“There was a wolf,” he said. “One of them was here. A big male, I think. Big silver-furred beast.”
She swallowed. The pack’s alpha male was still in the enclosure – he could only be referring to Billy. “What happened?” she asked.
“I got one shot,” said McQueen. “But we cannae see any sign of the beast now. Probably won’t know until daylight. Right now it’s either dead, cowering wounded down among the rocks, or half a mile away by now.”
He laughed, trying to make light of it, but Jenny was still stuck on the first two options he had presented to her: dead or wounded.
They came to the Land Rover. McQueen must know it was Billy’s, but he made no comment.
He put a hand on each of her shoulders and fixed her with a hard look. “Get back down to the castle and shut yourself in your room, do ye hear me?”
She stepped back, turned, and climbed into the driver’s seat.
Be safe, Billy. Be safe, and come back to me.
§
How could she ever hope to sleep?
How could she do anything but pace the length of her room, arms wrapped around herself, stopping only to stand at an open window, oblivious to the cold night air, peering out into the darkness?
She had had to fight every urge to go back and try to find Billy at the foot of that gorge. McQueen would never have allowed that. She heard no more gunshots, at least, which must be good.
Some time, maybe an hour after she had come back, she saw headlights and then the dark shape of a police car moving slowly along the trail, heading for the Lodge. A short time later, the silver car she had seen earlier emerged from the trees, heading in the opposite direction. A change of shifts, she presumed.
Later still, she saw movement in the inky black shadows beneath the trees. Two shapes slightly less dark than their surroundings.
Were they two of the escaped wolves? Might one of them be Billy?
She did that thing of looking just to the side, and detail resolved itself. Tentatively, their movements twitchy and hesitant, two small deer emerged from the trees and moved across the grass. Roe deer, she remembered from her research into the local wildlife. Moments later they turned and darted back into the trees, white rumps moving like disembodied ghosts in the darkness.
She made herself lie down, still in her clothes. She pulled a blanket around herself, the room chilled from having the windows open for so long. Turned onto her side, knees tucked up in the fetal position.
And all the time, that single gunshot rang through her head.
§
He came to her, as dawn’s light turned the uneven glass of the windows to silver.
She must have finally dozed, then there was a click, a muffled thud from the door, a shift in the mattress as he lowered himself down behind her.
“My love,” he said softly into her hair, and she arched her back, pressed against him, a massive weight lifting.
She lifted her head and he tucked one arm under, the other arm going around her midriff.
“Are you hurt?” she said now. “He shot at you...”
“I’m fine.”
She lay there, secure in his arms. No need for words, no need for anything other than the simple fact of his presence.
§
“I found them,” he said, a little later. “I tracked them down. They were scared. Confused. Split off from the rest of their pack.”
“What did you do? Where are they?”
“They’re safe. Down in the valley at the foot of Beinn Madadh there’s another enclosure, one of the sites where we first reintroduced the wild boar.”
She remembered Billy telling her before about how there were odd fences and enclosures throughout the estate, remnants from the various stages of reintroduction projects.
“I led them in there, then pushed the gate to. I’ll go back later this morning to make sure they’re secure.”
She turned, and pressed against him. Both of them were still fully clothed – Billy must have returned to the moor by Loch Ellen to shift back, then found his clothes and walked back down to the castle.
“You scared me,” she said. “I heard the gunshot. Mr McQueen didn’t know if he’d hit you or not. Not that he knew it was you.”
Billy stroked her hair.
“You saw me change,” he said.
She nodded, her head against his chest.
“I’d understand if you just got on that plane back to America.”
She nodded again, then said, “So would I.” She didn’t know if that was an attempt to joke, or a simple admission of truth.
Billy didn’t press, perhaps scared of where it might lead.
They lay like that for some time. Jenny was exhausted, but a still million miles from sleep. She was intensely aware of Billy’s physical presence, his strength. Every slight movement of his body against hers.
She couldn’t help but think of how, only a short time ago, his physical presence had been a very different thing.
Eye contact changed the tone. That moment when she tipped her head and looked at him and saw that those dark eyes were studying her.
Suddenly, she was aware of every point of contact. His arm across the narrowing of her waist, his hand on the small of her back. His thigh against her. His ribs hard against her breasts.
That hand moved, up the curve of her spine to the back of her neck, finding hair and tangling, tipping her head back.
He kissed her, his lips hard, tongue driving deep. No subtlety or finesse, just sudden, abrupt need.
He steered her onto her back and his hands were on her, pulling at clothing, releasing, tugging, revealing.
Her jeans came clear, and he was between her legs. The hardness of his jeans ground against her, the roughness of thick seams and metal buttons, making her cry out in a mix of discomfort and a sudden stab of pleasure.
He reached down, impatient. The back of his hand brushed against her as he fumbled at his buttons, knuckles hard and tantalizing against her softness.
He pulled her panties aside and pressed himself against her, and she felt that delicious moment where everything was just poised, the bulbous pressure of his manhood pressing against her soft folds, parting and pushing, and then finally entering her and driving deep.
