The Wolf's Mate Book 1: Jason & Cadence Page 22
Her nerves ratcheted up another notch as Peter announced that he was giving her to Jason, and Jason’s blue eyes simmered as he took her hand and drew her close.
Not a dream. Not a dream.
The vows left her brain as soon as she said them. The people with them were just blurs in the periphery of her vision. The only thing that mattered in the universe was the man next to her, and when he drew her into his arms for their first kiss, she swore the world stopped turning for a heartbeat.
Everything clicked into place for her at that moment. She and Jason were married. She was now Mrs. Cadence Gerrick and he was her husband. She wouldn’t be alone again, and hadn’t ever really been in the first place.
Their reception was just dinner in the hotel restaurant where their guests were staying, and since it was their off-season and they were deserted, the staff pushed the tables from the center of the room and turned the stereo system up so they could all dance.
Michael and Callie covered Jason’s truck in what she thought were balloons, but upon closer inspection were blown up condoms. Callie had clearly tried to soften the glaring display with flowers but Michael’s personality was all over the decorating.
It started to snow that night, and by the time they checked in and drove up the hillside to their secluded cabin, the ground was well on its way to being covered. When they woke up the next day, the world looked fresh and new, just like the start of their life together.
Jason got his request of plenty of nudity over their weeklong honeymoon, and by the time they checked out, there wasn’t a surface in the cabin that they hadn’t made love on in one way or another. And in between all of their lovemaking, they talked and became best friends again. Two parts of a whole. Two sides of the same coin. Husband and wife.
The official Tressel pack reception was held in the bar with the whole deal – cake, dancing, throwing of garter and a fresh bouquet and plenty of liquor and good food.
Seated in the usual booth, Jason kissed behind her ear. “Are you happy, Mrs. Gerrick?”
“I am. You?”
“I just married my best girl. I couldn’t be happier.”
And she couldn’t have been happier, either.
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Christmas Eve began with a large tree lighting ceremony in the center of town and the pack gathered for a large family style dinner before the full moon hunt. She and Jason stood together in front of the large bonfire with their pack, the first time that it was only their pack and not the two packs together. The mood was solemn, marking the start of a new time in Allen and with their people.
She had been feeling out of sorts all day. The month had passed by so quickly that it seemed like the full moon had a mind of its own and snuck up on her. She and Jason had spent the day in bed but she’d still been wired for sound. Looking up at the sky, she closed her eyes and took in a deep breath as the sound of clothes hit the ground and the wolves all raised their muzzles to howl and she was drowning in the familiar and sweet fall scent of wolves.
Jason nudged her leg with his muzzle and she looked down at him and felt twin pains in her upper gums. “Ouch,” she grumbled, touching the place in her mouth where her gums ached and gasped in surprise at the taste of blood. Tender to the touch, she followed her swollen gums down to where her canines had elongated into sharp points.
“Jas?” Her voice came out trembling and she opened her mouth and pointed to what felt like thicker, longer teeth.
He made a questioning sound in his throat and he and the wolves nearby looked for all the world like they were confused. Hell, she was confused! She wanted to see a mirror so she could be sure she hadn’t imagined they were longer than normal.
Her voice was less trembling and more in control when she gave a gentle shove to Jason’s head and said, “Go hunt and then come home. I’ll be fine.”
She turned to walk away and a tug stopped her. Jason had snagged the back of her jeans leg behind one knee in his teeth and pulled her to a stop. Anger rode over the tickling fear as she growled and flashed what she hoped were at least mildly intimidating fangs at him, “If you rip my jeans I’m going to be so pissed off that you won’t be able to hear right for a week when I’m done yelling at you. Go hunt. I don’t want you to freak out on me again. My body can’t take it.” She knew he would be upset at the jab, but she was starting to freak out a little at this new development and she wanted to be in the relative privacy of the house.
Immediately he released the fabric and after growling a command at the females around her who had already agreed to stay with her at the house, he darted off with three wolves: Michael, Linus, and Bo.
She watched Jason until his form was lost to the darkness and turned towards the house, Callie on her right, Tina on her left, two females ahead of them, and another bringing up the rear. She turned on the light in the small downstairs half bath and lifted up her top lip with her fingertips that were shaking now. There in brilliant white were tiny white fangs, delicately pointed like little shiny daggers. As she thought, they were thicker and longer than her normal teeth, very clearly…fangs.
Callie made a sad sort of whimpering sound in her throat from where she sat on her haunches in the doorway. She glanced at her best friend. “I don’t know, Cal. I felt weird all day and then they just popped down. Hurt like a bitch, too.”
Her gums twinged a little still, but not so bad she couldn’t ignore it and she walked out into the front room and sat down on the couch, waiting for Jason to finish hunting and come back. Callie and Tina sat in the room with her but since they couldn’t talk it was rather like having two large dogs staring at her with humanly intelligent looking eyes, and she felt even more on display than she had in front of the bonfire.
The hours trickled past but finally she heard a warning bark that alerted the females around the house that the alpha was on his way home, and she stood up and walked to the back door. Jason leapt onto the back porch and shifted as she held open the door for him. In the laundry room, he tugged his jeans on and hugged her, pulling her into the extra warmth of his just shifted body.
