Page 37 of Hunted

“Show me,” I breathed. I didn’t need words. Only that wicked tongue.

He smirked, warm, large hands spanning my ribcage as his lips ghosted kisses down my throat. You’ll be the death of me.

I moaned when he took one of my nipples between his teeth. Bolts of pleasure snaked down my spine. He quickly chased them with his tongue as I strained against the belt holding me to the bedpost.

River smirked when I gasped and fell back against the sheets, hair tangled and sweaty against my neck.

“Please.”

“I love it when you beg.”

At the first swirl of his tongue, I felt myself clench around him, a cry choked in my throat as I strained to hold back the release that was coming. I felt River moving over me, and suddenly the belt holding my wrists was released.

“I know you like being tied up while I fuck you.” River held my eyes, gently kissing my wrists to soothe the red marks where the leather had dug into my skin. “I like it, too. But tonight, I want to finish with your hands all over me.”

He captured my mouth, fucking me with greater urgency. As he tugged at my nipples, I arched up off the bed, biting my way down his throat until I captured one of his nipple rings in my teeth. River gritted his teeth. Sheathed within me, I felt him thicken, his heartbeat thrumming in tight, hot pulses as he strained to keep from releasing inside me. I traced the dark tribal tats inked across his chest with my tongue, eliciting another groan, fingernails digging into his shoulders as I fought the dark intense pressure building where we were joined.

God, Ellie.

I rotated my hips, coaxing him deeper. With a groan, he descended over me, plunging into me again and again, the rough slap of our bodies loud in the still room. His breath came in ragged gasps, so close to the knife’s edge of losing control. And River Caldwell didn’t lose control. He was a Tracer. All rough edges and hard military training. Only when we were together like this, locked together so intimately I could barely breathe for the way it made my toes curl every time he nudged thatplace deep inside me, his pupils fat and hungry as he gazed down at my naked skin, did I see glimmers of the man behind the soldier. The boy I’d secretly had a crush on so long ago.

“River,” I gasped, fingernails scraping down the broad planes of his back as he drove into me, relentless. “I’m going to come.”

Instantly everything changed. He pulled out, stripping off the condom and kissing his way down my stomach.

“Please, just this once. I want you to finish inside me.”

The kiss just below my navel made my toes curl, the tip of his index finger teasing my clit until I saw stars. You know why we can’t. I won’t infect you like my brother did Lacey.

This isn’t real.

It’s always been real. You’ve always been mine.

His tongue caressed my sex, silver eyes locked with mine, and I knew he could feel everything I was feeling. How close I was, my climax balanced on a knife’s point, pain so close to pleasure, begging to be released. There was no shutting River out, no keeping him from my innermost thoughts. He knew how badly I needed this, was turned on as hell by watching every time he made me fall apart.

His eyes shadowed, just for a second. This was an argument we’d had so many times. But then he nudged me the tiniest fraction, and I was falling, lost to the aching pleasure of his lips and tongue.

Mine.

“Yes,” I breathed. “Yours.”

Say it again.

“Yours,” I gasped, arching up off the bed as a second wave crested. River’s large palm flattened against my stomach, holding me firmly in place as I cried out. And then with a growl, he was on top of me, eyes blazing gold as he fisted his cock.

Fuck. He wanted to bite me.

His wolf wanted to claim me.

And in this wild, reckless moment, I wanted him to.

“You can’t infect me right now,” I whispered, nipping at the base of his throat. “Can’t change me. It would just be for fun.”

“Yeah. Tell that to my brother. He thought he was just fucking around one night, too.”

According to Hayden, River’s older brother Dallas had secretly dated a human girl named Lacey Blair all throughout high school. Their father Ben had strict rules against any of his sons dating human girls and would have forbidden the relationship had he known about it. For years, they’d kept the relationship to dating and kissing. And then Ben Caldwell had discovered Dallas had been seeing Lacey and ordered him to break the relationship off or he would banish him from the pack. Dallas had gone to see Lacey, intending to follow his father’s orders, but hadn’t been able to follow through. Instead, he and Lacey had both had too much to drink at a party and lost their virginity together. Everything should have been fine because male werewolves normally could only infect humans during a small three-day window at the full moon. Dallas was well outside the transmission period. But within hours, Lacey had started spiking a fever. By the time Ben Caldwell found her with Dallas, she was already showing signs of infection with the lycan virus.

Their story ultimately had a happy ending. It had taken ten years and a few bumps in the road, but they were now happily married with two businesses and a beautiful baby girl. But I understood River’s concern. Lacey had become a Bitten wolf and at seventeen had to go no contact with her family for over a year while she learned to control her wolf. It was ten years before she was able to tell her mother the truth about what happened that night. Most Bitten stories were similar to hers, involving loss of family and trauma.