Green's Hill Werewolves, Volume 2 Read online

  “The deal,” Jack told him, gently biting the nape of Teague’s neck and then laving it with his tongue, “is that once—just once—you stay here and let me make love to you. No running away, no fighting to be on top, to be in charge. Stay here, let me touch you. Touch back if you want to, but don’t take over.”

  Teague’s supreme discomfort with the idea came out with the whine in his throat. “I’m… I’ve got to…. Jacky, I’m not good with that….”

  Well, it was obvious he wasn’t good with it—his body was straining against itself—and Jack’s hands started rubbing his shoulders in more insistent circles. “Just let me, Teague.” Jacky pushed on Teague’s shoulder without comment or weakening, and Teague found himself rolling over onto his stomach. “Let me. I promise, you let me take care of you, and I’ll let you go running. No strings attached, no drama—you’ll just put on your shoes and go.”

  Then Jack sat up and straddled Teague’s thighs while his hands worked big-palmed magic on the twisted, knotted steel bars at Teague’s shoulders.

  “Damn, Teague. You just woke up—how can you be this tight?” Jack wriggled, and Teague could feel the long muscles of Jack’s inner thighs against the corded muscle of his flank. Jack’s semihard cock nestled between Teague’s legs near the crease of his buttocks, and Teague kept wanting to clench his asscheeks to keep it there or bring it closer, which surprised the hell out of him in general.

  He grunted a noncommittal sort of reply to Jack’s question and forced himself not to move, not to respond, to just lie there and accept the wonder of Jack’s touch as it was bestowed on him.

  “So,” Jack asked, leaning forward so his lips would touch Teague’s spine between his shoulders, “do we have a deal?”

  “I’m not good at this,” Teague temporized, because he wasn’t sure he could. To lie down and just accept touch? To not give anything in return? To exercise complete trust that another human being, even Jacky, would not hurt him when he had relinquished control?

  “Not good at accepting love?” Jack asked, still bent over Teague’s back. “I never would have guessed.” He rained some more kisses along Teague’s back and then shifted so he was no longer straddling Teague’s thighs, the better to knead the muscles in Teague’s lower back and buttocks.

  Teague made a sound of loss for Jack’s cock, no longer wedged near his bottom, and tried to think of something to say to the sarcastic truth Jack had just given him.

  “You’ll just let me go?” He ended up whining and wondered when he’d turned into a six-year-old girl.

  “After we’re done,” Jack affirmed. Teague, mesmerized by the absolute wonder of Jack’s hands moving from his lower back to his scrawny, muscular ass, couldn’t do more than grunt and agree.

  “You like that.” Jack wasn’t asking—it seemed obvious, because Teague couldn’t stop himself from arching into Jack’s strong, massaging pushes against his skin. “May I….” A thumb traced the furrow of his cheeks and brushed on the scars Teague knew were there on the backs of his thighs and toward his opening.

  Teague whimpered. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t want Jacky to know, to think about the pain, to worry about the shit that had happened to him when he’d been helpless. He didn’t want Jacky to think about him that way, period.

  “They’re just scars,” he managed to say, glad his face was turned away. “I’ve got lots.”

  “I know,” Jack said softly against the side of his bottom. “You’ve got lots. And they all hurt both of us. How about you let me touch these, and then they won’t be able to hurt us anymore, okay?”

  I am not worth all this pain.

  He was almost biting his tongue in an effort not to say it. Instead he pulled his arms underneath him in an effort to escape.

  Jack threw his long body on top of Teague’s, pinning him to the mattress. Teague kept his shoulders tight, because they both knew he could throw Jack at any time. He’d proven that two nights ago. He was the meanest, most aggressive werewolf in the pack. They both knew it.

  And Jack was a beta—not anywhere near as strong as Teague, and certainly not as tough.

  He defeated Teague’s intentions with two words.

  “You promised.”

  They stayed there, frozen, for a couple of heartbeats, Teague’s breathing harsh in his own ears. Teague’s glance slid sideways to the red-numbered clock on the end table, and he saw they had a good long time before he was going to have lunch with Cory and talk about the werewolves locked in the basement.

