“Timber Valley. I’m still here. It’s a long story. It turns out that Maxwell isn’t that bad, he’s actually incredibly hot, and-”
“Where are you specifically?” Her voice was urgent as she interrupted me.
“A restaurant called Flapjack Fannie’s. Why?”
“Leave. Go home. Do it now, don’t stop for anything.” There was naked fear in her voice. “Kray found out what happened, and he’s on the warpath. He’s headed your way. I’m so sorry I got you involved in this, Josephine.” And she hung up.
How did she know that, if she wasn’t in town? What was happening here?
I felt my blood chilling in my veins as I headed back to my car, which I’d parked under a big, shady tree at the far end of the parking lot so I could yell at Bess and Corwin in privacy.
Then I stopped in my tracks.
Kray was there, blocking my path. He had Kimball and two other wolves with him, and he was headed my way, and he looked very, very pissed off.
Chapter Eleven
I was too far from the diner for anyone to hear me if I screamed. I grabbed my cell phone and pulled it of my pocket book, but before I could finish calling Maxwell, Kray had rushed forward and slapped it out of my hand. It fell on the asphalt and broke.
He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me over to a pickup truck while I shrieked and struggled, and he slammed me in to the truck so hard my ears rang.
“Get your god damned hands off me! I’m not in your pack!” I yelled at him.
“You think you can make a fool of me?” he yelled, his fingers sinking in to my flesh. His face flushed red with rage.
I tried to yank away from him, and he just held on tighter. My arm throbbed with pain. Behind him, his men growled menacingly, partially shifting, black lips wrinkling back from their fangs.
“You will pay for this, and so will Camille.” His voice was deep and rumbling with rage. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m her friend from college,” I said, my voice shaking.
“College,” he sneered. “I’m glad I made her leave school the second I took over the pack. Women don’t need to go to college. It teaches them to be disrespectful bitches who think they can talk back to a man. No woman in my pack will ever leave pack territory again without a male escort.”
My God, I thought. It’s like he’s with the Taliban. Would he force them to wear burkas next? He’d gone completely mad.
Surely the Elders wouldn’t tolerate this – would they?
The more pressing problem, however, was that I needed to get out of here without him killing me. Then I could worry about how to help the women of the Iron Claw pack.
“I am married to Maxwell Battle,” I informed him, my voice shaking. “I am under his protection.”
“Bullshit you are,” he snarled. “He can’t be married to you unless he wants to go to war, because he made an agreement to marry a bitch from my pack. He’s going to honor it. He’s going to void the marriage with you, and marry whoever the hell I send him. You are going to come with me, and I will make you tell me where she is.”
“No, I won’t,” I said through gritted teeth. My arm pulsed with pain under his brutal grip.
His laugh was an ugly thing, more like a combination between a bark and a snarl. “Trust me, when I’m done with you, you’ll be begging to talk. Then I’ll declare war on your family pack, and we’ll wipe out the males, and take the females for my men. When I find Camille, I’m going to drag her back by her tail and-”
“Let go of her, now.” An angry voice cracked through the air. It was Sheriff Battle, and he had half a dozen shifters with him.
“Make me,” Kray snarled.
While he was distracted, I shifted. Kray’s hand slipped from my furry leg, and I pulled away and tripped, rolling over on the dirt. I scrambled to my feet and ran behind the sheriff and his men as fast as I could.
There were more men coming, people pouring out of the restaurant, both men and women. “Get away from her, and get off our land!” one of the women yelled. “You’re not welcome in this town!”
Kray stood there, glaring, fists bunched. He had three men with him. There were about forty men and women facing off against him now. The diner had emptied out, everyone had come running to my defense.
If he started a fight, he risked being defeated and killed, or having to submit. He’d lose an incredible amount of face.
Sheriff Battle pushed forward, grabbed Kray by the collar, and threw him up against the truck.
“I’m up for a challenge,” the sheriff snarled. “Right here. Right now. Are you?”
There was a moment of silence, the air crackling with tension. Kray stepped back, and bowed his head. The crowd broke into a chorus of howls of derision.
Kray climbed in to his truck, and his men scrambled in after him. As they pulled out, he stopped the truck for a minute and stuck his head out of the window. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear there were tears of rage and humiliation glittering in his eyes.
“I am not submitting, and this is not over!” Kray screamed.
“Sure looked like submitting to me,” Sheriff Battle shouted after him. “Maybe they call it a different name where you come from.”
Kray screeched out of the parking lot, and roared away down the road as if the hounds of Hell were on his tail.
I didn’t get it, I thought, staring after him. He really didn’t seem all that Alpha at all. How was he winning all these death challenges? He seemed like a typical bully to me, a wanna-be. He seemed like the kind of guy who pushed it too far and then got killed by an Alpha. Maybe he won because he was only challenging the Alphas of smaller packs. I was just surprised to see that he was winning any challenges at all, seeing the way he carried himself, the way he bullied and terrorized those weaker than him but backed down the second an Alpha offered to fight him.
With him gone, I shifted back to human form and stood up, stark naked. Someone rushed over to me with a sheet, which I wrapped around myself.
