Lone Wolf: A Rejected Mates Wolf Shifter Romance (Reach for the Moon Book 1)

by Sam Hall

  His words may have been all very wise, but they weren’t my focus right now. I clawed at his arm, trying to drag him forward, bring him and his cock closer, but he just slid another finger in. The stretch, the rub of his knuckles went some way towards approximating the feel of his knot, which drove me wild. Short, stabbing movements pushed me higher and higher, his smile widening when my hands went to my breasts, tugging my nipples.

  “Come apart for me, love, and then we’ll snooze for a good long time. You’ve had a massive day.”

  So I did, wide eyed and screaming, before he bundled me up against him and drew me down into sleep.

  Chapter 24

  “Hello darling,” Nan said when she opened the door, but she paused when she saw Zack and the prominent bite on his neck, proclaiming him as mine. “It’s started then.” She nodded, then ushered us inside. “I thought we had a little more time, thought it might’ve been that Klein boy who’d be first, but I guess when your love follows you from the big smoke, that’s difficult to resist. I was fond of grand gestures too. Did I tell you about the time your pa picked every wildflower he could find in the fields outside of town and filled my room with them?”

  She had, but I was always willing to listen to her stories, especially now.

  “Of course, I developed allergies to the goldenrod, didn’t I? My face swelled up and he thought I hated what he’d done, but we made up, which is always the best part. Sit down, sit down.”

  “Zack, this is my grandmother, April.”

  “A pleasure it is to meet you, young Zack. Now, coffee or tea?”

  I’d warned health-conscious Zack that he’d be expected to have a hot beverage and there would not be a kale smoothie in sight. Which then started a conversation about the health benefits of green coffee and tea, and as a result, I punched him. He’d just grinned then and drove over to Nan’s.

  “Whichever suits you, April,” he replied.

  “Coffee then, at this hour of the morning. For energy, though I daresay you two don’t need any more of that.” She puttered around in the kitchen, boiling the kettle, setting out biscuits, another health sin he needed to commit to make Nan happy. But when she sat down, he wrapped his hands around the mug he was given and took two of Nan’s Anzac biscuits, so he was sweet, literally.

  “So congratulations are in order.” Nan looked at the two of us with a soft smile. “Is he a good man, Paige?”

  “The best, Nan. He looked after me when I took off for the city and helped me stand on my own two feet, then trained me to stay on them.”

  “So it’s your fault she’s too skinny. You need to feed her more if you want to keep her. In my day, men liked a girl with a fat arse.”

  “They still do to be honest,” he muttered. “But I focussed on developing Paige’s strength, her speed. I wanted her to have the ability to fight anyone who wouldn’t respect her boundaries.”

  “You knew then.”

  “My mother was a nix—”

  Nan wrinkled her face up at that. “Nasty word. Like calling a girl a slut in my day. So you grew up with a woman with the touch then. Was it a happy life?”

  There was an edge to Nan’s voice, something that both of us picked up. He shifted in his seat, consulting his undrunk coffee.

  “It was a house full of love…but I wouldn’t say happy. Mum didn’t realise what she was until it was too late, was driven out of her town for stepping out on her first mate, my brother’s father, with mine. She took Mason—”

  “Mason Klein? I thought you had the look of him!” Nan said.

  “And brought him to my dad’s place. That’s where we grew up until…” Zack shook his head. “My mother wasn’t the most stable woman. She was always torn in two by who she was and how she was raised. I don’t know if she ever worked out where she fitted in that.”

  “She hadn’t found her pack,” Nan said decisively.

  “What?”

  “We were always told, don’t go making eyes at anyone until the Spehr girls were done. If they set a cap for the boy you liked, you would never keep them. That’s what your family has done, Paige, schooled you girls into thinking one and done. He’s the alpha, he’s the power in the town.” Nan’s eyes twinkled. “The power is you, girl, but like your mate says, you can’t let it twist you. It did that to your mother, poor thing that she was, and Zack’s mother too from what he says.”

