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  The heat of her presence pushed his pain aside. Colton had a sensation of his strength returning by bounds, as if she were the one pulling it back, inch by agonizing inch, and as if the kiss connecting them was drawing his better parts out.

  Her arms encircled his neck. Their hips ground lusciously together. Through the silky cloth of her shirt Rosalind continued to radiate the kind of enticement that he imagined would be similar to getting too close to the sun. Pure, radiant fire.

  He groaned when her hands touched the nape of his neck, and he repeated the sound when her fingers moved upward into his hair. She grabbed hold of a handful of strands and tugged, trying to pull him closer. But the only way they could have been closer was for him to be inside her. And there was no way to describe how much he wanted that.

  His body responded to hers as if he hadn’t been hurt. His erection was proof that a Were’s ability to heal was indeed nothing short of magical.

  Rosalind’s touch made illness seem distant and irrelevant. The swift return of his libido told him that if his body wasn’t fully recovered, he was well enough to oblige the desire to claim her, and to enter the blistering heat he knew would be waiting for him if he did.

  “Ties that bind. You and I, Rosalind,” he whispered to her, allowing her only a very small breath.

  It seemed to him that the female whose tongue now swept boldly across his had somehow created an energy flux that encompassed them both. Maybe it was only a male-female attraction that had made him get up from that bed, because hell, he didn’t know how he could be standing up when he had only opened his eyes a short time ago. He wasn’t entirely sure what had happened to him out there in the dark.

  Nevertheless, there was healing in her fingertips. Her breath rammed a steady stream of energy into him as she willed him to take her, and urged him to hurry.

  She was a fast learner, an apt pupil. Already she kissed him back with enough fervor to melt away the doubts.

  Oh, yes. One of his dreams lay within his grasp. All he had to do was what came naturally to them both.

  But, his mind nagged, they are going to take her away. Away from him. This seemed a ridiculous impossibility, now that he had found her.

  Dampness broke out on his forehead. Rationality warned that they were guests in someone else’s house, and that the door might open any minute. Rosalind had mentioned the name Landau.

  Still, Rosalind’s fingers moved like little bolts of lightning across his upper back, scorching his tender skin, making him wince from the sheer intensity of the pleasure. She was exploring him, as well as the other way around, and she liked what she found.

  He seemed to hear her whispering to him, though his mouth on hers left her no ability to do so. “Now,” she was thinking. “Seal our fate.”

  Chapter 6

  Reluctantly, Colton pulled his lips from hers to gaze at her flushed face. How far would she go? How far would she let him go? The she-wulf was looking back at him. Their gazes met, held.

  He had a sensation of falling, though he was on his feet. His body imploded with the desire to have all of her; every last bit. Wrapped in her heat, he could almost forget the vampires and what they had done. He stood a chance of sidelining his need for vengeance.

  When he tore at her jeans, neither of them spoke or moved apart to make access easier. Rosalind’s palms were like burning coals when she placed them on his chest.

  With ease, he lifted her from the ground, turned and threw her on the bed where he’d been tended. Rosalind was, he noticed, barefoot, her feet delicate, her toenails unpainted.

  Her jeans were discarded in seconds. The blue underwear beneath them was destroyed in less time than that. She lay half-naked on the bed, her hair and her silk shirt glistening in the light from the bedside lamp. Her eyes told him that she anticipated what might come next.

  Colton crawled up to arch over her on his hands and knees, so that the only thing between them, below the hem of her shirt, was his thrumming cock—the dusty, unused body part of a werewolf who had been too long without.

  “Mate,” she said huskily through pink, swollen lips, her eyes wide and as brilliant as emeralds.

  “Yes,” he growled.

  Her hips rose to meet him when he slid both hands beneath her slick, bare buttocks, buttocks that were as sleek as her shirt. Her legs were endlessly long, and stretched out beneath him. Her thighs were shaped with lengths of strong, lean muscle.

  “Some other time and place,” he told her, “this would take much longer and move much slower. Hours. Days. Weeks.”

  “Find me. Promise,” was all she said in return.

  Somehow, Colton knew there was no time for foreplay and that the needs driving them ruled out any effort at further restraint. With trembling fingers, he explored the spot he needed for entering her body. Although she might have been kept from this in the past, Rosalind was more than willing. Between her thighs, behind a wedge of dark fur, she had dampened. With his fingers pressed against her, she growled low in her throat.

  When her legs opened for him, he forgot everything else. Time, and all that had gone on before, seemed to slip away.

  Easing the tip of his cock inside her, Colton closed his eyes. He didn’t want to move, wanted to linger and soak up this wicked heat, but he had to continue. His body demanded satisfaction.

  With an agonizing slowness, he began to make tender stroking motions, moving his hips, dipping in and out of her meagerly at first, amazed that he could exert this much will over himself when what he longed for was a singular thrust hard enough to fill her completely.

  He shook with the intensity of that desire.

  He and this stranger had imprinted. And this sealed the deal. That’s the way this went: eyes, thoughts, body, then soul. They had bonded, and all he knew about her was her name, and that she had pulled him up from unconsciousness, and how extremely hot she was.

