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I shook my head then started to pull away, but he clasped his hand around the back of my neck and pulled me into him again. His heat enveloped me. His scent, musky clove and sea salt, snaked up my nose and made my mouth water. His eyes hooded, the amber glow pulsing past his dark lashes. I looked at his lips, so close, so firm.
I wanted to tilt my head and let him take me. I wanted him to make the first move. I wanted him to do what we both needed, what we’d both been dancing around for days.
“You must stop holding back,” he growled, his voice a tumble of gravel.
I rested my arm along his hip, my fingers splayed against his lower back. “I could say the same thing to you.”
He flinched, and something dark flashed over his face. Desire pooled in my gut. My breasts ached, crushed up against his chest. I wanted to rock against him. I wanted to taste him.
He squeezed the back of my neck then yanked my head to the side, his other hand in my hair, tangled and tugging. “You don’t want this.”
I licked my lips in response. Of course I do.
He gulped. Tried to glare me into changing my mind. Then he gave in and slammed his lips against mine—hard, punishing, taking what he wanted. He waited for less than a heartbeat before forcing his tongue past my lips and devouring me whole.
* * * *
I wasn’t saying Kane’s kiss changed my mind about going to face my uncle, but his kiss did shoot me straight into the stratosphere, so when Johnny came to collect me for our mission, I was floating so high I couldn’t form words to argue.
Was that Kane’s tactic? Kiss me into oblivion so I’d comply?
After he’d ravaged me for a good eternity of minutes with his long, breath-stopping, tongue-sucking kiss, he pulled back, ran a hand through his hair then beelined out of my room like he’d touched a forbidden totem and couldn’t cope. I was too stunned to actually do anything about it, floating outside of myself.
Kane kissed me.
He’d kissed me, and it wasn’t punishment. It wasn’t delayed gratification. He gave in and kissed me—and he loved it. He loved it so much that it had scared him out of my room.
After Kane had run, I’d slumped onto the couch in a daze, still there when Johnny had poked his head in my door and asked if I knew the plan.
My slight nod was all he needed to get me up and hustling with him to the waiting car.
And that was where I found myself, not on my way to my uncle’s compound but headed to his vacation house in the mountains. As if that made it less of a problem. It was still a place that triggered me all the same. I’d been to Uncle Gareth’s cottage many times throughout my childhood, always with my mom and sometimes with my stepbrothers.
My mom… Gareth’s most beloved sister.
A pang of loss rocked me, taking me by surprise. I’d mourned my mother deeply, heavily, when I had been a child, and the thought of dredging up memories of better days, fun times at my uncle’s vacation home, sat like a boulder on my heart. Another reason not to go.
But the ghost of Kane’s kiss still burned on my lips, and I kept touching myself there as if to prove that it had actually happened in real life. He wanted me to go face Gareth. He wanted me to let my beast have her way. All I could think about was how I’d finally broken Kane out of his armor. I didn’t know what the hell that meant, other than that my heart was all drippy and soft and I wanted more of what he’d given me. I wanted to make him proud.
Mix that in with the turmoil of the past and memories of my mother, and I wasn’t at all the right frame of mind for heading into potential battle.
“Your uncle is expecting us,” Johnny said as he tapped on his phone. “Kane reached out.”
“Wonderful.” There was no turning back now. “Great plan. Now he has time to gather his posse of elite killers.”
“He doesn’t think this is an ambush.” Johnny grinned. He was beaming like a kid on the way to a theme park. “Even though it is.”
The rest of the envoy were traveling in an SUV behind us, a whole half dozen of highly skilled weres—the correct amount of back up for whatever was about to go down, according to Johnny. He felt it would be more appropriate to arrive as emissaries in appearance, which was why we were turning onto the service road that led to my uncle’s place in Johnny’s Maserati. He swore as he tried to maneuver around the potholes, and I swear he’d cry buckets if any of the branches leaned down to scratch his cherry-red baby.
“Kane said we’re after information. What is it you expect me to do?”
Johnny cocked an eyebrow my way, compelling me to continue.
“Kane wants me to let loose and get what I’m owed.” A reckoning. “I doubt my beast will be much for talking once she gets going.”
“You focus on doing what you need to do to square up with your uncle.” Johnny tapped his head. “I’m interested in seeing how things play out organically.” He cursed as the car dipped into another divot in the road. “You’d think with all this guy’s money, he’d do something about this road.”
I turned away from him to look out of the window. The trees that I used to race through were larger, fuller but also familiar in the way they zigzagged. I used to love shifting then exploring through my uncle’s property as a wolf—taking in all the smells, hunting the small game, enjoying the little freedom I was afforded in the safety of my uncle’s land. Little did I know what was coming for me after I went through puberty. Once it became clear to those around me that my father had no intention of trading me into the service of one of his pals or relatives, my uncle had become furious.
