared at her. “Say it again.”

“What?” she asked, bewildered, ankles shifting on the bed, hips rising without thought to meet the thrust of his finger. Oh, that felt so good, and even her swollen clitoris had relaxed. She was going to come again, soon, very soon….

“My name. Say my name again.”

“Sebastian,” she murmured, distracted by the feel of him, willing to say anything he wanted as long as he continued.

His response was to dip a second finger inside her, then slide it down lower, between her cheeks, and slip it into her backside. Liv jerked a little, startled, fairly certain he’d never done that when they were together, but intrigued, shocked at how it felt, the two fingers moving in harmony, in and out, filling her everywhere. The tightness increased, spiraling up and out of control, and she cried out, the orgasm slamming into her. The feel of her muscles contracting around both his fingers had her bucking up off the mattress, but Sebastian held her steady, his stroking never slowing or altering.

As her body settled back down, she shook her head, cloudy, unsure of what to say or do, waiting, knowing that it wasn’t for her to dictate anyway. Here it was all him, in charge, pleasuring her.

When he slowly withdrew his fingers, her body gave a spasm against the loss. The fullness had been so wonderful, and then it was gone. Her disappointment was so profound, she was going to beg to have them back, but instead, Sebastian settled between her thighs and pushed his thick erection into her wet, aching body.

“Oh!” she cried, opening her legs as far apart as they would go, back arching and hands reaching for him. Yes. This was what she wanted.

As she gripped his biceps, he thrust deeper inside her, as far as he could, then pulling out to the very tip, before plunging deep.

“Oh, God,” she said, amazed at how good it felt, how much she had missed this, him.

“You like it, don’t you?” he demanded, pausing half in, half out.

“Yes, yes.” She moved beneath him, lifting her hips to force action.

He didn’t disappoint. He started a pounding rhythm that had her insensible in seconds, the thick fullness of him deep inside so satisfying she wanted to scream in relief.

“He doesn’t make you feel this way, does he?”

“Who?” she asked, struggling to focus, her breath coming in short, urgent pants, her thighs clenching around his cock. She was going to come a third time.

“Scarborough. He can’t do this to you.”

So lost to the pleasure, she didn’t even pause, but answered truthfully, “No, no, he can’t.”

Sebastian grunted, and she felt the hot pulse of his orgasm, tripping off her own. They gritted their teeth and groaned in unison, memories of all their nights together mixing a desperate melancholy into the magic of the moment.

How could he have done this to her? How could he have left?

But there were no answers in the illusion of his eyes, and even as the last shudders wracked her body, Liv found herself drifting, limp on her bed.

As she lost the clarity of the dream, as the images grew shrouded and shifted, Liv’s last thought was a cold one, one she needed to hold and own more so than any pleasure he had brought to her asleep.

Sebastian had not kissed her.

Not even once.

S
ebastian watched Liv fall asleep, her eyelashes fluttering as she settled back into slumber, nightshirt still bunched up over her breasts.

He shouldn’t have come here.

Shouldn’t have made love to her.

She didn’t think he was real.

She was living with his brother.

And now he had the taste and touch and smell of her all over his skin, on his tongue, embedded in his brain, his heart, his soul. The memory of Liv had helped him stay alive, the reality seemed like it might kill him.

He couldn’t have her. She was no longer his. And she had betrayed him as surely as his brother had.

Yet he lingered before he pulled the sheet up over her, allowing himself one last touch of his fingers over her full lips. Then he moved off the bed, unable to stay another minute. God, she had felt so good, and he could stay inside her forever.

But she was no longer his, and his brother had seen and touched and tasted the same places on her body that he had and it made him sick, disgust and anguish overwhelming in their intensity.

Sebastian shifted and leapt out of the bedroom window. He padded carefully down the metal stairs, then when he hit the ground, he ran. Away from Liv, away from the past, way from the uncertainty of the future, and the temptation to claim her body with his yet again.

