Chapter Thirteen: Briar

Her entire body felt amazing. She had no idea that anyone could do anything like that to her. That it was possible to feel like that at all. But he had made her body hum with pleasure. Torin was fantastic.

The only regret she had was that she hadn’t been able to make him feel the same things. She wanted to touch him. To make him feel wave after wave of pleasure coursing through his body. And while she had no idea what she was doing, surely he could give her some pointers, because he definitely seemed to have more than a little experience. And unless she was reading his signals entirely wrong she thought that her attraction to him wasn’t entirely one sided.

That was quite possibly the best part of finding herself there with him after everything she had gone through.

She’d been brought up to think that she could only ever have these sorts of feelings for one person and that that person was her mate, but clearly that wasn’t true. Her mate hadn’t even rejected her and while she would very much like to, she hadn’t had a chance to reject him. Yet here she was having feelings for someone else. And that someone else wasn’t even a werewolf. Even if those feelings were entirely physical it made for all sorts of possibilities open going forward, now that she knew she wouldn’t be with her mate.

Life was strange, but Briar had to admit that what the Bear Shifter had made her feel was both strange and wonderful and she had enjoyed the Hell out of it. Or at least she had been for the past half hour or so. And she intended on continuing this new trend.

Briar was laying on the couch, enjoying not just the pleasure coursing through her veins, but the fact that she wasn’t in excruciating pain like she should have been after her mate had obviously just fucked someone else. She opened her eyes to suggest to Torin that she let him try something to make things a little more even, but the words she’d been about to say never left her throat.

Instead she screamed. Then she grabbed hold of a blanket that was now laying on one of the thick carpets that covered the floor and she pulled it back up over her body, trying to force actual words out from between her lips. When that didn’t work, she pointed in the direction of the window, which she realized she should have done immediately. Except maybe a part of her didn’t want Torin going out there.

What would they do to him? Especially after what they had probably just seen?

There had been two faces that she recognized. Beta Poe and Hux, a pack warrior, had been looking in the window, staring at them. She was certain of it. And if they were there, it was very likely that there were more wolves nearby. Maybe even her mate, although she realized almost immediately that that was unlikely since he was obviously otherwise engaged. That meant that he’d sent out a search party for her, while he’d stayed comfortably at home. Or Cara had sent out the search party.

By the time those thoughts had passed through her mind, Torin was at the window and then in a flash he’d made his way to the door. He opened it and stepped outside and she quickly slipped back into the t-shirt she’d been wearing, not wanting to be entirely naked if something horrible happened and she somehow fell back into her pack’s clutches in the next few moments. Not that the t-shirt was much better. But it was something. Once she was dressed, or what passed for dressed, she grabbed one of the blankets and raced to the door after him, stepping out onto the porch, where he was standing now, peering off into the gathering twilight.

When he saw her there, outside of the house, his eyes flashed with anger.

“What are you doing outside?” His voice was low, quiet even, but his tone made her feel as if he had roared the words and she took a step backwards without even thinking about what she was doing. One moment she was worried for his safety and the next she was concerned for her own. Turning on her heel she rushed back into the house, wanting to get away from him and the disapproving look in his eyes nearly as much as she wanted to get away from the wolves she now knew were outside. How could she have gone from wondering if she could figure out how to give him a blow job to wondering how fast she could get out of his house in less than two minutes?

She heard him come back into the house half an hour later, and by then she was back in her room. Well, even if he’d come back into the house three minutes after their encounter on the porch, he would have found the exact same thing.

It had taken her less than thirty seconds in the house to realize the hopelessness of the problem that she faced. If she left the house that she was now in she would have to face the weather and the wolf pack that she was fairly certain hadn’t tracked her all this way to sit down to enjoy tea and biscuits and pleasant conversation. Especially since she was certain that Theon wasn’t with them.

If Theon wasn’t there then he couldn’t reject her. And if he couldn’t reject her then Briar thought that there was an extraordinarily high chance that she was never going to be making it back to the Pack Land alive. The Warriors in the pack especially, had always looked on her, and all the Omegas, as a burden to the pack system. They didn’t seem to understand that those in the lower strata of the pack hierarchy contributed to how the pack functioned. And she definitely couldn’t imagine them traveling with her back unharmed. But if she was dead, Alpha Theon might get a second chance mate. Which made her beating heart a problem for the pack if he decided that rejecting her was too much work, or just something he didn’t want to do.

A shudder passed through her body at the thought of accompanying Beta Poe back, or even spending any length of time with him, if he did have orders to bring her back. She’d vaguely remembered seeing him leaving her house once, after her father had died, and she had gone into the kitchen to find her mother crying even harder than she had been for the previous week over some insensitive thing that the asshole of a man had said. While she wouldn’t repeat what he’d said to Briar, and her mother had tried to deny that it was really his fault, Briar knew he’d done something to cause her mother pain, and she had never forgiven him for it. She’d been watching him for years, ever since that day, and she had come to the conclusion that there wasn’t a more cruel man in the entire pack.

A small sigh escaped her lips as she burrowed deeper beneath the covers, which were now toasty warm from the heat of her body. Perhaps Torin’s reaction made a bit more sense, now that her heart wasn’t pounding nearly out of her chest, and she wasn’t cowering right in front of him. It had been hard to think straight when he’d been so close and so intimidating. She bit her bottom lip as she closed her eyes, her mind drifting back to what had happened before their unexpected visitors had arrived.

Of course, what he’d done had been out of obligation. He’d known she had been in so much pain that she had passed out twice. He had wanted to spare her that pain. It hadn’t meant anything to him.

And of course it had meant something to her. But that was different. It was just because she was a virgin, who had no experience doing anything. She couldn’t expect that he would feel the same way.

Her hand slipped down, past the bottom hem of his t-shirt, which had bunched up over her hips when she had slipped down into the bed, and she touched the places that his mouth had explored, surprised to find them soaking wet again, and hot, as the ache she’d felt from before returned. But this time it was also different. This wasn’t the pain of Theon taking someone else. This was a strange sort of need that she’d never known she had until Torin had begun to kiss his way down her body, his thickly calloused hands touching and stroking and exploring and bringing her body to life in ways she hadn’t known were possible.

Her index finger found that small nub of nerves that he’d been so intent on pleasing her with earlier, and while she certainly couldn’t do to it what he had, she circled it with her own wetness. Within a few minutes she found that her body was not far from the place that he had brought her too, or at least something like it. And she might have reached that place if a knock at the door had not stilled her hands and raised the color in her cheeks for what had to be the twelfth time since she’d woken up that morning.

For a moment before she opened her mouth to speak, she wondered if she could actually die from embarrassment, because if he walked into the room she was fairly certain that she might.

His sense of smell had to be at least equal to hers, if not greater. And there was no way he could miss the scent of her desire that filled the room. She wasn’t usually one for swearing but she let out a whispered string of profanity that would have made a sailor blush before pulling the covers tight around her waist, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath.

“Yes?” she finally managed in a small voice, knowing that he would hear her. “You can come in.”