by Sam Hall
I’d laid curled up against this chest, a growing awareness of how hard and muscular it was coming to me as I got older. But touching it? I’d shoved that need away ruthlessly when he’d rejected me, so now? My breath couldn’t seem to come fast enough as I pushed them up under his shirt.
“Yes…” He nodded in encouragement, then shocked me by pulling his T-shirt off over his head.
I didn’t know what he thought, me just standing there and staring. Like I’d seen him shirtless often enough. Man, had I seen him shirtless. It’d been an assault to my teenage hormones, catching glimpses of hot, half-naked shifter men working in the backyard for Dad, but Mason? I reached out hesitantly to touch pecs and abs I’d dreamed about, fantasised…
He grabbed my hand and laid it against his chest, holding it there so I could feel him. This should’ve been the moment the illusions were dispelled, where he just felt warm and hard, like any other dude, but it wasn’t. I looked up into his eyes, saw them, him, shining through. Everything my father had made him hold back was here now, he was here now.
But why? My brain complained, but I couldn’t let that get between us. I moved in this time, fitting my lips to his, swallowing the rush of his breath, then him.
I glutted myself on Mason, letting my fingers roam, trail, touch, and grasp. His muscles were like iron, tensing as he held himself still, allowing me take my fill. I outlined his collarbone with my lips, traced his nipple with my nails, marked the path of his happy trail with my fingertips until his hand snapped out, stopping me from going further.
“No?” I asked.
“Yes, fuck yes, a thousand times yes.” He bit the words off, making sure I understood. “I want you on that bed, naked and spreadeagled, ready for me to cover every inch with my tongue.”
“But?”
“Paige, honey? Are you here? What happened at the town meeting?”
Aunty Nance’s voice floated up the stairway.
“Shit, my family.”
“Always your family.” He surged in, claiming one last kiss before pulling his shirt on and moving towards my bathroom. “I just need…a minute.”
“Right, yeah.” I smoothed my hair down, sure my lips told a very clear story of what I’d been up to, but I swung out the door and met Nance halfway.
“Oh, there you are. Are you OK? You left early.”
“I had some research I really needed to do, and I think we need to talk.”
“Sure, what’s going on?”
Her face was open and pleasant, her smile sweet as she asked the question.
“What do you know about the heir designation? Like why the Spehr family? Why the firstborn daughter?”
“Well, I guess that’s the way it’s always been,” she said with a shrug.
“So there’s no reason why all the contenders are acting so oddly?” I pushed at her slightly, letting my dominance leach into the words, and was rewarded for my efforts.
The mask dropped, if only for a few heartbeats, her brows jerking down, her eyes flashing as she looked off to one side, dealing with some foe I couldn’t see. But she was still bristling when she met my eyes, her mouth thinning down to a straight line.
“You’ve got the touch, haven’t you? Jesus bloody Christ, what was Adam thinking letting you go?” She shook her head tersely, then her arms were crossed as she regarded me with a steely gaze. “Well, there’s no swapping Selma for you, more’s the pity. When there’s no touch, the heirs are interchangeable and there was no sign you had my sister’s affliction.”
“Um…what the actual fuck, Nance?”
“Since when did you talk like that, Paige Spehr? I told your father you should have been fostered with my girls. Growing up with good girls like mine might have mitigated this.”
“So what? I’m a bad girl?” I fought the urge to laugh out loud. Nance was always kinda prissy, but really?
“The reason why we retain this position, why it’s always our family that chooses the alpha? The women of this line, the eldest daughters anyway, they carry a ‘gift.’” She said the word like one would dog shit. “Most normal shifters find their fated mate and that’s it for them. They get married, have children, live a respectable, happy life.”
One, up until right this very second, I thought I was going to have.
“And me?”
Her eyes were flint hard when they looked into mine.
“You can’t break mate bonds or anything like that, but your touch, your scent, your presence, if you’re strong with it, will send the single male population of this town into a frenzy. Back in the old country, our fathers set those of us girls with the touch before the men and gave them a head start to run into the nearby forests.”
I was the thud of paws, the whistle of wind, the scent of pine needles.
“The unmated men ran them down, caught the girls, dragged them to the ground.”
“And?” I asked the question, but I didn’t want to know the answer.
“And then those that caught her became her mates, whether she wanted them or not. They rutted with her in the dirt, one after the other, then ruled her and the village.”
Her eyes flicked up, going impossibly harder when she saw Mason had moved to the top of the stairs. Her jaw locked down tight, her teeth grinding before she turned on her heel.
“I need to inform Alan and Bill.”
“Wait.”
My voice was a lariat of steel, and it whipped out and caught my aunt mid step, only her hand on the bannister saving her from falling forward.
“You’ll say nothing, do nothing about this without my express permission. Do we understand each other?” I walked downstairs until I could look into her eyes, seeing the anger, the hatred, the disgust that raged there, making me wonder how long that had been simmering. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
I’d basically pulled the word from her, but I didn’t care. I needed time to work out what the hell this all meant, and I wasn’t having Nance running around throwing a spanner in the works.
