The Walls of Jericho

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“I want to know what you learn about oracles,” I tell Rebecca, closing the book she gave me on my lap. “As soon as you learn it. And what’s on the USB drive?”

“What USB drive?”

That earns her a withering glare. “The one right there.” I point to the location of the hidden drive and let a few sparks snap at the end of my finger. “You can tell me, or I can download and read it myself. Up to you.”

“It’s a genealogy tree,” she admits. “I was trying to find the lost dragon bloodline.”

“Hmm.” I eye her, hoping to force her confession of anything else she may be hiding, but I’m already sort of resolved to come back down here tomorrow morning and copy the thing, just to be sure. “I want to see what you’ve found.”

“I can’t print it,” she shakes her head. “Damien monitors computer traffic on the Avernus servers.”

“Then it looks like you’ll be going back into town.” Rising, I hand her the book, then zap the handle-less door so it swings open. “I want a copy by morning.”

The noxious smell of the garage hits me as soon as the door opens again, and I can hardly wait to get out of here. Realizing how much I’ve disliked being trapped in that little room underground, even for the brief period we were talking, I skip the elevator and opt to walk up the outdoor stairs from the garage up to the house level.

Besides the awesome windows and the pool, I absolutely love Tassler house for the gorgeous landscaping. So much so that I scarcely notice I’ve reached the front door because I’m enjoying all the brightly colored flowers in the sun on the walk.

It’s late enough now that I’ve probably missed Channing’s call. After I check on Mr. Adriani and find him sleeping in one of the cinema loungers, I break out a frozen container of Channing’s homemade pasta sauce and plan we’ll be having spaghetti for dinner.

All of it is just as well, since I haven’t decided what, if anything, I want to address with Channing about Rebecca. Nor have I decided how I want to bring up his version of the little history lesson I just got from her. I’m particularly curious if the name ‘Jillian’ comes up again.

By the time I get outside to collect my phone and the glass of watered-down iced tea I left with my towel over the lounger by the pool, it’s late afternoon. I’m sure it’s much later in Dublin, though I don’t bother trying to calculate exactly how late. There’s a missed call and a message from Channing, so taking my things upstairs to the bedroom, I call him back.

He picks up on the first ring. “Hey babydoll. Where’ve you been?”

“I went swimming this morning and accidentally left my phone out by the pool. After lunch, I was talking to Rebecca.” Well, technically, neither of those are lies.

“Rebecca talks to peons like us?”

“I know, right?” I laugh. “Actually, she’s all kinds of paleontology crazy, and once I got her started, I couldn’t get her to shut up.”

“What did you want to know about paleontology?”

Recognizing a possible conversational segway, I take advantage. “Mostly I was trying to get her to open up—she’s God-awful boring, you know. By the time we were done, we’d come around to the dragon topic, and how this war got started.”

There’s a long silence at the other end of the line. I glance at the phone to make sure the call hasn’t dropped, then press it to my ear again. “Channing?”

“Let me call you right back.”

“Um. Okay. Everything alright?”

“Yeah. I want to FaceTime. I’ll call you right back.” Immediately after, the line goes dead.

Huh. Weird. Seems like I might’ve touched a nerve. I don’t have any time to ponder that though, because immediately, the phone rings again. This time, the call is on FaceTime.

“Hey,” I answer as the video connects, then I’m absolutely stunned. I expected this video chat to be a novelty, contributing nothing of any significant value to the conversation.

Damn, was I ever wrong.

As with any phone, the screen being small doesn’t seem like it will add much, but as soon as Channing’s smiling face appears and his voice comes through the speaker so clear it’s as if he’s in the room with me, I revise my opinion. This isn’t some blurred-out mangled jumble of pixels. The image quality is incredible.

“Hey,” he answers, then I see his gorgeous blue eyes skimming the background behind me. He glances down, as if at a watch. “You’re in the bedroom?”

My God. He looks touchable, the picture is so good. Rolling over on my belly, I prop the phone against the headboard. Then I prop myself up on my elbows so I can see it. “Yeah. Is that a problem?”