“Maxwell is on his way,” the sheriff said to me. “Are you all right? Let me look at your arm.”
People were crowding around me. Someone thrust a cup of coffee at me.
“I’m fine,” I said shakily, holding my arm out. “He didn’t hurt me.”
Maxwell pulled up minutes later, parked, and ran over to me. “Jesus Christ, are you okay?” he demanded.
I stood there rubbing my arm. “I’m fine,” I said. “What are we going to do, though? He’s going to be looking for Camille now.”
Did that mean the marriage was off? I wondered. Supposedly, we’d been carrying on this charade so that Kray wouldn’t know to look for Camille. Now what?
“I have a feeling that we’ll be resolving this issue one way or the other very soon,” Max said calmly. “I can’t tell you any more than that.”
As soon as we got back to the compound, he walked outside to make a phone call. I went inside, scowling. He was gone for a long time. I poured myself a cold beer to steady my nerves, and sat at the kitchen table, and waited. And waited.
He came back in. “I have to go up to the lodge house,” he said. “My father and I need to hash things out.”
He came back about an hour later.
“What happened? What did you work out?” I asked.
“We had to report matters to the Elders,” he said. “Kray called here demanding that I end the marriage, deliver you to him, tell him where Camille is, and marry a female of his choosing, or he’d issue a death challenge.”
My heart dropped to the bottom of my stomach. “And?”
“I told him to take his demands and shove them up his ass, and I’d be waiting to receive his death challenge. Then I hung up.”
Chapter Twelve
I barely slept that night. Max acted as if he wasn’t worried, so I tried not to worry either. I kept reassuring myself that from what I’d seen, Kray wasn’t anywhere near as tough as he thought he was. Would he even dare to follow through with a
death challenge? If he was as weak as he seemed to be, that would be suicide.
When I woke up the next morning, Max wasn’t there. I got up and walked outside to find Max standing on the front porch, on the cell phone, again. As soon as I came outside, he hung up.
Frustration boiled up inside me. “Max, I really can’t take any more of this secret squirrel stuff,” I said. “Who are you talking to?”
To my surprise, he held up the cell phone and showed me the last number on the phone. Battle Construction Company.
“Huh? Why were you hiding it then?”
“I wasn’t hiding it, you’re just being paranoid. Come on, let’s go for a drive. It’s a beautiful day,” he said.
“Coffee. I need coffee,” I protested. “I’m a beast without my first coffee cup.”
“I know that’s right,” he said, and he followed me inside so we could brew the precious nectar that turns me semi-human every morning.
After coffee and a blueberry muffin, he dragged me outside in my pajamas and urged me into the pickup truck. As we drove, his fingers skimmed over the inside of my thigh. I bit back a whimper and squirmed in my seat. I’d been too distracted and worried for sex the night before, and now I found myself craving Max more than a chocolate sundae. And I love chocolate sundaes.
“I will molest you right here by the side of the road if you keep teasing me, Mr. Battle,” I said.
“I will gladly let you molest me, and then I will molest you right back, Mrs. Battle,” he said.
I have to admit, I was starting to love the sound of that. Mrs. Battle. It felt so right. So homey and comforting.
“By the way, what’s up with Flint Battle and women?” I asked him. “He seems like he’s had some secret heartbreak. Is there anyone you could fix him up with?”
“He doesn’t need any help in that department,” Max said. “I know what you mean, though. For the last year he’s barely dated. He went on vacation somewhere, came back, and he’s never been the same when it came to females. He doesn’t want to talk about it though, so not much I can do to help.”
We drove for miles and miles, the truck bumping along a dirt road that was hemmed in by pine trees so tall that it was like driving through a green tunnel.
“Mr. Battle, are you taking me deep out into the woods so you can take advantage of me?” I demanded.
“Mrs. Battle, I’m wounded that you would accuse me of such a thing. As if I need to get you out in the woods to do that.”
We finally stopped driving, and he climbed out of the truck. I climbed out too.
“Now, we shift,” he said.
We stripped right there and folded up our clothes, and tossed them in the bed of his truck. Then we shifted and ran through the woods. We leaped through berry bushes and over fallen, lichen covered trees, weaving through the Aspen and pine. We ran for miles. Finally, we stopped by a crystal clear lake, and shifted back into human form, standing there naked on the mossy ground.
“This is the location of the future Battle compound,” he said. “This is where the new pack will live.”
Max’s father was an Alpha, and so was Max. Max, in his late twenties, had reached the age where he needed to leave and start his own pack. There couldn’t be two Alphas in one pack; a pack could only have one leader.
The area was so beautiful, deep in the forest of Ponderosa pines, with the mirror-glass of the lake spreading far off into the distance. It was also forcing me to think of the future, a future that might not include me.
He pulled me up against him. “Why so quiet? Don’t you like it?”
I took a deep breath. Time to stop hiding from the painful truth. “Maxwell, I’ve got about a week and a half left,” I pointed out to him.
“What do you mean?”
“A week and a half until the full moon, and Camille can mate and then she’ll be carrying her mate’s cub and nobody can force her to go back. What then?”