  She looked me clear in the eyes, her gaze steady, even with the faint circles of cataracts beginning to form. “Torn between two lovers…” Nan sang, her voice only wavering a little. “Used to love that song I did, before I saw what happened to your parents.” She went still for a moment, just staring at the table, tracing the grain with her fingers, as the moment stretched on and on.

  “You got yourself a good one, darling. A boy that understands what it is to have a girl with the touch.” My grandmother’s eyes slid sideways. “You know you’ll never have her entirely to yourself. Adam wanted that for her, wanted her to have time to find herself, find them…”

  “Of course.” Zack reached over the table and held my hand, something that warmed me way more thoroughly than coffee did. “She’s my girl. I love her, April, I don’t mind saying. That means making sure she gets what she needs. Whatever she needs.”

  I took Nan’s hands when I saw the suspicious shine form, her jaw tightening, but she just nodded quickly.

  “He was right then. I wish he’d lived long enough to see it, but perhaps he does, from the pack lands beyond.” She visibly calmed herself, then got up, picking up her mug. “I need to tell you the story of your family, Paige, the one those hoity toity idiots on the Spehr side will never tell you. We’ll talk in the front room. Don’t want talk like this upsetting the energy in my kitchen. The yeast won’t rise and the milk’ll sour.”

  I shot Zack a look at that, but we followed her through to a stuffy, airless lounge room, where the floral couches had neatly trimmed strips of plastic to protect the furniture. Nan sat and looked out the picture windows to her garden beyond, settling when she saw the willy wagtails playing.

  “Your father was one of six men fighting for the hand of your mother,” she said, not looking away. “She loved or could have loved five of them. She loved Adam the best, or that’s what she told herself. Perhaps she thought he was the best candidate for father or for alpha. She wasn’t wrong, of course. My boy, he was a good man. He did his best by her, tried his damnedest to make her happy, but that’s the curse of the touched.”

  Her fingers tightened around the mug she held.

  “Our hearts, they’re split in two, one half with us, the other with our mate. Well the touched? They never know until they’ve found all the parts, and then they’re done. They form their pack, then their hearts are whole and so are their mates. I know they told you your mother died of heart problems, love, and I guess it was partly true. She died of a broken heart, did Lucy.”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “My Adam had to watch it happen, had to raise a little girl by himself. I think that’s when he decided enough was enough.”

  “He knew…” I whispered. The rejection. Walking out the door. Dad’s claws on the newel post to keep himself from running after me. Zack pulled me in close, but still, I shivered. His body laid out so neatly on the dais.

  Daddy…

  “You can’t live your life full of regrets, darling. If he saw how you’d turned out, out from under those bloody Spehrs and their bullshit!” My eyes jerked up. Nan did not swear often. “I’m sorry, but they built a nice little power base on girls just like you, on their misery and pain. You strengthen their position, never forget that. With every single man in town sniffing after you, imagine the deals and negotiations that family has carried out to strengthen things. A bad business, Adam helped me see that. The women hate the Spehr girls for taking all that male attention, but the Spehrs raise their girls to be at odds with their own nature. Then you have those with no touch but they have the blood. Perfect little c
reatures they are, what they thought they had in you.”

  She jerked herself to her feet, but I saw the tremble in her hands as she disappeared deeper into the house. I set down the coffee cup and followed her down to her sewing room.

  This was where the magic happened, the old-fashioned wireless on the sewing table, patterns and fabric hanging from pegs in cupboards, scissors and needles put neatly away. But in a cupboard tucked right up in the back, she retrieved a familiar looking leather satchel.

  “Dad’s bag…”

  “Keep it here, love. It can’t get in the wrong hands, not after he did everything he could to gather it all. You can sit in the front room for as long as you like, any day that you like, but please.” She pressed the bag into my hands. “Read it. Read everything he collected.”

  Zack looked me over with concern when I returned, clutching it to my chest.

