Werewolf Wedding Page 10

  As I took him into my mouth, his groaning became thicker, huskier, more urgent. The hand on my face stiffened along with the rest of him. Circling my tongue around his tip, the taste of Jake mixed with the scent of his hard, rough masculinity had my knees weak and my inhibitions weaker.

  I’m not exactly pent-up and I’m not exactly wild when it comes to how I act in the throes of passion, so when I reached up and dragged my nails down Jake’s chest without even thinking about it, I was just as surprised as he was.

  His huffing groans sharpened again. He hissed, first with either surprise or pain and then immediately afterward with pleasure. He moaned my name, and tried to pull me to my feet, but the instant I slid the tip of my tongue along the most sensitive little point underneath his tip, I knew that I, little Delilah Coltrane had somehow tamed a big, bad wolf.

  Jake grabbed my hair, desperately clinging to me like he was holding on to life itself.

  “Bite me,” he hissed.

  I did, but I guess not quite like what he had in mind.

  “Harder, harder, drag your teeth down... oh... yes!”

  He had me nibbling, then biting, at the underside of his tip, running my teeth up and down his shaft so hard that I have no idea how it didn’t hurt like hell, but from how he was carrying on, I knew it didn’t. Or, at least if it did, he was really into pain.

  Jake pushed his hips against me, gasping and moaning and throwing his head from side to side as he called my name over and over. I slid one of my hands down his leg and then back up to squeeze his base. Pausing to take a breath, I tasted a drop of him with the tip of my tongue and felt another wave of heat, then cool, then heat again, pulse through me.

  “I can’t stop,” he said. “You got me, you really got me. I’m...”

  I felt his body tense, his muscles contract. He went completely rigid and then all at once, the tension and tightness relaxed all at once. He hissed my name, he held me tight as he pulsed, and then he howled.

  Oh my God did he ever howl.

  -12-

  “I have no idea why the neighbors didn’t call the cops, I’m gonna be honest.”

  -Delilah

  “You weren’t kidding,” I said with a chuckle as my snoring fiancée finally opened his eyes when the sun was right outside the window.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He smiled, even though the sun was obviously blinding him. His squinting made the laugh lines in the corners of Jake’s eyes stand out, and a split second later, I was back in bed with my arms around his muscular neck, and my legs on either side of him.

  The heat in his body warmed me through and through. I reached down and felt him harden at just the first brush of my fingertips. He made a sort of clucking sound when I touched him to the place between my legs, the place I wanted him more than anything in the world.

  I bit my lip, almost trembling with anticipation, but he clicked the tongue against the roof of his mouth again, and flipped me over so that I felt him, big and heavy, against my clit.

  “Unless you want a cub right here and now, we better hold off for a while.”

  “What do you mean? Oh,” I blushed. “Wait, how do you know I’m ovulating?”

  He laughed a little. “It’s a wolf thing.”

  I gave him a playful scratch. His hot, bronze skin warmed my fingers. “I mean, there’s always condoms. Kinda what I was intending anyway.”

  His laugh turned into a snort. “No can do,” he said with a wistful sigh. “Have to use special ones. Latex isn’t made for... er, well it isn’t strong enough. You ever heard that old phrase ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’?”

  “Er, I’m pretty sure that refers to Little Red Riding Hood, not how werewolf sperm can only be contained by the power of a sheep’s intestine.”

  Jake looked thoughtful for a moment. “Never thought of that. And honestly I don’t know if the sheepskin would work anyway.”

  “Okay,” I said, taking a breath. “Assuming I believe you about the werewolf thing, how the hell do you people have sex without getting a million babies or ending up with all those diseases that my teacher terrified me with in freshman biology?”

  “It’s a—”

  “Wolf thing,” I cut him off, “right.”

  Before we could go any further, and holy shit did I want to go further, the phone in his jeans, which were thrown into a corner of my bedroom right beside the bean bag chair I’d had since I was fourteen, started buzzing. Jake grunted and looked very irritated for a few seconds. He waited until the phone started ringing for the fourth round before he got up. “Hoping they’d give up,” he explained, and then werewolf-sped over to the corner.

