• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“We’re not the same kind of animal, Anita. They had to find out who’s . . . tougher.”

I stared down the line of my body into those brown eyes. “Are you saying this was some kind of dominance display?”

“Not exactly.”

Strangely, it was Merle who answered. “When two such different beasts meet, and they are both strong dominants—such as a true Nimir-Ra, and a true Ulfric—the two animals must fight and test each other. I have seen it before. It is a type of taming of one beast by the other.”

I looked way up at the tall man. “No one tamed anyone.”

Merle knelt beside us. “I think you are right. It is as the Ulfric has said, a standoff. He could have kept fighting until one of you won, or lost, but he chose to let it be.”

I remembered someone telling Richard to control it, it being his beast. I looked at Richard. “You stopped, didn’t you?”

“I don’t care which of us is more dominant, Anita. Those kind of games have never meant anything to me, unless people forced me to play them.”

“You said something about helping Gregory. What did you mean?”

He started working his way a little higher up my body, sliding his body along mine. I could feel the slime from his shirt recoating my bare stomach and nearly bare chest. My disgust must have shown on my face, because he asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Your shirt is covered in slime, and I’m lying in a pool of it. I didn’t just want you to get off me to be off of me, I wanted to get up out of this mess.”

He came to his knees, his legs on either side of mine. I could feel our beasts stretched between us like something that should have been visible, as if each of their heads was buried in the other’s chest. He offered me a hand. I stared up at him.

“I know you don’t need the help, Anita. But our beasts are touching now. It’s a close connection and physical contact will help us keep it until we finish with Gregory.”

I didn’t need the earnest look on his face to know he was telling the truth. The marks were still open between us. I knew he was telling the truth.

I took his hand and he lifted me to my feet. Standing up hurt, and either he felt it or saw it on my face. “I hurt you,” he said softly.

“We hurt each other.” I could feel that he was stiff, aching, but he moved like he wasn’t, and I still moved human stiff.

He raised the bottom of his shirt, still holding my hand. “Touch me.”

I looked up at him, and he laughed. “Just keep physical contact, Anita. I don’t mean anything by it. But I need both my hands.”

I laid a hand on his side, very tentatively.

He shook his head. “I’m going to take my shirt off.”

If you can’t touch a person’s hands, arms, or much of their upper body, you run out of polite places to touch. I settled for sliding my hand under the wet shirt, touching the smooth firmness of his side. Even his skin was damp from the shirt having molded to it.

Richard drew the shirt over his head, and I was left standing inches from him as he revealed the flat plains of his stomach, the muscular swell of his chest, and arched his back to draw the shirt over his head. The sight of him, the pull of the lust that always came when I saw him without clothes pushed my beast against his. I felt furred sides roll against each other, a tentative roll of power that felt like someone had taken velvet and caressed the most intimate part of me.

Richard gasped.

I concentrated hard to stop the movement, but that I’d done it without thinking brought heat in a wash up my face. I looked at the ground; my hand was still only touching his side, just above his jeans, but the touch felt suddenly intimate. I wanted to take my hand away, and his hand covered mine before I could move. He pressed my hand to him, firm, but not forceful.

He touched my chin, raised my face until I had to look at him. “It’s alright, Anita. I love the fact that just seeing me moves you like that.”

The blush that had been fading, blazed harder. He laughed, soft, low, with that edge that a man’s laugh gets when he’s thinking intimate things. “I have missed you, Anita.”

I looked up at him.