The Beast Within Read Online Free Page A

back into slumber, nightshirt still bunched up over her breasts.
    He shouldn’t have come here.
    Shouldn’t have made love to her.
    She didn’t think he was real.
    She was living with his brother.
    And now he had the taste and touch and smell of her all over his skin, on his tongue, embedded in his brain, his heart, his soul. The memory of Liv had helped him stay alive, the reality seemed like it might kill him.
    He couldn’t have her. She was no longer his. And she had betrayed him as surely as his brother had.
    Yet he lingered before he pulled the sheet up over her, allowing himself one last touch of his fingers over her full lips. Then he moved off the bed, unable to stay another minute. God, she had felt so good, and he could stay inside her forever.
    But she was no longer his, and his brother had seen and touched and tasted the same places on her body that he had and it made him sick, disgust and anguish overwhelming in their intensity.
    Sebastian shifted and leapt out of the bedroom window. He padded carefully down the metal stairs, then when he hit the ground, he ran. Away from Liv, away from the past, way from the uncertainty of the future, and the temptation to claim her body with his yet again.
    He ran hard, as fast as his four legs would carry him, into the thick lustrous forest behind Scarborough’s house. Once under the cover of the trees, he dodged and weaved, sailing over fallen limbs and hurtling himself through brush. The crisp air felt good on his hot fur and the night around him whistled with an autumn wind and hummed with the presence of insects and nocturnal creatures.
    Such as the wolf.
    He heard the high keening howl immediately to his right and he drew up short, not wanting an encounter.
    But it was too late. He smelled the scent of the other werewolf, and he knew it was doing the same. Before he could make the decision to retreat or confront, there was a werewolf with mottled gray-and-white fur in front of him.
    Nick. His cousin, younger than him by two years.
    Their eyes locked, and Sebastian bared his teeth, ready to battle.
    Yet Nick did the unthinkable and shifted back to man, the expression on his face, as he crouched naked, incredulous. “Sebastian?” he murmured. “You’re alive?”
    It was that incredulity and the trust it took for Nick to risk being human with Sebastian still as wolf, that led him to make his own shift.
    “Obviously, yes, I’m alive. No thanks to you or any of the James clan.”
    While Sebastian was wary, Nick was jubilant. A grin split his face. “Man, I’m so glad to see you!” He clapped Sebastian on the shoulder. “I thought for sure you were a goner, but no worse for the wear, huh?”
    Actually, he felt like a pickup truck with three hundred thousand miles on it, but there was no point in going into all of that. “Yeah, I’m alright. So when you run to Scar and tell him I’m back in town, you make sure he understands I know who put the knife in my shoulder.”
    Nick’s smile fell off his face. “About that…we didn’t know. The rest of us had no idea that’s what Scar was planning, I swear to you. I never would have agreed to that kind of bullshit.”
    Sebastian wanted to believe him. Nick had always been a happy-go-lucky guy and a fairly docile werewolf. He was a follower, not a leader, and had no head for elaborate political scheming. Much like Sebastian had been. “You’re trying to tell me that none of the four of you in the pack knew Scar was going to kill me?”
    “Hell, no, we didn’t know that. We’ve always known Scar was ambitious, but in human form. I never thought that he took the clan so serious. I never thought we were anything more than six guys who got extremely hairy and grew an overbite once a month. A family quirk, nothing more.”
    Studying Nick, Sebastian turned his words around in his head. Damn, he did want to believe him, but he didn’t know who to trust anymore.
    “And by the way, can I just point out that this is