Trust the Moon Read online

  “Now we can have fun.” Smiling, she pulled at his covered cock until he hovered over her again. Wrapping her legs around his hips, she guided him back down until the tip pressed into her channel. They moved at the same time—her muscles tensing as she drew him closer, his muscles hardening as he pushed forward. Their subsequent sighs as he sheathed himself in her heat matched too. “Oh, yeah. Probably a third date too.”

  Dylan smiled before ducking his head, his lips skimming the column of her throat. He took her hand, his fingers entwining with hers as he held her to the mattress. The hair on his chest was rough as it scraped across her breasts, and even though she craved a hard, driving rhythm, he chose to move his hips in a maddeningly slow rhythm. Every time he rocked forward, it stoked the fire in her blood until she smoldered.

  The only way not to force his rhythm was to distract herself elsewhere. Gena tilted her head, seeking out his lips, and got lost in Dylan’s supple mouth, in the deep, penetrating kisses she’d dreamed of more than once since the last time they’d seen each other. In his kisses, she didn’t care about breathing, or going faster, or anything but the touch of his tongue to hers, the spicy heat of his mouth, the small sounds he always made when she nibbled at his lower lip. Those were moments where nothing else mattered at all. She might even have foregone actual fucking if he would just kiss her like that for eternity.

  A harder stroke drove the base of his cock into her clit. Sparks showered behind her eyes and into her flesh.

  Or maybe not.

  Dylan slid his arm under her shoulders, lifting her partly off the bed to hold her against his chest. The angle prompted a new rhythm, though it was still nothing like their first night in the stream. When they broke apart to breathe, Dylan’s mouth didn’t stop moving. He collected the fine drops of sweat on her throat and the ridge of her shoulder. Each thrust forward brought fresh contact to her clit, and her second orgasm began to build, pushing everything else out of her mind.

  She clung to him, partly because she feared flying apart if she didn’t, partly because it felt like the only thing she could do. Power radiated from his pores, tightly contained in his smooth, even strokes. Behind the power, though, was the same sweetness that had pervaded his earlier attentions. Every caress felt like worship, every touch of his lips or fingertips another devotion. His declaration about making love to her had not been a lie or an exaggeration, but Gena shoved aside the realization as it formed.

  Here. Now. Him. Her. That was what she’d focus on. That was all that mattered.

  Her heels dug into his ass, her cries almost continuous as he quickened his pace. She teetered on the verge of her climax for an eternity. Sweat coated their skin, and in that moment, with this man, Gena was glad they didn’t have pelts diminishing the sensations.

  “Gena…”

  She couldn’t tell if her name was a plea or a warning, but she did feel his body tensing. She held him closer, encouraging him to let go of that final thread of self-control he still held. He whimpered her name again, his breath catching in his chest, and he pressed his lips to hers. Their tongues entwined as he drove into her body a final time, and she caught his scream in her mouth, swallowing it as his cock jerked against her walls.

  Was that what drove her over the edge? Lying entwined with him afterward, Gena didn’t know. It could’ve been that last thrust, or the way his body trembled atop hers, or the sound of her name when he just couldn’t restrain himself any longer. She felt that if she could dissect it, she could understand it, because right now, with her arms tight around him, their mouths slowing to languorous sweeps, she didn’t have a clue. About any of it, if she was honest with herself.

  Dylan kept her close, like he couldn’t stand the thought of losing even an inch of contact. “How was that? Worth coming into town for?”

  She caressed the line of his brow, collecting the beads of sweat like talismans. She should lie. She should run him off, before more of her world crumbled around her. Except she had a funny feeling that would only make him try harder. He had sought her out, after all.

  And besides…she didn’t want to. She didn’t want the hopeful gleam in his eyes to fade. She wanted to hold onto this moment so she could replicate it in her dreams for months to come.

  “Yeah.” She touched his lips with her fingertips first, then kissed him softly. “You were.”

  Chapter Five

  Dylan went to work on Monday, but he wasn’t really there. Not that his position as assistant manager at PCGlobe required his undivided attention, but he could barely stay focused on the few daily tasks he did have. Twenty-four hours after Gena had flown away, flapping her powerful wings around his bedroom and out the window, and he was still thinking about her. Not just thinking about her. Absorbed in her. His bed still smelled of her, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to change the sheets. She had left her clothes in his room, and he hadn’t given into the impulse to fondle them—or shift and smell them—but he was still aware of each garment. Each piece of clothing that didn’t belong there.

  He wanted to go to her again, but he knew he couldn’t do that. He had already gone begging for an audience and requesting a date. If anything more happened—even if she just wanted her clothes back—it had to be because she wanted something more to happen. Only, he couldn’t even begin to guess at the chances of that. She had promised him a second date. She had even gone so far as promising a third date. But that didn’t exactly mean she’d be knocking on his door anytime soon.

  The hours at work dragged by. They crawled. They slithered on slimy, dirty stomachs. It was worse when he had to help customers and pretend that he cared whether they got a new laptop or a new desktop. If there was a job less glamorous than assistant manager of a tiny computer shop, Dylan didn’t know what it was. Did Gena know that he was just an assistant manager of PCGlobe? Had he mentioned that? Did she care? It didn’t seem like something she should care about, but Dylan couldn’t read her mind and he was second-guessing everything.

