Sherri hated to fly with a fiery passion. Her luck was terrible, and every trip somehow wound up going sideways.
This time it had been mechanical delays that kept her in Houston for half the morning, before arriving in DC to find her rental car had been given to another customer. After more than an hour’s wait with a paperback from one of the airport gift shops, the car rental folks apologized with an “upgrade.” Sherri didn’t see how giving her a pickup truck that sucked more money in gas than the GDP of a small country was an improvement, but by then she only wanted to get to her hotel and sleep, so she took the damned land yacht. Thank God for valets, because she’d die trying to squeeze that thing into a downtown parking garage.
By the time she arrived at her hotel, all she wanted to do was climb out of her clothes and into the shower. She got as far as getting naked when she realized she hadn’t turned on her phone since getting off the plane. When the screen lit up, she had three voicemail notifications.
She turned down the covers on her bed and flopped back to listen:
Hey, baby. I know you’ve got things to do back in DC, but I wish you were here. Zoe woke up, but she’s not saying much. What she has said doesn’t sound good. Jett needs you to get back soon, or at least call him. Call me first, so I know you’re all right.
Hey, Lady. It’s Lisa. Wanted to touch base and give you the news, which is that there isn’t any. Probably that’s a good thing. Chances are good Ryan’s gone underground, and if he’s smart, he’ll stay that way. Call me when you get in, and we’ll meet up to check out your place. Grab some coffee. See you soon.
Hey, babe. Listen, something’s up with Jett. He’s big-time agitated, and I can only assume it’s got something to do with this case. I’m gettin’ tense myself, given that you should’ve landed by now and I haven’t heard from you. I need to hear something. Call me. Well, call Jet because he needs to talk to you. But me first. Please.
Sherri smiled into the phone. According to Ash, alpha was a position. A role he’d left his pack to avoid rather than have the responsibility of leading a gang of criminal werewolves thrust upon him. If this past month together was anything to go on, alpha was really more of a state of mind. Ash tried to give her free reign, but he didn’t handle it well when he didn’t know her whereabouts.
Then again, it might help if she hadn’t landed in trouble a couple of times since they’d met. She chewed a fingernail, wondering briefly about Zoe and whether or not she could really be responsible for that body. Zoe had tried to shoot her departed mate. This guy Sherri found had been mauled. The methodology didn’t fit. Hopefully that would work in Zoe’s favor.
And here Sherri was, trying to solve problems that weren’t hers again. She sighed and dialed Ash, deciding to talk him down from his ledge before she went to take a shower.
“Hey, there you are. Everything all right?” He answered the phone with his customary low rumble, but the note of concern carried through.
She pulled at a strand of her own hair. “I’m in one piece. The trip has been one fiasco after another, so my aversion to travel is firmly in place.”
“I should have gone with you.”
“You’re sweet, but I’ll survive.” A fierce yawn forced her mouth open wide. “I’ve got a junior suite with a tub big enough to drown a wildebeest, and the front desk is ordering up tapas and a glass of wine. I’m not going over to survey the condo damage until I relax in the bath and put some food in my stomach.”
“Not going to the hotel bar, eh?
Thinking of the night they met flushed her body with heat. One hotel bar, two tumblers of Black Label. “Well the last time I went to a hotel bar for a glass of wine, I ended up spending the night with this sexy, mysterious werewolf. Life has been quite the rollercoaster since then. I think it’s best I stay out of hotel bars.”
“Hmm. Wise.” Rustling noises came from Ash’s end of the phone. “So you’re about to take a bath? Does that mean you’ve taken off your clothes?”
Reflexively, Sherri pulled the bed sheet over herself, but she smiled at his suggestive growl. “I’m not sure the hospital is an appropriate place to play the ‘what are you wearing?’ game.”
“Actually, I came home to change. They took Zoe up for more tests. Jett and I have been taking turns pacing the halls. I’m keyed-up from the approaching full moon, and it was hard not having you here last night. Real hard.”
Sherri scrunched her nose at the rush of breath that came through the phone. “Are you... touching yourself over there?”
He chuckled, deep and low. Maybe it was the chilly air in the room that made her nipples tighten, but that laugh of Ash’s came with magical, panty-melting powers. Since her panties were already off, she supposed her nipples were a logical next place for it to launch an attack.
“C’mon, Sherri,” he murmured. “You’re naked. I’m naked. You said you needed to relax.”
“I’ve got wine coming.” Even as she whispered the words, her hand crept across the bed, sliding onto the skin of her stomach.
“Aren’t I better than wine?” He hummed as if he needed confirmation. “When I put my tongue on you, and my fingers inside you? When I make you scream the way you say no man ever has... would you rather be kicking back with a glass of Copa del Vino?”
Her hand slid lower. “No-o-o.”
“Because I do, don’t I? I touch you in ways no other man has.”
“You love hearing that, don’t you?”
“I love knowing it’s true. That I please you.”
“It is true.”
“Like the day after we met,” he continued. “When I made you come up against the door in my office, wearing nothing but those black high heels. Or like yesterday when I had you on all fours and you screamed my name when you came.”
Her breath hitched, the memories suffusing her body with tingly warmth. Suddenly feeling desperate and aroused, she circled her clit with frantic fingers. “I remember,” she panted.
“Sherri. Are you touching yourself?”
She didn’t answer at first. Her breathing quickened. Her belly rose and fell with the effort. Too lost in sensation to speak.
“Sherri?”
“Yes?” The syllable rushed out of her.
“If I were there with you, what would you have me doing?”
“Your mouth...” Her fingers worked faster, making it a challenge to both hold the phone and breathe.
