by Claire Ryann
Cascade Storms Book One
A Pack Divided
by
Claire Ryann
Copyright © 2016 Claire Ryann
All rights reserved worldwide
No part of this book may be reproduced, uploaded to the Internet, or copied without permission from the author. The author respectfully asks that you please support artistic expression and help promote anti-piracy efforts by purchasing a copy of this book at the authorized online outlets.
This is a work of fiction intended for mature audiences only. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locales, business establishments, or actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
All sexual activities depicted occur between consenting characters 18 years or older who are not blood related.
A Pack Divided is a complete novel in the Cascade Storms series and the first book in the series.
If you would like to read more of Claire's work or sign up for her mailing list, visit her website at www.claireryann.com
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A Pack Divided
Cascade Storms Book 1
By
Claire Ryann
1
This was getting ridiculous.
Haley put the sedan in 1st gear and still had her foot lightly on the brake. She remembered the lessons her dad had given her about using lower gears and driving in the mountains but he'd never taught her about driving in snow. She knew she was supposed to let the engine do the braking with the transmission in the lowest gear and keep her foot off the brake but she couldn't help herself.
Even with the car crawling along at barely 10 miles an hour, it felt like she was rolling down the mountain out of control.
Damn ice.
Of course she'd looked up the cabin on a map before she rented it. It was close to the hospital and was cheap enough to let her bank some of her housing stipend, so she jumped on it. By the time she'd actually arrived at her temporary home, however, she'd already had her first lesson in how deceiving mountain travel could be.
The cabin was only 6 miles from town-- as the crow flies-- but it was 24 miles of hair-raising twisty, single-lane mountain road up a steep grade. 24 miles that took-- on a clear day-- an hour to navigate. But the rent was cheap and the scenery beat the hell out of some of the 2 hour traffic jams on the LA freeways she was used to back home. Plus, she'd signed a lease.
Of course, that was back in September. When the evergreen pine trees of the Washington forest had been lit with accents of bright gold and deep purple from the smattering of deciduous trees that managed to find sun below the thick canopy. Those first few weeks had made for a good chance to decompress on her way home from her night shift at the small community hospital where she was working.
Of course, "hospital" was a bit of a stretch of the imagination too. The small town at the base of the mountain that had hired her might have been the biggest city for several miles, serving a variety of downright tiny towns and communities, but at best its own population was 12,000. The hospital needed exactly 2 registered nurses to stay in business, one day shift, one night shift. Unfortunately, the previous night shift nurse had decided to move to Florida.
So the little community hospital had been forced to hire a traveler, an RN from somewhere else that would come to them and work on a temporary contract.
Haley had only recently gotten her credentials to work in this state at all after that no good sonuvabitch left her high and dry after moving her 2000 miles from home with the promise that he was going to marry her.
She should have known better. Hooking up with some guy she met on the Internet and thinking she'd found Happily Ever After just because they had amazing conversations and he sent her cute little texts every morning seemed pretty stupid in retrospect.
She'd given up everything to move up to Tacoma. She sold her condo in Long Beach, quit her job at the swank hospital where she got paid bank for relatively easy work, and had even found a new home for Mr. Cranky-- the 20 pound orange tabby that had shared her life since her last year of college. Because Rodney was allergic to cats.
Haley's foot came down fast and heavy on the brake pedal. Locking up the wheels and causing the car to slide uncomfortably to one side.
The car glided gently toward the side of the road and came to a graceful stop. Haley willed her fingers to relax their death grip on the wheel as she tried to avoid hyperventilating.
Fuck driving in snow.
When her heart stopped feeling like it was trying to escape her rib cage, she took a deep breath and let her foot off the brake. The car resumed its downhill course once more.
She knew better than to think about that asshole while she was driving.
Rod had filled her head with all sorts of romantic notions. He'd told her she could move up there and that he'd support her while she planned the wedding. No hurry on getting her licensing transferred or finding a job. And besides, he didn't want his wife to work when she was going to have babies to raise anyway.
She'd been so stupid. She fell for the whole line. Given up everything she'd worked for and hopped in the car.
Only to get to Tacoma and find that the lovely cottage home he'd sent her pictures of was actually his mother's house at the front of the property. Yes, he did live on 3 and a half acres "just outside of Seattle," but it was his mom's land. He lived in an old, single wide mobile home on the back corner of the property. Not even a cute one. One of those old trailer houses with aluminum siding and a leaky roof.
Still, Haley had been ready to give it her best. Who cared, right? Rodney loved her. He apologized "if the pix of Mom's house were misleading" and promised that that was the only thing he'd "exaggerated" about.