The females that had stayed with her left to go hunt. In the kitchen, Jason looked down at her and held her lip up to expose her little fangs so he could see them, along with Peter, Michael and Lon. She couldn’t help but flush with embarrassment at being exposed, even though it was only her teeth they were looking at. It just felt very intimate.
Peter scrubbed his hands through his dark blonde hair and sighed, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Do you have any other odd feelings, Cadence?”
“Like what?”
“Like needing to hunt, wanting to taste fresh blood, or feeling like going for a long run?”
She shook her head. Jason dropped her lip and pulled her hands up so he could inspect them. He squeezed each finger between his finger and thumb, exerting enough pressure that after four fingers she jerked her hand away and said, “What are you doing?”
“If your fingers are sore it may be claws. I’m just checking, let me finish.”
She let him pinch her fingers and thumbs and then massage his grip down the palms of both hands, twisting her wrists around so her palms were up as he caressed just shy of painfully hard down the length of her arms and up to her shoulders. It felt incredibly good and she sighed and closed her eyes.
With a laugh, he said softly, “That’s fucking hot as hell, baby.”
Her eyes popped open and he grinned. “None of your joints hurt?”
“Nope.”
He dropped his hands to his hips and looked at his dad and the elder who had come back after their hunt. “I don’t know, Jason. As far as I know, your mate is the only hybrid werewolf in existence. She is wholly unique,” Lon said.
“But why fangs? Why now?” Jason asked.
“I don’t know. I wish I could tell you something to alleviate your concerns but I have nothing over pure speculation.”
“Such as?” Michael asked.
“Such as, it
would be highly unlikely for a human to turn into a werewolf so late in life. Fangs are one thing because the canine teeth already exist in the human mouth so it’s not necessarily an exaggeration for them to elongate as ours do. But the ability to shift is something that is born into our DNA. If she were ever able to shift into a full wolf, she would have done so at 16 like the others.
“She is faster than a human, stronger, too, but other than that, she doesn’t have our hearing or scenting abilities. This may be a fluke occurrence or she may sprout fangs every full moon because her beast is more in tune with the pack than it has ever been before. Perhaps this is just one more way for her beast, even as partial as it is, to connect with the pack that she’s accepted as her own.” Lon leaned back in the chair and looked at Jason and her with his silvery gray eyes.
“What if they don’t go away?” She asked.
“We have no reason to believe they won’t.” Lon answered.
Well, it wasn’t their mouth, was it? That’s just fucking great. What if she walked around for the rest of her life with fangs? She needed to think about something else before her head exploded, and her husband, her sweet wolf mate, sensed her tightrope walk with her emotions, thanked his dad, Michael and Lon for their help, and promised to let them know how she was in the morning.
As he hefted her over his shoulder in what was clearly one of his favorite ways to haul her upstairs, she stared down at the view of his incredible ass and pondered her fangs.
He dropped her to the bed abruptly and walked into the bathroom. She heard the water running in the sink and realized he was brushing his teeth. She was tempted to join him to look at her fangs some more, but she didn’t think she could really do that without having an utter meltdown and if she did that, then the heat in Jason’s eyes would disappear and be replaced with pity and concern. There wasn’t a look that killed a libido much more than pity.
“Why are you still wearing clothes?” He demanded, walking out of the bathroom and stalking towards her in all his nude glory.
She didn’t have an answer for him. If she said she was thinking about her fangs, well, she’d already reasoned out that scenario so she instead said, “I was just waiting for my husband.”
A happy grunting reply was all he could seem to manage as he stripped her hurriedly and climbed on top of her. Spreading her thighs with his knees and her arms out to the side with his hands on her wrists, he nuzzled under her chin and sucked open mouthed kisses down the column of her throat, hard enough to twist her gut into a tight ball of need and bring every nerve ending to life. He slid into her with one hard thrust that made her teeth crack together with the force of it, and he pounded into her as he held himself just slightly away from her so that she could watch his cock saw in and out of her body. Bracing on her wrists, he drove them with determined, bold thrusts until they both crashed into climax, and her need to mark him rose like a tidal wave. She had fangs now. She could use them. She wanted to. She needed to.
Panting, dewy sweat lighting his features, he kissed her gently and then licked once across her bottom lip. Parroting her own words to him, he growled, “Mark me, Cades, make me yours in truth.”
He slid over, rolling to his side, and she pressed him forward slightly by the shoulder and lifted the curl of his dark blonde hair up from his neck to reveal the bare skin. She licked the sweat from his neck and he shivered at the action. She had only the top fangs, so it wouldn’t look entirely normal for a wolf marking, but she was going to take what he offered willingly and bite the hell out of him.
Anxious to sink her fangs into his flesh, she hugged her leg across his hip and her arm across his chest, and lowered her mouth to cover his spine. She dug her fangs in until they broke through the skin, slicing easily into his flesh like the sharp knives they appeared to be. He let out a quick breath that ended on a moan and she felt his cock grow hard against her ankle that was draped over him. She tasted his blood, a delicious hot and salty metallic taste as she pulled her fangs out and licked the two puncture wounds.
