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Slap and Tickle
by
Gax



Disclaimer: All of it belongs to Marvel, with the exception of Cody, Cody's Blue and Bondo Ford Eyesore and her really good stereo, Green Acres (which belongs to someone else, I don't know who), and Coyote, who belongs to us all (though we may sometimes wish he didn't).

Dedicated to the BadGirls a the Swirl (with a special nod to Yaz), Tim (who has been my martial arts consultant guy), Lori (BAAANG), Paul (my Wolverine consultant guy), Shoosh (the love of my life), and to all the readers and reviewers who hounded me to post another chapter. Well, here it isãBecause you demanded it!




There was a knock on the door of the laboratory early the next morning.

"Come in." Hank said absently, transfixed by the display on his monitor.

Ororo padded in softly, bearing a cup of tea and a sandwich on a tray. "Good evening, Henry. I thought you could use something to eat."

He greeted her with a warm smile and relieved her of her burden. "What a pleasant surprise."

"What are you watching?"

The usually voluble Beast was at a loss for words. "Er...um...Just a bit of background research. Nothing of interest." He shifted slightly to interpose himself between his guest and the display.

She peeked around him. Onscreen was a woman in a cowboy suit, peeling off a pair of what appeared to be leather riding chaps with her foot propped on Peter's shoulder. She raised an eyebrow.

"I ah-assure you, it is not what you think." Hank stammered.

"The security video from the strip club?"

"Well, perhaps it is what you think. But I assure you, I am only watching it from a detached, clinical perspective, to gain insight into her abilities."

Ororo's eyes widened ever so slightly as she watched Cody tear her shirt open. "She does seem to be displaying her 'abilities' quite prominently."

"Ha ha." Hank said tartly.

Nonetheless, both kept watching. After the routine was over, Hank fast-forwarded to the beginning of the brawl. The camera being fixed, Cody and the X-Men flitted in and out of the frame. "The fight accelerated very quickly." Ororo pointed to the screen, where Cody was being carried out of view by a very large biker.

"So I noticed. The atmosphere in the bar seems to have undergone a most rapid and violent transformation." Hank took a sip of tea.

"Any idea what might have caused it?"

"I am still formulating an opinion. Her approach is certainly...unorthodox, to say the very least, but one cannot deny its effectiveness. She presents a very intriguing case, one which I am very much looking forward to studying." After pausing to take a sip of tea, he added, "Provided, of course, that Jean does not kill her first."

"I think Cody could hold her own." Ororo's enigmatic smile would have reduced Mona Lisa to tears.

"Indeed?" Hank clicked off the video and leaned back in his chair.

"Indeed. Have you had a chance to meet her yet?"

"Only briefly. I found myself in the awkward position of interrupting a rather heated argument between her and Logan shortly after my arrival this afternoon."

She sighed. "It does seem to be their favorite pastime."

"You've had a chance to get to know her, Ororo. What is your opinion of her?"

"She is everything she appears: Brash, cunning, impulsive, and chaotic." Her serene demeanor could not disguise the fondness in her tone. "She is also intelligent, charming, and fearless."

"That's high praise, Storm."

"Wait until you see the Danger Room tape."

"Cody?"

At the sound of Kurt's voice, her stomach went into a gymnastics routine. She was still dealing with residual twitches from her fight with Logan, not to mention nursing several decent injuries from the Danger Room. She didn't feel at all ready to cope with what she knew he'd want to talk about. But she did owe it to him.

She turned around in the hallway to see him standing there, hands in the pockets of his jeans, tension in his shoulders, and what looked like hope in his bright yellow eyes. And she was about to take a hammer to it. "Hey, Kurt."

"Could we talk?"

"S'pose we should."

They walked outside, strolling toward the big oak on the hill.

Best to get this over with quick. Cody bit the bullet. "It's about the kiss, isn't it?"

"Yes." It was more an exhalation than an actual spoken word.

"Guess you wanna know what that was all about, huh?" She wiped her sweating palms surreptitiously against her jeans. This was not easy. She usually avoided scenes like this by simply being somewhere else in the morning. Leave it to Mr. Tall, Blue, and Double-Jointed to take all the fun out of breaking a guy's heart.

"What was it about, Cody?" He didn't want to know almost as much as he needed to.

"You want the nice answer, or the honest one?"

"I would prefer the honest one."

She took a breath. "A big part of it was tactics. I was outnumbered, and the only way I could see to win was to throw everyone by doing the most shocking thing I could think of."