It should have been brutal and clumsy, the transition from tender embrace to full, balls-deep penetration in so short a time. There was no subtlety, no seduction to this.
But as he paused, fully inside her, his fingers intertwined with hers as he held her hands against the mattress above her head, his weight bearing down... as those eyes fixed on her, widening slightly as she pressed back up against him... that single moment was all the seduction she needed. She’d gone from nothing to... to this... in seconds!
She felt it building, relentless.
She pressed against him just a little harder, felt that tightening, that flutter of muscles deep within, and then orgasm swept through her, making her cry out with its intensity. She sensed a darkening at the edge of her vision, a thundering of her heart, and then she buried her face against his chest and rolled her hips, urgently riding out her climax, making it last, until finally it started to ebb and she slumped back beneath him.
He held himself there, rock hard inside her, then slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, he started to move, rolling his hips, withdrawing a fraction and then pushing. A little more, a bigger thrust. More. Harder. Drawing almost completely out then driving in, hard and fast, until he was pumping rapidly, grunting like an animal, using her spent body to please himself until, finally, he thrust and held deep, arching his spine, throwing his head back and crying out as his wet heat filled her.
They slumped together, and he started to soften inside her. She eased her hands from his, moved them to his face, held him and kissed him, as slow and tender as what had gone before had been urgent and brutal.
“I saw you change,” she said. “And it didn’t scare me.”
31
“I discovered
something else last night. Or rather, I confirmed it.”
Billy sat in one of the chairs at the window of Jenny’s tower room. Today when they had returned from showering together, the breakfast tray had been set for two.
“What?” asked Jenny. “What did you find?”
She stood at the window, leaning with her ass on the frame, a cup of milky tea cradled in both hands.
The day was sunny, and the police presence outside had scaled back drastically from the previous afternoon, the difference between a possible murder investigation and the hunt for missing dangerous animals. Just a solitary police car was now pulled up under the trees, where blue and white scene of crime tape still cordoned off the area where Lilian had been found.
“I’m not alone.”
She turned to look at him. “What do you mean? Another wolf? Not just the escapees?”
He shook his head. “No, not that,” he said. “Another shifter.”
§
She sat down opposite him, then leaned forward with elbows on knees, the cup still cradled in her hands. “What do you mean? How could there be another shifter?”
“Last night,” he said. “When I was out tracking down the escapees. I picked out their scents easily enough. One of the juveniles, a male, had been marking territory as they went – I think he fancied his chances of forming a breakaway pack with the alpha still in captivity. But... there were other scents, too. Wolf, but not wolf. I’ve never come across anything like it. And then I realized that, actually, I had. Me. That mix of human and wolf. But that wasn’t my scent. It was someone new. It was another male, marking his territory. My territory.”
“It’s what you always wanted,” Jenny said now, voicing the thought as it occurred to her. “You’ve traveled the world in the hope that you’re not alone.” But he didn’t seem too happy at the prospect now that it had materialized.
He looked at her. “I know that,” he said. “I should be happy. Excited. So why does the prospect chill me to the bone?”
“Because two alpha males are never going to get along?”
Confirmation was in his look.
Then she made the leap, the connection. She remembered how agitated Winston Tsang had been the previous morning. That was only hours after Lilian Lee had been killed, but a long time before anyone knew. So why had he been behaving like that?
“You think Lilian’s project was more advanced than she would admit?” she asked now. It was a question she’d raised before, and which always received the stock answer that the scientist’s work was theoretical only. Test-tube work. But now the question took on a whole new significance. She could see that in the way Billy stopped to think, rather than leaping in with a response.
“I saw Winston Tsang yesterday morning,” Jenny went on. “He was distracted, short-tempered. I couldn’t work out what was wrong with him. If their work was more advanced than they admitted, do you think they might have tried it out on someone?”
“Someone like Tsang?”
She nodded.
Again, a long pause while Billy considered. Then he said, “I don’t know. Winston’s always been a bit erratic. I don’t think Dr Lee would have used him as a guinea pig. If anything, I reckon she’d try it on herself before anyone else.”
“Maybe she did,” said Jenny. “Maybe she tried it on both of them and things went wrong. You told me what it was like the first time you shifted. That night with the Carrs...”
She saw his look – it really was as if a cloud had passed over his features as he recalled that night from his youth.
“What if they were both testing this cellular transformation process she was developing and they changed together? You said it’s impossible to prepare yourself for what it’s really like, the–”
“The bloodlust. It’s overpowering. Explosive.”
“Maybe they did that, and turned the bloodlust on the nearest thing to hand. Each other.”
§
Billy left a short time later to see to the recaptured wolves, having extracted assurances from Jenny that she would stay in the castle until she had word from him that all was safe.
“The stalkers and marksmen will be out in force this morning,” he’d said. “Mr McQueen knows that if they don’t track the wolves down in the next few hours the chances of finding them quickly are going to be tiny. Last night alone, if the wolves just kept on in a straight line, they could have put a hundred miles between themselves and Craigellen.”
