by Marcy Jacks
The Werewolves of Willow Lake 1
Rescuing His Pregnant Mate
Edward, one of four ancient wolves, has discovered his mate, reincarnated and in the hands of hunters. The man is also pregnant, so even though it means that he must have mated with someone else in this lifetime, Edward is willing to risk it all to set him free.
Craig McCourt is a human, but his abductors insist he's a werewolf. Then Craig turns his head and spots the real thing. The wolf changes into a handsome man that Craig can't take his eyes off of, and when he's injured while rescuing Craig, Craig takes him home to care for him.
Craig has no mate, and when he tells Edward about this, the man insists they are the ones who are mated. As much as Craig wants to be with him, he's still not convinced that he is pregnant. He can't be. For one thing, he's a man, for another, even if that was possible, he's a virgin.
Genre: Alternative (M/M or F/F), Contemporary, Paranormal, Vampires/Werewolves
Length: 36,182 words
RESCUING HIS PREGNANT MATE
The Werewolves of Willow Lake 1
Marcy Jacks
EVERLASTING CLASSIC
MANLOVE
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Everlasting Classic ManLove
RESCUING HIS PREGNANT MATE
Copyright © 2013 by Marcy Jacks
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62740-835-6
First E-book Publication: December 2013
Cover design by Harris Channing
All art and logo copyright © 2013 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
About the Author
RESCUING HIS PREGNANT MATE
The Werewolves of Willow Lake 1
MARCY JACKS
Copyright © 2013
Chapter One
“Are you people out of your damn minds? Look at me! I’m not pregnant!”
“Keep your mouth shut, wolf, or we'll have to cut it out.”
Craig McCourt closed his mouth in a hurry at that threat. He’d watched these men find other men and women who looked just like normal people, only to witness them change into various animals. The four men had made Craig watch as they had sliced those animals up in front of him, so he was pretty sure they were telling the truth.
Craig put his hand on his swollen stomach as he felt another cramp rush through him. It felt like something was eating him alive inside there, but he was not pregnant. He was a man, and he wasn’t a shifter. He was just incredibly sick. He had to be for his stomach to have gotten this swollen in only a matter of months.
His first thought was that it was some sort of cancerous tumor, which made everything that much worse because he couldn’t go to the doctor to get it checked out.
He was a florist, for God’s sakes, and this was still the United States, last time he checked, but here he was, being kidnapped and chained up like he was being held for ransom in a third world country.
He didn’t know why these men were keeping him alive when they thought he was some sort of creature of the night, not after they’d killed so many others. He wasn’t about to ask either. The last thing he wanted was to give any of these men some ideas.
“You might as well sit down,” said the oldest, the one with the black hair that was buzzed close to his head in some kind of military cut. There were several silver hairs streaking through the black around his ears and forehead. “You’re only gonna hurt yourself if you keep pacing like that.”
“What do you care?” Craig asked, but he still took the offered stool and sat down. Only then did he let out a long sigh as his weight was off of his swollen feet for the first time in what felt like hours.
“I don’t,” the man said.
Craig still didn’t have any names, but he supposed that was a good thing. If he didn’t have names, then it meant that the men around him might be considering letting him go. For that reason, he also took great care to try not to look at any of their faces.
Craig removed his shoes. He’d been at this camp for the last four weeks, and in all that time he hadn’t had a chance to change his clothes or even wash them. His only bathing came those three times the other men had dumped buckets of water over him when he’d been sleeping, leaving him to freeze until his clothes dried. His shoes were feeling smaller by the day as his ankles swelled, and it was a relief to take them and his socks off, giving his skin a chance to breathe for a bit.
He tried to rub his feet, but
it was hard with his belly in the way.
He’d heard the men talking about him from time to time. They claimed he was about five months along or so. Craig had tried to convince them up and down that he was not pregnant, which had made them look at him oddly for a little while before they went about their business again.
He’d screamed at them for days that he was a man. He’d even tried showing them that in a fit of desperation. He still had the bruises over their lack of appreciation for being flashed, so he didn’t bother trying that again.
Then he’d gotten really desperate. He wasn’t admitting that he believed them, or anything like that, but he even told them that he was a virgin, so it was impossible on another level for him to be pregnant, or get anyone else pregnant, for that matter.
Again, they’d looked at him funny. One of the men even brought out a stethoscope and put it against his stomach. Craig could hardly believe he’d willingly gone along with that, but he had.
The man confirmed the pregnancy, and when Craig continued to insist that he was not because he was a man, one of the guys had left the camp and returned with food and other supplies, and then threw at least five pregnancy tests at him. “Shut up and see for yourself,” he’d said.
Craig refused to do it. That was a week ago, and even now, sitting on that tiny little foldable stool, the pregnancy tests were still on the ground by the tree he was chained to.
He wasn’t about to take some stupid pregnancy test because that was ridiculous. He was not pregnant, end of story, and he shouldn’t have to take a test just because these guys were a bunch of stupid hicks who were having trouble telling the difference between a man and a woman, probably because they’d never seen a woman in their lives.
Craig crossed his arms over his knees and put his head down to sulk. The other men were chatting now that Craig had gone through his daily fit of anger, and he told himself he wasn’t about to cry.
That was when he heard the low, animalistic growling off to his right, and he turned.
The clearing was so small that it was practically nonexistent, which meant that the tree Craig was chained to was very close to the shrubs. In those shrubs, less than two feet away, was the abnormally large head of a wolf, glowing green like it was on fire—he really was going insane—appearing very angry, and for some reason, instead of fear, all Craig could feel at the sight of it was relief.
Chapter Two
Edward could hardly believe what he was seeing.
Craig, his Craig, was sitting there, dirty and clearly exhausted, in chains, being held prisoner by these men.
