Cry Wolf Read Free

gusts buffeted the branches and kicked up forest debris in a circle around them, but none of that was dangerous. The forest was familiar with wind and its destruction, and the leaves were well-worn from the number of times they had been swept up just like this.
    She leaned into his touch, shivering as if cold. Kelly had spent most of her life feeling out of step, closer and closer to exploding from whatever raged inside her. And this man knew what it was.
    “What am I?” she whispered.
    He stroked his thumb over her lower lip and met her gaze. “What big eyes you have,” he said
    His head snapped back. A giant red welt formed along the line of his cheekbone. Kelly gasped. Apologising was as automatic as breathing for her—she had been doing it for so long. David had basically kidnapped her from an alley after stalking her for over a month, but she was the one who was horrified.
    “Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Kelly said. After apologising, her next instinct was to flee, but David caught her wrist before she could. Not that she could have outrun him anyway.
    “Did I say we were done?” David grinned. The whip mark was livid, but it didn’t faze him. “We’re not finished yet, witch.”
    He had named her curse.
    It should have made her scoff, like the idea of ‘werewolf’. Yet what other word—fantastic though it may be—could describe the things she did? Pseudoscience had its terms—telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition. However, in the old days it was called something else—magic. And the ones who used magic were called witches.
    “Is that what I am?” Kelly asked in wonder.
    David tugged her closer, wrapped an arm around her waist and brought her hips against his. She gasped again, but this time it had nothing to do with magic, although branches snapped around her.
    “What did you think you were?” David asked, chuckling. He lifted her arm up and breathed deeply from the place she’d scraped herself from her fall. He licked his lips then pulled her arm around his shoulder.
    “Cursed,” Kelly replied.
    “Some say our kind are cursed, too,” David said. He danced to music only he could hear, danced them around in slow circles as the isolated wind storm around them picked up, yanking at her skirt and hair and tousling David’s hair further. “I don’t listen to them. Weak, jealous meat, all of them. Nothing this alive and powerful could be cursed.”
    “But…” she tried to protest.
    David pressed his lips against hers with soft and delicious tenderness. The storm continued to whirl around her, but she went still, her world narrowing to David’s kiss, his hot tongue slowly but thoroughly claiming her mouth until she clung to him to keep herself standing.
    When he pulled back, she tried to follow him to make the kiss never end.
    “You are a child of the earth and I am a child of the moon,” David murmured. He was so close to her that he didn’t have to raise his voice to be heard over the howling wind. “You can’t control your magic because it’s too big for the human you are. I can make you more powerful. I can give you the earth and skies and everything in between, as well as the strength to harness your magic. If you keep trying to fit yourself into their world, it’s going to tear you apart. I can let you loose. I can make you wild.”
    “That doesn’t sound like control to me.”
    He was undoing her jacket, pulling it down her arms. It dropped to the forest floor.
    “ This doesn’t feel like control,” Kelly said, a little breathless.
    “You got to lose it to find it again,” David said with a feral grin.
    He slipped a hand under her skirt and squeezed her ass. Among the cacophony of leaves and breaking branches came the sound of tearing fabric. Her blouse ripped apart of its own accord—or perhaps from her own force of will. Because I wanted it, Kelly thought with amazement. I wanted it and it happened.
    Her skirt quickly followed the torn shreds of her blouse on the