Not trusting his voice, Kurt merely nodded. He'd thought as much, but it still hurt to hear it.

"But I'd be lyin' if I'd said that's all there was to it."

His ears pricked up, and he turned to look her in the eye. "So, what was it, then?"

"Look, Kurt. You're great, it's just thatã"

He cut her off. "That I'm covered in blue fur? That I have yellow eyes and a tail?" he said bitterly. The last thing he wanted was a compassionate let-down. He'd had far too many in his life. "Or, my favorite, 'it's not you, it's me?'"

"Okay." She fired up a cigarette, pushing the smoke out her nose like an angry dragon. "I wanted to make this easy, but it's pretty obvious you don't. So I'll lay it on the line. I dig your blue fur and your sharp teeth and your yellow eyes and your goddamn tail, and I may be the only woman on earth who would put the smell of brimstone on her list of turn-ons. I'd like nothin' more than to push that oh-so-flexible bod of yours to its limits and have my way with you until your eyes rolled back in your head and you begged me to stop." The way she paced toward him was more than a bit menacing. "Ride you hard and put you away wet." Her face was inches from his, her nostrils flaring. She heard him swallow hard as he backed into the trunk of the old oak. "But if you want to fall back on your Poor Unloved Mutant crutch, be my guest. That's not what this is about."

"Then what is it about?"

"This is about you not knowing what I'm like. I've seen a lot of action in my time, enough to know a good-hearted guy when I see one, and a good heart is one of the few things on this earth I hold sacred. You just don't mess with that." There was an unfamiliar ache in her chest. Cody sucked down a lungful of smoke in an attempt to make it go away. It didn't work. "Kurt, I'm trouble. I'd chew you up, spit you out, and leave you broken. I wouldn't mean to, but it'd happen just the same. I couldn't live with that."

"So, why did you kiss me?" he managed. "Why start something you had no intention of finishing?"

"Because I wanted a taste." She said. "Look, I know right from wrong, but that doesn't mean I'm good at towing the line. I wasn't trying to mess with your head. I just had to find out what I would be missing."

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, doing his best to seem nonchalant while fighting to keep his heart from leaping through his ribcage. "So, what would you be missing?"

Cody's throat was as dry as her palms were wet. "More than I thought possible."

"Does it change anything?" he asked.

"Of course it does." She said. "Just not in the way that you think."

Silence hung between them for a long moment.

"So, Kurt, are we...okay?"

"I don't know."

He walked away slowly, leaving Cody to contemplate the sad, sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She put her hand to the old oak, but the tree didn't seem to want to talk to her.

Charles leafed through the file on his desk, then set it aside with an uncharacteristic sigh. Cody Latrans had been with them for a week now, run through every conceivable test, medical and otherwise, and he was still no closer to understanding what she was.

Of course, Jean had performed most of those tests, and she was not exactly objective where the other woman was concerned. Given the circumstances of their introduction, it was only natural there should be some friction, but Jean's reaction seemed out of proportion somehow. In all the time Charles had known her, he'd never seen her in such a constant state of irritability and anger.

For her part, Ms. Latrans' goading did not seem to be helping the situation any, and it was not limited to Jean. By proxy, Scott's ability to lead the team might be compromised because he was siding with his fiancee, rather than weighing the pros and cons rationally. Kurt was obviously smitten with Cody, reducing his objectivity considerably, as well; and Logan, who was not the most predictable or stable of them at the best of times, was in a constant state of frustrated paranoia. Even more so than usual. Peter and Ororo seemed to be warming to her, which might prove to be a positive development, but Charles couldn't help but wonder where it would lead.

For himself, he could not decide how he felt about her. Her determination, especially in the face of great odds, was admirable. Her methods were questionable in their propriety, but they did get the job done. On a personal level, the two of them seemed to have reached a dÈtente. She respected his power, if not his authority, though that power could not touch her.

He had not discussed his brief jaunt into her mind with anyone. It had been...unsettling. He had been able to enter, but once inside, he found himself completely at a loss. It was like jumping into a fast-moving river of images, thoughts, and feelings, all in a language he could not comprehend. He could perceive them, but he could neither translate nor speak to them. Since the awakening of his telepathic abilities, he had never encountered anything quite like it. Even alien minds had been more accessible.

Her powers were also a mystery. What was their source? The only thing they knew for certain was that she was neither a mutant, nor an alien. Even more bothersome was that her moral code was elusive at best, and she seemed to bear no allegiance to anyone or anything.