  It would help if he knew more about her. But as much as he had fished for information, he felt like he didn’t know anything about her at all. He didn’t know anything about her family. He didn’t know why she viewed the people of Delta with so much suspicion. Shifters were like an extended family. They took care of each other. They took care of their community. He found it very difficult to believe that anybody could have done anything to hurt her directly. But she clearly believed that if she stuck around long enough, somebody would cause her harm. How much of that was because somebody had indeed hurt her and how much was because she had spent so much time relying on herself?

  He didn’t even know what he wanted from her. A second date would be enough of a start. But at the bottom of things, when he was being completely honest with himself, he didn’t want her to be so far away from him. He didn’t want her to be inaccessible, hiding in the desert, alone. He didn’t want to lie awake at night aching for her. But if he was still going to be honest with himself, he couldn’t really expect any more than that. How could he get her to come back to Delta if he didn’t even understand why she was keeping away?

  At lunch, he didn’t stick around to eat his sandwich and chips. He wasn’t hungry, and he thought that had something to do with Gena too. Instead of worrying about food, he drove directly to his parents’ home. They had driven home from the airport in Salt Lake City early that morning, and he wanted to give them a chance to rest and sleep, but he knew his father would have the answers he needed.

  His father’s grandfather came to Delta as an old man, encouraging his children to follow him once he had a home there. Only one of them did, and that had been Dylan’s grandfather. He had built a home, married a local girl, and proceeded to multiply with his wife. Dylan had eleven aunts and uncles, and more first and second cousins than he could count. It was like having eyes and ears all over Delta. The entire Peterson clan had their system of gossip down to a science. If there was information to be had, his father would have it.


  To his surprise, he found his father in his front yard, watering the flowers growing along the edge of the lawn. A few weeks later and he would be at the high school as the assistant principal. That was the other reason Dylan sought him out. Gena had attended his school for almost two years before leaving town. With his steel-trap mind, he was likely to remember her.

  As Dylan headed up the driveway, Cory lifted his head, shielding his eyes against the sun to peer at who was approaching. His father was still a young man of forty-five and he was sporting a healthy, Hawaiian tan. He smiled broadly when he saw Dylan and tossed the hose aside.

  “Well, there’s my wayward son.” He dragged a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped at the sweat on his brow. “Heard you had quite a blowout.”

  “From who? You’ve only been home for a few hours.”

  “I have my sources?”

  “Aunt Jackie?”

  “How’d you guess that so fast?”

  “Because I’m pretty sure she sends you daily emails about what I’m up to and my whereabouts.”

  “Nah.” Cory put his arm around Dylan’s shoulders and pulled him close. “We told her that every two days would suffice.”

  “Only every two days? I’m proud of you, Dad.” Dylan returned the embrace before stepping back. “That’s almost reasonable.”

  “Admit it. You’ve missed your mother calling you daily.”

  Dylan grinned. “Missed is one word for it.” His smile faded. “Did Aunt Jackie mention that I’ve been seen around town with a new friend?”

  “She might have. Anybody you want to talk about?”

  “Gena Pelletier.”

  Cory’s brows shot up. “Well, Gena’s definitely one to make things interesting.”

  “You’re not surprised she just sort of showed up out of nowhere?”

  “It’s not exactly nowhere.” He waved towards the edge of town. “She just doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “It seemed like out of nowhere to me. I’m used to people coming to Delta for the community, not fleeing the town because they don’t trust the community.”

  “Gena’s not exactly most people, though. Never was. And after what happened to her father…”

  “What happened to her father?”

  Cory moved towards the front door, gesturing to Dylan to follow. “How ’bout we take this inside where it’s cooler? I could use some iced tea about now anyway.”

  Dylan nodded and followed the older man into his house. Which wasn’t actually much cooler, but his throat felt a little dry and the iced tea was welcome. He perched on a stool at the kitchen and watched Cory fill two tall glasses and top them with lemon wedges.

  “Thanks.” Dylan took a deep swallow from his glass and smacked his lips with satisfaction. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Asleep. She didn’t even make it to the bed before she passed out.”

  “She brought me back some souvenirs, didn’t she?”

  “She did. And about a thousand pictures that she wants you to put on disc for her.”

  “That’s pretty much what I expected. We could just show her how to work the digital camera.”

  “But then she wouldn’t have an excuse to lure her son home and feed him.” Cory set his glass aside and leaned against the counter. “So do you know anything at all about what happened to Hugh Pelletier?”

  “Not much. Just that he died, and when he did, he left Gena alone. She was the last one in the family. Nobody really seemed eager to give me the details about what happened.”

  Cory sighed. “That’s because it wasn’t exactly our finest hour.”

  “But I honestly don’t remember much about it at all. I mean, I’m sure I must have heard something, but I guess I was more interested in the X-Men or something.”

