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Sorority Wolf
Copyright © 2014 by Rebecca Royce
ISBN: 978-1-61333-729-5
Cover art by Syneca Featherstone
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work, in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
Published by Decadent Publishing Company, LLC
Look for us online at:
www.decadentpublishing.com
ROAR
Mischief, Mongrels & Mayhem
Coming Soon
Phoenix Rising by Cara Carnes
Imperfect Mate by Lia Davis
Shifted Plans by Brandy Walker
Tempting her Tiger by Virginia Cavanaugh
Also by Rebecca Royce
Another Chance
Initiation
Driven
Bar Mate
Out of Place Mate
Mate by the Music
Unwanted Mate
Behind the Scenes
Believe in Me
Embraced
Eye Contact
Rebirth
Subversive
Return to the Sea
I’ll be Mated by Christmas
One Night With a Wolf
Forever
Love in One Night
Hexed and Vexed
Justice
February Lover
Sorority Wolf
By
Rebecca Royce
Dear Reader,
Welcome to autumn, 2014. It’s a time for pumpkin spice lattes, cooling days, and kids heading back to school. I swear it feels like just yesterday that we were doing this last year. You know, I have a deep and abiding love for paranormal romance. I actually fell in love with urban fantasy and by extension paranormals thanks to two authors: Anne Rice and Emma Bull. If you’ve never checked them out, you should.
Fortunately, in the years since I read those the genre of paranormal romance has grown by leaps, shifts, fangs, and fur. I’ve always had a soft spot for shifter romance, and if you told me a book had wolves or cats or bears in it—well, I was so there. This hasn’t changed, not one bit. I don’t think there’s enough shifter romance in the world, but I did want to see more—what happens when young shifters leave their packs? What if they go off to school? How do they start over? How does a young wolf or cat or bear or any young person really make that final leap to adulthood?
I am thrilled to introduce Decadent ROAR as an answer to those questions. The line is dedicated to featuring stories about young weres and shifters who have come of age but now must determine the path of the rest of their lives. It's an exciting time of making your own decisions and not having to seek permission, but freedom always comes with a cost. Fortunately for these burgeoning adults, they have the ROAR hotline to reach out to.
Run by the mysterious siblings Hui and Min, 555-ROAR is a line shifters can text or call for help, whether it’s, What’s the best spot to hunt, or I’m in danger. What should I do? It’s a helpline, and a lifeline in some cases. Growing up is hard—being an adult is harder.
So what do we have to kick you off as ROAR launches a new school year? How about a mongrel attending college close to home who must contend with a sexy Alpha and his pride moving into her region? That’s the problem Mischief “Missy” Jones faces in Mischief, Mongrels & Mayhem by Heather Long.
Pledging a sorority can be hell, but is it so bad when you have a demon on your side? Werewolf Alexandra will have to decide when Kieran promises to turn over heaven and hell to help her out in Sorority Wolf by Rebecca Royce.
Not everyone gets encouragement when they head off into the big, bad world on their own. This couldn’t be more true for fragile and abused Riletta who’s dumped at school with no options, no fallback, and no hope—that is until delicious Macen intervenes in the hot ride that is Phoenix Rising by Cara Carnes.
Choosing college can be a grueling experience, but, then again, so can diving into adulthood and taking responsibility for your actions. Samira faces s a lot of hard choices, none tougher than accepting human Gavin might be her mate in Lia Davis’ Imperfect Mates.
Life is what happens when you’re not paying attention, and the best things don’t always occur in the order you expect. They sure don’t for Avery and Declan. Both are busy setting up their lives but the allure of mating throws them for a loop in Brandy Walker’s Shifted Plans.
Attracting attention from the male species is a hard job, even more so when that male is a shifter. Some lines, though, are hard to cross, and Jordan will fight his attraction to his best friend’s sister, Stacia, with everything he has in Tempting her Tiger by Virginia Cavanaugh.
Ultimately, the question these six stories must answer is not who will they be as adults, but who are they? How do they reconcile everything they've ever known with what can be? It's a new type of shifter romance, with all the love and passion required to achieve a happily ever after....
Thank you for joining us as we launch a hot new series—we’ll do our best to make every single tale memorable.
Happy Reading!
Heather Long and
Decadent Publishing
www.decadentpublishing.com
~Dedication~
To Heather Long, for so much.
Chapter One
The wind blew hard against him, and his body acted as a natural resistance to the onslaught of a Massachusetts winter. Three months into the school year, November had hit the northeastern part of the United States with a vengeance. Any sane person would be inside where it was warm. But she had come outside, and he’d followed—as though a length of invisible rope connected him to her.
He loved to watch her.
The way she moved. The way she sometimes didn’t move.
