KNUD, Her Big Bad Wolf: 50 Loving States, Kansas

by Theodora Taylor

  “It’s okay, baby,” he said, reaching down to rub her back. And this must be love because at the moment, he was more concerned about her than he was focused on his second release which came streaming out of him with the unceasing tug of her pussy. “Just get through it. It will be over soon.”

  But she couldn’t hear him over the overwhelming sensations she was experiencing. And she screamed again, this time bucking so hard, Knud had to lower his body over her and hold her down for fear she might hurt herself.

  “It’s okay,” he soothed, wishing for her sake he would unknot sooner than later, and hating how confused she must be.

  But then the point became moot because nature took over, protecting her mind and body before it was completely depleted by the back-to-back orgasms. And she passed out beneath him, collapsing over her knees.

  Ironically, it didn’t take long for him to unknot and fall out of her after she passed out—only about fifteen minutes or so. And the male wolf’s basic instinct for aftercare soon kicked in as he climbed to his feet beside her still prone body.

  She was his now, he thought as he grabbed a throw from the couch, and gently wrapped her up in it.

  But then right as he was about to pick her up, he stopped. Sniffed. Then sniffed again, because he couldn’t believe what his nose was telling him.

  The HCG hormone. The one he’d smelled only a rare once or twice on human women who were at the club, but had no idea they were in the earliest stages of a most likely unintended pregnancy. This far into the twenty-first century, very few humans still continued to get pregnant unexpectedly.

  But his Layla was no longer fully human. Here was the proof strong and clear, because she had been bred by her wolf after just one session of unprotected heat sex. One and done, as his Uncle Mag had once crowed, when bragging about how he’d instantly put a baby in his mate, Knud’s Aunt Janelle.

  Knud picked Layla up inside the throw with a tenderness he wouldn’t have suspected himself capable of even a few hours ago. And not bothering to cover his own nakedness, he walked out of the study with her. Only wanting to get the mother of his future pup into a warm bed. As he walked toward the stairs with her, he nuzzled her hair, marveling at the work her body was already doing to grow his son or daughter. Knud hoped for a daughter. A perfect replica of her with a personality to match.

  He imagined them all in the house he would buy as soon as he got his residency placement. Maybe before. He knew Wichita Children’s Hospital was desperate for doctors who knew AI. Desperate enough to maybe let him set his own hours if he agreed to do his fellowship there. Then he could have breakfast with his family and make it home on time to have dinner with them, too.

  Plans on top of plans unspooled as he ferried her up the cabin’s main set of stairs. He was ready. So ready to start this new life with her.

  Stupid, stupid wolf…

  27

  I bring the car to a stop right outside a set of wrought iron gates. They look like the ones at our Texas compound with some significant differences. Instead of fleur-de-lis, each ornamental spike is topped rather surprisingly by wolf heads.

  And while my family’s estate takes up a few acres, this one seems to take up a few thousand of them. Beyond the huge front lawn and circular driveway, stands a gigantic white stone house with a columned two-story Moorish entrance. That piece of real estate would be impressive on its own, but the paved black road I just drove down curves around it and continues on into a town dotted with charming stone and wood cottages.

  As I take in the scene in front of me, I realize there’s another important difference. The gates to my house were built to block access to our three villas.

  Whereas these gates…they stretch across the entire road, and then what looks like miles to both the left and the right to block access to an entire town: Wolf Haven.

  I’d expected to have to talk my way through the gates, possibly even name drop to get to Qim Wulfkonig. But I had no idea I’d need to figure out how to get into the town itself.

  Worse, there was no visible security box for me to use to call or get buzzed in. Just a good old biometric lock—one I suspected I wouldn’t have access to this time. Which meant if I wanted to walk into this town without getting in touch with Qim Wulfkonig’s people beforehand, I was salt out of luck (as my mother used to say after the PR team made her give up cursing).

  Beside me, Jared lets out a weary sigh. He’s also staring at the gate’s lock, probably coming to the realization that after two decades of having the most biddable Rustanov in his charge, I’d suddenly become the client from hell. “I assume these people really have no idea you’re coming?”

  “No, they don’t,” I answer, keeping my voice light though I’m feeling just as frustrated as he sounds. “I only meant to pop in.”

  “Pop in,” Santiago, who stands on my other side, repeats. And though they’re both wearing polarized sunglasses, I can sense some serious eye rolling happening behind those mirrored lenses.

  “I’m sure there’s some way to let them know I’m here. I’m just not seeing it.”

  “Yeah, nothing’s coming up on my bioware when I try to pin down our position. Just ‘Location Unavailable.’” Santiago shook his head. “I don’t like this.”

  “Maybe if you told us where we are, Shimmer,” Jared’s voice has taken on an unfamiliar pleading note. “Why we’re here…?”