He ran hard, as fast as his four legs would carry him, into the thick lustrous forest behind Scarborough’s house. Once under the cover of the trees, he dodged and weaved, sailing over fallen limbs and hurtling himself through brush. The crisp air felt good on his hot fur and the night around him whistled with an autumn wind and hummed with the presence of insects and nocturnal creatures.

Such as the wolf.

He heard the high keening howl immediately to his right and he drew up short, not wanting an encounter.

But it was too late. He smelled the scent of the other werewolf, and he knew it was doing the same. Before he could make the decision to retreat or confront, there was a werewolf with mottled gray-and-white fur in front of him.

Nick. His cousin, younger than him by two years.

Their eyes locked, and Sebastian bared his teeth, ready to battle.

Yet Nick did the unthinkable and shifted back to man, the expression on his face, as he crouched naked, incredulous. “Sebastian?” he murmured. “You’re alive?”

It was that incredulity and the trust it took for Nick to risk being human with Sebastian still as wolf, that led him to make his own shift.

“Obviously, yes, I’m alive. No thanks to you or any of the James clan.”

While Sebastian was wary, Nick was jubilant. A grin split his face. “Man, I’m so glad to see you!” He clapped Sebastian on the shoulder. “I thought for sure you were a goner, but no worse for the wear, huh?”

Actually, he felt like a pickup truck with three hundred thousand miles on it, but there was no point in going into all of that. “Yeah, I’m alright. So when you run to Scar and tell him I’m back in town, you make sure he understands I know who put the knife in my shoulder.”

Nick’s smile fell off his face. “About that…we didn’t know. The rest of us had no idea that’s what Scar was planning, I swear to you. I never would have agreed to that kind of bullshit.”

Sebastian wanted to believe him. Nick had always been a happy-go-lucky guy and a fairly docile werewolf. He was a follower, not a leader, and had no head for elaborate political scheming. Much like Sebastian had been. “You’re trying to tell me that none of the four of you in the pack knew Scar was going to kill me?”

“Hell, no, we didn’t know that. We’ve always known Scar was ambitious, but in human form. I never thought that he took the clan so serious. I never thought we were anything more than six guys who got extremely hairy and grew an overbite once a month. A family quirk, nothing more.”

Studying Nick, Sebastian turned his words around in his head. Damn, he did want to believe him, but he didn’t know who to trust anymore.

“And by the way, can I just point out that this is more than a little awkward standing here bare-assed in the woods with you? I hope we don’t run into any campers…that’s how rumors get started. And that could seriously affect my ability to pick up women.”

The way Nick was looking around them uneasily made Sebastian laugh, no easy feat these days. “I probably shouldn’t hang around too long anyway.”

“Scar’s out of town.”

“I know.” Sebastian felt his face fix into a hard frown, the way it always did when he thought about his brother now. “Why’d he do it? He could have talked to me about taking over the pack, he didn’t have to kill me.” He had turned that one around and around and while he thought he understood that Scar was motivated by power and control, it still seemed excessive to Sebastian.

But then again, he wasn’t entirely lacking in human emotion.

“Because if you believe the legends, even if you had given the pack leadership over to Scar, you still had Liv.”

“The sole survivor of the French clan of werewolves.” Sebastian ran his hand through his hair.

“Mated to her, it doubles his power.”

Which was why Sebastian had never married Liv. He wanted no part of anything that smacked of ulterior motives when it came to her. He had loved her for her, not for what she could bring him.

“Liv has no idea who and what she is.”

Nick nodded. “Just so you know, she’s started shifting at the full moon. But Scar says she doesn’t have any memory of it.”

Sebastian’s eyebrows shot up. “Liv is shifting? But she never did before.”

“Extreme emotion triggers the first shift, you know that. It started almost immediately after you disappeared.”

Yeah, he did know emotion could initiate the change. At sixteen, Sebastian and Scarborough had both shifted for the first time after their parents died in a car accident. Scar had internalized enough of his anger that he had learned to shift at will almost immediately, a dark talent Sebastian now possessed himself.

