Last Alpha: A Highland shifter romance

by Ruby Fielding

  Hand still wrapped around the base of his shaft, she gave a gentle tug, then slipped her hand away as he drove slowly home. Even when she thought she could take no more, he kept sliding in, until finally he was hard against her, lifting her to the toes of the one foot that remained on the ground, taking most of her weight on his hands and arms and the tiled wall against her back.

  He started to move then, a pressing of the hips, a series of shallow thrusts, most of his length still inside her.

  She became intensely aware of the hand looped under her raised thigh, supporting her. Of her head tucked into that hollow again. Of the heat of their bodies and of the steam, of the water flowing down over them.

  She started to roll her hips in response to his thrusts, feeling that hard core sliding deep inside her.

  She felt heat within. Tension. Muscles drawn tight. Pulses of sensation surging out from her clit as he ground against her.

  A new hardness in him. Every muscle tensed, hard as rock, sinews straining.

  He was close.

  She swung one hand up from where it had been clinging to the side of his waist. Brought it across his shoulder blade, fingers clawed. Dragged down, fingernails raking his skin, making his back arch in reflex response, making him tip his head back and cry out. She had never heard a human sound that was more inhuman than that strangled groan, as she drew those stiff fingers down his back, nails against flesh, unforgiving.

  That sound, that intense physical response to her touch, the sharp thrust of his body... all of his responses took her to the edge and over. Took the tightenings and pulses, the electric stabs through her belly, the tremors deep within, and brought them all together into a single, mounting wave that built and built and finally broke.

  She ground her head back against the tiles, cried out. No words, just sound. Pressed against him, held him, keeping him deep as that ripple of muscles within her clenched in the first wave of climax, tightening and releasing again and again around the hardness of his shaft.

  She felt him pause, hold himself in check, and for a moment she thought the intensity of her reaction had confused him. Then he pressed just a fraction harder and she felt a throb deep within, felt a surging, a blossoming of wet heat, and it was Billy’s turn to throw his head back and cry out, to thrust against her again as another surge of climax took him.

  She held him, her breath ragged. Staggered by the power of what had just happened.

  He started to ebb within her. His body softened, and now they clung to each other in a different way, tender intimacy taking over from animal intensity.

  She kissed the tight skin across his collarbone, the side of his neck. Felt another subsidence, a withdrawal, and then his manhood flopped down, out of her.

  She looked up, into those dark eyes.

  Forgot the madness. The scariness.

  Forgot all the sensible, rational thoughts that had told her this could never be right.

  Forgot everything except the moment, and the moments they had just shared.

  22

  Pressure inside. Building. About to burst.

  Feelings. Responses.

  Base, primal things.

  He runs. Careening off walls. Skidding on polished floor. Staggering, rolling, tumbling down hard steps.

  Out.

  Struck by chill night air that almost burns the lining of throat and lungs as it is sucked deep.

  Reeling away, like a drunkard. Across gravel. Over a low hedge, trimmed geometrically square. Grass, damp with the night’s fall of summer dew.

  Bare skin. Wet. Cold.

  Pain. Deep, skeletal pain.

  He drops to his knees, hands on thighs, breath ripping raggedly from his lungs.

  Too much to take in, to absorb.

  Too much to handle.

  A popping of vertebrae, one after the other. Ribs pulling apart, stretching.

  Legs shifting, tucking under as the pelvis realigns itself.

  Jaw stretching, face distorting.

  Pain.

  So much pain.

  Nausea, from the agony of the change, from the internal shiftings to match the external.

  Body hair thickening, forming a layer of soft underfur; coarse guard hairs sprouting, thickening across the shoulders and neck into heavy hackles, almost a mane.

  Pain.

  Pain.

  Pain.

  §

  The world seems new.

  Like the smell of the earth after a summer shower, or ground emerging in the spring thaw.

  Every scent is new, a fresh discovery.

  His heart beats fast.

  He has found his soulmate, and the world is as new.

  §

  He pauses under the first of the trees, looks back at the dark bulk of the building.

  There is a pale shape at a window. A human, looking out.

  He turns, starts to trot.

  Starts to run. Fast and hard, body held low, threading over bracken and through the trees.

  The world hasn’t felt like this – so vital – since the very first time he changed.

  Back then he had been scared. Hadn’t known what was happening, how to respond.

  And now? He is scared. He doesn’t understand what is in his head or his body, how it makes him feel. Doesn’t know how to respond.

  He stops, tips his head back, rocks onto his haunches, lets the sound build up from a low growl in his belly into a mournful, musical howl that cuts through the night.

  Then he drops his head, and trots away through the trees.

  23

  She woke alone.

  It took a few seconds to adjust, for her to realize why it felt strange to be alone, even when she had woken alone most nights and mornings for the last two years. Waking alone was the norm, so why...?

  She rolled onto her side, not sure if she was imagining the hollow in the mattress where he had been, the remnant body heat, the musky man-scent.