  “I must put the meat on. We’re having roast lamb for lunch, and that nice boy from up the street said he’d come by. You’ll stay, won’t you, love?”

  “Yeah, of course,” I said on automatic. It took Zack grabbing my hand and pulling me down beside him to reveal my burden. He took the bag from me and opened it to find it was bulging with papers. We started to pull them out, laying them across the coffee table.

  They said we needed to look at history to predict the future, and if the papers were anything to go by, mine wasn’t bright. Hangings and burnings, Whore of Babylon and witches, nixes and sirens and succubi were all fanned out before us.

  “Fuck,” Zack said.

  “Fuck indeed.”

  Chapter 25

  “So I’m gonna die screaming.”

  I flopped back against Nan’s couch, the plastic coverings now sticking to my sweaty skin. The room that had been stuffy before, but now it felt volcanic.

  “Paige…”

  I got to my feet, started to pace back and forth. I needed to move, do something about what we’d just looked at.

  “It’s not that bad. Most of this stuff is from like, the Dark Ages or something.”

  “This is from 2019. ‘The dark side of polyamory no one talks about,’” I said, swooping down to pick up an article Dad had printed from the internet. “Blah blah blah, workplace discrimination. Blah blah, have your kids taken away from you. Like fuck, this is now, with relationships between consenting adults. In America, which has a much bigger population than—”

  “Paige…”

  “What? What am I supposed to take from this, Zack? What Zen koan have you got to get me through this? You’re telling me this is who I am. As a wolf shifter, I always risk fear and persecution if anyone ever found out what I was, but now this as well? I can see why Nance and the Spehrs try to keep a lid on this, because this,” I gestured to the table and piles of paperwork, “is a life of ostracism and hatred and pain.” I jerked my hand down when I saw the shake there. “I can’t have kids. I cannot do this to another daughter. It’s irresponsible and cruel.”

  “You’re jumping to some pretty big conclusions here.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m really not. Female sexuality is demonic.” I lifted the printout of a woodcut carved in the 1500s showing a hideous woman with a long flickering tongue and what looked like a small cave between her legs, complete with stalactites and stalagmites. “Women with power should be burned.” I waved an etching of a witch burning. “Women as evil seductresses that damage the minds and bodies of innocent men.” A colour printout of a beautiful oil painting with a thick gilt frame, showing an ethereal girl coming out from the lake’s edge, to pull her prey under the water. “Show me one positive image of a…whatever you think I am. Just one. Just one role model.”

  “Here,” he said, pushing a screenshot from the shifter social media site, Jungle, to me.

  “Jungle, really? That’s just full of menopausal shifter women swapping recipes.”

  “It’s a little more than that. And when did you become such a social media snob? If you start posting photos with #blessed on Instagram, we’re breaking up. Take a look.”

  I plucked the printout from his fingers, frowning the moment I read the group name. “‘Nix and the Sacred Feminine’? Ugh, this is just more moony, girl power shit.” He didn’t reply, just waiting for me to keep reading. “Hang on, this post was written by Dad, about…”

  I kept reading, seeing my dad’s faltering attempt to introduce himself and then talk about me.

  I’m Adam Meyer Spehr, Alpha of the Lupindorf Pack in Australia, and I think my daughter might be a nix. We have some weird traditions that were brought out from Germany. I was raised to expect that the eldest Spehr girl would take a mate and that man would become the next alpha of our pack. It’s what happened to me, obviously. But there’s something weird about our process, and it took me talking to shifters outside of town to realise.

  Spehr girls don’t have fated mates like most other shifters. They pretend they do, the young men who want her and want to become alpha step up and compete for her affections, but it wasn’t until I had a daughter of my own that I realised how weird it is. I knew my Dianne was my mate the moment I locked eyes on her, so why the need for competition? If we were fated to be together, shouldn’t that be it?