  Eventually that’s what decided him. He didn’t want to burden Cory and Green with any more of his bullshit—Cory, especially. She took too much on her narrow shoulders as it was. She wouldn’t talk about the werewolves in the basement until she knew if Teague was going to be okay. So he had to make himself okay, had to make it okay with Jacky, right there in the privacy of their bedroom, before he left it.

  Teague’s shoulders softened, pressed into the mattress, and Jack’s tackle became more of an embrace. “They’re just scars,” Teague repeated stubbornly, but they could both hear the catch in his voice, both feel the way his whole lower body clenched against the memory of a long-ago bastard with a broken bottle.

  “We both know that’s a lie,” Jack countered. Teague snarled into the pillow—a human sound, but still visceral and angry.

  “Can’t we just leave my shit alone, Jacky? We’ve been doing this for a few weeks. Can’t we just stick to that pattern? It was good, right? I didn’t let you down in the sex department?” Jack sat up, but he kept the flat of his hand between Teague’s shoulder blades to keep him pinned down. “We were all good,” Teague finished helplessly, and Jack’s other hand came up to ruffle reassuringly through his hair.

  “The sex was great, Teague. Never doubt it,” Jack said, scooting back until he was straddling the bottom of Teague’s thighs again. “It was just one-sided. You gave, I took. That’s not fair, man—don’t you want to get a little back?”

  I get it back when you let me touch you. “I don’t want to be a pain in the ass.”

  Jack laughed breathily as he contorted impossibly forward and kissed the base of Teague’s spine. “You are—frequently. I like it.”

  In spite of himself, the slowly burgeoning erection unfolding under his belly, and his discomfort with this situation, Teague found himself chuckling. “Didn’t we do enough of this yesterday?”

  “Yesterday was about comfort. Today is about you letting me give you something.”

  Jack’s tongue carefully traced a crooked path across Teague’s right asscheek and descended into the tender skin of the cleft. His movements were so deliberate that he must have been chasing a scar across Teague’s skin. Teague gasped, all words gone, and held his breath. Jack used his palms to separate the halves of Teague’s bottom and continued that torturous path, replacing pain and fear with love and joy.

  Jack paused, right where… where….

  Teague tensed again, hoping that would be the end of it, praying that it wouldn’t. “What are you doing, Jacky?”

  Jack’s breath puffed against his secret skin when he spoke. “Giving you better memories.”

  Teague almost came off the mattress when Jack’s tongue touched home.

  “Oh God…. Jacky….”

  It was warm, and it was wet, and it was invading, plunging into him, teasing, laving, and Teague was held in place only by the pleasure, the drug of touch, as Jack licked and penetrated and gave. Teague’s vision went black behind his clenched eyes, and he gasped and moaned softly. Jack shifted off his thighs and between them so Teague was lying spread-eagled and vulnerable beneath him as his fingers came into play.

  It was… it was… oh God… it was sweet. But he wanted more. His hips started undulating, pressing against the mattress, and he let a whimper slip out, a begging sound. Jacky pulled away and gruffly whispered, “Roll over,” and God help him, Teague did.

  Jack didn’t take up where he’d left off. He straddled Teague’s stomach inste
ad and started kneading the muscles of Teague’s shoulders and chest.

  Teague’s cock was so hard it hurt.

  He scowled up at Jack fiercely, unable to articulate his pain or his want or his need. Self-denial was too deeply ingrained in him to break the habit now.

  Jack grinned in his face. He was panting slightly, and his own cock was hard on Teague’s belly, but he was smiling. Teague was even more affronted—and more than seven-eighths tempted to whip his body around and fuck that smile right off Jacky’s pretty face.

  “You want something, Teague?”

  Teague closed his eyes and counted to ten. “I’m fine, Jacky. No worries. Never… nnnngghhhhh”—because Jack’s fingertips had found his nipples and pinched—“better.”

