Eyes Like a Wolf Read online

  I stared at him in incomprehension. “Now, what?”

  “Now tell me about these issues.” He rubbed a hand over his face wearily. “Is it the whole brother-sister thing again? Because I swear to you, Rachel, there's not so much as a drop of common blood in our veins. We're not even fourth cousins twice removed.”

  “No,” I said, curling my legs under me carefully and smoothing down the edge of my towel. “No, it's not that exactly.” I didn't want to tell him what it was—didn't want to tell him in the worst way because it was so embarrassing I could barely think about it, let alone talk about it.

  “Well then?” He looked at me questioningly. “Is it that you're still having problems accepting how I dealt with my curse before I found you? Because honestly, Rache, I didn't just pick people at random. I actually researched their lives. I followed them—watched them beating women and selling drugs to kids and a hundred other horrible things. No one I killed to free myself from my other form was a saint by any stretch of the imagination.”

  I bit my lip for a moment and thought of the bloody bodies of the mafia wiseguys he'd killed. No saints indeed. Maybe I could bend my ideals on this one—at least a little. “I believe you,” I said at last. “I do, Richard. It's hard for me to take, but I guess…I guess I can accept your past as long as you promise never to do anything like that in the future.”

  He nodded gravely. “As long as you stay with me I can control the curse. So I'll swear never to kill again as long as I have you by my side. If you leave, all bets are off, though. I don't intend to spend the rest of my life as a beast.”

  “I guess that's fair,” I said, nodding. But when he scooted up the bed and reached for me, I still pulled away from him.

  “Rachel.” He looked at me sternly. “There's something else. Something you're not telling me. Whatever it is, I need to know because it's standing between us.”

  I could feel my cheeks beginning to heat up. “I…I don't like the way I feel when I'm around you,” I said, trying to think of a way to say it without saying it. “I mean…the way I seem to lose control. The way I can't say no to…to anything.”

  “Anything?” He raised one black eyebrow at me and frowned. “Or something specific? Tell me, Rachel. I need to know.”

  It seemed like I was just going to have to say it. “Richard,” I said, looking down at my hands and speaking slowly. “You made me want you. Even when I thought of you as my brother. Even when you took me while you were…while you weren't even human. While you were an animal.” I looked up at him, feeling my cheeks heat to burning with my shame. “What does that say about me?” I asked him. “What kind of person am I to want to have that kind of relationship? It's sick—I'm sick.”

  “No, you're not.” He stroked my cheek gently. “You're not sick, Rachel. You're Amon-kai, and we are a different breed. There's nothing wrong with wanting me to take you. With your desire to give yourself to me.”

  “Yes, there is,” I insisted. “Especially when I…I enjoyed last night. Well,” I rushed on. “I don't know if enjoyed is the right word, but…but I wanted you. Wanted you in me even though you were…were an animal. I spread my legs for you willingly, and even though part of me hated it, part of me loved it. Part of me wanted it. I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be that person.”

  “I think I see the problem.” He scooted closer to me and put a warm hand on my bare knee. I shivered but didn't try to move it. “The problem is that you're still thinking like a human,” Richard said. “But you're not human—neither one of us is. We're Amon-kai.”

  “Stop saying that,” I said irritably. “What does it even mean?”

  “It means that your body has different needs and desires, and there's nothing wrong with acting on them. Look,” he said reasonably. “You're upset because you wanted me to fuck you—to breed you—even when I was in my beast form. Right?”

  I nodded briefly, not meeting his eyes.

  “But that's normal for us,” he told me quietly. “In fact, back at the beginning of our race it's how prospective Lanor-zurs found their Lana-zeels.”

  I looked up at him. “What do you mean? I thought they were bound as children—the way you said we were.”

  “That's a fairly recent custom,” Richard told me. “It used to be that when a female became fertile, she was taken to a stone altar in the middle of a large field on the night of the full moon. Then she was stripped naked and bound on her hands and knees with her legs chained wide apart so that she was helpless to resist what happened next.”

  I looked up at him with wide eyes, captivated by the story against my will. “What…what happened next?” I asked, biting my lip.

  Richard stroked my knee gently. “All of the prospective Lanor-zurs came to circle her in a pack—and this was after they had changed and were in beast form. One by one they each mounted the steps to the altar. They breathed in her scent and tasted her nipples and pussy as she knelt there, vulnerable and exposed.”

  “And then?” I knew what was coming next, but I wanted to hear him say it. For some reason the story made my sex feel swollen and sensitive. I could just imagine the poor girl, bound in the moonlight on her hands and knees, forced to submit, just as I had been forced to submit, while the hot, wet tongues of her prospective mates lashed at her nipples and lapped at her open cunt.

  “If her scent was attractive enough, the male who was tasting her would breed her,” Richard said matter-of-factly. “And if she was attractive to more than one male, then she got bred more than once. Sometimes the same female would be bred by four or five different males.”

  “My God!” I blurted out. “How…why…?” I had barely survived my own ordeal the night before. I couldn't imagine going through it four more times. “Why, why would they do that?” I finally managed to get out.

  “To learn which one of them was her true mate—her Lanor-zur,” Richard said patiently. “You see, her body would only open all the way to the right male. And so the male that was able to get his knot all the way inside her pussy, to join himself to her and shoot his essence more deeply into her body than any of the others, was her mate. That's where the instinct to breed hard and deep comes from—it's a biological imperative. And it's also why the body of the Lana-zeel—your body—sometimes craves a second breeding almost at once. To strengthen the bond with the right male.”

  “You said you wanted it to happen,” I said softly.

  Richard leaned closer and looked in my eyes. “I did, Rachel,” he murmured. “I wanted your lust for me to be so strong you couldn't help yourself.” He laughed ruefully. “But I didn't count on you being so bull-headed and stubborn.”

  I lifted my chin. “I don't want to do something that doesn't feel right to me, that's all.”

  “Is it beginning to feel at least a little more right?” Richard asked me. “At least now you understand why your body craved mine even when I came to you as a beast—it's in your nature to crave being bred by the beast.”

  I looked down at my hands, my heart pounding. “Does that…does that mean I'll want you again that way?”

  “You may or you may not,” Richard said neutrally. “My essence is stronger when I'm in beast form—more concentrated—and your body will probably crave it at some point. Possibly at every full moon when it's easiest for me to change completely.”

  “So if I stay with you I'll…we'll do it that way again?”

  “Only if you want to,” he said soothingly. “And even if I change completely, I'll still retain my human consciousness—my sense of self. You do that for me—our bond tethers my mind to my body. So I can be as gentle or as rough as you want me to and you won't have to be afraid.”

  “I'm not,” I said, and was surprised to know it was true. The idea that I might want to have beast sex with him again still made my cheeks hot, but if the urge was truly a part of my genetic heritage…well, I would have to think about that. About whether I really believed wanting something so strange could actually be a biologi