  By the time he managed to free his phone from his shredded slacks, he had missed the call. With a grin and a cute shrug, he was about to throw it back on the ground, when it started up again. That time, the grunt was a sneer.

  “It’s Barney,” he said, muffling the phone against his chest.

  “Oh come on, Jake,” I said. “You can’t be mad at him for calling. After your brother and you had that Hulk-a-thon at the mansion last night, he’s probably worried to death about you.”

  “I guess,” Jake said with a sigh. “Hey Barney, what’s up?”

  There was a long tirade of chatter from the other end of the line that I couldn’t understand, but watching Jake’s face contort in all sorts of grimaces, frowns, pursed lips, and finally, open-mouthed horror was entertaining enough without hearing the lines that went with the cinematography.

  “Now hold on,” he said. “Dane is... wait, Barney, hold on, let me ask a question for clarity. Barney, I—”

  Jake fell silent again under the power of another tidal wave of cultured accent. I watched him take a deep breath, his massive chest swelling as he held the air and then sinking when he finally exhaled. He opened his mouth to say something else, but somehow Barney psychically realized it from ten miles away, and cut him off again. Poor Jake was getting flustered enough that he’d run his hand through his hair so many times he’d given himself a cowlick.

  “Right,” he finally said. “Okay, yeah. I... Barney! I said I’d be there in fifteen minutes and I will. Okay, bye.”

  “Fifteen minutes is plenty,” I offered, demurely.

  “I have to be there in fifteen,” he said, pulling on his clothes. He paused as he buttoned the last of his shirt buttons. “Although that should still be plenty.”

  “Oh shut up!” I couldn’t help but laugh as he bent over to kiss me.

  After two quick ones, and a third that made my heart pound just a little, he pulled away and whispered in my ear, “Well I meant that’d be plenty for you. Keep the bed warm, I’ll be home for dinner, honey.”

  I cocked my head. “Excuse me, Prince Jackass?”

  “Oh never mind,” he said with another grin. “I’ve just always wanted to say that. I’ll call you when I can. Stay safe.”

  And then, with a swishing turn and a click of my front door, he was gone. But those words, stay safe, stuck in my throat like a lump of Tylenol.

  *

  An hour later, I pushed the door to my studio open with my foot, not because I was being cool, but because my arms were full of crap. I had a statue to fix before my subject... er, fiancé, came to finally model for it, and I wasn’t going to be the one to screw everything up.

  Then again, I wasn’t entirely sure how to fix a statue broken in such a way and have it look convincing, but I’m also not the type to give up without a fight.

  Obviously. It takes a certain kind of stubbornness to try and not only corral a werewolf, but also convince him that maybe jetting out of town at the first sign of trouble isn’t the best course of action. And why had he told me to stay safe? Isn’t that the sort of thing the guys on Band of Brothers said to each other right before someone got blown up?

  “You’re sweating,” Jeannie said in her trademark deadpan. “Did you have more sex? I only ask because you’re sweating but you aren’t acting all fretful, which m
eans—”

  “Yes,” I said, as flat as I could manage. “All the way, every place, tongues all over the body.”

  She helped me with my double armload of stuff and as soon as the epoxy jug, the paste, the color matching caulk and the silicone tube were safely on the floor, she put her hands on her hips and frowned. “You’re lying.”

  “That’s true. Sort of. There were tongues all over the place, but not all the way.” I felt a little abashed as I was talking, but it was something I had to get out. “This might sound really stupid, but I think he’s trying to make it special. Also we’re getting married.”

  “Huh,” Jeannie grunted. “I’ll take this stuff to the back.”

  I stood there, waiting and listening, well aware of what was about to happen. Jeannie’s never at her best early in the morning. She always jokes that her meds haven’t kicked in yet, which I know isn’t true because she takes them before she leaves the house. My guess is she’s just naturally a night owl, and has forced herself to assimilate to normal, polite society via sleeping at night and waking in the day.