  Jack scooted his hips backward until they were groin to hard, aching groin. He hovered over Teague’s face for a moment, lips to lips. “Because it would be okay, you know, if you wanted something. I’d be happy to give you whatever you wanted….”

  Teague wanted Jack to kiss him. He’d always thought kissing overrated until he’d first kissed Jack. It had been passionate and intimate, the way kissing a stranger wasn’t. He’d kissed Katy too, and the sweetness had been a surprise, but that passion and intimacy—he’d learned it all from Jack.

  He didn’t have any words. Teague lifted his lips up to Jack and prayed the boy would forget his game and just kiss him, without strings or caveats…

  And oh God, his mouth was glorious. It was hard and fierce and wanting. Jack wanted Teague as much as Teague wanted Jack, and their tongues meshed and mated and their lips whispered. Teague groaned and lifted his hands, not in mastery but in need. He needed to wrap his arms around Jack’s shoulders and hold him—it was imperative.

  Their bodies ground together as they kissed, just the friction of their cocks between their stomachs and the terrible, terrible want between them.

  Jack tried to move. Teague knew it was to finish what he’d started, to take Teague’s erection into his sweet mouth and try to suck his brains out of his dick. Teague didn’t let him.

  “Stay,” he begged between kisses. “Oh God… please stay….” Because he needed an anchor, someone to hold onto, so he didn’t disintegrate, fly into outer space, lose himself completely in the unbearable high of being touched. He needed Jacky, whether he came and—oh… oh… Christ, he was going to come—or not. Teague needed to hold Jack. It was more important than orgasm, more important than his pride, more important than breath.

  He needed to hold Jacky. He just did.

  His climax shattered through his synapses and exploded out of his skin. He held on to Jack, clenching him so tight Jack could barely move, could barely breathe, even as Jack’s own climax shot a scalding path across Teague’s belly. They clung together, breathing hard while Teague’s arms convulsed around Jacky’s shoulders.

  “Anything,” Jack panted. “I’ll do anything you need me to.”

  They were touching, skin to skin, sex to sex. Jack had touched him, without reservation, without reciprocation.

  It was a debt Teague could never repay.

  Being the Royal Bank

  I LOOKED at the shiny silver knife in the werewolf’s shaking hands and was completely baffled.

  “You wrapped that in bubble wrap and shoved it up your ass?” The sincere dedication to hatred in that act was really out of my league.

  Behind me I heard Teague grunt. “So I smell, my lady.” He sounded as baffled as I was. Bracken wasn’t confused in the least—he was cracking up.

  Fucking awesome. Bracken was in fine form today, which, considering how rocky things had been between us after the werewolf thing, was a good sign. I don’t like it when the people I care about put themselves in danger. I really don’t like it when they do that and I’m left out. It makes me all pouty and irritable, and Bracken gets the brunt of it. Especially when he’s the dumbshit who gets shot!

  Teague also seemed to be in good fighting trim, and this heartened me to no end. We’d heard him—hell, the whole hill had heard him—have a class-six emotional hurricane two nights before. I didn’t blame him—I’d been in the process of a similar storm myself—but Teague… well, shit. Teague was so damned repressed, so sincerely sure that he didn’t deserve anything, much less honest emotions—man, the fact he’d walked out into the living room, fresh from a shower after his run, looking like he could take on a biker bar and then some, was a testament to the guy’s resilience, that was for damned sure.

  A good thing we were all hunky-dory, because this negotiating thing wasn’t going so well.

  “Shut up, cunt, and let me the fuck out of here.” The guy we were “negotiating” with, the werewolf with the bubble-wrapped knife, was a mixed bag of genetics with straight black hair, cinnamon-colored skin, and light gray eyes. He was also about seven buckets of terrified, pissed-off crazy.

  I looked around the bare steel room and at the four other werewolves in it. They were at the opposite end of the room from MacShitsyerpants and looking at the guy like he smelled really, really bad.

  According to Teague, he did, and not just because his hands were covered in feces. There was something otherworldly going on with this one that was setting off the werewolf sensors like alarm bells.