Nance has ambitions where your mother never did. You have to learn to manage her, love, Dad had always said. If Mother Moon had been kinder, she would have made your aunt the heir, not Mum.
“You can go,” I said, regal as a queen, because arrogance was the only coin Nance responded to. Mason moved into the space she left as she strode from the house, slamming the backdoor when she went, and he paused to check in with me before sliding in close.
Feeling him against me, smelling his scent, feeling Mason had, for most of my life, been something that settled me, so I felt about ten years old when I rested my head against his shoulder, feeling his hand on my back.
“I need all the enforcers in the room, then I need to see Nan.”
“Consider it done.”
Chapter 20
So this is what a lamb led to slaughter feels like.
I doubted the wisdom of my decision the minute I walked into the enforcers’ quarters. There it was, scrubbed clean of the mess we’d made the other night. Sure, it had a few dishes in the sink, a stray T-shirt hanging off the back of a chair, but it was pretty neat and tidy. That wasn’t really what had my attention. It was them, filing in, one tall, muscular body after another.
The unmated men ran them down, caught the girls, dragged them to the ground.
They moved slowly, but still they prowled like the feral beasts they were. All the smiles and the laughs were gone, replaced by silver eyed intensity. They stopped in a rough line a reasonable distance away, sparing a few sidelong looks at those around them, but then everything was directed back at me.
An almost hysterical giggle rose in the back of my throat, but I swallowed it down. I didn’t need to do that. A fighter assesses a threat and then works out a way to deal with it. That’s what I needed right now, to know if they were threat or asset.
“You asked to see us?” Mason asked.
“I did. It’s your jobs, the beta, the enforcers, to keep me safe until the
alpha is chosen, right?”
“It is.”
The men moved restively at that, as if there was an enemy yet to be identified that they needed to meet.
“What I need to work out is if you can.”
“No one will touch you without your permission,” Micah growled, his eyes glowing so bright against that tawny skin. “No one.”
“That’s what I needed to hear.”
That’s what I needed to test.
I walked over, watching the men’s body language, the way they shifted and jostled slightly, and I knew why. It seemed ridiculous, arrogant to assume it was for my attention, but I knew it was, which threw up all sorts of red flags. They weren’t like this beforehand. Dec had his flirty little memory share, Micah sent me spinning around the room to the music, but this… This wasn’t right.
You can’t fight every battle on your own, Zack had always told me, especially when I was being pigheaded again. Well, Nance had painted me a pretty devastating picture. A frenzy she’d called it. I needed to know if these guys were soldiers in the fight or wolves at my door.
I moved closer and closer, feeling like I was walking into an actual wolf pack, watching them watch me until I came to a stop, just in front of Micah. His nostrils worked, dragging me into his lungs, scenting me, his eyes shining like the moon. His muscles twitched, his hand rising then forced down.
“Paige?” Mason said, but I held up a hand, then reached out for Micah.
“I need to know if you can resist this. Can you do that for me?” He nodded quickly. “And if any of the others try to touch me?” His mouth transformed, fangs bared, a godawful snarl rising in his chest. “Good instincts. Don’t hurt them, but don’t let them touch me, OK?”
There was something insanely intimate about this, putting my fingers to the top button of Micah’s plaid shirt and undoing it. A hard muscled chest appeared as I worked, the skin a deep brown, and I could see his ribs work as his breath came faster and faster.
“Tell me if this gets too much.”
I sounded cool, clinical, yet this was anything but. The guys had moved now, circling so they could watch me work, turning the big open space into a tight claustrophobic one.
“I’m going to put a hand on your chest, and I need you to talk to me, tell me what’s going on with you. I need the rest of you to stay back.” I didn’t inject dominance into my words because I hoped I wouldn’t need to. If that was what it took to keep them in line, I’d be better off not having them around. “Does everyone understand me?”
I felt the moment that Mason appeared by my shoulder, not touching, not that close, but watching what I did.
“You want to make sure we can protect you through this.”
“If what Nance says is true, every single straight guy in the place is gonna go nuts. We might need to turn the house into a citadel, and I need to know who I can trust.”
“You can trust us. We’re sworn to protect you.”
I glanced around, looking at all the intent gazes taking in everything I did. I knew Mason wanted to trust his men, but I needed to know, because to me, it felt like things were on a knife-edge.
“So is this OK, Micah?”
His nod was jerky, his eyes unblinking as they stared at me. I stared back, caught the moment I made connection with him, saw the heat bloom in his eyes.
A flare that rushed up my arm and through my body, turning me molten, and it appeared it was the same for him. His eyes rolled back for a second, his breath coming in short, sharp pants. I could feel it, this slow-moving infinite loop of need, flowing between us.
“Talk to me,” I said, pushing him slightly. “I need to know what’s going on.”
“Hard. Fuck, I ache for you… I can smell you, your need. I have to—I want to reach out and—” His hand whipped out and a spate of snarls went up around the pack, but it just covered mine, feeling shockingly warm and…
My eyes jerked up, looking into his and searching for what I sensed. It was a confusing tumble of need, desire, heat, and so much else. It felt like I held Micah in my hand, a great swirling mass of intense feelings I’d spend a lifetime teasing out.
