Page 199 of Shifting Hearts 1
This twisted creature I had become. Was this what she wanted, or were we taking from the only pure being in this place?
But from what the wolf described earlier of her nighttime activities when everyone else but both herself and him were asleep, I knew our Bryn was far from pure.
The wolf stepped into her space. His true form fluctuated under the skin that contained his beast, rippling outward until fur consumed him, one inch at a time.
“What the fuck is he? And you—” Bryn’s scream left my forest rippling in a different sort of shudder.
A grayed palm slapped over her mouth, cutting off her breath. My trees stilled as I watched their interaction with curiosity. Unmoving, sinking deeper into the earth and reconnecting with my forest.
Wolf might think he succeeded in stealing her from me, but this was my realm, and neither of them would walk away unscathed.
Wolf wasn’t the only one who watched her. Craved the female he held still in his arms when she should be writhing and screaming.Running.
His eyes glittered as he stared at her, and my branches moved softly.
Perhaps we could…Share.
FOUR
BRYN
“Iremember your moans last night.”
Warm firm lips grazed the shell of my ear in a seductive caress.
Whatever the hell ever I expected to hear in the forest with thatthing,the tree man in the middle of the clearing who stared down at me like some sort of benevolent god who I swore closed the paths and forest around us…
It wasn’t that.
“What?” I stopped struggling, speaking the single word into the man—wolf’s—hand, and twisted in his embrace to face him fully.
Dark eyes with no whites gazed down at me. There was nothing forgiving in his deadly face that was all angles and hard lines, coated with black and grey lines like markings that had not yet erupted from beneath his skin. A sense of an unyielding hardness exuded from him. One corner of his arched mouth that held a carved quality tugged upward. The motion was so brief that I might have imagined it, but we didn't think so. That hefound my plight—me, trapped here, in a circle of trees with him while he talked about stalking me last night while I— while I?—
My cheeks blazed with heat that originated from a source a whole lot lower on my body at the recognition that he really did know what I’d done last night in the quiet hours when I thought everyone else in the house was asleep.
But you weren’t in the house.
The lips I’d admired twisted up into a cruel smile that could have been an artwork in their own right. And while I admired the deadly creature before more, I realized that he stood a mere hairbreadth from away. If he spoke, we’d touch—intimately.
But nothing could be more intimate than what he just pronounced into my ear in the middle of a haunted forest.
“What did you say?” I repeated. My mind caught up with what he’d said even though my body understood the implications just fine.He was there. He knew.
The wolf leaned forward so we shared the same breath, our mouths grazing with every word. His hand slid beneath the remains of my hooded cloak, hard fingers tangled in my hair to hold me in place. I couldn't move anywhere—forward or back. Turning about had been my last mistake. My mind screamed at how dangerous this was, this whole situation, but I wanted to hear him say it. Needed to hear the confession fall from his lips before he devoured me for my sins.
I’m not crazy. I knew someone was there?—
I’d known, because the last moan I’d heard that night hadn’t come from my lips.
Now, I knew that that sound came from him.
The wolf didn’t answer me, though a peculiar brand of cruel bemusement streaked across his black eyes.
“Say it,” I snapped, shoving my hands against his chest, his shoulder, anywhere I could reach, but the man was as immovable as?—
Well, as a tree.
Hello, Immovable. Please meet Unstoppable Force.