  Inside, she was tight and beautifully lush. He stroked her gently until that tightness began to relax and a rush of cream surrounded his erection. Even in man form, he nearly howled.

  As he pressed himself farther inside her, Rosalind made more encouraging noises in her throat. When he stopped moving, she seemed to stop breathing altogether.

  “I will find you,” he said with a pledge that seemed to have been dragged from his heart.

  Though she gasped, Rosalind didn’t open her eyes.

  “You understand what this means?” he asked gruffly, because her body, and what she was allowing him to do with it, had stolen his own breath away.

  Her eyelids fluttered, the long, midnight-hued lashes dark against her flawless ivory skin. As he studied her face, her chin moved up and down once. She understood perfectly.

  “All right,” he whispered to her. “God. Okay.”

  His plunge into her rich depths brought another, louder, sound from her throat. It was a purr of encouragement. A nod to pleasure.

  Colton withdrew, then sank his length into her again and again, building a rhythm that took him deeper and deeper, trying not to burst with the pleasure this gave him. He hung on to his sanity by a thread.

  When waiting was no longer an option, he lowered himself to her body and drove himself into her with a force that rocked his body and hers.

  Unparalleled gratification careened through him that was as violent as live wires crossing. And when Rosalind bent her knees, grabbed his buttocks with her hands and invited him to partake of the last remaining barrier, he felt the rise of an oncoming orgasm that would truly weld them together for life.

  With his scent on her, and imbedded in her, no other Were could hope to gain her interest. That’s also the way this worked. She would be his. Forever. Until death do us part.

  And when she drove her hips against his, he tumbled over the rim of an abyss. One more move of his own hips,
and he executed just one more powerful thrust; the exact one he had longed to make.

  He reached the molten center of the female beneath him, not thinking of taking or claiming her now, but offering himself to her in a union that was tantamount to the binding of their souls.

  “Rosalind.”

  The rumble started in his back, spread to his torso and careened between his legs. A similar rumble, like an approaching earthquake, tore through Rosalind, hitting and then overtaking them at the same time.

  The room exploded with a light that seemed to carry in it all the emotion of the life Colton had lived so far. With their moist bodies pressed together in a rigid few seconds of suspended stillness, and their mouths locked together so that no sensation could go unresolved, the suddenness of the intensity of their mingled ecstasy ripped through them.

  But so did something else.

  One last peripheral sensation slid through Colton unexpectedly as he reached his peak.

  In that moment of heightened awareness, as his body convulsed with pleasure, he was sure that Rosalind tasted not only like wulf, but of metal.

  In her feverish mouth, and at her heated core, lay a hint of what he imagined silver to taste like. Silver, a concoction that was the bane of all Weres, purebred or otherwise.

  Absurd.

  He let the notion go as he rode the crest of a wave of ecstasy prolonged by each tremor that shook her.

  And when the storm finally subsided and some time had passed without sound or motion, Colton was afraid to move. Afraid to believe. Opening his eyes, he again found Rosalind’s eyes waiting.

  Problem was those eyes were no longer green.

  Liquid darkness swam in Rosalind’s irises, drowning the color, turning them black. It was like watching a curtain drop over a verdant landscape. Like a dark veil descending suddenly to cloak something fine.

  The sudden strangeness made Colton draw back. The skin on his neck prickled. His jaw tensed.

  “What the—”

  What had happened to Rosalind? Hell, had he just linked himself to a Were who might be something more than wulf?

  He heard the word special in his mind, and knew it came from her thoughts. He didn’t like the questions turning up.

  Was the key to Rosalind’s well-guarded seclusion the fact that she might not be just any She after all, but something else? Something far more dangerous?

  Was that why she wasn’t allowed out, when Lycan females were so scarce, and why she felt she was different?

  Perhaps also sensing this, or seeing the concern in his expression, Rosalind opened her mouth to protest the look on his face. After a brief hesitation, she uttered a strangled cry.

  Between her beautiful lips, so swollen and lush and pink, lay a pair of tiny needle-sharp incisors reminiscent of no wulf canines that Colton had ever seen. On her lower lip lay a fine sheen of pooled red droplets where she had bitten herself during their moments of shared passion.

  Blood. On her mouth.

  Dark blood, red as roses.

  Before Colton caught a startled breath, his lover, his she-wulf, the female he had sealed himself to forever, moved from under him with an astonishing speed that was little more than a time-slip of barely disturbed air.

  She leaped gracefully onto the sill of the tall, open window, where she paused in a crouch to draw her fingers across her mouth. Glancing at the smear of blood on them, her body visibly shook.

  For a moment more she remained there, outlined by the night beyond, her silk shirt shining, her long, loose hair billowing in the breeze.

  She looked at Colton with a shocked, pleading glint in her wild black gaze as she held up her hand to show him the red stain on her fingers. Then, uttering one more sound, a sob, Rosalind turned from him and jumped out.

  Chapter 7

  “What the hell are you?”

  Colton swore to himself, shocked as he sat back on the bed where he had just made love to a...what? Certainly not the she-wulf he’d assumed her to be.