After all this time, his mate was alive. He’d seen the man’s body. He’d seen the result of when those other shifters and humans had ripped into him, spilling his blood and killing him and their unborn child when Edward was not there to protect him.
Edward’s eyes flickered down to the man’s swollen stomach. He was pregnant.
A pang of sadness lanced through his heart. Whatever miracle this was, it seemed that Edward was only meant to enjoy it from afar, because from the look of it, his mate had chosen someone else in this time.
“What are you doing over there, wolf?” one of the humans asked.
Edward slipped back into the relative safety of the shrubs before he could be seen. He forced the glow of his body to go down, until the green of his fur coat was allowing him to better blend in with the shrubs and trees around him. All the while, he could still keep his eyes on his mate.
“I…” Craig looked up at his captors, and then back at the spot where Edward had previously been. Edward was not there, of course, but he wished he could be. He wanted to give his mate some sort of support while he was in this situation.
“Nothing,” Craig said, and his voice sounded so incredibly small and sad, as though he believed he’d imagined what he’d seen. “I’m not looking at anything. Ow!”
The hunter speaking with him grabbed on to his shoulder and gripped it tight. Tight enough to make Craig yell out in pain.
Edward only just managed to stop himself from charging forward. “You’d better be telling me the truth.”
“I am!” Craig yelled and then got a hard punch to the side of his head for his trouble.
Edward couldn’t make a sound. Not a growl, nothing. Anything he did could bring the axe down on his mate’s head. People in this time had much different weapons than in the past, and the last thing he wanted was for his mate to get shot at with pieces of metal that moved so fast, Edward couldn’t even see them.
“What’s going on over there?” one of the other four men asked.
He was an older man, with short black hair and some silver within. He also appeared to be the oldest.
“Nothing, just teaching him a lesson,” said the other hunter. The man was still grabbing on to Craig’s shoulder and the back of his neck. He liked inflicting pain, it seemed. Edward was going to enjoy inflicting pain on him.
Now all four men were close to Craig, which was exactly what Edward did not want. The man’s heart rate was spiking and he was flinching from the pain of being grabbed so roughly.
“A lesson for what?” asked their leader, and Edward took his time, being slow and careful about moving around to the other side of the small camp.
“About hiding things from us,” said the hunter who was holding on to the back of Craig’s neck. Finally, he let go, but that was just to pull a strip of cloth from out of his pocket, and another pair of those tiny shackles that Edward had seen from time to time.
Handcuffs. The man gagged Edward’s mate, and then, even though his neck was already attached to a chain that was keeping him in close proximity to the tree, the hunter grabbed Craig’s hands and lifted them above his head. The links in the cuffs were long enough that they could reach around the tree, keeping Craig’s hands up high.
Edward was going to kill them all for this.
“You sure that’s a good idea?” asked one of the men. The leader just seemed to stare at the work of his comrade, but he didn’t do anything to stop the cruelty.
“It’ll make him think twice about escaping if there’s another wolf out there,” said the other man, the one with the streak of cruelty, right before he stepped into the shrubs to have a look around. Right in the spot where Edward had been hiding. He was clearly searching for whatever it was he believed Craig had seen, and Edward was glad he’d moved. He needed to be slow and lethal about this. Craig was no longer his. Whether this man was a reborn version of the man that Edward had loved, or someone else altogether who just so happened to share the same face, Edward was not about to let history repeat itself.
Now that he was on the other side of the small camp, he had a better look at where these men kept their guns and other weapons. They weren’t the only weapons that were here, surely. These men would have to have some on their person if they were proper hunters, but these were the ones that Edward could see, so he focused on them.
He let his claws come out a little more, pressing his paws deeper into the earth, feeling it teeming with so much life above and below. He called to it until something called back.
Weeds were hated by mankind, but Edward loved them. He loved them because they were hard to kill and fast to grow, and those traits were multiplied by a thousand when he put some of his power into them.
Several vines, ragweed and tall grass, all began to grow around their campsite. Better than all that was when the vines themselves twisted around the guns and the knives, even their bags, claiming the items as their own. There was an interesting looking bow, the likes of which Edward had never seen before, and the weeds claimed that as well.
Edward thanked them for what they did, and he returned to circling around the camp before he could be seen by the hunters.
Just in time as well, since that was when the weapons area was noticed.
“Hey! What the hell is going on here!” one of the men yelled, and that was enough for all four to come rushing back to the place where their sleeping bags and
weapons were kept, just to see the mess that had become of them.
That was just the distraction that Edward needed as he slunk on back to the place where his mate was.
He breathed in deep through his nose the man’s scent, taking him in. It was the same scent. The same smell of clean earth and new budding flowers, the smell that Edward hadn’t experienced since the day his mate had died.
There was no mistaking it. This was not a look-alike. This was Craig. His mate was alive and well, and just breathing in the man’s scent gave Edward enough energy and strength to make him feel like he could battle all four of those hunters and take them and their weapons on.
Craig, however, did not seem to be noticing any of the things that Edward was. His heart rate picked up, and his breathing was panicked at best as he clearly struggled to keep calm as Edward approached.
Strange. He hadn’t had this reaction the first time he’d seen Edward. What had changed?
“There! Right there!” one of the hunters screamed.
Oh, that was it. One of the hunters was still looking in this direction.
When Edward saw the gun being lifted, he knew to run away from Craig, to get away from the man so that he wouldn’t be accidentally shot.
A gunshot did sound, however, just as he turned his back, and Craig screamed through the gag in his mouth, but there was no scent of blood in the air. He hadn’t been shot yet.
He wouldn’t be shot at all. Edward ran back into the bushes, but he stayed close enough that he could still hear the hunters yelling out instructions to each other, and he could still smell their stink as well.