  The other thing about her is that underneath the slightly gruff exterior, and the small frame, she’s strong as a goddamn aurochs. As soon as she was in the studio, I started counting backwards from thirty. If she lasted that long, it’d be a new obliviousness record. To her credit, and to my surprise, I only had to count down to eighteen before I heard the sharp inhalation from the other room, a lot like the sound an excited teenager makes when he’s huffing nitrous.

  “YOU WHAT?”

  Something hit the ground and broke, but it didn’t sound expensive. The only thing I hoped was that it wasn’t one of the novelty coffee mugs that I liked. When she re-emerged from behind the sliding door to the studio, she was covered in flour.

  Except there is no flour in a sculpture studio, so she’d somehow gotten herself covered from head to toe in Plaster of Paris dust.

  “Don’t turn on the sprinklers,” I said, “or you’ll freeze like that.”

  She was unfazed. “What the hell did you say?”

  “Don’t turn on the—”

  “You are getting married?” Jeannie’s voice was halfway between excited and a vulture shrieking. “To that billionaire? Holy shit, Dilly I think I’m going to faint. And I haven’t even had an over-the-panties handy from the guy.”

  I shrugged, trying to act as casual as I could. Reality was, it had only just hit me what I was doing, and somehow hearing Jeannie say it put a lump in my stomach that felt like I’d eaten a bucket of spackle.

  Without my having started talking, I guess she felt the need to keep on, out of fear that otherwise she’d either explode from tension build up, or maybe the world would disappear. Even as nervous as I was getting as reality set in, the fact that she was standing there, covered in plaster, and hooting at me was just a little too much.

  I sat down, a little harder than I meant to sit, and then just started howling with laughter. I don’t mean the kind where you get some tears in your eyes – I mean the sort of laughing that’s as bad as a terminal case of hiccups. My sides hurt, my face burned from the exertion of being pulled up into a smile for so long. My eyes began burning from either the plaster dust wafting off of Jeannie or from how tightly I had them clamped shut.

  But then the damndest thing happened.

  As I sat there screaming with laughter, I felt my chest tighten up a bit, and then my eyes burned not from the dust, but from something coming out of them. Moisture in the corners of my eyes collected and rolled slowly down my cheeks. The volcanic laughter that had took me so quickly shifted to what I thought before was the complete opposite, but in that moment, I realized exactly how similar they were.

  Despite riding a falling-in-love high for the past two weeks, exactly how stupid I’d gotten hit me square in the chest. The droplets turned to streams, and before I knew it, I was sitting there in the floor of my studio, weeping loud and proud.

  Jeannie ran over to me, and held me tight.

  I let her for a second, sobbing helplessly into the crook of her neck and then I remembered her situation. “Cloth,” I managed to choke out. “Wet cloth from...”

  Speaking coherently was beyond me just then, so I went the ‘point like a caveman’ route and indicated one of my workbenches that had an old, brass faucet in it. The plaster on my face had already started to set, but luckily Jeannie took the hint quickly. I managed to get my eyes cleared out before I needed a trip to the emergency room, which... well, in the scheme of things, was a pretty fantastic turn of events.

  Jeannie scratched at the place on her neck that my tears turned the plaster into a stiffening slurry. “I’m going to the shower, and you’re going to come talk to me while I’m in there,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  Part of the work I do is getting messy. Really, really, horrifically messy. I routinely get covered in all kinds of noxious chemicals and dust and other awful shit, so I have a sort of make-shift shower stall in the back of the studio in case I need to go somewhere right after I finish working.

  Of course, the number of times I’ve needed to desperately go somewhere after work could be counted on, I think, three fingers.

  Jeannie stripped down, turned on the shower, and unleashed a torrent of swears and curses and words that I’m not sure how to categorize.

  “It takes a while to warm up,” I said, noting that my own voice sounded listless. “Solar powered water tank.”

