hate what the moon does to people, she had said.
Those words still echoed in his mind.
Its beauty is deceitful, she’d said.
Looking at her now, he wanted to say, If you only knew what deceit actually is.
His wolf stirred, raising goose bumps on the back of Cameron’s neck. The wolf was searching for an early way out. This wolf, Cameron feared, might want to bite somebody back.
Oh yes, I want you, both man and wolf agreed when eyeing this woman, though in spite of the physical need pounding through him, he had told this woman he was a gentleman.
No joke.
Still, he had to admit that she possessed a streak of wildness unlike anything he’d encountered in a female, and this sparked his pleasure buttons. Part of him voted to take her up on her offer of closeness. Heck, most parts did. He was hard in all the right places and aching to act.
Didn’t everyone need company on a dark summer night?
Even a monster?
As the scent of female hormones floated in the moonlight, Cameron’s heart thundered. Her face was dewy, and enticingly damp. The slightest flush of pink had returned to her cheeks. Those large emerald eyes, slowly lifting to the level of his neck, his jaw, and continuing upward, were wide open. Her generous lips opened as if she’d say something else or take back what she’d said about him either taking her up on her offer, or leaving it.
He almost wished she would take all this back.
Cameron ran his hand over her black T-shirt, his heated palm sliding slowly from the rounded collar to the swell of her breasts. The shirt was thin. He felt her fullness as if there were nothing between his hand and her skin. And indeed, she was lacking undergarments that would have taken precious time to remove.
The raised buds of her nipples were an erotic discovery and a telling symptom of her heightened state of arousal. She was exotic, narcotic, and had become his drug of choice on a moon-filled night.
After all, the whole gentleman thing only went so far.
The sting in his fingertips announced the closeness of claws that had no business intruding on tonight. A ghostly shudder of lengthening ligaments tickled Cameron’s spine as his baser side pined for release, when in reality, he and the wolf were one, and inseparable.
The feisty woman’s heart beat frantically beneath his hand. She dripped with the same moonlight that would soon issue a command for him to trade one shape for another, and the light made her features appear more angular, and riddled with shadows. She was moonlight personified...and he was going to use her. Because, swear to God, she looked as if she could handle what he wanted to do to her, and like it.
Stroking upward from her breast, wedging himself tighter against her, Cameron allowed the beastly cravings some room, just this once, and angled his ravenous mouth toward hers.
His face came close. Their breath mingled. The stranger’s supple mouth closed over hers with a kiss that made Abby stagger.
She let him touch her. Let him kiss her. Their closeness was combustible. With that first meeting of their eyes he had become the need. The must have. Rampant desire for him ruled her, fed her, drove her toward a storm of emotion that wanted him inside her. Nothing else would do.
She couldn’t allow herself to examine the reasons behind this sudden irrational craving.
So, really...who was the animal here?
She kissed him back, giving in to the sensations. His hot, demanding, talented mouth rendered her breathless. When their tongues touched, a blistering dance began between mouth and lips and bodies straining to get at each other.
He tasted like midnight. Like moonlight on a mountaintop. Like a howl of wildness echoing through a vast valley. And a lot like the physical manifestation of greed. No human connection could be like this, she realized. None ever had.
Her mouth clung to his, nipped at his. As the kiss went from dry to damp, moving quickly toward savage, Abby raked his lower back with her fingernails, wadding up his shirt to get at the taut flesh beneath, desperate to make him pay for what he was doing to her. Both of them needed to share the pain of accessing the forbidden.
His skin radiated the heat of a hundred bonfires, burning, singeing. His mouth piled fire on top of fire in an overlapping grid of flames. Being close to him was a pleasure that existed in a land beyond thought and consequences, falling into the realm of her pure carnal fantasy.
Maybe this was why werewolves were feared. Because of what they had to offer.
His masculine body felt solid and rock-hard against hers. His embrace became an all-consuming bliss. She pulled at his shoulders and wrapped her hands in his hair, wanting to be closer to him still, processing the danger as sublime.
Her feet left the ground. Air whooshed out of her lungs as her back hit the grass. Her companion dropped to his knees and stretched out on top of her, as breathless as she was.
And this felt good.
Writhing beneath his weight, Abby tore at him with trembling hands, her fingers finding his waistband, and beneath it more fiery skin that simultaneously burned and beckoned.
Hell, in a minute, she would howl, even if she didn’t know how.
When he paused, she formed challenging words against his lips. “What’s wrong? Did you get an A in self-control?”
In answer, a growl rolled from his throat and into her, its vibration the biggest surprise of all. As if that growl had tickled something hidden inside her, Abby felt the rise of her own voice, coming from a place she hadn’t known existed.
The sound she made shot through her, emerging as an echo of his. Her body twitched in shock.
“Well, well,” her sexy companion whispered, his golden gaze boring into her. “I suppose that makes things infinitely easier.”
He lifted her up before his remark had time to register, and set her on her feet. He peeled her T-shirt over her head, then ripped open his shirt with a pop of pinging buttons. Warm hands eased her pants and underwear over her hips, and down her thighs.
She was naked, and quaking in anticipation of his next move. But he stood there, looking at her with a gaze that nearly did her in.
Damn him and the moonlight he rode in on, she was not going to beg.
He sidled up to her at last, the heat radiating off his shirtless chest like that of an inferno. His arms encircled her waist. Their chests met with a jarring impact. They were going to do whatever it took to address this raging passion. There would be no stopping it. She was in the arms of the enemy, and had willingly crossed enemy lines.
The scratching sound of a zipper opening stirred Abby’s blood. His hands stroked upward over the curve of her buttocks, and up her spine. His fingers splayed over her rib cage. When he elevated her again, she wrapped her legs around his waist.
Her
