Page 68 of Feral Werewolves
“She’s our mate, so our bodies want it,” said Paladin.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I said it was okay, Lazarus.”
“Well,” he said, chagrined. “It is not.”
The hatred coming off of him seared me, like something hot and acrid. I tried to take it somehow, with my hands or my lips, but it was stuck into him hard. “Don’t apologize again,” I said, because I couldn’t stand it, the way he hated himself. It hurt me.
The next morning, I woke up to Kestrel climbing out of the bed in the darkness.
I went after him, and I followed him out to watch him gather eggs and see to the cows and feed the chickens. I had my phone now, and I pulled up an app to make a list of all the things that he did in the morning, asking as I did what all the other chores were.
He answered in gruff monosyllables, until he finally stopped, setting down the basket he’d used to gather eggs and turned on me. “How do you talk so much this early in the goddamned morning?” he practically growled.
“Am I bothering you?” I said with a coy little smile. “Or is it that you don’t want Paladin and me to do our fair share of chores?”
“Of course I want Paladin to step the fuck up,” he said. “But I don’t see how making a list is going to help anything. You either do the chores or you don’t.”
“Well,” I said, “some people are gifted with the natural ability to hold lists in their heads and other people get distracted and can’t. So, those people do better with physical reminders of what they need to do.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re going to do whatever it is you want, is that it? I mean, I tell you that if you stay out here,everyone fucking dies, and that doesn’t matter—”
“You really want me to leave, Kestrel?” I knew he didn’t, somehow, I just knew it. I was secure in that. It was strange, but I liked this, liked early-morning Kestrel, growly in the barely-there dawn light, liked his frustration.
No, I liked making him react, I guessed. It felt, strangely, like safety. I’d seen him argue like this with his mates, and arguing with me, too, it meant that he had accepted me, that I was part of this pack.
He gave me a withering look. “Even if I did, you wouldn’t go.”
“You don’t want me to leave.”
“What I want is for you to stop distracting me while I’m doing chores,” he informed me.
“I don’t think you want that either,” I said. I moved in close to him and put my hand on his chest.
He drew in a breath, looking me over, his expression changing like clouds blowing away from a bloated, round moon, revealing its brightness beneath.
“I think you like being distracted, actually,” I said in a teasing, soft voice.
He groaned. He kissed me. His lips traveled over my jaw, my neck. He hadn’t shaved yet, and his whiskers brushed tantalizingly against my sensitive skin. “Fuck, you’re my favorite distraction, Clementine,” he breathed into my ear.
I wrapped myself around him.
We started kissing in a frenzy.
I seized handfuls of his shirt, and I felt like I was coming alive, like the sun stealing over the countryside in the brisk autumn morning. I felt like our connection was waking me up. I wrapped my legs around him, practically climbing him.
He put his hands under my ass and lifted me, holding me against him like I was nothing. Fuck, he was strong.
He walked me backward until we collided with a wall. “Stay forever,” he gasped against my lips. “Distract me forever.”
“I will,” I managed, kissing his prickly chin, scrabblingfor purchase against his broad shoulders. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He fucked me up against the wall there, and he barely kept his knot out of me, barely managed not to come in me.
The coming days were full of sex and minutia.
Paladin and I made the chore chart and we posted it. Three days after it was posted, Kestrel was all apologies, saying that he hadn’t realized he was being a dick to Paladin, that if a posted chart was really all it took, he felt like an idiot for not just agreeing to it already.
Because everything was running more smoothly now. I think my being there helped, because it meant that there were more hands on deck, and that meant less to do for everyone.