It troubled him, more than he was prepared to admit, perhaps even to himself. It also rendered him even more determined to get to the bottom of who and what she was. The powers she had exhibited did not disconcert him nearly as much as her apparently innate talent for dividing his team. Ms. Latrans had proven herself quite formidable. Should she ever be on the opposite side of a conflict involving the X-men, it would behoove them all to be well acquainted with her weaknesses.

Perhaps it was time for a deeper exploration of her background. Professor Xavier reached for the telephone.

* * * *


Jean Grey made her way to the Danger Room to work off some excess energy. She felt like she had been angry for days.

Okay, she had been angry for days. But not without good reason.

Cody Latrans was poison. The woman had no sense of propriety or fairness. She had talents and abilities that could have been used to do good, to make the world a better place. Instead, she employed them to turn a profit as a stripper. What a waste. The fact that she was lean as a whip and in perfect health when her diet consisted entirely of meat, caffeine, alcohol, and assorted junk food had done nothing to endear her, either.

Jean was not in the habit of questioning the Professor's judgment, but to her reckoning, whatever knowledge could be gleaned from studying the woman could not possibly be worth all the trouble involved with keeping her around.

Things had been just fine before she had arrived, thank you very much. They seemed to have finally settled into a comfortable place. Even Logan. It had taken hard work and dedication to build them into a team, and no small amount of blood, sweat, and tears. Literally. Then, out of nowhere, Cody Latrans drops into their lives, and suddenly, everything is disrupted.

Everyone was acting...well, weird. Piotr was holed up in his studio day and night, and refused to tell anyone what he was working on. Kurt was moping around like a lovesick puppy. Ororo seemed flighty and distracted, almost absent-minded. And "cranky" didn't begin to cover Logan. Not only was he constantly tense, but in trying to avoid Latrans, he was avoiding everyone. Including Jean.

That hurt. Almost as much as the downhill slide between her and Scott. It also left her with no one to confide in about it.

Of course, it had been Logan's bright idea to drag them all out to a stripclub. (Despite the bond that had developed between the two of them, she had no illusions about the essential nature of his character. If presented with a choice between an evening at the theater or a night at a dive bar, the dive bar would win every time.) And when it came down to it, okay, sure, boys would be boys. She didn't have to like it, but there it was. However, she probably could've gotten over it a lot faster if she hadn't seen video of Scott falling over himself to stuff money into Latrans' g-string. Pheromones or no pheromones, it had taken a great deal of restraint to keep from belting him.

The flashing incident had not helped. Neither had the argument she and Scott had afterward.

"Why didn't you just let her have it?" Jean had fumed.

"Because that would have involved looking at her." Said Scott.

"You've already looked at her. This time, when it counted, you just pulled your punches instead of taking her out. Why did you go soft?"

"I did not go soft." The forced calm in his voice made him sound condescending, which only irritated her further. "What would you have had me do? Blasting a half-naked woman is not exactly honorable."

"Aha! You did look!"

They hadn't slept in the same room, much less the same bed, since.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the door opening on Piotr's studio. "Check you later, big guy." Speak of the devil. Cody Latrans edged out with a wink, buttoning her shirt. She cast a cursory glance at Jean. "Hey, Red. What's shakin'?"

Jean glared at her as she loped down the hall. As if you don't know.

She was more than glad to have handed the case over to Hank. Forced to spend anymore time with the woman, she was unsure how long she could go without strangling her.

Cody stretched out casually on the exam table in the Med-Lab. "So, what's the word, Hank? Will I be able to play piano?"

Henry lowered his spectacles. "I wasn't aware you played piano."

"I don't. Just like to keep my options open." She grinned.

He smiled back, shaking his head and chuckling in disbelief. She had suckered into one of the oldest jokes in the world. "Well, I do apologize for subjecting you to the battery of tests again, but I needed to confirm some of the earlier results. I know it's not pleasant."

"No worries. Besides, you were much more gentle than Jean." Despite the fact that she hadn't been to a doctor in years, Cody was sure the redhead had definitely indulged in some unnecessary roughness when examining her. Compared to that, Hank had been gentle as a kitten.

He glanced at the results on his clipboard. He had never seen anything quite like them, especially in an individual lacking the mutant gene. "I'm sure you're aware that your physiology is not exactly normal."

"Uh-huh."

"I have a few questions about your reproductive organs."

She smirked. "Wow. Aren't you even gonna buy me dinner first?"

He felt his cheeks sizzling, and did his best to fabricate a stern glare. "Tell me, is making me blush really all that entertaining to you?"

"You betcha."