  She was naked and she ached. She felt as if she’d gone to the gym after a long break. Which is pretty much what had happened.

  After their shared shower, the two of them had tumbled back along the dark corridor, stone slabs cold on her feet. Falling into bed, they’d suddenly been awkward, intimate. Still spent from their love-making, this was a tender thing, the touching and pressing, the kissing, the small talk that had been anything but small talk.

  Everything was different now, wherever they went from here.

  Different, and in no way straightforward.

  Slowly, tenderly, intimate had become something else again, passions stirring once more. There was no stopping him! No stopping her.

  She couldn’t remember a time with anyone when desires had been so heady and tumultuous, and when bodies and performance had been up to the task. Couldn’t remember a man who had ever left her so ragged and spent, or made her feel more desired than this.

  At some point they had fallen asleep, tangled and wet and exhausted.

  And now... waking alone.

  Had he slipped away to the bathroom?

  Even as she had that thought she knew it was not the explanation. His side of the bed had been abandoned for longer than that.

  She was being too self-absorbed, too caught up in her own feelings, her own response to this situation. But for Billy... If he had been telling the truth, then all this was entirely new to him. He’d never had a real relationship. Never had a woman. The intensity of his feelings for Jenny was clear – how was he feeling now? How overwhelmed must he be? How much of a struggle was it to adjust to all this?

  For everything was different for Billy, too.

  She sat, skin contracting into goosebumps from the coolness of the night air.

  She climbed out of bed and stood for a moment. She was so wet from him, still. She reached for a handful of tissues and dried herself, then balled them and tossed them towards the trash basket.

  She listened, but there was no sound of anyone moving around. Had he gone? Was he coming back, or wa
s this it?

  She moved across to the window. All she saw outside was different shades of darkness. No stars tonight – hidden by cloud-cover, she guessed – it was impossible to tell where sky became forest. Lower down, a wash of silver light spilled out from one of the ground floor windows, casting a misty sheen across the grass.

  She was just about to turn away when she spotted movement, a pale patch against the dark – picked out, perhaps, by that ground-floor light.

  She strained her eyes, but the patch was hard to distinguish. Then she remembered a trick she had been taught years back. Normally, when you look directly at something, the image falls on a part of the retina called the fovea, packed with cone cells which form a sharp image but need lots of light; when it’s dark, if you look slightly away from the thing you want to see, the image forms away from the fovea on areas richer in rod cells, which function better in low light.

  She looked just to the right of the pale blob, and in the corner of her vision she saw that it was a wolf.

  What the...?

  She couldn’t help but look directly at the thing again, and then it flickered in her vision, becoming fuzzy and moving, retreating into the darkness beneath the trees. Before she could look slightly away again, the animal was gone.

  A wolf?

  Her first thought was that she had imagined it, that what she had seen was something else, a deer, perhaps. She had only seen the beast briefly, and not well at all. Certainly not well enough to leap to conclusions.

  Her second thought was that Billy had lied to her. They all had. The wolves in the enclosure out back of Lilian’s lab building were not the only ones here. Either there were others already released, or there was some kind of remnant population, drawn here by the captive pack. Or perhaps the pack were allowed to roam free at night, only returning to the enclosure for shelter and food?

  Her third thought was so far-fetched she dismissed the possibility before it had even formed into words.

  Cold, she hugged herself, then turned away from the window, climbed into the big bed and pulled the blankets around her once more.

  A howl cut through the air. A low, musical cry, building and climbing the scale, holding for long seconds, and then falling away again.

  It could have been the alpha male from the pack in the enclosure, she knew. The logical part of her mind understood that. It was foolish to rush to any other conclusion.

  To decide that the pale creature she’d seen at the edge of the trees just now had clearly not been a deer. No deer made a sound like that.

  Sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, she put one hand to the mattress where Billy had so recently rested.

  She worried for him now.

  There was a wolf out there, and she didn’t know if it was worse that he might be at risk or that he might have been telling the truth after all.

  §

  The morning repeated the familiar pattern. Waking late, the shower, the breakfast tray awaiting her on her return to the tower room.

  Last night seemed so distant, as if it had happened to another person.

  Madness.

  But she couldn’t help worrying. There had been no word from Billy. In what kind of world was it okay to profess your undying love, then vanish in the middle of the night?

  Was he okay? Just how thrown had he been by the tumultuous sequence of events?

  She sat with her cup of milky tea in one hand, her cell phone in the other. Texted him with a brief, You OK?? Pressed Send before she allowed herself time to get hung up on the etiquette of whether or not to add kisses.

  She didn’t have a plan for the day. Carr seemed either distracted, or to have lost interest. She’d have to track him down later, try to arrange an appointment to see him. She needed to work out where this story was going, if it even was something she could turn into a story. And she needed to work out what she wanted to do about his job offer.

  It was hard to see herself staying here, but she knew a part of her mind was already working along that track.