  “I hate to put you either of you in this position,” I say. And I do mean it. Making it onto the family’s private security team is a big deal, and I can’t imagine how much stress they’re under right now. “I promise I’ll run interference with my father before the daily call…”

  I trail off when I see three people walking toward us from the other side of the gate. They’re all wearing warm weather track suits, and from a distance, they have the appearance of Olympic athletes. There’s an older black woman, compact and dark with the build of a former gymnast. There’s also an older white guy. Huge and grey, with so many muscles, he looks like he could be a former weightlifter. They flank a tall, lean light-skinned man who could certainly pose as an Olympic basketball player in any piece of entertainment content—but I immediately recognize him as Qim Wulfkonig. The pictures didn’t do him justice. Square-jawed with kind brown eyes, he walks with the confidence of a natural born leader.

  I’d be completely charmed by their matchy-matchy “family of athletes” look…if they weren’t all carrying shotguns.

  Jared and Santiago burst into action on either side of me, raising their own SIG Sauers as they yell, “Put the guns down! Put the guns down!!!”

  28

  Kukunniwi Woods

  Knud watched his new mate wake with a start late that afternoon. She sat up in bed as if she’d just had a nightmare, then looked around until she found him in one of the guest bedroom’s dark leather barrel chairs.

  “Hello,” she said carefully.

  He wondered what she was thinking about, and that made him realize they might not share a telepathic bond, one of the many things that could go “wrong” when wolves mated with humans.

  “How are you feeling?” He pushed the thought into her head, testing.

  But she continued to stare at him expectantly, obviously waiting for him to answer her greeting.

  No psychic bond then. To tell the truth, he wasn’t sure if that was necessarily a bad thing. He wouldn’t be able to get into her head, but that also meant she wouldn’t be able to get into his.

  “Hey,” he answered out loud.

  She smiled, raised her hands to push the curls off her face, then snatched her hand back when she found a nest of knotted hair. “I didn’t put my hair in braids before I fell asleep?” she asked, as if this was the most alarming thing that had happened to her in the past twelve hours.

  “Nope,” he answered.

  She shook her head as if trying to clear a fog, and rubbed her temple, “I just had the strangest dream…”

  Knud made a considering noise and
went over to the window, remembering from some textbook or other that she-wolves could be sensitive to light after going into heat. He closed the curtains on the aggressive summer sun and said, “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  “I asked you to marry me, and you said yes—crazy right? But things got even crazier afterwards. We decided to go back to Wichita with your parents after I was done supervising Jandro’s visit with Qim, but then I started feeling…truly abnormal. A fever came over me very suddenly, and a strange smell appeared in the air. For some reason, my clothes began to feel unbearable and I had to take them off, even though I was in the middle of an assessment! However, Qim seemed to understand. He quickly removed Jandro from the room and then…”

  She blinked up at him as if trying to reconcile his presence in the dream and his presence in the room, as he came to stand beside the bed. “…then you came in and we had extremely intense sex, during which you kept talking about impregnating me—why are you looking at me like that?”

  Knud stroked his knuckles over her cheek, before deciding it was best to just rip the band-aid off. “Because it wasn’t a dream.”

  She laughed.

  He didn’t.

  Which made her quickly sober as she said, “It had to be a dream…”

  He shook his head. “But it wasn’t.”

  He suspected if not for the melanin, all the color would have drained out of her face right then. “No…. no… tell me I did not start tearing my clothes off during an assessment!!!”

  Knud was torn because he wanted to alleviate her embarrassment, but didn’t know how to without violating quite a few long-held wolf laws. “Qim understood. Everyone did,” Knud assured her, hoping it would be enough.

  Of course, it wasn’t.

  “Exactly how did everyone come to understand that in the middle of an assessment, I stripped down in Qim Wulfkonig’s study, then had…oh my gosh…extremely loud sex with his cousin on the floor?” She stopped, her eyes widening with a new thought. “Did I… did I faint while you were still inside me.”

  “I wouldn’t call it fainting. More like a passing out,” he answered.

  “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!” she said, scraping both hands through her unusually messy hair. “What am I going to do? How am I going to explain this to them? I’m no longer under my parent’s media protection. If this gets out, my father will…”

  Knud had no idea who her father was, but if the look that crossed her face when she spoke of him was any indication, it wouldn’t be good.

  “It won’t get out,” he told her, bringing her to her feet so he could look her in the eyes as he made his next promise: “You don’t have to explain anything to anyone. I promise you that, baby. You’re all good with everyone in my family.”

  She looked at him like he’d just told her there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. “Are you seriously telling me no one in your family is judging me?”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  She didn’t believe him. He could see the disbelief in her expression, which in turn made Knud wish he could just tell her everything, straight up. But thanks to his old black ops job, he was more than familiar with all the rules that surrounded mating with humans. And he knew he could only spill all the details on the day of her first full month shift or three months into a viable heat pregnancy.

  As it turned out, he’d have to wait the three months since neither a pregnant she-wolf nor her partner could shift for a year after a successful heat mating—nature’s way of ensuring the she-wolf didn’t accidentally terminate her pregnancy, and also had protection while she was at her most vulnerable.

  Normally he’d risk it and just break the law. Like most people who’d spent a little too much time in the grey moral ground that was black-ops, he often considered himself above the law. And at this point his besotted wolf was willing to do almost anything to relieve the stark worry on Layla’s face. However, in this case, he couldn’t risk it. As pissed as Rafes was at him right now, he’d lock Knud up in one of their secret werewolf penitentiaries just to make an example of him to their people.

