Free Her Viking Wolf by Theodora Taylor

barely form thoughts, much less words.
    In fact, she didn’t even notice she was talking to him, even though she hadn’t moved her mouth, or that she could now understand every word he said, until right before the blackness enveloped her.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    CHLOE woke up feeling like she had been run over by a school bus. But she also woke up alone. She sat up on the cage’s matted floor and looked around. She was definitely alone. And the smell of her own heat was so thick in the air, it obscured anything else that might have been there before.
    Maybe, she thought, it had all been a dream. Maybe she had gone into heat and gone crazy with arousal, conjuring up the Viking who was in actuality still locked in the clinic’s cage. But when she got to her feet she had plenty evidence of what had happened in the throbbing raw and used feeling between her legs.
    And if that wasn’t enough to tip her off that last night had really happened, her wolf ears picked up the sound of someone moving around upstairs. With a sigh, she walked over to the pajamas she’d laid out the night before. She was momentarily frozen in place by guilt however, when she saw that this particular set was covered in white horses with orange manes. The Broncos pajamas had been a Christmas gift from Rafe’s father the year before, and she’d worn them every morning following a full moon since.
    Where was Rafe now? It was only a matter time before he found out…
    Chloe pushed those thoughts out of her head and pulled on the pajamas. She couldn’t think about that now. She was starving, her body felt like one huge sexualized nerve ending, and she had a Viking stomping around her house. She’d deal with the consequences of betraying her fiancé later. Right now she needed food.
    She found the Viking standing stark naked in the kitchen, turning the knob on her stove back and forth, his face crinkled in confusion as the flames switched on and off.
    As unhappy about this situation as she was, for a few seconds she became mesmerized by the sight of his rock-hard body, which didn’t look like it was carrying even an ounce of extra flesh on it.
    But then she cleared her mind with a shake of her head and asked him telepathically, “What are you doing?”
    “This flame doth appear with the turn of a dial. ‘Tis magic?” he asked, continuing to turn the flame on and off.
    “First of all, please stop.” She came to stand beside him, but stopped just short of touching him, which she sensed would be dangerous in the state her body was in. “You are literally playing with fire. Second of all, no, it’s not magic.”
    “Then how is such possible?”
    “Well there’s gas and there’s this thing called a pilot light.” She struggled to come up with an explanation for how her gas stove worked, but realized she didn’t quite know herself. “It’s hard to explain, because the thing about now as opposed to your time is we have a lot of technology we use, but most people couldn’t even begin to tell you how it works.”
    “So then this ‘technology’—this is how you call your magic? The kind of which my own aunt, who is a sorceress, might perform?”
    “Sort of. But instead of sorceresses we have engineers. They understand how these things work, but nobody else does. The truth is we don’t really care as long as we can cook our food.”
    “Things are much the same way in my own time. Most do not care to learn spells or perform rituals themselves, only benefit from them. Still, your engineer-sorceresses must be very powerful indeed if they are able to create dial-heat and also invisible heat for your home.”
    “Yes, I suppose they are,” she said. “But speaking of magic, how is it we can suddenly understand each other? When did you start speaking English?”
    He gave her a confused look. “I would ask the same of you. I thought you were speaking Norse to me. A strange version of it, yea, but a Norse which can be understood by my ears.”
    “No,”