She kissed each mark and lifted up so that he could roll onto his back as she straddled him. Leaning forward, she kissed him carefully, letting him caress the edges of her fangs with his tongue as he hummed a wolfy purr of pleasure. He guided himself into the wet, hot depths of her core and they spent the night locked together, two marked alphas.
When she finally woke in the morning, her fangs had receded at some point while she slept. She was thankful that they were gone but worried what it meant that she actually had no control over their coming and going. Jason said he didn’t care if they came back and stayed permanently because he thought they were hot.
They passed into the new year without much fanfare. They had a party that went all night with lots of toasting and Jason not letting her kiss anyone at midnight that wasn’t mated.
She had big hopes for the first year of their marriage and of her place as alpha of the pack. She wanted to make him proud, to behave the way he needed and expected and to be the softer balance of his rough nature. Even though she couldn’t shift, she felt like a werewolf and she was treated that way.
Her fangs returned on the January full moon and disappeared by the next morning. At Jason’s urging, she explored the area around the bonfire the night of the full moon with the female wolves and tried out the main senses that the wolves had over humans: speed, strength, scent, sight, and taste. Everything was slightly more pronounced for her on the full moon. Already she was faster and stronger than a typical human female, but on the full moon she could smell better. She could pick out Jason’s location if he was within a few hundred feet of her, even in the darkness, and he tested her in February by having her track him. Although a few guards followed her closely, they offered no help. She succeeded brilliantly. Her sight didn’t get better and her sense of taste was no different, but she did experience food cravings on the full moon that trended more towards red meat of the rare variety. The alterations to her body once she’d become alpha and her she-wolf had blossomed, made her wonder what their children would be like. If she was part human, they may be human. It was the most likely scenario. But hopefully because she was unique, their children would be unique as well and in her eyes they’d be perfect.
She was human and werewolf, one foot in two vastly different worlds. She could have gone human. She could have shuttered away what made her the person she was, but she would have been lying to herself and anyone she was with.
She’d been an outcast and a leader, a vixen and a wall flower. She’d walked the edge of death, been threatened and beaten for friendship and love. She’d stood before a pack of wolves as their leader. She suffered grief and heartache and love at its most pure form. And she stood securely in the arms of the man that she loved more than her next breath and waited for their future to unfold.
The End
From the Author: Thank you so much for purchasing The Wolf’s Mate: Jason and Cadence. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed bringing the Tressel Pack to life. Check out my blog for news and updates about the future books in the series at http://www.rebutler.wordpress.com or drop me a line at rebutlerauthor@gmail.com, too! All the best, R.E.
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*Also by R.E. Butler*
A Curve of Claw
A Flash of Fang
Read on for an excerpt from the next book in The Wolf’s Mate series,
The Wolf’s Mate Book 2: Linus & The Angel by R.E. Butler
Linus Mayfield had a lot of good things in his life: fourth ranked in the Tressel wolf pack, nice house, decent job, and plenty of friends. What he didn’t have was what he longed for most – a true mate. His first foray into marriage was a disaster and he thought he would never be free to love again. One icy winter night, he found the nearly frozen body of a woman in the snow and brought her back from the brink of death. Then he wanted to keep her forever. Will his past destroy his growing love for her? Will her secrets keep them from being together? You can't have a Wolf's Mate s
tory without claws and fangs, possessive wolves, and plenty of hot werewolf mate sex. What happens when legend meets reality? Find out in the second novel in The Wolf's Mate Series by R.E. Butler.
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The Wolf’s Mate
Book 2: Linus & The Angel
By: R. E. Butler
Linus was woken from sleep by the buzz of his cell as it danced across the nightstand next to his bed and sounded like an out of control woodpecker. He blinked the sleep from his eyes and picked up the phone, his eyes barely registering the alarm clock that read 2:17. Shit, it’s early.
He should have checked the ID, because he wouldn’t have answered it if he’d known it was her.
“Linus!” Brenda whined, “Linus I need a ride.”
He sighed and sat up, swinging his feet down to the carpet. “It’s fucking late, Brenda.”
“But there was like a blizzard, Linus, and I don’t want to get trapped at this guy’s house for days.”
His sluggish brain picked up on part of that. “Wait, are you on a date and you’re fucking calling me for a ride? You have got to be kidding me, Brenda. That’s low even for you.”
Her voice tipped whinier, “But you’re my husband.”
“Not any more. We’ve been divorced for three years. This has to stop. Just don’t fucking call me anymore.”
He hung up and sat there staring at his cell phone while she proceeded to call him four more times and leave both voice mails, emails, and texts. He finally turned it off. In one of the kitchen drawers, he found the paperwork for his cell plan and called the 24 hour customer service number and had his number disconnected and exchanged for a new one. As he sat at the computer to send a message to the pack about his new number, he also decided it was a must to get a new email address so he did that first and then sent all the new information out to everyone. Except his ex. He was sure to get a ribbing from them, especially Jason the alpha, on what a whipped puppy he’d been the last three years for her. Six months ago he would have gone running to rescue her and then begged her for sex.