“You should let your wolf out tonight, give her a chance to run before the other alphas arrive.” The moon had risen and peered through the window invitingly. My own wolf stretched longingly inside me.
I fully expected Anna to say no, but she nodded. “You’ll stay with me? No hunting games.”
“Just a run, and I will be there every step of the way.”
There was a small stretch of land right outside my home that was off-limits to the other wolves. Before Anna, I never used it. No point in me being alone, but I knew how protective Anna was of her wolf. After what had been done to her, I understand.
But she let her wolf out around me. Only me.
Anna shifted first, and she stared up at me, her beautiful, honeyed coat gleaming in the moonlight. Her eyes remained human for just a moment before she blinked and was all wolf.
Carefully, I reached out and stroked her fur. She was so scarred, it hurt my heart to see them, but she was a survivor. “You’re safe with me,” I told her. “I will always protect you.”
The wolf trusted me, but would Anna?
Her wolf howled for me, and my own shivered before I undressed and let him out.
Immediately, he raced to his mate’s side and sniffed her over. Nuzzled her.
Mine, he howled confidently.
We raced through the night, reveling in our wolves. There was not a moment of fear in her, and when we finally collapsed back near our clothes, her tongue rolled out of her mouth happily.
With a chuckle, I shifted back. A moment later, she followed suit. Her face was flushed with adrenaline as she stared up at me.
“Maeve is not going to be the only alpha with a hidden agenda,” she murmured, not doing anything to hide her nakedness.
“No.” Slowly, I curved a hand around her thigh and waited to see how her body would react.
She did shift, but only to widen her legs. “We’ll be ready.”
“Will we? After dinner, Maeve walked by me and asked how it felt to have a mate who doesn’t trust me. She’s not going to be the only one who notices.”
I skimmed my knuckles up the insides of her thigh to her gorgeous wet pussy. “What did you tell her?”
“That I didn’t need your trust to have your cock, your wolf, and your protection.”
When I pushed my finger inside her, she moaned. “I bet she loved that answer.”
“She did. And then she told me that I didn’t need to have a mate to have good sex and a bodyguard.”
Snarling, I leaned over her and captured her lips. After the hard kiss, I stared down at her.
“Mine.”
In response, she shifted her legs to straddle me and rolled us over. With a hand on my chest, she eased herself over me and closed her eyes. “Be honest, Jax,” she whispered before she kissed me. “I belong to your wolf, but I don’t belong to you.”
Whipping her back over, I slammed into her until her cries filled the night. Desperation drove me to claim her. How the fuck could she not see just how fully I belonged to her?
The words stung, and I fucked her until there was nothing but pleasure. Nothing but her sweet heat driving me higher and higher up. And when she came, trembling around me, I kept riding her until I was fully and completely spent.
“We should head back and try to get some sleep before tomorrow.”
“Did you know? About Irene’s old coven?”
“Some of it. Some I discovered on my own. I didn’t know that the Darkwyns were the ones to cull her coven.”
“Cam knows that I’m a null, which means the other witches will too. Will they tell their alphas?”