  She answered with a sputter, and something that sounded like an insult aimed at the shower’s mother. Jeannie’s so nonplussed and hard to rouse that I usually forget how wonderful it is when she does get excited. I’m so used to her calm, almost defiantly even temperament and ability to completely avoid surprise... but damn is she a girl who hates cold water. She took a deep breath and let out a long, comically pleasured sigh.

  “Thank God that’s over,” she announced. “I felt like a cat in a frozen lake. You should get a real hot water tank back here.”

  “You gonna pay for it?”

  “No, you are. Anyway, now that we’ve decided where your next four months of profit are going, you need to open those pretty lips of yours and start yapping. What the hell are you talking about, getting married to a guy you met two weeks ago? You’re not knocked up and trying to act like we’re living in 1947 and you can’t go around being a sullied dove, are you?”

  “No, I’m—”

  “Because that’s stupid as all shit, and women these days are perfectly capable of carrying on a good—no a great life—and to be fantastic parents without some idiot alpha male wandering around and wolf-whistling, and swatting them on the ass and showing off their chest hair with big, open-collared shirts.”

  She made an affirmative-sounding grunt, as though she were pleased with the point she’d wanted to make.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m just saying... the President of the damn country came from a single mother! The President! I’ll babysit, and you can just bring the little rug rat to work. It’ll be fine!”

  There was a long pause. “You’re not pregnant, are you?” Jeannie asked.

  “Not so far as I know,” I said. “Although he wouldn’t screw me to the wall this morning. I was basically begging him to, but he said he was too fertile, and that I was ovulating.”

  That elicited a loud boom of laughter. “Is he charting your period? How the hell would he know? And why couldn’t you just roll on a jimmy hat, and get on with it?”

  And... this is the part that I was almost sure was going to convince my best friend in the world, Jeannie Wilders, my friend since I was six, that I had gone completely nuts. My next admission, I was sure, was going to make her realize that I had long since slipped into loony tune land, and that she may as well call the guys in the white lab coats to take me away.

  “Oh right,” she said before I could speak, almost as an afterthought. “Werewolf sperm is supposed to be like the reproductive equivalent of a Viking berserker hoppe
d up on whatever those plants were they chewed up before they went into battle. I read something about how werewolves have to use special rubbers or their little men just punch right through and before you know it, you’re carrying around a belly full of puppies. Or... er, whatever they call their babies.”

  My jaw might have actually disconnected from my head. “You... what?”

  Jeannie looked at me with a look of slight disbelief on her face. She remembered to pull her pants up just about then. And then she remembered her pants were covered in plaster, and instead grabbed a pair of the green scrubs I keep in the back of the studio for when I’d prefer not to ruin my real clothes.

  “I told you, I’ve read lots of books,” she said with a look of genuine confusion. “Werewolves are always like that.”

  If accepting a marriage proposal to a guy I hardly knew, and then watching him turn into a wolf and beat the shit out of his brother – who, by the way, drove a motorcycle through the window of a mansion and then lit the dining table on fire – was becoming hard to swallow, the fact that my friend had apparently never not believed in werewolves was like chewing on an anvil.

  “Have I somehow missed a memo that werewolves and vampires and zombies are all real?” I asked, a little more sharply than I had intended to be.

  “No, zombies aren’t. That’s dumb. They’re just shambling corpses. Who the hell wants one of those up in their business?”

  “I... have no idea how to respond to that.”

  My head was swimming. Maybe it was all the Malbec I’d had over the past couple of weeks, but on the other hand, maybe it was the fact that my best friend was completely unexcited about werewolves and was vastly more interested in me getting married.

  “Jeannie?” I asked. “I have to... why are you more surprised by me getting married to a guy I barely know than you are about the werewolf business? Because I’m gonna be real honest with you, it’s kind of disconcerting.”

  She shrugged. “I just never figured you’d be the type to get all worked up over someone and fall on them, that’s all. The werewolf thing seems more likely to be real.”