enjoyable flavour of torture. “You know what I want,” she whispered, nipping at me with her strong, sharp teeth.
I did. I’d known since day one. Tara Vane-Tempest never gave up a chase and never lost a battle. She’d hold on no matter what until she had it all. “Please,” I whispered back. “Please.”
That was all it took, and she gave me everything at once. Pinning me down with all the passion and urgency that, there and then, I needed so very badly to be a part of. She overwhelmed me, her mouth sometimes soft sometimes savage, her hands here gentle, there clawing. Her skin tasted of dark, wild places and she smelled of blood, sweat, and soil. She made me forget, and forgetting was what I was here for.
The knock at the door came at the worst possible moment. Tara stopped dead, sat bolt upright and whipped her head around. She hadn’t been expecting an interruption, and she responded swiftly and decisively to the unexpected. “What?” she demanded.
“Put the girl down and get dressed.” Henry’s voice came through the door. He was one of the nicer werewolves and had personally saved my life on more than one occasion, but right about then I’d have cheerfully sent a couple of silver bullets in his direction. “We need you.”
Tara was off me way faster than was flattering. I got that her pack came first but—well, that was sort of the problem. “We’re in the middle of something,” I yelled.
“You’ll live,” replied Henry with what I had to admit was more patience than I’d have shown to somebody asking me to put my sacred duty on hold while she fucked my cousin. “This is urgent. There have been developments.”
Tara was already dressed which, given the bewildering size of her wardrobe, I thought must have been some kind of top-secret side effect of werewolf powers. For somebody who’d been on top of me less than ninety seconds ago she was looking almost offensively put together in a sheer black gown and killer heels that pushed her stature from tall to towering. She opened the door. “Here. What is it?”
“Tuffy. She didn’t come back from the borderlands. Neither did anybody who went with her.”
If I was a better person, I’d have felt bad. I’d met Tuffy and Smudge a couple of times and, admittedly, a lot of those times they’d been very much not on my side, but I didn’t want either of them to disappear or get ripped apart. But I wasn’t a better person, so I was still resentful about being left only partially laid. “Fuck, I’m sorry.” I tried to sound sincere and I think I mostly managed it. “Go do your pack thing. I’ll be here when you get back.”
Tara cast me a haughty look over her shoulder. She was in full alpha mode, which I found unhelpfully sexy given the circumstances. “This will take some time. I advise you not to wait for me.”
I curled up in the breakfast-stained ruin of the bedsheets. “Oh I won’t be waiting for you. I just have very little going on in my life right now.”
To my mild surprise, she took a step back inside the room, closed the door on Henry, and turned to face me. “I have been indulgent, Kate Kane…” okay Kate, she’s angry, stop finding it hot “…and perhaps I have been short-sighted. If my pack is in danger, then I will need a warrior, not a self-pitying drunk.”
That was unfair. Not inaccurate, exactly, but unfair. “You weren’t complaining last night. Or the night before. Or five fucking minutes ago.”
She was standing over me. Christ, wolves could move fast when they wanted to—not as fast as vampires, who could do the whole bamf-I-am-the-darkness thing—but still much quicker that I was comfortable with for something that might be trying to kill me. “Do not test me,” she growled. “For years I have been warned against associating with you. I have ignored those warnings because I know you can be better.”
“Oh spare me the I believe in you more than you do yourself bullshit. You’re a horny wolf-domme and whatever you may tell yourself, you like your women on their knees.”
She cupped a hand around my jaw. Her eyes faded to yellow again. I wasn’t sure if it was meant as a threat. “True. But I prefer it if they can get back up when they have to. There’s no sport if there’s no chase, and there’s no chase in someone who