A month later, she had written one hell of a check to replace the 1972 leaky single wide with a brand new, state of the art, 2200 square foot manufactured home with a matching 3 car garage and shop building. And she'd been excited to do it too. Getting so much more for her money up here than the dinky little 850 square foot condo she'd sold in Long Beach and setting up home sweet home with her fiancé.
Rod's mom was a sweetheart. A little on the older side with Rodney being one of those late in life "oops I thought I was done with menopause" babies that was born when she was 44. She probably shouldn't have been living alone, but Rod said that's why he hadn't moved completely out on his own. And now Haley was there to help out! And she was a nurse to boot!
Haley caught herself chewing a hole through her inner lip and pulled her foot of the gas pedal, remembering not to slam on the brakes this time. The engine's protesting whine calmed as the tachometer needle feel from 3500 back to just over 1000.
By the time she reached the bottom of the steep mountain road and joined the freshly plowed main highway, she had almost-- almost-- stopped thinking about Rodney. She'd almost stopped thinking about how attached she'd become to his mother and how heartbroken she'd been when the old woman passed away. She'd almost stopped thinking about Rodney's sudden change in tune as soon as he'd come back from his meeting with his mother's attorney. And she'd almost stopped thinking about how stupid she'd been to not insist on having her name on the new house when she put all her savings into it.
What she hadn't stopped thinking about was how it had all ended with her losing everything but her pride, getting her license for Washington so she could take a job making less than a quarter of what she did back home and renting a small cabin that required her to drive down a treacherous mountain road every day to get to work when there was snow on the ground.
And recently she was pretty sure there was wolf roaming the woods that surrounded her rented property.
2
It was a wolf all right. After managing to get a few lousy pictures with her cell phone and passing it around to her co-workers, she'd been assured it was "just a timber wolf."
It was mostly white with a few patches that appeared to be light tan, and male. Definitely male. So far he'd always been alone and Haley could only hope that there wasn't an entire pack that she couldn't see hiding in the bushes.
The night staff that worked with her at the hospital had assured her that she didn't need to worry about wolves. They wouldn't hunt humans unless they were starving. Her co-workers looked at her pictures with "oohs" and "ahhs" as if she were passing around photos of her new baby. They said that wolf sightings were actually very rare and that she was really lucky.
Haley didn't feel lucky. The wolf was just one more reminder of how far her life had deviated from her expectations.
She had expected to be married and pregnant by now; spending her days with her feet elevated while she knitted booties. Not that she knew how to knit, but she figured there were probably enough Youtube videos that she could learn.
Making her way back up the road to the cabin was almost as harrowing as getting down it. Fortunately, there was virtually never any traffic on the road-- since she was the only fool living at the top of the mountain through the winter-- so she could creep along as slowly as she was comfortable with.
One of the doctors had told her she needed to get snow tires but when she'd priced them out, she'd almost died of shock. She had picked up a set of snow chains but one of the janitors at the hospital had warned her not to put them on her little compact sedan. She had a set of passenger car appropriate cables on her to-buy list but even though it was late November and the snow kept falling on the road that only got plowed once a week at best, she hadn't bothered to make the trip to the local mercantile shop yet.
This morning was rougher going than usual. It had snowed over night while she was at work and she was crawling up the hill about an hour before the sun would be high enough to melt off the upper layer of icy crust. Her front wheels slipped every so often, losing traction and spinning in the snow. When that happened it felt weird because even though her foot was still on the gas pedal and the wheels were still spinning, the car just stayed in place. Once, she actually felt it sliding back for a bit before the wheels caught and she regained uphill momentum.
She wasn't supposed to be driving through 6 inches of snow. She was supposed to be decorating the nursery. Waiting for her husband to come home from his job...
Haley ground her teeth against each other, her jaw tight from pushing the small car through increasingly deep snow as well as from her brain's insistence on hashing through the disaster of her last 2 years in Washington.
Take care of his mom, buy him a new house, pay off his credit cards-- with the money from her savings because Rod kept telling her there was no need for her to transfer her license and go back to work. All while planning her wedding.
Only to find herself out on her ass as soon as his mom passed away. Suddenly Rodney had found himself the sole owner of a nice piece of land with two homes that were all paid for and a sweet chunk of money from a life insurance policy that he hadn't even known his mother had.
He suddenly didn't "feel like" getting married or starting a family. And that new house that Haley had paid for? All his. Because when she had it put on the land, it had sounded perfectly reasonable to not put the title in a different name than was already on the property. What did it matter? They were going to be married soon and it wouldn't be an issue.
What a fool she was!
The heel of her hand landed hard on the edge of the steering wheel with frustration.
She felt the front wheels lose traction, the rear end slid gracefully sideways as the drive wheels spun in futility. The car spun slightly, falling backward toward the side of the mountain till the rear bumper came to rest against the snow bank piled 3 feet high on the side of the road. When she was sure she had stopped moving, she gingerly let off the brake and applied throttle. She heard the sound of the rubber spinning effortlessly against slick ice and water.