He arches his scarred brow and one side of his mouth quirks up in a lazy grin. “Not in the least.” The background blurs where he is, and I realize after a few seconds that he’s propping himself against the headboard to have this conversation.

FaceTime has just subtly altered this entire interaction. I can already tell, we're totally headed to Naughtytown.

“Why’d you freak out about Rebecca and me talking and my werewolf history lesson?”

“Because she likes to pretend that’s something that it’s not.” He peers at me, and I can see the subtle movement of his sharp eyes. “Is that my t-shirt?”

Internally, I can’t help my laugh. I remember how this conversation went down the last time, and I can see from the sly expression on his face that Channing does too. I shift on my elbows, so he can see for himself that it is. “You know that your answer to my question wasn’t really an answer. What’s Rebecca pretending? You answer that, and I’ll answer yours.”

That scarred brow twitches, and I notice the second thing incredible about FaceTime. Since the screen is so small, both it and the camera are essentially in the same place. We’re actually looking at each other directly—not like we’re looking at some odd point one direction or the other in the distance like with computer video chat. We’re literally gazing into each other’s eyes. The level of intimacy is astonishingly erotic.

“I’ll give you a better answer, if you take my shirt off.”

My eyes narrow, locking on his, seeking, and finding, the glimmer of mischievous agitation that I’m expecting. “You give me a better answer and we both take our shirts off.”

His megawatt smile is enough to start my heart pounding. “Deal. The war between dragons and werewolves has been going on for millennia. At some point, the dragons were engaged in a civil war. Being dragons, they didn’t give a crap about collateral damages, which got a lot of humans and werewolves killed. As it happened, the werewolves came out on top of that and managed to capture all the dragon leaders. They were banished in exchange for their lives. Hang on.”

He props the phone on the bedside table, facing it so I can see. Then he tucks his fingers in the collar of his t-shirt and tugs it over his head. The view of those heavenly abs of his is like a gut punch. It takes my breath away.

Grinning like a maniac, Channing picks the phone up again. “Where was I?”

“Um.” I can still see his smooth chest and the bumpy ridges at the top of his abs and they’re mind-erasing. “Um, exiled the dragons.”

“Oh, right.” The soft white-blue whorls are swirling in his blue eyes when he meets mine again. “Obviously if we’re fighting a dragon again, they didn’t uphold their end of the bargain. Now you take off my shirt.”

“Ah, no, loverboy. That’s the same thing she told me. So what’s she pretending about?”

“Damn.” He looks genuinely disappointed and sighs heavily. “Rebecca thinks this started about four or five hundred years ago, when a dragon—this dragon we’re hunting, in fact—showed up and demanded the Alpha’s mate of Avernus as his own. She’s got some stupid idea in her head that the werewolves were betrayed to the dragon by another werewolf.”

Sounds an awful lot like Rebecca’s two bloodlines bit. I sit up carefully, so not to tip the phone.

When you’re stripping for yourself, it’s no big deal. The whole ordeal is about efficiency. When a man like Channing is watching, with the kind of single-minded interest that he is, taking off your clothes becomes a whole other animal.

I don’t consider myself particularly seductive in any capacity but entertaining the half-lidded arousal in his eyes over FaceTime doesn’t require much seduction. Just languid movements that burn moments. So I arch my back. And I cross my arms and reach for the hem of his t-shirt. Then I lift the soft cotton over my head, agonizingly slow, and leave it dangling behind me for a moment before I drop it.

“Jesus. You’re not wearing a bra.” Over the small video screen, Channing’s eyes are absolutely blazing.

Uncrossing my legs, I tuck them underneath me and lift into a kneel. His gaze is positively predatory as he tracks my hands making a tantalizing thirty second journey down my abdomen, then my thumbs hooking in the waistband of my yoga pants. “Who was the betraying werewolf?”

“Uh—according to Rebecca, uh—the dragon’s human diviner,” he stutters, and I can see his chest rising and falling a little faster. His scarred brow flicks unconsciously as I inch the waistband down.

“Why’s a dragon need a diviner?”

He exhales through pursed lips. “Jericho—.”

“Hmm, shame.” I start to draw my yoga pants back up.

