Page 41 of Truthfinder’s Promise

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Jensen watched Meredith drive, the rage boiling beneath his skin making shift magic itch in his bones. Her hands gripped the wheel and the gear shift so tightly her knuckles had bled white. She looked as sick as he felt. It had taken everything he had to lie still while Meredith wrapped herself around Julian. Everything he had not to rip out the man’s throat.

There was a bone-deep insistence beneath his skin whispering that Meredith was his, even if she wasn’t, and that made him even sicker. To remember the way Julian had said, You’re mine, like she was property.

If he could shift maybe it would dispel some of his fury, the energy consumed by the transition enough to calm him. But every time he started to regain his human form Meredith snapped, “Not yet,” and he held off.

He had no idea where she was going. It wasn’t back in the direction of her home and she was speeding so egregiously, the speedometer nudging past one-hundred miles-per-hour, that he couldn’t even memorize the turns they were taking.

Aspect poured off her in soft waves, trailing out like a ribbon behind the car, and he scented the same type of magic that had made his sister’s trail impossible to follow when she’d gone missing. Meredith was ensuring they weren’t being followed, and she was spending a lot of power to do it.

By the time she finally slowed and pulled the car off the road, driving down a dirt path a vehicle this low to the ground had no business being on, he had no idea where they were. Because they weren’t anywhere. The path swerved, ending in a small clearing hidden from the road by a thick shelter of trees.

Meredith turned the car off and just sat, staring out the window, her jaw clenched. When he started to shift, she didn’t tell him not to. It went more quickly this time, his human form easier to find, a few minutes of pain and reshaping bones before he could open his mouth and demand, “Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry,” she said without looking at him.

She was sorry? “For what?”

She shivered and refused look at him. “The things I said about you—the way I treated you.”

“I’m the one who should be sorry.” She’d told him Julian was obsessed with her. But she’d said it so flippantly, like it was nothing, that he hadn’t taken it for the literal truth. He asked again, quietly, “Are you okay?”

When she still didn’t answer he raised his fingers to her cheek, to the small bruises already forming where Julian had dug his fingers in. For a moment she was perfectly still. Then she shuddered and closed her eyes, pressing her face into the palm of his hand.

“It’s okay,” he said soothingly.

She gave a sharp, short laugh. “Liar.”

Of course he was a liar. Nothing about what had happened was okay. “It’ll be okay.” He would make it okay. Somehow. Whatever he had to do, he wouldn’t let Julian do anything worse to her than he’d already done.

“How?” she asked softly.

“Come here.” The way she’d leaned into his hand told him she needed to be comforted, to feel a touch that wasn’t Julian’s. He could give her that. He needed to give her that. He drew her across the console and she came willingly, maneuvering through the small space in the car like a master contortionist until she straddled his lap, the roughness of her jeans sliding against his naked thighs.

He’d meant only to hold her, to rub some warmth and feeling in her until the fire came back into her eyes. But she’d barely settled atop him before she leaned in and kissed him.

He froze. If he moved at all he was going to rip every stitch of clothing off her, and he wasn’t going to do that until he was certain it was what she wanted.

She stilled at his lack of response and opened her eyes. There was need in them, tempered by confusion and hurt and the fear of rejection. “Is this not okay?”

“It’s more than okay, darlin’. I just don’t want you to regret it.”

She relaxed, the hesitance in her eyes giving way to desire. “I won’t. But it’s just sex, Jensen. We’re clear on that?”

“Just sex,” he repeated, and if she heard the lie in those two words, she didn’t call him on it. Sex with her wasn’t just sex. It never had been. But he wasn’t thinking about it anymore when she drew her shirt over her head and stripped off her bra, baring the lush curves of her breasts. He palmed them and flicked his thumbs across her nipples. She arched into him, her core pressing down against his hardness.

She adjusted the seat back as far as it would go and then her fingers fumbled at the clasp on her jeans, undoing the button and zipper, but that was as far as she got. The car was small, and he didn’t see any way in hell she was getting her pants off inside its confines.

“We going anywhere after this that requires you to have pants?” he asked.

“I have spare clothes in the trunk.”

“Perfect.” He gripped her jeans to either side of the zipper and tore. The fabric split along the seam under the assault of Shifter strength, a perk he hadn’t truly appreciated since his teenage years, which was the last time he’d found himself so desperate to fuck a woman that he took her in a car off the side of a road.

He’d barely finished shoving jean material away before she took hold of his cock, shoved her panties to the side and slid down onto him.

He groaned as her tight heat wrapped around him like a fist. “Fuck, are you still on birth control?”