Sorrow for the pain Liv had suffered enveloped him. “What does Liv think happened to me?”

Nick cleared his throat like he was uncomfortable, but he didn’t evade the question or Sebastian’s stare. “He told Liv that you disappeared without a trace, no sign of foul play. She thinks you walked out on her and emptied her bank account right before you did.”

“
What?
” Sebastian felt the anger rising inside of him, from his gut, feathering out to all his limbs in a hot rush. His hands twitched. “You’re telling me she thinks I stole her money and skipped out?”

Nick shot him a look of sympathy. “She had no reason to think otherwise, especially since you would never marry her. I thought about telling her the truth, but why would she believe my crazy-ass story over Scar’s? His was a hell of a lot more believable, and the money being gone just cemented what he told her. And then he would have just killed me too and he’d still be with Liv, so there was no point. But it was rough on her, Sebastian…. I’ve never seen her look like that. For weeks she was just…” He cleared his throat. “Anyway. I’m glad you’re back, man. Your brother is a little out of control.”

Sebastian couldn’t believe it. No wonder Liv was living with Scarborough. The guy had attempted to kill Sebastian in cold blood, then had lied to Liv about it, claiming he had walked out on her without a backward glance, with all her cash. Then clearly Scarborough had been there as a shoulder to cry on.

The fucking bastard. It was so devious and cold and calculating.

It made Sebastian want to throw back his head and howl in disgust and frustration.

It made him want to go back and make love to Liv again, with more tenderness, with the truth between them.

And it made him want to rip his brother apart, piece by miserable piece.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he told Nick. “I have plans for Scarborough.”

The alarm shattered Liv’s sleep and had her reaching over to smack the quiet button on her cell phone to stop the squawking. Peeling her eyes open, she swallowed, her mouth dry, and clutched the sheet a little closer to her. She was freezing. She shouldn’t have left the windows open, it was too late in the year for that. Plus she realized that somehow her nightshirt had worked its way all the up to her neck so the majority of her body was exposed, nothing but the thin sheet covering her.

The dream came back to her then.

The bride, morphing into a wolf, then the bride’s room morphing to her room, then the wolf in her room morphing into Sebastian.

It had been intense and so very real, like all the bride dreams were. Yet in this one, Sebastian had been there and he had touched and licked her, brought her to orgasm, and buried his erection in her.

Her cheeks heated and her inner thighs throbbed at the memory. It had felt so good, so powerful, so satisfying.

Clearly her body was hinting to her that she needed release. She refused to admit that it meant she missed Sebastian. She couldn’t possibly still crave a man who had done what he had to her.

But there was no denying what the Sebastian in her dream had said when he was thrusting in her. He had demanded she tell him that Scarborough couldn’t make her feel that way, and she had admitted it. It didn’t take a psychologist or a professional dream interpreter to figure out what that meant.

She couldn’t bring herself to make love to Scarborough, and that was a serious problem.

It meant she needed to be slapped for still wanting the touch of Sebastian when it was his brother who had treated her with kindness and respect.

Yanking her nightshirt back into place, she tried to ignore the tightening of her nipples and the tingle between her thighs at the lingering memory of the dream.

Maybe she should do dream analysis. The wolves were a curious repetitive theme of the last few months, one she really didn’t understand. And not just wolves—these were werewolves, shape-shifting humans.

Liv forced herself out of bed. She didn’t want to be late for class. She only had half a semester to go until she had her degree, then she could finally have a decent-paying job to both support herself and replace some of the money she had lost. The money Sebastian had stolen.

Maybe she should start taking a sleeping aid. Something to knock her out so that she didn’t dream for a few nights. Because dreams weren’t reality and she needed to put aside the false sense that Sebastian had come back to her, had touched her like he still loved her.

As she padded across the floor to the bathroom, Liv suddenly froze. It wasn’t possible. It was just a dream….

Yet she lifted her nightshirt, and in the early morning light streaming from the open windows, saw the distinct and telltale sign of semen trickling down her inner thigh.