“If every guy that fits the criteria feels like you do, they’re not gonna play nice. I need help, I need protection.” This could’ve been an order, but instead, it came out a plea. “I need people who’ll fight with me.”
“I’m yours.” Fuck, whatever this was, it was brutal. It tore down people’s defences and made them… “You know that.”
I was shocked by the vulnerability on his face, and so was Micah. His eyes fluttered, as if realising what a gigantic faux pas he’d just made, but when he met my eyes, none of it had gone. Whatever was in him burned bright and true, and for some reason, he’d felt he needed to mask that. He couldn’t right now, something that made me frown a little, wanting to know why. But I couldn’t ask questions, not when a beautiful near stranger had basically put his heart in my hands. My thumb moved of its own accord, stroking across his chest in tiny sweeps, and he shuddered in response. Then I pulled it back, his still wrapped around mine, twisting until we held hands.
“Thank you.”
That was such a lame response. I didn’t want that. I wanted to pull him in close, taste his breath and then his mouth, keep on peeling off those clothes until there was nothing between me and him.
Which is what alerted me to the fact this might not be a one-sided thing. Nance had given me this weird non-con scene in her description, but that’s not what this felt like. It was like the fun, hot feeling of the other night when we were dancing had been turned up to eleven. The fun part had been lost in the mix, but what had replaced it was intense. He squeezed my hand again, that same simple human gesture of ‘hey, you’re OK’ that had me smiling, even as I felt my eyes ache slightly from unshed tears.
They said you truly became an adult when you realised your parents are just fallible people. My dad had known this would happen, had prevented me from taking a mate, knew me well enough that I’d leave and go live in the city. Why? He never mentioned a word of this in emails or phone calls, though how did one ask your only daughter if she’s turned the local single guys into her sex slaves? I sighed, and the breath felt like it had to fight its way to get out.
“Can we sit down? If we’re going to do this, you need to know what’s happening. I also need to find out what Dad already shared with you.”
“You heard the lady,” Mason said with a short bark.
Micah sat by me when we did, still holding my hand, something I had to reluctantly relinquish when everyone’s focus remained on it. The silver in the men’s eyes faded at that.
“Did Dad ever talk to you guys about the heir, about me?”
My hands rested on the table, clasped together, and as I scanned the men, it was like their personalities came back online. Will settled back in his chair.
“Told us that you’d be back, that we needed to protect you most of all. That you were special.”
“And not to touch you unless you said it was OK, or he’d cut our balls off.” Declan laughed, staring into space, like he could see it. “He talked about cutting our balls off a lot.”
“We just figured it was the usual pack princess thing,” another guy said. “I’m Brett, by the way.”
“Hey.” I waved a hand limply.
“But that, that’s not normally the way these things go. I came to this pack a few years ago, after you left. Couldn’t get along with my alpha, but while they’re protective of their daughters—plenty of alphas come from the pool of enforcers—I’ve never seen any girl able to reduce a man to that. Sorry for being blunt, but when you touched Micah, I felt like my nuts were boiling in my sack and that I wanted to rip his head off all at the same time.”
“Is that what all of you felt? Like you wanted to remove Micah as a threat?”
The grumbles from around the table didn’t make that super clear, but as often was the case, Declan piped up and added a whole lot of clarity to the is
sue.
“Only if you didn’t share.”
“What?” I looked down the table, that intense mood rising again, the smiles fading, the looks piercing. “So if I’d said, ‘hey, fellas, let’s all get naked and—’”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” Mason ground out. “Just don’t.”
I sat back, blinking for a second, but my mind was racing ahead, wanting, needing answers.
“So, is that something you guys have done in the past, shared girls?” I thought about my cousins coming here and dancing. “Is it like team bonding orgies or something?”
“Never,” Will replied, shaking his head for emphasis. “I love these guys, but seeing their junk? I’ve got no interest in seeing Micah’s Goofy face.”
“Nor me your lily-white arse. Saw enough of that when you didn’t leave the sock on the door knob that time,” Micah shot back.
“Hey, Miss Penelope was hot to trot, and I wasn’t standing around thinking about you when she shoved her hand down my pants.”
“Nah, little Will was making the decisions again.”
“Not so little—”
“So me proposing a threesome with you two right now wouldn’t change your position.”
The two men froze, they all froze at that, and yup, the shiny eyes of doom rose again. Fuck, there was something seriously weird going on here.
“Of course it would.”
Everyone turned around to see Zack leaning in the doorway. God knows how long he’d been there. He walked over, every eye on him, and then came to stand behind me, my eyes falling half closed when I felt his hand on my shoulder.
I didn’t know I needed that. I should’ve called him once I worked out what was going on, but being around Zack was terribly seductive. He was always ready to jump in and fix everything if I just asked, something I couldn’t let him do. But when my eyes opened, I heard his words more clearly.