“Ah! No! No! I’m thinking, okay!?” he says in a rush. “It gets a little difficult when you’ve routed all the blood out of my brain. For some reason, the dragons use a diviner to decide their mates for them. To my knowledge, no one knows why.”

Wiggling my hips as I go, I work my yoga pants over my panties, making sure to leave those in place. It’s not particularly graceful, but I get on hands and knees to kick the pants the rest of the way off.

Still, it draws a rough groan out of him, then a husky whisper. “God, I love those panties.”

“Your turn.”

There’s nothing graceful or seductive about his mad scramble to get out of his jeans. What there is is an obvious bulge in the front of his boxer briefs that sets a dark coiling ache twisting between my thighs. Naturally, he detects it the instant he settles back in place.

“That diviner have a n-name?” I ask, my voice hitching when he strokes his hand over the gigantic bulge in his cotton briefs. I slip my fingers under the edges of my panties on either side. 

“No,” he orders, and I can practically feel the excited hum of his body. “Leave them on. Kneel back on your heels, like you were. Mmmm, yeah.” His tongue makes a purely seductive pass over his bottom lip. “The diviner’s name was Jillian. But she wasn’t a werewolf. We keep meticulous records. We can trace lines thousands of years. There’s no record of her. Now,” he purrs, his eyes aglow, “I want to watch you get yourself off.”

I chuckle. “Are you going to do it too? Oh,” I gasp as he lifts the waistband of his briefs over his engorged member so I can see, then strokes it with one hand from the base to the head. His wolf teeth elongate, protruding from his fine lips.

“Do it, Jericho.”

The words ring with his alpha voice, but he needn’t have bothered. Nothing says ‘I wish you were here’ quite like a man getting lost in his own feverish desire, stroking himself with heated urgency as he’s staring at you. It’s a potent aphrodisiac.

Channing’s rasping groan rises with my whispering moan as my slender fingers glide under the see-through lace of my panties. I shift my knees further apart, then shiver at my own touch and the heated wetness that coats my fingers.

“Look at me, Jericho,” he growls. “Eyes on me, babydoll. All the way.”

He bucks into his hand as my eyes meet his. It’s intoxicating to realize I might have that kind of power over someone as powerful as him, even thousands of miles away. Working my fingers through my own tender flesh, I shiver again, spreading my slick over the tiny, sensitized button of pleasure tucked inside my wet petals. Even that slight touch makes my abdominal muscles clench at the scorching heat that races over me.

Matching the tempo of his hand working up and down his stiff length, I stimulate myself. My skin prickles with gooseflesh as I seek my own pleasure and the exquisite circles I make with my fingertips become more eager.

The pebbled tips of my breasts between the fingers of my free hand send a stinging pleasure spiking into my brain and set my core ablaze. I shudder again, this time more violently.

On my phone’s screen, Channing is pumping at himself, harder and faster, driving his desire up with mine. A tiny muscle ticks in his clenched jaw and I see his glorious abs contract. Unable to resist, I let my hand dip low, slipping a finger into my heated softness and feeling the warm, silky slickness drench my fingers.

“Channing,” I gasp.

He gives a low growl. “Not yet, babydoll. A little longer.” His efforts concentrate at the tip of his enormous member, pumping faster.

Another gasping moan escapes me as my fingers rub impatiently, my hips arching to my hand. Round and round. Faster. Faster. So close. So close. “Ah! Channing!” I pant. “No more.” A hot flush spreads over my skin, tingling and burning in a complex concoction of self-consciousness and eagerness.

Caught up in the euphoric rush of intensifying pleasure, I brutally massage the swollen bud between my slick thighs. Channing’s blue eyes are a whirlpool of white-blue hunger locked on mine. As I buck violently and tremble with the crashing wave of my climax rolling over me, he bites back a harsh groan and his hot seed spurts over his hand.

Our rough pants fill the silence between us as our tensed bodies relax into this odd afterglow. I collapse to one side, exhausted, and reach for the phone so I can still see him.

“Jesus, Jericho,” he pants. “You are so damn sexy. I want to get back on a plane right now.”

I giggle at his shallowness, even knowing his Alpha obligations will keep him there until the job is done. “I love you.”

“I love you, babydoll. So much.”