  One thing was sure: if she was going to invest herself in the work that was going on at Craigellen she would need to shake away any feeling that she wasn’t properly in the picture. She wouldn’t work with anyone who refused to trust her fully, and share accordingly.

  Billy’s reply to her message came through about an hour later. She was out walking under the trees, following one of the little paths that led away from the castle gardens.

  I’m fine, his message read. Just up by the lodge with the pack.

  The message’s timestamp was nearly half an hour ago, but it had only just come through. The signal here was patchy, at best. She wondered if he’d still be there, but then this path had brought her partway up towards the labs anyway, so she might as well try.

  She cut through to the main trail, and minutes later had reached the point where it opened out with the view across to Beinn Madadh to the left.

  It was a gray day, dampness thick in the air. What had Aileen called it, when Jenny had passed her in the castle? Dreich. This was a dreich day.

  She’d borrowed a green, waxed coat from Aileen. She really hadn’t packed well for a visit to the Highlands. Now she pulled the coat tight, dipped her head down against a sudden flurry of rain, and walked on towards the laboratory building.

  §

  The entrance was locked, but she didn’t want to buzz for attention. She remembered coming here the day before and being confronted by Lilian’s oddball sidekick, Tsang.

  A narrow path led around the side of the building, between the Lodge and the sharply rising rocks of the hill. Jenny followed the path, and emerged in the clear area to the rear. She saw Billy immediately, perched on a big rock, one knee drawn up, supporting his hands and chin. The wolves lay just beyond the fence, stretched out in the sun that was starting to break through.

  As she approached, neither Billy nor beasts showed any indication that they were aware of her until Billy’s eyes flitted her way and he said, “I couldn’t stay. I’m sorry. I didn’t know how.”

  Such an odd way of putting it. How could you not know how to stay?

  “I was worried,” she told him.

  She hadn’t seen him this nervous before. Unsettled.

  “I didn’t know where you’d gone, or why. I know this is all new territory. Scary. Intense. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for you.”

  “It scares me,” he said. “It’s all I want, but it scares me. Unsettles me.”

  It’s all I want.

  This really was new territory.

  She went to him, put a hand to the back of his head and drew him to her. Cradling his head against her breasts, the stiff waxed fabric of the coat making what should have been intimate more uncomfortable than anything, she stroked the back of his neck with her thumb.

  “I don’t know what this is,” she said, not sure what she was saying until the words spilled out. “I don’t know where it’s going, and some of the things you say – the things you believe – scare me. But I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere, okay?”

  He nodded against her, then his arm looped round behind her, his hand coming to rest on the small of her back. Even in such a small movement, his strength was evident. She flashed back then to the walk from the village, the way he’d lifted her from the ground so easily.

  She dipped down and kissed the crown of his head, the coarse tangle of dark hair damp from the rain.

  “I came out here last night,” he said. “I was unsettled, couldn’t hold it all in. Had to get out into the fresh air, you know? So I came up here. When I got here I could tell something was different. Something was up. The scents were all confusing, the behavior of the wolves. The pack were unsettled, as if there was a newcomer.”

  She thought back to the night, standing at the window. “I saw it last night,” she told him. “The newcomer. The wolf.”

  Now he peered up at her, something unreadable in his eyes.

  “No,” he said. “That wa
sn’t any newcomer. That was me.”

  24

  Billy Stewart had the knack of taking a beautiful moment and flipping it onto its back in the dirt.

  All the fears and misgivings came rushing back. He was unbalanced, delusional. He was suffering from the very psychosis he had ascribed to all the other screwballs they had both investigated over the years.

  And she had slept with him, allowed herself to be drawn inextricably into this madness.

  That was me.

  The wolf. The werewolf.

  That was me.

  §

  He must have sensed the change in her, the tensing of her body as they held each other in the rain.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t know what else I can say. I’ve spent my life concealing this thing, but I can’t hide it from you, Jenny. You’re the one person who might understand.”

  “So tell me,” she said, struggling to fight down the rising clamor of voices telling her to walk away, to do anything but engage in this madness. “Tell me what it’s like. What happened last night.”

  “It’s like something waiting to burst,” he said. He straightened now, pulling away from her. She wasn’t sure if that was so he could study her reaction, or so she could study him, read his sincerity as he spoke. “Last night... the rush of emotions. I lay there, watching you sleep, and it seemed the more you settled the more... the more it all built up in me. I had to go. I knew I needed to change, and there comes a point when you can’t suppress it any longer. It was intense. More so than it has been in the longest of times. It reminded me of the very first time, and that scared me.”

  “Why? What was so bad about the first time?” There was something about the way he explained all this. A sincerity that silenced the questioning part of her mind that usually nagged away. Now, in this moment, all disbelief was gone – or suspended, at least.

  “I was a lad,” he said. Now, his eyes refused to meet hers. “A teenager. I had no idea what was happening, what might explain these strange feelings I was experiencing. Just that it was something I should do all I could to suppress.”

  He paused, running a clawed hand through his wet hair.