Haley pounded her hands against the wheel again. She screamed a few obscenities and finally let her forehead fall against the steering wheel.
She wasn't going anywhere.
3
Daelan knew the sound of her car. It was creeping slowly up Old Tower Road in low gear. She still hadn't invested in snow tires, he could tell from the sound that she was still running those street tires designed for fast freeway driving somewhere where it didn't snow.
He'd been worrying about her more and more as the winter brought longer nights and colder temps. The snowy season had finally arrived and now the sky was dumping snow at a faster rate than normal to make up for its late start. He'd had a hard time getting the kid up here to keep the road plowed for her before the next storm came through.
Of course, plowing Old Tower wasn't really the Pack's responsibility. The road and the cabin at the top were still in their territory, but the land had been sold off a years ago. Still, Daelan had developed an interest in the woman who was staying in the old hunting cabin and he wanted to make sure she didn't fall off the cliff driving in the snow.
This morning had started like most of his mornings recently. He'd found himself out alone-- "scouting" he called it when the others raised their prying eyebrows-- on the west side of the mountain where he had a good view of the road. Just a little after dawn, well before the sun rose high enough over the peaks of the Cascade Mountains to chase off the shadows and melt the snow from the tree tops.
Daelan often wondered why the pack had chosen him as the new Alpha after his father died, rather than hold a competition for the position. He didn't mind being in charge but he knew the elders didn't agree with his plans to modernize the ancient pack's traditional ways.
That's why he was glad he had Rek for his Beta. Rek was better at balancing the modern with the traditional. He kept a level head under pressure and had calmed many a heated debate between the Alpha and the council.
He and Rek made a good team and that was important when they had one of the oldest packs on the west coast to manage.
Daelan listened for the sound of her car turning onto Old Tower Road and cringed as he heard the nerve-wracking sound of her tires slipping their way up the steep old road. He ran ahead of her car, staying ahead of her as he made his way uphill to meet her at the cabin.
His paws were wide, built for running over the snow, and he made good time on his way to the long drive way. He jumped up on one of the big boulders that hung high above the road and trained his eyes on the small car that was making questionable progress toward his new location.
Why hadn't this woman prepared her vehicle for winter travel? She should have had her tires swapped out over a week ago. And why was she living up in the old cabin when she clearly had reason to be in town nearly every day? She should have found a place at the bottom of the hill.
Of course, if she had, he would never have found her.
Daelan had been keeping an eye on her since he first spotted her as she carried groceries in from the car.
He had been blithely trotting across the property on his way back from an actual scouting mission when she'd seen him. He'd been frozen in his tracks at the unmistakable scent of a human in an area that hadn't been occupied for quite some time.
The woman had just stepped onto the porch from the cabin's front door, no doubt headed toward the trunk of her car that she had left open.
The inviting scents of raw meat and sourdough bread had caught his attention and when he'd turned to investigate he'd frozen at the sight of her.
She had been just visible though the open front door of the old cabin, standing in the small kitchen completely unaware that she was being watched.
Her heavy breasts lifted from her frame as she stret
ched to put dry goods away in one of the high cabinets. She'd been wearing street clothes that day, not the nurse's scrubs he'd come to expect since then. The sweater looked soft and it hugged her curves as it moved with her body while she stretched and bent with her task. It was long and it clung to her round hips before ending just below the crease of her full ass. She'd been wearing the sweater over a pair of black leggings that fit like skin.
God bless Spandex, Daelan remembered thinking.
That first sighting had awakened something in Daelan that he didn't recognize. He wasn't sure why the human woman with the dark brown hair and the rounded hips captured his imagination so much more so than other females but since that day he'd been compelled to visit her again and again. He'd memorized her routine, her scent, and every tempting contour of her body as it flowed and shimmied beneath her clothes.
Images of her dimpled skin filled his mind each time he watched her. Saliva dripped from his jowls as he spied on her while she moved through the cabin, leaving the blinds open without a hint of concern that she was on full display for anyone-- or anything-- that might be lurking in the woods.
Didn't women get warned to watch for wolves in the woods anymore?
Daelan had no qualms about stalking the human and he had every intention of taking her as his lover. Taking her fully and completely. Hearing her moans echo through the forest while he took his fill.
Lust for a woman-- human or were-- was not new to him. It was the need to worry over her and make sure she was safe and well cared for that had been driving him to distraction since the first time he saw her. She wasn't of the Pack and she wasn't wolf, he had obligation to her.
Daelan watched anxiously as the car slipped and spun, careening backward down the hill till the ass end came to rest against the wall of snow that had piled up from the kid's plow blade.