  And since his hands were covered in feces, he didn’t smell that great to me either.

  I squinted at the guy. “I’ve got to say, I’m at a loss. What in the fuck was your plan?”

  Because really, this was a lose/lose situation for the guy. After we’d taken him and his buddies out two nights ago, we’d brought them here. We were pissed—I mean seriously pissed. The fuckers had set up a “peace treaty” meeting and then tried to ambush us. We should have taken them out before the ambush even had a chance to take effect, but Teague had brought Jacky, and shit had gone down, and… well, we were as pissed at ourselves for walking into the trap as we were at these assholes for springing it.

  Since we’d killed fifteen out of twenty of them, we figured we’d let these five sit in lockup until we didn’t feel like annihilating them on general principle.

  And it wasn’t like lockup was that bad. It had a bathroom—one of those little portajohns, but still, odds were they’d seen each other’s junk before, right?—and food and water. We’d even given them a big warm soapy bucket for a sponge bath, and some clean clothes. We’d put cots in and given them blankets. Hell, someone had even brought in a box of untouched paperbacks. I mean, we wanted negotiators, not hostages, right? And we’d thought it might be going well, until Bracken, Teague, and I had walked into the vampire vault, so called because that’s where we put our brand-new or out-of-control vampires, and this guy had reached into his soiled shorts and pulled out what had proven to be a knife.

  I looked at him again, waving that knife in front of me, the word “cunt” echoing in my ears like a dying cat. “Do you have any idea how many people are outside who would be willing to kill you if you lay one finger on us?” I asked, hoping for sanity. “Besides the fact that the three of us did some serious damage to your entire pack two nights ago for shits and giggles?”

  “I don’t give a fuck!” the guy screamed. Spit flew out of his mouth, and with that and the smell, I was really glad I was across the room from him. “Just let me the fuck out of here and I won’t fucking kill you!”

  “Or maybe,” I said with a grimace, “you put that thing down and we won’t kill you?”

  I was charging power as we talked. Of course I was. I had a shield at the ready, because I was standing between Bozo MacShitsyerpants and my beloved and my friend. I’m not stupid—just mortal. The plan was that nobody else got to shed a drop of blood because these guys were brain-damaged assholes with no sense of family, honor, or organization.

  He’d shoved a silver knife up his ass?

  I looked at the guy in complete disbelief, shaking my head and wishing I was the type of power-mad psycho bitch who could just fry all these fuckers where they sat and get rid of this little problem.<
br />
  “I just want the fuck out of here!” the guy sobbed, and I sighed. He was so pathetic.

  “Okay, Junior,” I said, trying to take the irritation out of my voice. “I’ll make you a deal. You put away the pig sticker, and we’ll take you outside for a bit while we work this out. Does that work for—”

  The dumbshit rushed me—knife out, arms flailing, shouting, spittle and drool, the whole nine yards. He didn’t even use his werewolf speed, and I was in the process of throwing a shield up between that knife and me and the guys when Teague did something supremely stupid.

  He threw himself in front of me.

  And took the silver knife right in the middle of his ribs.

  Teague screamed and fell at my feet, and I screamed and used my shield to slam MacShitsyerpants back against the steel wall with enough force to make his head crush in a little bit. I wasn’t sure if he was dead yet, so I kept him mashed there like a gurgling bug and sank to my knees in front of Teague, glaring at Bracken to stand back so the guy wouldn’t bleed out.

  “Green!”

  He was coming.

  “Jesus, you dumb Irish motherfucker, what in the hell did you think you were doing?” I fished in the pocket of my jeans for the bottle of herbal salt wash that counteracted silver in werecreatures and iron in the sidhe. Our lives were risky enough that I never went anywhere without it.

  “Protecting… my… queen….”

  Christ, spare me from heroes. With a yank I cleared the knife from under his ribs, grimacing as the blood welled up from it. The knife wasn’t that long—five inches, maybe—and on a werewolf, this sort of wound was normally cake. A few minutes panting, some beer, some salty meat, and he’d be good to go.