  I asked my wife about it some time later, and I’ll never forget what she said. It took a long time, and I’m ashamed to say, a lot of shouting, but while my baby slept in her cot, my wife let me know that while she’d felt our bond instantly as well, she’d felt the same with several of the men who’d fought for her hand. She cried and cried, not wanting to say the words, not wanting to hurt me, but I made her.

  I’d heard about nixes, of course, though mostly when blokes were at the pub talking about girls who were loose with their favours before they found their true mate. That was always the big fear, that you’d be bound forever to some girl who everyone had been through. A shitty attitude, I’ve come to realise, but being an older bloke, that was a very different time. But I’d never heard anyone use the word you ladies do.

  My wife passed on, but nothing was the same after that confession. I’d watch her all the time, see where her eyes, where her attention was, always wondering if it was on me or those other men. It created a rift between us, one that I think ultimately ended her life.

  But I have a daughter. She’s beautiful, smart, talented, like every man’s daughter is, I guess. But if she’s one of these nix things, what does that mean for her? Will she never find the satisfaction of a true mate? Never stop searching for the one, because there isn’t one? I came here wanting to find some kind of reassurance that she’s got a happy future ahead of her.

  I had to force myself to read the last of it. It was hard, and my eyes had filled with tears, blinding me until I angrily dashed them away, only for more to come. This was so…Dad. Awkward, clunky, loving… My jaw locked down tight, feeling sobs form in my chest, but I didn’t want to let them out. I hadn’t earned that right, I felt. I’d been blithely doing my thing in the city, and he’d… My fingers went to crumple the paper between them, but Zack stood up and took it from me.

  “Let me see what this group is. I’ll see if I can join it.”

  “You have a Jungle account?” I croaked out.

  “Don’t get snotty. I run a lot of ads for the gym from it.” He pulled out his phone, opening the webpage from the link only shared with other verified shifters, then searched for the groups. His thumbs danced over the buttons as he answered the questions to apply to join the group, and then closed out of the site.

  “Just remember, you don’t have to do anything. It can just be you and me if that’s what you want. It’s what your mum did, what most of your female forebears have done for some time. Your dad was concerned, felt like you might be happier being true to your nature, but he wasn’t you. It’s your choice, Paige. It always has been. I’ll never pressure you to take other mates. I just don’t want you feeling like you can’t pursue things if that’s what you want.”

  “Well, you’ve been working har
d in here for hours!” Nan said, appearing in the doorway. “Come and have some lunch while it’s nice and fresh. An old friend will be joining us.”

  “You.”

  The word slipped from my mouth when I saw Lorcan sitting at Nan’s kitchen table, that black hair neatly combed back, a white button-up on over his jeans rather than the black T-shirt of yesterday.

  “You remember Lorcan, do you? You two were inseparable when you were little, always up to mischief. You cried so hard when his family moved away, but I thought you would have been too young to remember him now.”

  “Zack Gillespie,” Zack said, moving forward and holding out his hand to the other man, but Lorcan’s eyes went from me, to my mate’s neck, his face even paler than normal.

  Finally, ingrained social customs had him standing and shaking it. “Lorcan Roth.”

  “Paige told me a little about you,” Zack said as he sat down, his arm going across the back of my chair, Lorcan following his every move.

  “She told me nothing about you, though I guess we weren’t talking a whole lot last time I saw her. So, I can see congratulations are in order. Does this mean you’re the new alpha?”

  His tone was polite, but Lorcan’s movements as he took his serviette and spread it across his lap were sharp, abrupt.

  “Nah, mate, you know that better than anyone. The process isn’t done until the lady says it is.”

  Green eyes jerked up, flicked from mine to Zack’s and back.

  “This smells lovely, April,” he said, turning to Nan. “You didn’t have to invite me around.”

  “Nonsense. Too much meat for just one woman, and boys are always the most appreciative of my cooking.” A dark look was shot my way. “Girls are always too preoccupied with being skinny.”

  I snorted as everyone started helping themselves to meat and vegetables, taking an extra portion myself, then another when Nan continued to stare. It was only when she nodded that I started to cover everything in gravy.