He rubbed the stubble on his chin. How long had it been since he’d shaved? A day? A week? A month? The longer he spent with the humans, the more his body adapted to their form, which was exactly what he’d planned and why he’d risked everything to come to Northern Tide University. The more time he spent in this dimension, the less he had to try to resemble them.
Not understanding total assimilation was exactly what he craved, his father had warned him this would happen as if blending would deter him from his plan.
Only he hadn’t counted on her.
Alexandra Morgan.
She stood staring up at a white sorority house at the very top of the Greek hill the university was so proud of. Queen House—the one to rule them all—where dreams of young girls were crushed on a regular basis. All the female students desired to be Lambda Chi Sigma. The smartest, prettiest, strongest-willed women the university produced came from the sorority housed there. But first, they had to be accepted into the hallowed halls.
Unbeknownst to the human population of the school, LCS took only one type of student—female werewolves. No matter how many human girls threw their best smiles, hopes, dreams, and money at LCS, they would never be offered the opportunity to pledge. Unless they shifted und
er the full moon, they were no one.
If he wasn’t mistaken, Alexandra met that particular requirement.
So, why was she so nervous?
“Hey, Alexandra.” The others in her dorm called her Alex, but the nickname didn’t suit her. She embodied the nobility of Alexandra. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed with the cutest cleft in her chin. He wanted to run his human hands all over her luscious curves until he made her squirm with pleasure. Another symptom of his apparent internal change. Sex had been the last thing on his radar when he’d arrived on campus.
“Kieran.” She jerked, placing a hand over her heart as she laughed.
Jumpy for a werewolf….
“What are you doing out here? It’s cold.” For a human, she meant. She’d not feel the chill any more than he did. But she couldn’t know about his resistance or that he knew her secret.
He shrugged and pushed the glasses he didn’t need back up on his nose. He might need them soon with the way his body had changed—continued to change—but for the moment, they were for show.
“That’s what jackets are for.” He pulled at the sleeve of his leather coat.
“Oh.” She blushed. He resisted the urge to rub his hand over the touch of pink on her cheeks. Weird behavior wouldn’t do.
“What are you doing out here?” A repeat of her earlier question. She seemed to want an actual answer. Alexandra smiled, and for a second, he forgot to breathe.
“I could ask you the same thing. Planning on pledging there tomorrow? You freshman girls are all the same. Dreaming of your Greek letters and the privileges associated with them.”
She snorted. “I could say the same to you. You’re a Sigma guy, aren’t you? And a senior. So when you started, you must have been standing in line to rush with all the other freshman guys.”
Well, no, that hadn’t been him. His body, yes, but he would never have bothered with the show. As it was, he barely refrained from committing mass murder every week at his fraternity meetings. “That was then. This is now. I have other…interests taking up a lot of my time.”
“Such as?”
He grinned. The woman needed to learn to watch the growl in her voice if she didn’t wish the humans to find out about her. A lot of the newly arrived wolves had the same problem. They’d never lived anywhere except around other wolves before college.
“Are you okay? Something in your throat?”
“Oh.” Her face heated up again. “Maybe I have allergies.”
“Ah. I see.” He nodded and stared at the house she watched. Why was she worried? She was a werewolf. They took werewolves as their pledges. Boom. Done deal. Moving on.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
He cocked his head to the side. “What question?”
“What do you do if you’re not invested in Greek life anymore? I really need to know. In case I don’t get in. What will I do for the next four years?”
“I study.”
Her frown said she’d been hoping to hear a different answer.
Kieran had his goals, and nothing would get in his way. Studying fell into the required category. Maybe he didn’t have to make it so dour for her. “And I’ve gotten very involved with politics on campus. It’s good positioning for later in life.”
“If you say so.” She pointed at LCS. “My mother was a sister there. My grandmother, too.”
“So then what are you worried about?” And why did he care? This werewolf woman was taking way too much of his time and energy. Five hundred new freshmen every year and he fixated on this one? Why? Tons of women were beautiful. It wasn’t as though he could ever date her. A werewolf wouldn’t work for his ultimate plan.
“My mother didn’t leave on good terms.” She sucked in her breath. “But I guess it shouldn’t matter. I’m a legacy; they’ll take me.”
Her words resonated in his brain. He knew what his body had suffered during pledging. The hell his so-called brothers had put him through before he’d been initiated into his letters were stored in his mind. And those frat brothers had liked him, had asked him to be a brother. What would happen to this little werewolf if they didn’t wish for her? If they were forced to take her because of legacy rules?
He shook his head. “Well, I guess…good luck.”
“Ah…thanks.” She blinked rapidly, and he knew he’d been rude, but who gave a shit? Her feelings couldn’t matter. She was a werewolf and not appropriate.