“But you’ve trapped them again.”
Billy had nodded. “That’s true,” he’d told her, “but that old wild boar enclosure is quite big. If the stalkers’ dogs track the wolves down there, there’s no’ many people know that enclosure is intact – it could just look as if the wolves are on the other side of an old fence. I’ve left a message for Mr McQueen, and another with DI Cooper, but no-one’s answering. I need to get up there and make sure the wolves are safe.”
He’d paused, then added, “But I need to know you’re safe, Jenny. I need to know you’ll stay here until I let you know it’s safe. There are a lot of trigger-happy people out there.”
If he’d known her any better than a few weeks’ acquaintance and that intense, head-over-heels infatuation thing, he’d have known not to believe her when she’d shrugged and said something about not having any plans anyway. He’d have known that telling her not to do something was the worst possible way to achieve that aim.
And he would never have left her alone while he went off to make sure his wolf buddies were safe from all the bad men with guns.
§
It felt odd to be out in the open once again. So much had happened in the last 24 hours that even to step out into the bright sunlight and go across to where she’d parked her rental Toyota made Jenny feel strangely exposed, a risk-taker.
She could have walked all the way up to the Lodge, but she was still a city girl at heart, and the car made more sense. Added to that, it was so much easier just to avoid the challenging stare of the uniformed policeman standing duty beside the cordoned off area of woodland, look the other way and drive past. If she’d been on foot, it would have been so much easier for him to confront her, and try to persuade her that to be out in the forest this morning was foolhardy at best.
She drove slowly, allowing herself to survey the forest as she passed. Other than the scene-of-crime tape, there really was nothing to see. Just the policeman standing guard, and a man in a gray suit nearby, looking bored as he keyed something into an iPad.
She came to where the view opened out, and looked across the valley to Beinn Madadh. Somewhere over there, down where the river cut through the forest, Billy would be leading McQueen to the old wild boar enclosure where he had trapped the escaped wolves. She wondered how he would pitch it, how easy it would be to explain how he knew where the wolves were and how they had mysteriously been rounded up and contained overnight.
“Don’t try to do all this on your own,” she’d urged him. “Jim McQueen is your friend. He’s always looked out for you. Let him help you now: show him where the wolves are, Billy. Let him see that they’re safe.”
She found it easier thinking about practical matters like that. Logistics.
Rather than having to deal with what she had learnt last night. The nature of what Billy Stewart was. And the complexity of her feelings towards him.
Yes, she tended to default to being glib, to thinking of it all as some kind of infatuation. But she knew that to use such terminology was dismissing something far greater.
He was in love with her. And he was the kind of guy who saw love as a lifelong thing.
Wolves mate for life.
But what of her own feelings?
She could step away, analyze and dissect this thing. She could look back to their time together in the States, that easy friendship with moments of antagonism – the kind of antagonism that hindsight re-cast as those first sparks of what might follow. She could point out where they had similar interests, compatible v
iews on the world. And there was most certainly chemistry.
But cool analysis was never the way to look at matters of the heart.
It was about how she felt.
And Jenny knew that she, too, was falling.
Had, perhaps, already fallen.
32
She passed the turning onto the steep track up over the moor to Loch Ellen. This little Toyota would struggle to get up that first incline, let alone traverse the rough track across the heather.
She continued to where the trail opened out into the area used for turning and parking. One of the ATVs was pulled up in the parking bay to the right, and a small red Peugeot with a patched-up rear right wing was parked in front of the Lodge. She was pretty sure that was Winston Tsang’s car. She’d been surprised when Billy had told her Tsang would be at work as normal, after his moment of madness in releasing the wolves the day before, but he’d told her the police had released Tsang from custody that evening. He’d almost certainly end up charged with offences under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, but that was not enough to keep him under lock and key.
She pulled up, considering her options.
She’d Googled Tsang before heading up here, but found nothing to set any alarm bells ringing. Just a career scientist who’d been working on a post-doc contract at Aberdeen University until he’d been head-hunted by Lilian Lee the previous year. Born in Hong Kong, but raised mainly in Glasgow, his social media presence portrayed him as a young man without much in the way of a social life beyond his work and playing online games into the early hours.
He was the kind of guy who would fade into the background for most people who encountered him, but who equally easily could pop up on one of those true crime shows with old neighbors saying he was a nice young man who always kept himself to himself. He was, in short, a blank canvas, which didn’t help Jenny at all.
She hesitated at the main entrance. What if she buzzed him and he told her to go away, or simply ignored her?
She made a decision, and took the narrow path that led around the side of the building. She knew now that while the front entrance automatically locked itself when the door swung shut and had to be opened by the keypad or buzzed from within, the back door that opened from the passageway by the small kitchen was a plain, old-fashioned door, and out here in the middle of nowhere it was rarely locked.
Last Alpha: A Highland shifter romance Page 16
