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about the future and they each fit into the other’s lives and what would happen next . . . But tonight, he'd chased her, and she loved having Grayson Hemming chase her.

“Good,” she repeated softly, falling back on the bed. “I have big plans for us.”

* * *

Grayson & Vanessa will return in Moon Blooded Breeding Clinic

MOON BLOODED BREEDING CLINIC

Coming Summer 2022

He smelled it the instant he stepped from the borrowed car.

Hot and swollen and dripping, the tumid, delicious smell of a heat. His mouth flooded, and the air in his lungs seemed to hitch, nearly rocking him off his feet. He reached out for the hood of the car to steady himself as the world tipped, every drop of blood in his body racing away from his brain, being diverted to a far more pressing priority.

Closing his eyes, he forced himself to breathe. A long, slow inhalation through his mouth, sparing his nose . . . 2, 3 . . . then a hard exhalation, shaking his head, attempting to dislodge the lust-woven cobwebs. It’s fine, this is fine. She’s probably on a suppressant. Focus on smelling the drug. The smell of the heat suppressant was sharp and corrosive, like licking a battery, the opposite of alluring.

Deciding his i

He wondered if Moriah knew how badly she was fucking with his biology at this point, and he didn’t have the benefit of chalking it up to a head cold and a missed shot.

“I’m really sorry,” she’d said mournfully, her voice through the phone thick with congestion and coming from a million miles away, or so it had seemed. “I didn’t expect this cold to kick my ass.

We’ll have to wait until next month.”

He’d brought her chicken soup and a small brick of compressed botanicals and bath salt, made by an Oni who’d hosted him earlier that year when he’d been on a shoot in Hokkaido. It was the surest way for her to gain some upper respiratory relief, and the soup was from the only delicatessen he trusted, run by a shifter family who’d moved to Cambric Creek from Long Island. He would take care of her while she was sick, and once she’d recovered, he would fuck her into the following month to make up for the lost time.

Visions of wrapping her in a quilt and feeding her soup were dashed when she’d opened the door a crack, peering out with bloodshot eyes.

“You shouldn’t be here, Lowell. I don’t want to get you sick! And I don’t want you to see me like this. You’re supposed to think I’m sexy, not a snot-covered mouth breather.”

“We don’t get sick the same way humans do,” he’d called over his shoulder as he’d left her stoop, the door closing behind him, shutting him out.

Biologically inferior in every way. He could hear that particular, distasteful tone in his father’s voice, the one that was specifically reserved for talking about humans, turning over and over in his mind, the thought making him slightly nauseous. What would he be contributing to this future child other than dark hair and height if everything exceptional he brought to the table would be stripped away, diminished and erased in a flood of chemicals?

Moriah was doing more than triggering her own heat with the shots — she was provoking his instinct to want to protect and provide, the thought of anyone even speaking to her while she was in heat making him snappish short-tempered. He could think of nothing but seeking out the singular, mind-erasing hit of burying his cock in a needy, receptive mate at the height of the monthly frenzy . . .

and now, again, she was taking it away.

And she wasn’t, of course, his mate.

He had no intention of claiming or marking her, no plans to stick around Cambric Creek a heartbeat longer than necessary. He shouldn’t care, and it shouldn’t matter, and the fact that it did was the clearest sign of all that he was in too deep.

But at that particular moment, nothing mattered at all — nothing except the lack of blood flowing to his brain, making him dizzy, and the overwhelming smell of a needy cunt, making him hard. Lowell wasn’t sure his brain was even functioning, synapses misfiring in every direction as he stumbled. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d gone hard that fast, his erection scraping the inside of his jeans.

His cock was calling the shots now, straining to see over his waistband, to be better able to direct his movements. His balls pulsed, the dictator in his pants demanding immediate action, a slaking of his lust, and he was helpless to do whatever his smaller head commanded.

If he closed his eyes and focused, he could hear her panting — high and rapid, a slight whine on every cant of her hips. He could taste on the air how wet she was, her desperation a sweet-metallic tang on the back of his tongue, and he wanted to coat his mouth in her slick before he gave her what they both desperately needed.

He had taken two steps away from the car when another smell caught his nose. Another wolf, another male, already there. A ripple of aggression moved up his back as he crouched, prepared to fight for the right to fuck whoever she was, to calm the fire under her blood, first with his cock, then with his knot; to fuck her until he went cross-eyed and emptied himself, allowing a trickle of blood to finally return to his brain.

He was halfway up the driveway when he passed the car. It was one he recognized.

Her name was Vanessa, and she had worked in the law firm where his brother was a partner, before Grayson had been pressured to leave corporate law for his current self-righteous pro bono gig.

He hadn’t been back long enough to ascertain exactly what sort of relationship his brother had with this woman, but Lowell knew she was his regular sexual partner, if nothing else; that it was her he smelled in the house and that Grayson was the other wolf he smelled.

Grayson, who had been born without a moral compass and had at least 60 pounds on him, most of it muscle. He wasn’t sure what sort of neurological impulse it was that prevented him from charging into the house, cock in hand, but whatever it was, he was grateful.

His feet were frozen for several more heartbeats. He might win in a fight against Jackson, Lowell considered. His eldest brother was staid and professional; he spent his time in a lecture hall or chasing after his little boy, doing volunteer work around town, a perfect fucking Woodland scout.

Lowell would almost certainly win in a fight against his twin. Owen hunched over a desk fifty hours a week, he and his girlfriend spending their weekends hiking and bicycling and otherwise being insufferably in love. Liam wasn’t a consideration. Trapp and Grayson, however, were made of something different, something meaner and harder. He’d had his ass kicked by his two older brothers more times than cared to recount, and he knew that, despite what his drooling cockhead seemed to think, if he would ever challenge Grayson physically, he would likely have his ass handed back to him in a box, spare parts rolling around on the driveway.

His head was trying to turn him back in the direction of the pool house, his cock desperately trying to make him storm into the main house, but fortunately, wonder of wonders, the larger of the two heads prevailed. Not before he paused in front of Grayson’s truck, flicking on one of the interior lights before slamming the door shut, making his way around the back of the house.

He had no doubt Grayson would be well-occupied for the next day and that he and his pseudo-girlfriend would not emerge from their bed until it was time to drive to the lake.

“You need to get laid,” he’d told Lowell the previous week, making it sound like the easiest thing in the world, and Lowell supposed, for him, it was. Grayson was not helpless here, like a rat trapped in a rapidly shrinking cardboard box. This is where he’d chosen to stay, and he had a life here — a tawdry, gossip-spawning life filled with excess and probably too much cocaine, Lowell suspected, but a life nonetheless. Grayson had no conscience and was inured to the whispers around him, but Lowell wasn’t his brother. He’d ignored Gray’s advice, deliberately putting the orange juice carton back in the refrigerator with less than a swallow.