  His heart was thundering. She’d looked like a vampire. Like one of the creatures that had killed his parents.

  He felt weak, shaky, and not all from the surprise of having his new mate turn into a vampire-like creature before jumping from his window. Sex had taken effort he’d barely been able to muster before she had arrived. With Rosalind gone, and twisted by shock, he felt completely drained.

  “Have to get up. Must find out what’s going on.”

  Where was he? What was he to do now? Rosalind, God, whatever she turned out to be, had brought up the Landaus. Everyone in Miami would recognize that name. Prominent Judge Landau and his socially adept wife were Lycans from way back who obviously knew how to fit in with humans and had created a compound for their pack members.

  He was in their house. Landau’s house.

  Colton got to his feet. Chills covered his body as he stumbled to the window. Rosalind had left a spot of blood on the sill. Seeing it, his stomach seized.

  He looked out, seeing nothing below but the glow from windows that were lower to the ground than his. Backing toward what he assumed was a closet, he braced himself against the doorjamb as he opened it. After pulling on someone else’s jeans that he’d discovered on a shelf inside, Colton limped out the hallway door and down a wide wooden staircase, the drag of one foot awkward beneath a numb left leg.

  “If I have to crawl, I will find out what that was, and where she has gone.”

  This wasn’t a choice. He had promised, if not verbally, then with his actions. He had fully imprinted with what he’d believed to be an eligible female Were; one who had the courage to follow him into a vampire ambush. Now, hell, she looked a bit like one of those same monsters. How was that possible?

  He remembered the black pelt, and shuddered.

  “She could have been injured in the bloodsuckers’ attack, as I was,” he said, needing to hear his thoughts. “If that were to be the case, and her fangs were the result, I am ultimately to blame.”

  She had seemed as shocked as he had been when she stared at the blood on her hand. He’d never forget the flatness of fear in those big eyes. He had hurt her with the shocked expression in his.

  She hadn’t known what would happen to her.

  “Bloody frigging damn!” He staggered to a stop, catching sight of himself in a long mirror in the hallway. His legs threatened to give way as he stared at his image. It had to be someone else. Couldn’t be him. A ghostly form looked back at him from that mirror, its colorless skin marred by red slashes, its long hair freakishly white.

  “Christ, what happened to me out there!”

  Rigid with the horror of that, Colton limped on, putting distance between himself and that image. He had to get outside, get air, find her. There was no time to ponder what he might have become. If he had hurt Rosalind, he had to put things right.

  The Landaus had tended to him on the top floor of a three-story house. As he neared the bottom of the stairs, Colton pictured Rosalind jumping from such a great height. Did this mean she’d be dead, sprawled on the lawn? Weres were notoriously strong, and possessed the agility of big cats, but what would a dose of vampire do to that scenario?

  His heart sputtered as if unable to rev properly. He wasn’t sure he’d have the energy to make it to the front door, but he did. No one appeared to stop him from pushing through that door when he reached it.

  The suddenness of leaving a closed space and stepping off the boards of a large covered veranda, into the night, offered up yet another surprise that stopped Colton in his tracks.

  The night was composed of fragments of pure sensory bombardment that rushed at him from all directions at once—a barrage of sight, sound, scent, taste, arriving to flood and overwhelm his overworked, not yet up-to-par system.

  This bombardment was like b
eing caught in a whirlwind and felt like sharp knives were being worked into his eye sockets. It felt as though the mother of all migraines had rained down to provide a wallop, when the night and the moon riding high in it shouldn’t have been anything other than normal fare for him.

  Then again, he was no longer normal. He’d seen himself in the mirror and was pretty sure the world had made one too many wrong turns while he’d been asleep.

  Sucking in a breath of sensory-filled air forced him down to one knee. What energy he had left seemed to have deserted him in a time of need, but he lifted his chin in stubborn defiance, determined to face this. He took in another breath that tasted strongly of wulf, and then he saw why.

  Weres were waiting for him out here, as motionless and silent as a line of marble statues, on Judge Landau’s front lawn.

  * * *

  Rosalind sped through the night, chased by fear, driven forward by a newly discovered, terrible speed that felt like flying.

  She had landed on the grass outside of the house without injury. Springing to her feet, she had sailed over the wall before even making up her mind to do so, and was running to escape from herself. From what she had become.

  It had to be part of that same thing her father had neglected to tell her about.

  She’d had her first kiss, as well as so much more. And the experience had been beyond imagining. The sensations of their lovemaking remained. The spark her ghost wulf had ignited still flickered deep within her.

  Though she kicked up her speed, there was no outrunning the fact that something had happened to both her and the brown Were in the park that had made their needs a priority. She didn’t fully understand what that might be.

  If she went back there, to the same spot under the trees where she had first laid eyes on the Were, maybe she’d find out what the key to their connection was. If she found more vampires, she’d wring the truth out of them. She had to try. Emotions were rife, and cresting.

  The sickest question of all, one that followed her like a shadow, was about how many freaks the Were community might sustain in their midst.