"Now, your menstrual cycle, for instance."

"I had a lot of problems with it." Noting the look of concern on his face, she added, "So I traded it in for a Harley."

He rolled his eyes.

"Okay, okay. What do you want to know?"

"Well, with the high levels of hormones and pheromones your body produces, has its regularity been affected?"

"Nope. Regular as clockwork."

"So it runs fairly close to a twenty-eight day cycle?"

"No. More like a three-hundred-and-fifty day cycle." She said. "I get it once a year. Last week of February."

"That's your idea of regular?" Hank was thunderstruck.

Cody shrugged. "I've never missed one."

"Scott?" Ororo rapped gently on his door. "Are you ready to go?"

He stepped out, pulling on his jacket and did a quick double-check to be sure he had the keys. It never hurt to be thorough. "I'm ready. Do you have the grocery list?"

She held it up.

"Let's roll."

Moments later, securely buckled into the Land Cruiser, they were on the road. Ororo gazed dreamily out the window until her companion's fingers drumming on the steering wheel brought her back. He was not generally one to fidget. She glanced over. "Is there something on your mind?"

"No, not really."

It was hard to tell if he wanted to talk. She decided not to press. "All right."

"Storm...Do you think Jean has been acting a little, I don't know, off lately?"

She sat up and gave him her full attention. "Are you two having some trouble?"

"No, no. Not trouble, exactly. It's just, well, things have been kind of tense since..." He let his voice trail off.

"Since Cody arrived?"

He nodded.

"Well, she does tend to evoke strong reactions."

"Which one?"

"Both of them, though not in quite the same way." She smiled. "But I was referring to Cody."

"True, but in Cody's case, they're not generally positive." Approaching a stop sign, he decelerated smoothly, came to a full and complete stop, and checked he intersection before proceeding.

Careful was one thing, but sometimes Ororo thought he drove like an old woman. "Yes, but not all of those reactions stem from Cody's actions."

"What does that mean?" He asked, suddenly testy.

"It means that Cody did not force you to put money in her g-string." She was more than a little tired of Cody Latrans getting blamed for every problem the X-Men had.

"But that was the pheromones!" he protested.

"Scott, you and I both know, pheromones don't inhibit free will."

"And the flashing? You can't say that was my fault." He took the next corner a bit faster than he should have.

Ororo's hand slipped over to clutch the armrest. "Perhaps this is not a conversation we should be having right now."

He took a breath and fixed his attention on the road. "You're right."

They drove in silence for the last few blocks and pulled into the supermarket parking lot.

As he pushed the cart listlessly down the cereal aisle, she looked over at him again. He was obviously still upset, but as much as she wanted to help him, there were some things he needed to understand. "Scott, I'm sorry if I was hard on you back there. It was not my intention. It's just that I see Cody, isolated, in the middle of all of us. Yes, she has done some very questionable things, even been disruptive, but ultimately, we are all responsible for our own behavior. Cody may have been the lynchpin to some of the problems between you and Jean, but, ultimately, it is up to you and Jean to work through those problems." He seemed to be listening, albeit somewhat reluctantly. "Look at the power she exhibited in the Danger Room. She could have done any of us a great deal of harm had she chosen to do so."

"I think she knew she would never win if she did. We would have taken her down." Scott said confidently. He grabbed a box of raisin bran off the shelf. Ororo thought the fiber would probably do him good.

"Yes, but she went out of her way not to hurt any of us. I saw the footage of the fight in the bar. If moved to anger, she can be quite brutal." Small wonder she and Logan did not get along. They were too alike.

He sighed. "The thing that bothers me most is that she won by dividing us."

She reached over to where he held the shopping cart and placed her hand on top of his. "No one can divide us if we refuse to allow ourselves to be divided."

Cody sat on the flagstones by the pool, long legs pulled up to her chin, tobacco smoke trailing from the cigarette in her hand.

A week, and still no word from Coyote. He never left her hanging this long.

Dicking around Green Acres was all well and good, but she was starting to get edgy. The general sense of unwelcome wasn't helping. Neither was the guilt about hurting Kurt.

She wasn't used to guilt. To her reckoning, it pretty much sucked. In trying not to hurt him (okay, so maybe she hadn't tried quite as hard as she could have), she'd hurt him anyway. Cody had come up against a situation she couldn't joke, charm, or fight her way out of and she didn't like it. Not one bit.

Coyote must have some purpose for her being here. So why wasn't he letting her in on it?

