Page 5 of Trial of Three
I squeak as Shade tosses the apple into Sprite’s stall and grips my hips. Lifting me easily, he brings my face even with his and deepens the kiss. With no ground beneath my feet, I wrap my legs around Shade’s hard waist, feeling his low growl all the way through my core.
The smell of earth fresh from rain fills me, soothing the jagged, stinging wounds in my heart. Mate. Shade’s wolf is my mate, and the two of us... My body folds perfectly into his, alive and fulfilled in a way that only the shifter can offer.
“Shouldn’t you be a wolf?” I finally manage to say, pulling away from his lips. “The healing magic—”
Shade closes his mouth over mine again, his eyes flashing with a need that is half-living, half-feral.Later,his body seems to scream, and I’m in no shape to argue. Especially not when he opens the empty stall beside Sprite and lays me down on the soft, clean straw. His hands caress me, deft fingers pulling away my clothing until I’m dressed only in Shade’s desire. And my own.
As I reach down to relieve Shade of his pants, I feel the slickness between my thighs already coating my skin. The hard bulge under Shade’s trousers says the male is ready for me as well—so ready that a shiver racks his body at the merest brush of my fingers along his hard, throbbing shaft.
4
Lera
When I push Shade onto his back for a better look, I find his cock somehow even larger than I remembered. Erect. Throbbing. Dressed in a bead of enticing moisture, the sight of which sends a zing of want right down to my sex. Stars. Reaching out, I brush the cock’s velvety underside.
Shade whimpers.
A wicked delight blooms inside me, fueled by the memory of a certain male who made me beg in a certain bathing room.
“Cub—” Shade’s eyes widen as he sees my grin, but my hands are already gripping the bare crests of his hips, my gaze teasing his twitching cock.
Bringing my mouth a hair’s breadth from the head, I blow gently over his skin, starting with ruffling the curly tufts of coarse black hair and ending squarely on the tip of my target. Then, with no warning, I flick my tongue and lap that thick, salty droplet right off.
Shade jerks, his strangled whine so wolfish that my heart speeds with feral excitement. The thrill of taking him into my mouth, of tasting him, fills me to the brim.
I lick him again, this time caressing his cock all the way along its glorious length, feeling the thick vessels hugging its underside, luscious and firm beneath my tongue. I pull away, replacing my tongue with my hands and rubbing the shaft only long enough to tease a breath from him. And then... then I take the whole of him into my mouth, suckling greedily.
Shade’s body shakes with a tension I recognize all too well from when he once did this to me. Each of his noises, his flinches of pleasure, fuels my own need.
“You... are... evil,” Shade manages to say, his hands curling in my hair and shaking as much as the rest of him.
I stop, find his yellow eyes, glazed with strain, and hold them as I take him deeper. Withdraw. Nip the sensitive underside of his cock, just below the head.
That, I discover a moment later, proves a strategic mistake.
With a roar of need, Shade yanks me up, tossing me onto my belly atop a quickly recruited flake of hay. I gasp at the feeling of my backside suddenly in the air, my sex raised for the taking. All thought leaves with the next breath as Shade settles on top of me, his knees spreading my wet thighs. Gripping my hips, the male sheathes himself inside me with a single, glorious thrust. His thickness fills a void inside me so thoroughly that when his hand comes around to stroke my bud, my whole body already hangs on the cliff’s edge.
The same edge that Shade rides himself.
We move together, again, again, holding on for the last heartbeats of unbearable strain. Then Shade’s lips find my ear, his voice raw. “I love you, mate,” he growls, sending us both tumbling off the cliff into an abyss of pleasure and agony and stars.
I find no words to utter in the wake of release, but none need be said. Shade pulls me up and settles me into the hollow of his shoulder, the thin sheen of sweat on his skin carrying his wonderful male musk.
The utter joy of our connection is as warm as a blanket, as warm as the male wrapping me in his arms. As I close my eyes, content in Shade’s strength, I wonder if the wolf’s mating bond hasn’t seeped into me as well.
* * *
I waketo the infant rays of a chilly dawn piercing my eyes. For a moment, as memories of last night wash over me, twin fires of pleasure and guilt kindle in my chest. The latter, a condition of encouraging Shade’s shift from wolf form, sputters out as quickly as it came.
Having wisely shifted back before returning from the stable, Shade’s wolf has somehow evicted me not only to a scrap of mattress but to the worst scrap of the lot. Trying to pull the blanket over my head to ward off the rays, I discover that this too has been coveted by the two-hundred-pound lump of lupine insolence.
My skin prickling with scratches from tumbling in straw and hay, I prod the beast with my foot. Judging from the sky’s soft red cast, I still have a good hour before I need to rise—and I want to spend it in comfort.
Shade’s ear twitches, the only sign he gives of being anything but a plush toy. He certainly does not condescend to open his eyes or—stars forbid—move.
“Canine parasite.” I jab his rump harder with my foot. “If you don’t move over, I’m going into Tye’s room.”
One yellow eye opens, blinking at me unhappily. With a slowness to match growing grass, the wolf climbs to his feet and lazily stretches his back paws. Then his front paws. Then his back, arching it up, up, up like a cat, then down, raising his tail toward the ceiling. Then—
