LickingHerWounds Read Online Free

be…
     
    When she had located the survivors they had been too
frightened and shaken to care about her at all, despite their frustration and
rage over being unable to secure their meal. She had, as always, caught a
number of rodents and ground squirrels to slake their hunger, and had been
banished from their den to find a warm bed and her own sustenance for the
night.
    But when light had come and she had no luck hunting for
small game to feed the healing males, they hadn’t been nearly so lenient,
biting her repeatedly until she was nothing but a bloody mass of cuts and
bruises. They’d warned her that she must pull her own weight within the pack if
she expected them to tolerate her presence. They had called her worthless.
Again.
    The pack had managed to bring down an old mule deer without
her help and had sent her off to hunt for small creatures to fill her own
aching gut. As she had dug into a rabbit hole that rendered no hare, she had
come across the spoor of the fascinating golden shifter. And with barely
contained excitement, she had followed it to its end.
    She had lain hidden in the thick brush inside a copse of
trees and watched as the big male who had braved the pack to save a human cub
seemed to be playing joyfully with two small males. She’d assumed from their
odd scent that they were leopard cubs, but unlike Lykos cubs these seemed to
remain in man form when young. She had never once seen them shift into their
cat form. Odd. They would be better able to defend themselves in their cat
form, wouldn’t they?
    So many new things she was learning…
    She had returned to watch day after day, marveling at the
way these big cats treated their young. She had watched the big dark one as
well as the small female playing happily with the young ones, and she had often
wished that she could experience such joy. Deep inside, seeing these things
made her feel lonely…as if she were missing some elusive part of herself. But
she was especially drawn to the golden shifter…for many reasons.
    Especially after she had come into the copse one afternoon
and found the golden male lying with the small female in a shady shelter of
brush just beyond her hiding place. She had realized that in his human form,
the male aroused feelings deep inside that she had never felt before.
     
    She already knew from covertly watching the alpha male
and female of her pack that breeding in human form was by far preferred by the
members of the pack. But her pack alpha didn’t look a thing like this male. And
she didn’t feel any desire to experience Jock’s rutting. For it seemed to be
only that.
    The cats liked to play while mating…and that knowledge
made her shiver.
    The sounds that the small female made as the big shifter
rode her made her sex grow wet and twitch, despite the fact that, as an omega,
she would never be breeding material. And the female was acting as if their
joining gave her exquisite pleasure, despite the disparity in their sizes.
There was no biting or growling. There were sounds, to be sure, but sounds of
pleasure and passion, if she were any judge.
    She found a quiet spot and had shifted to her human form,
touching her own body where the male had touched the little female, and was
shocked and surprised that her body in human form was quite enjoyable. She
watched, touching her wet sex with her own hand, until her senses erupted in a
wave of shocking sensation that made her think she had died. She barely kept
from howling.
    Gods…if this is what the female is feeling, it’s no wonder
she begs the male not to stop!
     
    And so she had come back again and again, hoping for another
glimpse of the cats’ mating habits. Unfortunately, she had not seen the
leopards mating since that day. But their entwined bodies and the sounds of
their mating came to her often in her restless dreams, leaving her hot and
shaky when she awoke.
    Last night, after she’d returned from her daily excursion to
spy upon the seductively appealing