  “Well, there’s that. But we kept a lot of it as private as we could. The last thing we wanted was to create some sort of panic.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Hugh didn’t just die. He was murdered. Not here in town. They found his body out by the highway. The police concluded that he’d stopped to give someone a hand, only it was all a con. They shot him in the back of the head and stripped him down. They were never caught. The police never even had any suspects. It was all so… Hugh was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Dylan frowned, as another piece fell into place. “Did Gena witness this? Was she there?”

  “She was in the car, apparently. Not that any of us knew that then. We didn’t have any reason at all to think she’d be out with Hugh in the middle of the night.”

  Dylan’s eyes widened. “You didn’t know that then? How could you not know that? What happened to her?”

  “Because she was fifteen. She had her own life, and she wasn’t shy about letting everybody know. We didn’t know Hugh was taking her out to the desert so they could shift. Not to speak ill of the dead, but Hugh was a really strange guy. He was a few years older than me, but we both played football in high school, and he was pretty active in Gena’s schooling. I had never seen him shift, but I didn’t realize until later that nobody had ever seen him shift because he always went out to the desert. If I had known…” Cory took a deep breath. “It killed me, Dylan. Not knowing where one of my kids was. Not seeing her every day at school.”

  Dylan felt sick. The thought of Gena witnessing something so horrible sent hot bile to the back of his throat. No wonder she didn’t seem keen to talk about her past. If he were in her shoes, he wouldn’t bring it up either.

  “When did she come back?” Dylan asked softly. “How long did she hide?”

  “Almost a month.” Sighing, Cory shook his head. “The whole town went nuts. We thought she’d been kidnapped. Remember how everyone was when Sara Vail went missing? Gena wasn’t even an adult yet. People went a little crazy trying to find her. If they could shoot Hugh, what would they do to a pretty thing like Gena? When she came back to town, some people didn’t really believe she was okay, even though they saw it with their own eyes.”

  “I don’t understand. She came back, everybody saw she was safe…why didn’t the community close ranks around her? Why is she still out there, wandering around alone, acting like nobody can be trusted?” For that matter, why hadn’t Cory brought her into the Peterson home? It wouldn’t have been the only instance of Cory providing shelter for one of his students.

  For the first time since starting his story, Cory’s gaze slid sideways. “The community did try to help her. Most of them, anyway. But there were a few…” He gulped down the rest of the tea, plucking the lemon off the rim to suck it as he clearly contemplated his words. “Some people were mad at Gena when she came back.” He spat the word. Cory was the most laid-back guy Dylan had ever known, but the tension in his shoulders and the intensity in his gaze told Dylan how the memory affected him. “We’d gone to a lot of expense to try and find her, taken a lot of hell from the state authorities when they backed off the case, and the whole time, she’d been hiding out in the desert. Not dead. Not raped. Not even scratched.”

  “There were a few people mad at her? For being afraid? For hiding?” He set the glass aside, afraid he would either drop it or throw it at the wall. “She was a child.”

  “I know. But when people reached out to her, she shied away. I couldn’t even get her to talk to me, and she did a lot of blaming of her own when she came back.”

  “Do you know what was said to her? Wait…no, it doesn’t matter what they said.” All that really mattered was what she heard. What she felt. And apparently she felt that she couldn’t trust anybody but herself. “I’ve been trying to talk her into coming back here. Now knowing this…I don’t think it’s going to work.”

  Cory regarded him carefully. “What do you mean, you’ve been trying to talk her into coming home? You’ve seen her again since your party?”

  “A few times. I went to look for her and I’ve spent some time with her.” Dylan appreciated that Cory was being so open to him about Ge
na’s history, but he had no intention of giving his father the details of his love life. “She needs a friend, I think.”

  “Well, you’re right there. She’s a lot smarter than some people give her credit for. She just never got a break.”

  “Oh, I’d never give her less credit than she deserves. I don’t know anybody like her.”

  Cory sucked some more on the lemon before tossing it into his empty glass. “I’ll admit, I’m a little surprised you’ve seen her more than once. That’s not Gena’s style.”

  “I don’t know.” Dylan shrugged. “Maybe she likes me. I’m hoping she’ll see me again.”

  “Then don’t make the same mistakes we did. We should’ve looked harder for her. We should have fought for her.”

  “So I have to show her that I actually care what happens to her?” The words were tinged with more than a little sarcasm, and he regretted taking that tone with his dad, but he couldn’t help it.

  “The girl should believe someone cares.” Cory didn’t even seem to notice the edge in Dylan’s voice. “I’m not sure you can convince her to come home, but I think it’s worth it to try.”

  “I think it’s worth a try too. But I…” Dylan sighed. “I don’t know how. Not if she doesn’t think there’s anything here for her. She also thinks, or seems to think, that we’re all just fooling ourselves, living like this.” He gestured around him. “That we’d be happier as animals.”

  “That’s because she’s happier as an animal. She needs to be reminded that being human’s not so bad, either.”

  “I’m trying.” Dylan didn’t know if he was succeeding. He didn’t know if he even could. He had hoped that learning more from his dad would boost his confidence and optimism in that regard, but if anything, things seemed even worse now. “What was she like when she was younger? Before all this happened?”