  And Knud getting locked away from Layla would be a one-way ticket to Crazy Town. Lupine fathers-to-be were notoriously protective of their she-wolves. And he was not going to be the exception.

  He’d only mated her a few hours ago, but he spent nearly the entire time she was asleep making arrangements that included taking next week off from work. He needed to go check out some gated properties. And that walking everywhere thing Layla liked to do was done, son. He’d be driving her to work from now on…

  “Knud?” she said, interrupting his plan spiral with a soft look.

  “Yeah?”

  “Even if I end up in the news because of this, I’m glad it wasn’t a dream…and I finally told you how I feel.”

  Another burst of sunshine lit up his tired, grey heart. Because if that wasn’t the main point, he didn’t know what was. “Me too.”

  The moment would have been perfect if she hadn’t added, “Now I’m going to hop in the shower, and then go downstairs to make profuse apologies.”

  Fuck! He had been so busy planning for the future that it hadn’t occurred to him he might need to come up with a plausible reason why they’d need to stay the night. Or why Jandro would be MIA until tomorrow morning.

  “Any ideas about where my clothes might have gone?” she asked—only to groan with a sudden memory. “The part where I rip apart my vintage Mary Quant wasn’t a dream either, was it?”

  No, it wasn’t. He walked over to the guestroom’s other chair where he’d placed the clothes he’d gathered for her. “I’ve already got some new clothes for you from the other rooms. Shorts and a t-shirt and some hiking boots—my mom’s about the same shoe size as you.”

  He felt kind of bad handing over the ensemble he’d pulled together for her. It was so the opposite of anything she’d ever wear. But she thanked him as graciously as if he’d offered her the evening gown of her dreams, before disappearing into the room’s ensuite bathroom.

  He was going to enjoy the hell out of spending the rest of his life with her, he thought as he watched her disappear through the door. But first he was going to have to lie to her. A lot. And that’s how he found out the hard way that he made a full transition from his former black ops life. Because though he came up with a story that would be pretty easy for her to believe after what happened downstairs, he hated that he’d have to play psychological games that she hadn’t agreed to or asked for.

  Never again, he vowed when he heard the shower turn off a few minutes later. They just had to get through tonight and the next three months, and then he’d never lie to her again.

  “Tina Turner!” he yelled out, taking another stab at figuring out who Layla really was. “My mom loves Tina Turner.”

  “So do I. But I’m pretty sure she’s old enough to be my grandmother. Not to mention dead!” she called back.

  The shower switched off a few minutes later. And then she emerged from the bathroom faster than he expected, dressed in the clothes he’d given her, face scrubbed of her usual sophisticated makeup, and hair pulled back with a curly ponytail. She looked like a teenager…and somehow more familiar to him because of it. Something tickled in the back of his mind. Where had he seen her before?

  “You okay?” she asked, crooking her head at him.

  No. No, he wasn’t. The feeling he knew her from somewhere scratched at his brain. Also, he could practically feel his wolf stalking back and forth inside his gut. Itchy at the closeness of the moon.

  With everything going on with Jandro he hadn’t bothered to check the report. But summer moons were infamously tricky. Rising at the same time as its winter brethren, not caring whether or not it was dark out.

  “You’re that kid Angelina Jolie adopted, aren’t you?” he asked, to cover up how off he was suddenly feeling.

  She laughed, shaking her head at him. “No, I’m definitely not.”

  Knud snapped his fingers. “Wait
, what’s the name of that hot singer from back in the day? The one who turned out to have a secret twin sister? Rocky Road?”

  Her head jerked back a little, startled by his guess. “Roxxy Roxx is actually a really good friend of my family. You’re definitely getting warmer because I am named after Roxxy’s secret twin sister. But she’s not my mother.”

  That stopped Knud in his tracks because he suddenly realized, “I still don’t know your last name.”

  She clamped her lips and seemed to make a decision. “I usually use my mother’s maiden name on official documents, so it’s Layla St. James. But technically, my full name is Layla Rus—”

  She abruptly stopped speaking. And Knud wondered why….until he realized his perspective had changed. By a lot.

  For some reason, Layla was taller than him. Much taller than him. And her expression had change from one of soft amusement to pure terror.

  But why would she be scared of him?

  And that’s when he realized. Or rather, that’s when he remembered why his mother had told the story of the Wolf Prince around the Viking fires, as opposed to coldly documenting it, like she had the many stories of wolves who’d turned humans by scratching or biting them.

  The spontaneous heats were stories not History, because of the fantastical things that happened to the couples.

  Like a nightmare unfolding, he remembered his mother holding him and all the other English-speaking wolves in their long house in thrall as she told the story of the Wolf Prince around the Viking fire. In what sounded like a classic fairytale, a wolf prince agreed to marry a human maiden after “filling her belly with pup,” with the caveat that she not look at him whenever there was a full moon. Why? Because as it turned out he was secretly a werewolf. But could not let his still-human wife know until she delivered their baby for fear of repercussions from his wolf tribe.