After the young lovers roamed the places on each other once forbidden, the moon was high and bright in the sky, and Leila dizzy from his kisses, Sterling wet his lips as his fingers stilled at the hem of her dress. A question danced in his bright cerulean eyes. He waited for Leila to control where they took this new and beautiful thing forming between them. He was so careful not to press his weight down on her. So far, his touches and kisses had been almost chaste. But Leila wasn’t sure she wanted him to remain a gentleman tonight.The wolf inside her longed for him to tear her dress to shreds and devour her. Her human side wanted all the promises making love entailed, emotions and feelings which had been denied her since she gave her body to the first boy she’d loved. Since Miles, the times her body had been taken, and the times she’d shared it willingly had met a carnal need, but never anything beyond those basic primal urges. Tonight, she wanted to feel it all. Something that trans
It wasn’t the warm, welcomed summer rain that sent Leila and Sterling indoors, as they lay naked and entangled in one another by the smoke of the dying out fire. Their passion for each other was not cooled by the rain or dampered by the smoke that curled around their still heaving bodies like the ivy that snaked up the side of Ster’s cottage. If anything, both Leila and her wolf were ready for round two, in fact she stole a kiss from his plump lips, and deepened the kiss when her tongue plunged into his mouth. He rose up to meet her kiss and the ferocity of her tongue stroke for stroke. One glance down between his muscled thighs told Leila all she needed to know. She threw a leg over his hip and made to straddle him. It wasn’t even the clash of thunder that parted the lovers, but rather the streaks of lightening reaching out across the inky sky. It touched down far too close to the ground for comfort. Thanks to her wolfblood, taking a lightening strike would likely only stun her, but
Leila arrived early for her five p.m. shift at the bar the next evening to see if an extra pair of hands was needed to help get the bar up in running. But she soon saw that Ster had everything in tip-top shape, the window Gary Kline had busted was replaced, the food prep done for the night ahead, the place shiny clean, and even the band’s equipment was in tune for their eight p.m. set.She still tried to make herself useful. Her boss grinned at her from behind the bar with a dazzling smile and came to meet her halfway when she walked in. But Sterling let Leila control how far they were willing to take this, especially with an audience present. Amos Fox was visible through the kitchen window as he readied for the dinner service. Leila didn’t know the fifty-something man well, but he always talked about his wife Glory. They’d been married longer than Leila had been alive and it was a long running joke around the bar that Glory couldn’t cook a lick and burned water.Amos was a loving but
Leila should have been stunned, but she had heard versions of this before. The Sheriff had made claims that she’d been sleeping around with several men at the bar. But she was curious to hear this latest gossip on how Clyde’s death was her fault. Had Peggy fed this line to the Sheriff or had it been the other way around? Thorne had been insinuating Sterling had killed Clyde in a jealous rage because of Leila.Leila chuckled, “Let me hear it then Peggy. Go on. This town calling me a slut is nothing new because I don’t wear a wedding ring and don’t go to church, which neither do you come to think of it…But tell me why I’m the reason Clyde is dead?”The look on the shrew’s face was worth it alone. Peggy was insecure and jealous of Leila, and was probably the one who had spearheaded the smear campaign against the pretty young newcomer since Leila moved to Stillwater. Leila had never been overly flirty with anyone in the bar, except for Sterling, and had staved off all unwanted advances fr
Sterling stood tall and awaited his fate without flinching. The picture of surrender and compliance. This was a fight he knew he wouldn’t win, and there was more than one way to fight, to win. He had faith that the truth would come out at his trial and he would be found innocent. Leila tried to keep that faith too and wondered, if he stood strong and proud while facing down the law, for her benefit as much as his. To reassure those he held near and dear in the bar that night that true justice would prevail in the end.But Sheriff Thorne had a wicked glint in his eye, one that unsettled Leila and spoke of violence. One she knew all too well. He postured like a man with a small grasp of power in his hands, one who craved more, and was willing to get it at any means necessary. Men like Thorne were a plague to society, tale as old as time, and would be its ultimate downfall. Leila had known many of his kind among the wolves in the Blackwood Pack.“Sterling Mount, you are under arrest for
The air was so heavy inside the Stillwater Bar and Grill, it felt like it was suffocating Leila Dupree, and she could feel the sweat sliding down between her breasts. The joint was packed tonight, just like every night, as there wasn’t much to do in this one stoplight town. It smelled of cheap perfume, cigarette smoke, beer, sweat, and pheromones. Of course, ever since she had been turned, Leila could smell things more sharply. She preferred the open spaces of the great outdoors to appease the wildness that lived just beneath her surface.She paused to lean against the bar and fanned herself with a cocktail napkin. Her eyes drifted to the corner of the bar, where Grandpa Roy strummed his acoustic guitar and sang into a beer smelling microphone about losing his true love. Tonight, he had a bandanna tied around his forehead to soak up the sweat, rather than imitating one of his inspirations Willie Nelson. The old man’s button up shirt was also baptized in sweat, and
By the time Leila returned to the bar room floor, she was feeling somewhat sated, but her carnal urges had not entirely dissipated. She vowed to stay as far away from Sterling Mount as possible for the remainder of the balmy July night. Sterling didn’t make that easy. Even without him looking like he had just rode straight out of a wet dream on his stallion, he had the type of personality that naturally attracted others. He was calm and easy like a gentle, welcomed spring breeze, slow to anger and quick to smile.Sterling was something of a mystery in Stillwater, because somehow he had come from the loins of one mean old son of a gun. Titus Mount had been one hard, mean, and gruff old man. Many claimed it was Vietnam who had changed the man, and he had once been as jovial as his progeny. Lucille had remained ever faithful by her husband’s side, though rumor was she only had one child because of her husband’s hair trigger temper and rapidly changing moods. Lucille didn’t want t
The air was already hot and humid, mosquitos drawling blood on her skin, when Leila opened her eyes on a bed of moss the next morning. She groaned and swatted at the infernal bugs biting her exposed skin. She decided that mosquitos most definitely had been a part of the original plague the Lord himself set upon the Egyptians after they had thoroughly pissed off the man above.Dried blood, crusted and coated down her chin, neck, and chest just made her current situation even more uncomfortable, and her mood worse. Not that she often didn’t wake up coated in blood when her wolf took control, but really would it be too much ask for the beast inside her to go trapesing through some water after a kill?The smell of death was in the air. Along with the smell of soured, brackish waters, decay, and rot from the swamplands all around her. Leila sat up and her eyes gravitated to the carcass lying less than twenty feet away from her naked body. It was hard to tell from the mangled