The Sight. It had never come to her before. But was that a blessing from him, or had she just finally grown into it? She wished to hell she knew, but the Old Dog wasn't talking. Son of a bitch.

A quiet sort of panic was creeping into her heart. The sad part is, he's all I've got. There were a least a hundred people who owed her favors, but no one she could actually call a friend. Her friends were all dead.

Of course, It was great going solo. Not having to bow to anyone else's rules. Never having to compromise.

But there was the lonesomeness. That sharp pain in her chest that felt like it had been there since birth. Some days, she could feel it spreading out, growing big enough to swallow her whole.

Logan came around the side of the house, preceded by the smoke of his cigar, and lost in his own thoughts. If he could just steer clear of her, he figured his life would get a lot less complicated. It's a big place, right? Keep myself busy and I don't have to see her at all.

They caught sight and scent of one another at the same time. And groaned.

"You."

"You."

"Great." He scowled. The last person he wanted to see.

"Bite me." She snapped. "I'm in no mood, and I was here first. Why don't you just crawl back under whatever rock you came from?"

She was in no mood? "Hey, I live here, remember?" He wasn't going anywhere.

"Whatever." If he was dumb enough to stay after being warned, she had no problem with using him for target practice. "You know why you don't like me?"

"Where do I start?"

"You don't like me because I'm not a woman you can sweep in and rescue. I don't need protection, and I don't want it. That just blows your whole White Knight thing all to hell, huh?" She got sinuously to her feet, crushing her cigarette under her boot heel. Every time they were near one another, she itched. That high-strung alpha male smell about him, the way his hackles always went up when she was around, like she was some kind of threat to him. His presence was sandpaper on her nerves, and part of her just wanted to have it out and have it over with him.

"What makes you so qualified to judge me? Your vast experience with men?" It felt like he'd been on edge since the moment he'd laid eyes on her. The scent of her was a constant assault, touching off hormones and endorphins and who knew what else, leaving him wary and wound up.

"Oooh. Ouch." She paced around him, dancing on the edge of invading his personal space. "You know, I bet you just love 'em helpless and timid, like little Geishas."

Logan's teeth clenched around his stogie. "You're not funny."

The little shudder that skipped up his neck told her she'd touched a sore spot. "What's the matter? Little too close to home on that last one?"

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. Her face was so close that if he turned...he heard his heart hammering.

"Cool off" was the last thing she heard him say before he swept her legs out from under her and pushed her into the pool. She hit the water in a spectacular splash, and for the first time in days, Logan felt genuinely happy.

Cody surfaced, arms flailing, sputtering, and spitting out water and a slew of half-formed cuss words.

"Need a hand?"

Her only response was a stiff middle finger as she went down again.

She didn't come up.

She had to be messing with him. He listened for her heartbeat beneath the water. Slow and steady. Then slower. And slower. And she wasn't coming up. He started ticking off the seconds in his brain. When twenty seconds passed by with no heartbeat and she still hadn't surfaced, he started to worry. Thirty seconds, and he was at the edge of the pool, looking down for any sign of movement. There wasn't. Forty seconds, and her body slowly floated to the surface. Still no heartbeat. Fifty seconds. She wasn't screwing around. Christ, she's not breathing.

Logan dove in, getting his arm around her, lifting her head out of the water, and swimming frantically for the edge of the pool. He was so panicked, he hardly registered that her heart was beating again. Slowly, at first, then faster, faster---

Cody's elbow made sharp contact with his stomach, forcing him to exhale, just before she grabbed the arm that was holding her and flipped him underwater. Planting her feet on his shoulders, she used him as a springboard to jump onto the concrete, simultaneously pushing him down. With all that muscle, no air in his lungs, and a metal skeleton, she watched him sink like a stone.

He came up growling.

She swung her hair out of her face and slapped the knees of her jeans. "C'mon, cowboy. Let's see what you got under the hood."

Logan pulled himself out of the water with remarkable speed, and shook himself off. "Remember, you asked for it."

They sniffed the air, gauging the stakes, and sizing each other up. Both of them knew this wasn't a fight to the death. This was something worse. A battle for dominance.

She knew she had the reach on him, but his low center of gravity was going to be a problem. He knew he outclassed her in skill, but she had him on speed.

Against equals, Logan had only ever seen her evadeãduck, dodge, jump, and flash her way around them. He had also seen her truly terrified of him. She would probably dance around him, string him out a little before she made her move.

Fuck it. Time to count coup. Cody closed the gap between them in a blur, appearing in front of him and lashing out with a kick before he could blink. It caught him in the stomach, and she gleefully watched him double over.

