She felt her mouth working, but no sound would come out. “Collier didn’t tell you that, did he, Joey—that among my kind, there can be only one true mate. Once we have found that mate, the bond is for life. It is life, to us.” His words came in a barrage, cracking like gunshots. “Something we share with the true wolves, but different, because we are human as well. But not entirely.” His eyes glowed with an alien heat. “What we are means that we cannot mate and mate again as Outsiders do. Not once we’ve found the true bond. As I have with you.”
Shivering in sudden, uncontrollable jerks, Joey struggled for comprehension. She heard the words, but it was his eyes, boring into hers with inhuman ferocity, that made her shudder with a primal fear beyond controlling. “Luke, I don’t…”
He cut off her gasped attempt at speech with his mouth, stopping her lips with his own, the burning heat of them moving on hers in a kiss that held nothing of tenderness. Her body responded while her mind was still grasping helplessly at what she could not understand. He withdrew before anything other than primitive lust could penetrate her confusion; there was almost a smile on his face, a ferocious triumph that chilled her more thoroughly than anything that had gone before and doused the heat of her body with frigid lucidity.
“You see, Joey. You feel it, too. You are mine, and your body knows it. Your heart knows it and your soul, even when your mind resists.” His voice had become so rasping that there was little of the man left in it. “She said we cannot fight what we are. I tried to fight it when I met you, once I knew—but it was already too late. For both of us.” The restrained power in his hands gripping her arms could have snapped them like twigs. “We can’t fight it. You can’t fight what you are, Joey.”
She felt the blood drain from her face. The last words penetrated like acid into the roiling confusion of her thoughts and emotions. Full understanding came all at once, and she jerked free of him so suddenly that his hands hovered in midair where her arms had been. She turned on him then, feeling such wildness within herself that there was almost no surprise when he dropped his eyes from hers, fleeing the savagery of her reaction. There was a power rising within her such as she had never known, so thoroughly overwhelming logic and rationality and all those careful human boundaries in which she had prided herself that there was no hope in fighting it. She let it take her. It was that terrible power that propelled her forward to thrust her face into his, no softness that would yield to him or to any weakness within herself.
“I am not an animal,” her voice hissed from the mouth of that alien self. “I am a human being. I control my own destiny. And I don’t belong to you.” The savagery that welled up to choke her belied her words, but she hardly noticed the contradictions. She knew only one need to refuse submission, refuse surrender, refuse to lose the last vestige of control she had fought so hard all of her adult life to gain, over emotions and vulnerabilities that could lead only to unbearable pain. Refuse his demands and his insane assertions, refuse the identity he tried to give her. An identity that would make her lose what little certainty remained in her life.
Luke was trembling so hard that his body vibrated in sympathy to her own, an unwilling connection between them even in the extremity of their conflict. His eyes were on hers again, his face so rigid that it might have been carved like one of his wooden beasts. They did not touch, the battle was one of locked gazes and will, unbridled power that Joey used without comprehension.
Some small, faint aspect of what she had been scratched feebly at Joey’s frozen rage. It asked her why she could not simply turn and walk away, why she could not speak rationally and deny what could surely not be true, soothing Luke with words that brushed the surface and held him at bay until the time came to go back, resume the life she had known before.