“You’d let me put my tongue on that gorgeous skin of yours? Between your legs?”
Sherri’s hips shot off the bed. “God. Yes. That feels so good.” She could imagine the heat of his tongue, his hands on her hips and the scrape of his stubble on her thighs. Sparks fired beneath her fingers. “Ash, I’m...”
Too close to finishing to form a complete sentence, apparently.
“Would you let me be inside you?”
“Yes.”
“You’d let me do things no one else has?”
“Yes.” God, how many times had she already?
On the other end of the phone, raspy sucks and blows told her that Ash, too, struggled for composure. Her head dropped back on the pillow, her eyes squeezed shut so she could see his face in her mind, the way his jaw tightened and his eyes warmed when they made love.
“Are you touching yourself, Sherri?”
“Yes-s-s.” She really hoped he didn’t ask anything that required a different answer. She couldn’t promise to give one.
“I wish I could be there. I want to be inside you, fucking you. Making love to you. I want to feel your sweet, soft skin against me. I want to see you get damp and sweaty. I want to see your face when you come.”
Sherri gasped. The beginnings of her orgasm spread out under her fingers, running through her like fire in her blood stream.
“Are you going to come, baby?”
“God. Y—” The rest was an unintelligible mass of moans and harsh breath as she rode out her pleasure and listened to the grunts and groans of Ash riding out his.
For what seemed like an eternity she couldn’t do anything except lay there and catch her breath.
“So,” Ash mumbled through the phone after a long silence. “It was good for you?”
Sherri chuckled. “You’re so full of yourself, aren’t you?” But she laughed. “I swear, you weren’t even here and I won’t feel my knees for a day.”
“Then I have reason to be full of myself, don’t I?” He sounded like he was smiling. “And if you can’t feel your knees, then I’ve relaxed you, so I’ve done my job.”
A knock sounded on the outer room door.
“A little too well, I’m afraid.” Sherri groaned and pushed herself off the bed. “Now room service is here with my food and I have to drag myself off the bed, all boneless and fucked-out to answer the door.”
Ash’s possessive growl came through the phone.
“Relax.” She reached into the closet. “I’m putting on one of the room’s complimentary terrycloth robes. They’re one-size fits all and about as sexy as a burlap sack.”
“On you, anything would be sexy.”
She rolled her eyes, but had to smile as she slipped into the robe. “You’ve got a biased opinion, but I’m serious.”
“You’ve got me wishing I’d come with you again.”
“You said yourself you’re emotional because of the full moon. I’m telling you— My God. Ryan?” Sherri dropped the phone.
The man at the door was not from room service.
“Hiya, Sher.” Her ex, Ryan, stood hunched over in nondescript khakis and a pale blue polo shirt with a baseball cap pulled down over his head. “Could I please come in?”
***
Ash nearly crushed the phone in his hand. “Sherri!” He barked her name, raging against the need to barrel in and stop something he couldn’t even touch. “Tell me you did not say that fucker’s name. You did not open the door to the son of a bitch who betrayed you, cost you your job, and went to prison for all of it. Tell me he is not standing in your hotel room right now because I will be on the next plane out of here, and I will tear him into so many pieces the FBI won’t be able to find them.”
He lowered his tone and commanded his breath to even out. Still, his nostrils flared and his lip lifted with the urge to bare his fangs at an enemy who could not see him.
For a minute Ash wasn’t sure she would answer, and the room spun so fast he thought he’d nosedive into the carpet. After some clattering and muffled sounds and a few key beeps, a heavy sigh puffed in his left ear.
“He’s not... in my hotel room,” Sherri replied to Ash’s rant. Too slowly, but she replied.
“What aren’t you saying?” Tension made joints in his neck and hips pop. Some primal instinct urged his body to shift to fight off a threat that was too far away.
“He’s in the doorway.”
“Call the cops. You pull your gun on that motherfucker right fucking now, and you keep it on him until they get there. I’m coming to find you.” He paced with jerky movements, searching for the place where he’d cast his jeans aside.
“Ash. Stop.”
There. He grabbed them from under the bed and jammed one leg in, snarling when his foot caught. “Know what? I’ll call. I don’t want you to have to hang up the phone yet. I’ll call here on the house phone and you can stay—”
“Ash.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m not with the bureau anymore. I don’t travel with a gun.”
Ash grabbed his forehead. She didn’t take her gun. She didn’t fucking take her gun. “So slam the goddamned door in his face. After what that dicknuckle did to you, it’s better than he deserves.”
“Ash, let me handle this.”
He could hear the voice of Ryan—that fucker—coming through the phone. “...listen to me... you’d understand. Please. I need your help.”
Sherri released a heavy breath into the phone. “Oh, God. Ryan, you’re bleeding. What happened?” Another breath. “Jesus— just— get in here.”
Fuck. What the fuck was she doing? “Sherri. For Fuck’s sake, don’t let him in.”
“Ash. Trust me to handle this.” Thumping noises over the phone. Her hotel room door clicking closed.
Ash tried to picture Sherri’s hotel room, with sheets rumpled from their sexy phone call. Her criminal fucker of an ex sitting down on that bed. He swore the blood in his veins could catch fire. “Sherri, you have no idea—”
“I do, Ash. I do know. I spent two years with this guy, and he may have done a lot of shitty things, but I do know him. I’ll be okay. Let. Me. Handle. This.” Shit, her harsh words cut him.
And then the line went dead.
Jesus. Pain ripped through him as his body twisted and cracked. Rage and the coming full moon pulled out his were side. Even if there was nobody in front of him to fight, he couldn’t stop.
He screamed, and gave in to the agony.