Her gloating was cut short when he rushed her, slamming her abdomen so hard she almost saw stars. She hit the ground on her back with him on top of her. Before he had a chance to balance himself, she gritted her teeth, grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt, pulled up her knees, and heaved him over onto his back. That was more like it. Struggling against wet denim, she sprang sloppily to her feet as he rolled into a crouch.

Cody came out swinging, throwing a burst of speed behind her punches and doing her best to make each one hurt. The pain didn't go deep, but there was so much of it everywhere that it made it hard for him to focus. Just when he was deflecting one hit, the next was landing. She can't keep it up forever. All I need is for her to take a breath.

When she did, he got the window he needed to start blocking her. He had a feel for her rhythm now, and she couldn't touch him. By the time she realized he was clued in, he was under her defenses. One good, solid push to the solar plexus left her scrambling not to fall on her ass and gave him a chance to regroup.

Damp cotton was no good for mobility. He popped the claws on his right hand, sheared through his shirt, and tossed it aside. It cooled him off, and besides, it wasn't like she could do him any real harm. Even if she started throwing sparks, he wasn't dry enough to catch.

Cody blinked. His chest was a humbling sight. She had never realized exactly how muscular he was underneath all that flannel. Damn. I have never seen a guy that hairy, and I have seen a lot. Her eyes widened ever so slightly. It's like a pelt.

He noticed her staring. Though he never would have called himself modest, it was unnerving. It was even more unnerving when she walked slowly toward him with her gaze locked on his chest. Tough to get a handle on her scent. She smelled more than a little like a wet dog. Just when the look in her eyes was starting to make the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, she was right up next to him. Not touching, just close. Too damn close. Her nose was so near his ear that he could hear her sniffing his neck.

"I scare the hell of you, don't I?" She whispered.

He retracted his claws to show her she was wrong, but the muscles in his shoulders bunched like knotted steel cables. "Why the hell would you scare me?"

"Because I'm one step closer to pure wild than you will ever be." Her breath was warm in his ear. "You got a beast all locked up inside you, straining at the chain to get out." Why had he let her get this close? She was just playing games with him, trying to throw him off. His pulse rate was going up all the same. "Half of you is choked and strangled because you're afraid of what you'll do if it catches a breath and breaks free." She snaked in front of him, her gleaming eyes locked on his. "I am everything you won't let yourself be. I am the beast. I'm not perfect, but at least I'm complete." He was starting to believe her when her shoulder dropped fraction of an inch, and he knew she would strike.

Logan struck first, throwing a straight, powerful punch that would have knocked the wind out of her had she not gotten out of the way. Barely. Cody returned the favor by driving her knee into the small of his back, which hurt both of them.

He turned to face her. "You're right. You are an animal."

Her eyes darkened.

"No conscience. No real human feelings." He said. She snapped a kick at his head. He sidestepped her like she was a novice. "There's nothin' you care about. Maybe not even yourself." Her eyes felt hot, and her throat felt tight and all she wanted now was to make him stop talking.

She launched into a vicious attack, pushing her speed past its previously known limits. Little over half her hits got through, but she did her level best to make sure each one counted. Sound was starting to bend to a Doppler effect and her vision distorted with trails. That had never happened before. She knew she couldn't keep it up for long, but she hoped she could keep it up for long enough to kick his ass.

Logan knew he couldn't keep up with her blow for blow. He'd block a shot to the jaw only to get clipped in the ribs twice. It was starting to wear him down, and he wasn't sure which if them could keep it up longer. She was moving so fast he couldn't even think about landing a hit himself. There was only one way to end this.

He opened his arms wide and threw them around the blur in front of him. Expecting to be blocked, Cody went off balance and crashed forward into his chest. The two of them hit the grass in a rolling, growling tangle. When they came to a stop, she was pinning him to the ground. Her jaws came down in a flash and he felt the prick of her teeth, growing longer, pinching into either side of his windpipe. It was the same time she felt the tips of his claws poking into the spaces between her ribs.

Every joint ached, every muscle was on fire, they were covered in sweat, each had the other's life in their hand, and neither would back down.

Their noses filled with the scent of each other: The sharp tang of anger, the burnt aroma of exhaustion, and the unmistakable musky, sweet smell of arousal. They were both turned on. Both of them knew it. Both of them knew that the other knew it.

Her teeth receded. His claws retracted. Then, they jumped apart like a couple of scalded cats and walked quickly in separate directions.



CHAPTERS:   1   2   3   4   5   6   7




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