He looked puzzled. “Well, I thought I would keep having lots of hot sex with my wife, while we planned out our new compound. I was going to leave you in charge of the interior decorating, unless you start getting too frilly on me, and then I might have to put my paw down. What were your thoughts?”
“You want me to stay? Even though I’ve bought nothing but trouble?”
“Trouble with Kray’s group has been a long time coming,” he said. “You weren’t the one to bring it. What you did was very courageous. And of course I want you to stay, or I wouldn’t have introduced you to my family and the whole town. Don’t you want to stay?”
“I…I haven’t let myself even really think about it,” I said. “I thought you were just letting me stay because you were trying to help Camille.”
“A woman I’ve never even met? Josephine, you’ve got to stop underestimating yourself. You are a wonderful woman. A hot, sexy, smart-mouthed, strong, kind, wonderful woman. I want you to stay here with me, but only if you want to.”
“I do,” I choked out. “I really, really do.”
“Really?” He looked at me searchingly, as if the answer was terribly important to him.
“Yes,” I said, suddenly realizing that I felt as if a hundred ton weight was lifted from my shoulders, a weight I hadn’t realized was even there. I was really staying?
“I’ll show you how much I want to stay,” I said, and sank down to my knees in front of him. I could smell his musky scent, that smell of arousal and masculinity that I’d become so familiar with. I could scent him from fifty feet away, these days, and every time I scented him it sent a thrill of arousal shivering through my body.
I began kissing his flat stomach, and he moaned aloud, and tangled his fingers in my hair.
His cock stood upright, thick and hard. There was a gleaming pearl of pre-cum on it.
I grabbed the base of his cock in my hand and ran my tongue over the head of his cock, lapping it up, and he caught his breath. Then I moved to take him in my mouth. He tasted salty and sweet at the same time, and he let out a low groan as he slid into my mouth and down my throat.
“Baby,” he moaned. “You’re so good.” He pumped into me, his breaths coming harsher and faster and his fingers tightening in my hair. When he exploded, rivers of thick come flowed into my mouth and down my throat, and I greedily drank it all.
As we drove back, I found myself idly thinking about the future, and how one mating during a full moon could fill me full of cubs. Good God, this man could father quintuplets. Birth control, I reminded myself firmly. It was way too soon to be thinking cubs.
Later that day, he insisted on dragging me in to town to the Mercantile, so I could start picking out fabrics for the new house. The whole time, he was chatting about what buildings we’d need, and which of the younger members would be coming to join us as part of the new pack.
I was standing outside the store in a haze of domestic bliss, and I paused when a text message from Aunt Prudence came through. “Are you all right?” it said. I texted her back “Never better! Max and I are planning out our new compound, we’ll be starting a pack together,” and then I looked up to see that Max had walked over to the truck.
Something was resting on his windshield. An envelope. He opened it, pulled out what appeared to be a photograph, and I saw his expression turn dark and angry. He ripped it to shreds and stuffed it in his pocket.
I walked over, staring at him. He scowled, and opened up the passenger door.
“What was that?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
I was stunned into silence. Really. He didn’t want to talk about it. There was a mysterious photograph on the windshield of his truck, and he didn’t want to talk to his wife about it.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what kind of picture it was. If there were any kind of innocent explanation at all, he’d have told me.
He was quiet as we drove back to his house.
I couldn’t go on like this, with him keeping secrets from me.
“Listen,” I said. “I know something is going on. On the one hand, you’re telling me that you want me to stay here and you want this to be a real marriage. On the other hand, you’re getting these mysterious phone calls, and someone left a picture on your car that you’re hiding from me.”
“You’re my wife. You should trust me,” he said stubbornly. “As an Alpha, I am the one who runs the pack and makes the day to day decisions for the pack. You don’t need to know every detail of the pack business.”
I couldn’t believe it. He was trying to put this back on me, as if it were my fault.
“We barely know each other,” I said. “Trust takes time. It comes when somebody behaves in a trustworthy fashion. I’m asking you, Maxwell…what was in that envelope?”
“I can’t discuss it at this time,” he said.
Tears pricked my eyes and terrible sorrow swelled up inside me, choking me. This was how my mother let herself be treated. With every miserable, failing relationship she had, she clung on to hope and let herself be humiliated as men used her, and then cast her aside. It broke her heart, it wrecked her life, and mine.
I wouldn’t live like that.
“We can’t go on like this,” I said, not even trying to hide the tears running down my cheeks. “I’m going to go take a walk, and when I come back, I’m moving into another bedroom. We’ve got like a week left; we can re-evaluate things then.”
“So every time there’s a problem you’re going to just turn and walk out?” Max said furiously.
“Oh, drop dead, Max,” I snapped. “I’m not the one who’s having an affair and refusing to admit it!”
“No, you’re the one who’s falsely accusing your husband!” he shouted.
I stomped out, and ran away from that house as if it were on fire. For once, I ran in human form, jogging down the road until I found a spot near the main family compound. I sat down on a sawed off log by the edge of the woods. There were people on the front porch, but I wasn’t in the mood to talk.
I could scent Virginia coming. I turned to see her walking over. She plopped herself down on the bench next to me.
Bride of the Alpha Page 9