He turned on his heel and marched toward his fraternity house. Taking the stairs two at a time, he arrived at his room in less than ten minutes. Having an advanced position in the House came with some perks. He didn’t have or need a roommate.
Lying down on the bed, he tried to breathe through his nose. He’d watched werewolves for thousands of years. The same way he’d watched vampires. Lion shifters. Phoenixes. Humans.
That’s what demons did. They watched. Until they surfaced on Earth and took a body. What they did with their time depended on the demon, and so help him…his shot would count for something. He’d be twice the demon his father was.
Before this body turned thirty, he would be more powerful than any other of his kind had ever achieved.
He closed his eyes. All of his planning meant he needed to stop thinking about her. So what if the day she’d arrived for freshman orientation, she’d stared up at him with the bluest eyes he’d ever seen while he signed her in? So fucking what? Who cared if she giggled for a second before she laughed?
He was a teacher’s assistant in one of her classes. Alexandra had a brain in her head to rival any of her fellow students, but she stood on the side of the road, staring up at a sorority house that, by all rights, should desire her. Yet he knew the so-called sisters might not. Not his problem.
Werewolves were not part of his plan. Particularly not some sorority wolf whose kind didn’t wish to have her around.
His phone rang, and he rolled over to stare at it. Human feelings were seeping through into his consciousness, and he couldn’t allow the leak to continue. His hair could grow, but his lack of sympathy for humanity had to stay neatly tucked away as someone else’s problem.
Right then, he had to answer his phone. “This is Kieran.”
“Son.” His father’s human voice travelled over the wireless network to reach him. He flinched at the sound.
“Why are you calling? Bad enough I have to take calls from this vessel’s human parents every week. Are you planning to be a nuisance, too?”
A snicker echoed over the connection. “One call in three months and I’m stalking you?”
Kieran rolled his eyes. “What do you want?” If his father didn’t come up with a reason for this call soon, Kieran would hang up. Screw the man. Demon. Whatever.
“A favor.”
Kieran sat up straighter. “From me?” He’d never been in a position to help anyone before, and he didn’t really think anything had changed. He lived as a co-ed. “What can I do for you? Chiefs of police don’t usually need something from pre-law students. Need me to look up a statute for the District of Columbia?”
“If you could put away the snark for a minute, I’ll share something I think you’ll find very interesting.”
He rubbed his forehead. “Go ahead.”
As he listened to his father’s voice, his headache got worse. Kieran. He slammed his hand down on his side table. Stay out of my head. You’re dead, got it? Humans don’t master the Demons. We master you.
And yet sadness flooded him, and he knew it couldn’t be his own emotion. He didn’t feel sadness. Ever. Some twenty-two year old kid couldn’t beat the son of one of the most powerful demons in hell.
***
“Honey.”
Alexandra O’Henry stared at her reflection in the mirror. Should she stay in her black skirt, or would it be better to meet the sisters for the first time wearing something funkier? What said “accept me as your sister even though my mom’s a whore” better, a skirt or floral pants?
“Honey, are you li
stening to me?”
No, at the moment, she wasn’t listening to her mother who blabbed on the phone. “Sure, Mom, talk to me.”
“You don’t have to do this. Plenty of wolves are lone wolves. You weren’t raised around all of this nonsense, and you don’t have to play all their games now. We were fine. We were happy, right? Why are you doing this to me?”
Alexandra sat down on the bed. This was hard, a lot tougher than she thought it would be. Lying to her mother for months and months about where she had decided to go to college was one thing. Coming clean about it the day before she left had been hellish. But the sheer pain in her mother’s tone every time they spoke had to be the most difficult of all.
Why couldn’t the woman understand this was something she had to do? She was a werewolf—one who had never known the sanctity of pack, who had never felt the embrace of that kind of family.
Lambda Chi Sigma would give her all of that and more. The werewolves who were sisters there moved on to become members of any pack they chose. They did not have to petition an alpha for admittance; the alphas came to them. She could pick a future, pick a life, pick a pack. And, finally, for the first time in her life, take a deep breath.
“Mom. This is just something I have to do.” She rubbed her nose. “Why can’t you understand? You made a choice. You—”
Her mother interrupted. “I chose you. I chose your father. We were lone wolves. It was okay. I had a pack. If I haven’t made this clear over the years, what you really need to understand is a pack isn’t the Holy Grail answer to everything. The concept, sure, it’s fantastic. The reality? It sucks. I’ve never seen one that hasn’t ended up in the dirt. Your father knew—”
This time it was her turn to interrupt her mother. “My father? He left us. He was such a lone wolf he couldn’t even stick by his own wife and child. I’m sorry you had such a horrible time. I really am. But this is my turn. I’m not spending one more second talking to you if you can’t at least promise to respect my decision to try.”
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