He stopped once, to ease her back onto the bed, pulling free of her long enough to feel the ache that could only be relieved by losing himself deep within her. It was her hands that urged him down, her eyes swallowed in black and gold fire that begged for her own sweet release.
“Do you want this, Joey?” he growled, hovering at the entrance of her body, stroking the quivering, moist flesh with his own hardness. “Do you want me and everything I am?”
Her eyes opened, and for a single blazing instant they looked deeply into his soul. “Yes.”
There was a certainty and acceptance in that one gasped word that came from a place he could not touch, beyond the reach of his influence, beyond even the rule of her own intellect. “Yes, I want you, Luke. All of you.”
With a groan of overwhelming need Luke plunged down and sank deep within her. Her body arched to accept him, and in that moment she made a gift of what he would have taken, so that his guilt and fury were shattered in the sublime and terrible moment of release.
Chapter Eighteen
Winter arrived to grip Luke’s world with its perpetual cold and endless snowfalls, providing ample opportunities for use of the new bathtub, and sometimes even for long, hot soaks that Joey appreciated as the blissful luxuries they were.
Luke spent the days with her, except when he went for his runs, alone or with either of the two packs that accepted: him that of the village, and that of the true wolves whose territory overlapped the boundaries of his land. In the evenings Joey worked her way through Luke’s extensive collection of books as he carved his graceful wooden beasts, and they often talked by firelight long into the night before making love.
It was during these quiet intervals that Joey drew Luke most completely out of himself. She learned that he was as intensely interested in discussion and debate as she was and as fully capable of it, they fell frequently into long silences that never seemed awkward, but for the first time Luke seemed as ready to fill the quiet as keep it. Their lovemaking made him gentle and fiercely vulnerable and sometimes exposed more of him than he might have wished, but their long evening talks revealed his intense curiosity, his hunger for knowledge, and his driving need to understand what he was.
One night while Joey was curled up on the sofa, frowning over a passage in a particularly large and imposing volume, she looked up to find him watching her from his chair across the room, such an unguarded expression of tenderness on his face that the text fled her mind in a rush. His eyes transfixed her, and she stuttered out the first thing that came into her head. “Silver bullets!”
Luke raised his eyebrows in question, almost smiling. “I mean,” she amended quickly, “the legends all say that silver bullets…” She trailed off as heat rushed into her face.
“Kill werewolves?” Luke supplied amiably.
Joey felt her flush deepening. “Well, it doesn’t seem very logical to me, but—”
“Neither does anything else,” he finished for her. Setting his most recent carving aside, he stretched his long legs toward the fire. “That’s a legend with very little truth to it. There are no particularly deadly qualities to silver bullets, not for us.” Abruptly his face grew serious, and he glanced aside at the two wolf pelts hung on the wall. “A sufficient number of the regular kind will do the job.” There was enough bitter memory in his words that Joey felt no desire to pursue the topic.
She flipped a few pages of the book in her lap and changed the subject. “What about full moons?” She said it playfully, trying to win back his smile; he turned his attention to her and visibly relaxed. “I haven’t seen any evidence so far that one is required,” she added with a grin.
Luke surprised her by laughing, a brief, dark chuckle. “The change isn’t subject to the phases of the moon or of any other supernatural force. ” His eyes sparked on hers. “It comes with the end of childhood and, barring certain circumstances, is under our control entirely after that.”